Apple's Vision Pro - a Joke, Serious Contender, or Future Dominant Force in XR?

While many might mock the Vision Pro, they could soon find themselves chasing Apple's latest innovation.

I’ve been in the AR/VR industry since 2014. I ran marketing for an AR/VR startup and XR education company.

XR and Metaverse hype cycles were usually short but powerful, and with the introduction of AI in the mass public, the tech masses kind of forgot about it.

But Apple brand and dominance in the market can manufacture attention with a snap of a Thanos gloved finger.

The mixed reality headset Vision Pro was announced on Apple’s 2023 WDC Conference. The headset was long coming and while I was working at an XR education company we were praying that this would happen sooner rather than later.

We’ve seen the amount of AR/VR jobs Apple was hiring for in 2021 - 2023, so it wasn’t a secret they were working on something.

The reception of tech was mixed but mostly because of one thing - pricing.

With the price tag of $3,500 USD the headset is out of reach for most creators and definitely far from gamers.

But those aren’t their target market and I believe the announcement was genius and it has a lot to do with market and competitor intelligence.

This is good example of competitive intelligence for making strategic decisions.

Here’s what great about Apple’s Vision Pro headset.

• Good positioning - they call it “spatial computing” device and not a MR headset

• Different - it’s hard to compare it to what’s out there in the market (vs Meta Quest, Valve Index, or enterprise headsets like HoloLens or Magic Leap)

• Rejuvenation of XR - It’s a defibrillator shock to the metaverse and it’s definitely going to revive some parts of the market. Together with Meta this is a significant push for metaverse to stick.

• Pricing Ceiling - Pricing is prohibitive which means huge design firms, well-off creators, and studios will have their hands on them first and creating GREAT apps apart from “litter”

• Aim for Great Content — smart partnerships and curated developers will support the official product launch with content that will get attention and see practical use cases

• Learn from the mistakes of the competition - It was smart for them to wait and I’m surprised they pick this time to launch but they did a lot of smart moves (great apple design, mixed reality with focus on usability and CX, integration with the rest of the apple’s devices)

• Novelty and Launch of a new Product Line - They needed something new! We’ve seen relatively small iterations on laptops, ipads, iphones so pushing something new out is a nice refresher.

Super curious and nosy what’s going to happen since the XR market has been getting cold since the AI hype.

Is This Resurrection of XR?

As mentioned at the start, the AR/VR stopped being a hot topic after the 2023 tech craze.

And the serious lack of killer content over the years didn’t help either. I’ve been in the XR industry for almost 10 years and I could name perhaps 5 projects that really impressed me.

Valve’s game, Half Life: Alyx was one of them, and it was a parade horse, and a content juggernaut for the release of their own headset, Valve Index. Valve Index was in mid-2019. That’s 4 years ago.

Half Life: Alyx came out in March 2020 and it still by this day, the baseline for quality XR content that hasn’t been reached by other studios.

Apple is by no means trying to join in the category of entertainment or create their own “Metaverse” which has been a confusing definition of a digital world.

They play by their own rules. They don’t join the movement, they create it.

They decide when a mass used device like phone, doesn’t need a seemingly essential feature like headphones jack output.

Or imagine the sea of tears, when they introduced the new standard - a USB-C as an I/O connection. They have the power to direct where to go.

They are not following, they are leading.

Pricing Qualification

Apple’s products are intentionally expensive.

It’s by design. One of the easiest way to signal premium quality is jacking up a price that is way higher than your competition. And although the $3,500 asking price is a surprise for the tech pundits, it’s a smart tactic.

The high price automatically filters out dilly-dallies and dabbles. The price ceiling creates a natural elite inclusivity for creators, studios and development companies with budgets, history of quality, and certain reach on the market.

Great Content

The biggest opportunity for Apple is to get quality content first through this and now they have chance to build freaking finger-licking apps until next year (their partnership with Unity makes a lot of sense and some industry friends are already playing with it).

Meta launched cheap affordable hardware. It was necessary because most users wanted to experience XR but the cost of hardware was prohibitive. They needed to propagate living rooms, dens, and offices with platform first, and then deliver the content second.

And the content did come but it was suboptimal. Valve had Index and they paired it with Half-Life: Alyx which is still a pinnacle of what VR can do. Meta tried to make something happened with Horizons but the whole project never saw the light of day in a way they imagined it to be.

I expect Apple to come up with few bomb apps most likely in category of (mental) health, productivity (cross-device integrations), design, and carefully selected entertainment (movies and few enjoyable games from Apple Arcade).

These are going to be curated and polished. You only have one chance at first impression and Apple is in a position where they can’t afford to release anything but jaw-dropping.

Here’s a thing.

Hardware means diddly-squat if there’s no killer content for it (anyone that is buying Nintendo Switch because of new Zelda is violently nodding rn).

I mean you don’t buy a 4K TV for watching re-runs of Friends — you buy it to watch SuperBowl or a stacked card on UFC (blood in high-definition 🤘🤘).

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🤘🤘

d.