Vision Pro Is An Answer To A Deeply Sad Question

Who gets to touch the world?

Apple released it’s new “spatial computing” device, Vision Pro, last week for a cool $3,499. Vision Pro is a kind of immersive computer that consists of ugly goggles, an external battery pack that barely lasts two hours, and a nausea-inducing user interface that tracks eye and finger movements to complete actions.

Tech internet has been ready to offer high praise of the Vision Pro as the future of computing and work and life, and the Professional Surprised Men¹ were quick to post videos of themselves walking around looking like idiots with a 1.3 pound computer screen strapped to their heads. Some of the VR features seem cool, many seem like they were slapped together at the last minute just to get this thing to market. The graphics for video calls look particularly terrible, which is amusing since we, you know, already have video calls that look fine.²

Telling my kids this was the Vision Pro

It would be easy for me to view this excitement cynically, and to believe that the hype is largely caused by people who stand to benefit financially from this technology in one way or another. But I have seen folks outside of tech talking about how much they enjoy it, which made me question my knee-jerk reaction. Maybe Vision Pro users actually are impressed. It’s not an act. Something about the experience of controlling your computer this way is fun or interesting or shocking enough to provoke wonder.

Not all users are as impressed, of course. The team at The Verge did an in-depth review that acknowledged how full of cool ideas the Vision Pro is, but that ultimately it’s laden with tradeoffs,³ and is not a product that implies a future where the available product is part of an effective work environment. It’s buggy, it’s lonely, and just not all that good at what it’s supposed to do.

So why people are so impressed despite these obvious flaws? Vision Pro users are moved by the experience of this tool largely because they no longer manipulate things beyond their keyboard or screens by hand. The Vision Pro is most fun if you are already someone who relies on the technological maximization of the self and your surroundings throughout your life. Being able to use your eyes and fingers to change your environment feels novel in a way that it might fail to if you routinely do that, perhaps by making visual art, sewing, cooking, or some other physical manipulation of the world around you.

I can’t help but wonder if these users would be less impressed by spatial computing if they spent more time in actual space, away from screens, away from this narrow use of our immense and powerful senses. Maybe what Vision Pro users actually want is to touch the real world.⁴

Instead of touching the world, we touch our screens

Marques Brownlee, a tech reviewer and YouTuber who largely enjoyed the Vision Pro, posted on X asking his followers, what if you could see the Grand Canyon and smell the Grand Canyon and experience the Grand Canyon through a tool like Vision Pro in perfect fidelity? Would you even want to go to the Grand Canyon?

Be here now. Photo by Jad Limcaco on Unsplash

This Matrix-y thought experiment can add clarity to what is happening with the push of this technology: the Vision Pro is presently a space of play for the wealthy, but what starts as play for the wealthy becomes life for the rest of us. The iPhone was initially buggy and very expensive and the use case was not entirely clear compared to BlackBerry and other email phones. Now, every person I see on the subway is heads down, staring at a screen, so addicted to TikTok that they have to listen to three second video clips with the volume up on a tinny phone speaker.

And while many tech professionals use their iPhone and comparable tools for work, the people creating these technologies often severely limit their own usage and that of their children. Being able to opt-out of, for example, hyper phone usage, is a privilege, not a right. The more power you have, the more you can exercise control over your interactions with technology. The less power, the more technology controls you. The heights of possibility get commodified, packaged, and sold to us as if they will make us more like those who get to create possibility, while actually confining us in a narrow, dictated vision of life.

We have been given a world where our experience is mediated by screens, and in a dystopian way, that appears to be the point. Vision Pro is just the next step in an effort to placate and control workers. It’s a shiny new tool in that old kit, but the profound response to it implies that the severance of our bodies from our spatial existence is already so deep that being able to manipulate the digital world with our fingertips may be the closest we have come in a long time to the feeling of freedom.

There may be a case, of course, for VR to help people who are housebound have profound experiences, or for the spatial eye tracking and pinching to make new kinds of computing accessible for folks with limited mobility. And one can certainly imagine a refined version of this technology being used in field such as medicine and robotics, or other highly coordinated, precise endeavors.

But today we’re talking about a $3,500 toy that is being heralded as the future of work. If this becomes the next iPhone, who do you think will actually be wearing these all day?

And who will get to go to see the Grand Canyon?

1. Truly my new favorite term

2. I have not tested the Vision Pro yet, but hope to at some point. But I thought writing this before would be interesting, especially in case I change my mind after using it.

3. While it’s working for some, other users are reporting that they cannot use the Vision Pro in a dark room. And one of the best use cases is to watch a movie in bed while your partner or spouse or friend or kid is asleep. Likeeeee.

4. A sad note from early reviews is folks sharing that they forgot to walk their dogs, or that their cats are freaked out by the goggles. These things are shared with a touch of humor, but I can’t help but feel like this is a bit doom-y. Pets are one of the few things that force interaction with the world, and now you can…forget about them.