Apple Just Killed the Vision Pro？

The Apple Vision Pro is the most impressive, completely useless piece of technology that I own because it doesn't solve a single problem, not one. I mean, everything that it does, browse the web, run apps, view photos, create a Mac mega screen, you can already do easier, faster, and more comfortably on cheaper devices that you already own. Now, sure. The way the Vision Pro does them is genuinely impressive. I mean, spatial photos still make me emotional two years on. 3D movies look incredible. But being impressive does not mean being useful. Because before I can experience any of this magic, I've got to want it badly enough to go upstairs, to grab the headset, to check to see if it's charged because the standby time sucks, to plug it in, wait for it to boot. I've got to loosen the straps, mess up my hair, strap it to my face, deal with the heat across my forehead, and then resign myself to the reality that for the next hour of me wearing the headset, I'm going to be looking at the world through an array of relatively low-resolution, smeary webcams. Yeah. For what? To extend my MacBook's display with lower pixel density and poor ergonomics? Man, this thing is heavy. To run iPad apps floating in space? It's the barrier to entry. Just getting this darn thing on is so high that my $3,500 face computer mostly just sits there, on the floor, waiting for me to need it badly enough to justify the hassle. Which is what makes Apple's new M5 refresh feel particularly tone-deaf. I mean, Apple took a device plagued with fundamental intentionality problems with a dead app store in a form factor so heavy and expensive that nobody wants to buy one and decided the solution The solution was a faster chip. Hand tracking is not any better. The displays remain identical. It's still heavy, frankly, heavier than the original with the new tungsten counterweighted dual strap that, yes, should help balance the device, but does add more total weight, which is not great. And because it's a dual strap, it'll mess up your hair even more. It's still going to blow hot exhaust onto your forehead. It still has a tethered battery that can't even get you through many movies. And like every other VR headset, and yeah, this is a VR headset, it continues to demand deliberate effort while offering little practical justification in anyone's workflow. And that's why all of the other devices like this have basically been relegated to being glorified gaming machines. But the Vision Pro is not even really good at that. I mean, a year ago, I'd have said that this was due to insufficient hand gestures. And, well, Apple seems to agree with me, as they will soon be adding PlayStation VR 2 controller support next month. But that won't suddenly bring a bunch of games to a headset with fewer than half a million units sold App store that is incredibly small and tricky to navigate and then APIs that still prevent room scale usage, which is a norm for VR gaming. Thus, the Vision Pro has become, and will continue to be, my face TV. Full stop. It's the one thing that it does better than everything, except for maybe my OLED TV. But that often isn't an option with a sleeping baby, an exhausted wife, and there are certain instances, like 3D movies, where the Vision Pro is literally the best experience you can have. So, once a week, I watch Slow Horses in my headset, and then it sits on the floor for the next seven days next to my bed. Entertainment was so obviously the main use case for the Vision platform as soon as it launched that rumors started circulating right after this thing shipped about a Vision Air. A less premium headset with less premium materials, no EyeSight display, composites instead of metals, fewer cameras, but for a lower price point of around $2,000. That was a price that I said was still too high a little over a year ago and wouldn't move the needle. And, well, it seems Apple agreed with me because that got cancelled in favor of a fully redesigned Vision Pro 2, which also got scrapped. Which was then followed earlier this year by rumors of a tethered headset serving as an external Mac display. That was also shelved. Is the Vision Pro line just destined to be another enterprise-focused $3,500 headset like every other non-gaming VR device is and has been? Seemingly, no. Because Mark Gurman and other leakers now claim that while the Vision line has effectively been shelved, Vision OS will live on through, and I can't believe I'm saying this, lightweight AR glasses. I am convinced that this is insane. Why? Well, Let's first operate on the assumption that people even want to wear anything on their face, and that we're not just chasing this sci-fi augmented reality wet dream that's been around for 125 years. There are two ways to augment information into our perceived vision. There's the Vision Pro way of VR headsets with digital pass-through, and then the newfangled Meta Ray-Ban display way of superimposing digital content atop the real world. The HMD approach, the Vision Pro approach, excels at recreating digital content, of course. But it fails miserably at camera pass-through and recreating the real world and, well, also, you know, being small and cheap. Now, the glasses approach succeeds at certainly being smaller, but it can also barely display anything useful. It has primitive displays, a limited field of view, the works. But wait, because Apple isn't just targeting the fancy pants Meta display, they're also gunning their sights right at the screenless Meta smart glasses. These spiritual successors to Snapchat spectacles have been pretty popular. And by pretty popular, I mean Meta sold 2 million since launch a few years ago. There's no display. But they've got a camera for hands-free capture, which you can trigger via the on temple button, or you can trigger by saying, hey Meta, take a picture. Thank you. Hey Meta, take a picture. There we go. There are speakers for decent quality open ear listening, and a Meta AI that lets you query an LLM via voice or vision. Now, I suspected this would mostly be a party trick, but the LLM responds shockingly quickly and has, on the whole, delivered rather accurate results. People love these things. They love their Meta Ray-Bans. And as someone who hadn't tried smart glasses since the original Ray-Ban stories, which were frankly a heap of trash, I just didn't get it. But having tried the new Generation 2 glasses, I'm starting to. They're not practically the same size and weight as regular sunglasses. The camera quality is totally serviceable. Being able to instantly post to Instagram stories is neat. And even integration with iOS for messaging and calls is pretty good. Now the app is an abysmal AI slop trash fire, but the hardware is great and the software on the glasses themselves is pretty good. As is the John Cena voice. What about Snazzy Labs? He's pretty popular, right? Snazzy Labs run by Quinn Nelson has over 1.2 million subscribers and is known for honest tech reviews with an estimated net worth of around $109.6 thousand dollars. Please subscribe. I bought these to make this video, but honestly? I really like them, and I'm going to keep them. Now, Apple's rumored competitor, assuming they can get Siri into shape by then, which I honestly have zero reason to believe is the case, could do what these don't. Namely, integrate a killer camera that instantly syncs content to iCloud Photo Library. They can improve the audio quality significantly, because the speakers on this are just kind of mid, with AirPods-level speakers. They could perhaps integrate a sensor or two for fitness. They've got heart rate on the AirPods, and of course, they could seamlessly integrate into the ecosystem. Cool? Sure! Indispensably cool? The next iPhone? Please. I mean, if Meta's well-meaning success is any indication, Apple will certainly sell fewer of those units than they've sold AirPods or Apple Watches, regardless of price. But hey, product diversification, eh? Originally targeted for 2027, Apple's apparently accelerated development for a next-year release. Sure, cool, whatever. That's not the endgame product. Speaking of products that actually ship, And actually work, today's sponsor, Plaud. I've covered their devices before, but they just released the Note Pro. And unlike a lot of Pro upgrades, this one actually earned its name. Quick context, Plaud Note is a credit card-sized recording device that magnetically attaches to your iPhone. It's designed specifically for in-person meetings and phone calls. And unlike apps that drain battery and get interrupted by notifications, this thing just sits there with one button always ready. You leave it on the table, it focuses on the conversation, and you can skip the note-taking. Now, the Plaud Note Pro is even better. The big upgrade is multimodal capture. You can now snap photos during meetings, type quick notes, mark key moments with the on-device button, and when the AI generates your summary, it synthesizes everything. The conversation, the whiteboard photos, your annotations, it's the difference between a transcript and actually understanding what happened. Four mics with a 5 meter pickup range means that you can place it in the center of a conference table and capture everybody reliably, even with overlapping voices, thanks to improved noise cancellation and speaker identification. An AMOLED display shows recording status and battery, and the device now automatically switches between call recording, where it actually literally records the vibrations from your phone's handset speaker, and the ambient recording mode. But the best feature is the GPT-style chat interface that understands your recordings and helps you easily locate information that you may have forgotten. It's SOC 2, GDPR, and HIPAA compliant, basically every major security standard in the US and EU, which is fantastic. And well, you can purchase your Plot Note Pro today using the link below. All right, back to Apple's face computer ambition. So if the screenless Ray-Bans and delayed full-size Vision products aren't the end game, then what is? Well... This. Or something like this. The very expensive Meta Ray-Ban display, which I've also purchased. Gurman's latest suggests that Apple is developing display-equipped glasses of their own, originally planned for 2028, but now also fast-tracked for a sooner arrival. The thing is, having tried these, I'm even more convinced this is a dead end. Technically, you're not really supposed to be able to buy these without a fitment session, which is not yet offered in my area. But I just walked into Best Buy. I went to the customer service desk. I said, hey, can you give me some Meta Ray-Bans display? And they said, sure, are they these? And I said, nope, that's the wrong one. And they said, are they these? And I said, nope, that's the wrong one. The box looks like this. And then they came back and said, I think they're these. And I said, those are the ones. And they said, here you go. And they sold them to me because they're not street dated. Now, conceptually. These are really cool, amazing even, but they didn't really wow me like VR the first time I tried VR many, many years ago, because when you put the glasses on, you immediately notice that the right lens is, uh, it's much thicker than the left. It makes you look a little. Funny. That added thickness of glass is due to, well, complex optical glass, known as a geometric waveguide. Inside this temple here, there is a projector, it's tucked away, and it's a liquid crystal on silicon projector, an LCOS projector, which means that it's reflecting light off of a pixelated surface to form an image, and then that image travels through Ultra-thin stacked layers of specially treated glass, which contain precisely angled, partially reflective mirrors that actually bounce the light internally. Guiding it towards your eye while remaining nearly invisible from the outside. If you look at it from like a foot away when the display is on and you kind of have to trick it to do that, you can actually see the mirrors. But when you move your eye up close because of where your eye is focused, you don't notice it. You just see a screen. It's really cool. This lets the glasses project a floating digital image into your field of view, but without obscuring your real world. And well, unlike older AR approaches, it avoids the rainbow artifacting or eye glow effect. So other people genuinely cannot tell when it's powered on. It's powered on. I'm looking in a screen. You couldn't tell, could you? It's a remarkable feat of optical engineering, but it's one that comes with, well, a lot of physical bulk. Here's the problem. For all of that impressive engineering, the end result just isn't that impressive. The display appears as a tiny portion of your field of view and quickly fatigues your eyes because you have to adjust your focus distance to read it. In my testing, the relative focus is about Here. So the display and my hand are both in focus, I'm about a meter out. And this subsequently gives the distinct impression when I look at the screen that I'm not paying attention to you or whomever is directly in front of me, even if you're in my field of view. Additionally, because there's only one projector in the right eye, your left eye is trying to focus on an object that doesn't exist, because our eyeballs are used to seeing content in both eyes. But here, there's not. So the end result is not just cross-eyedness, but frankly, Some fairly rapid and intense eye fatigue. As somebody who is used to wearing VR headsets for hours on end and has been for more than a decade, it takes quite a bit of work to strain my eyes. But these do, even when the display is not on, because the wave guide mirror assembly slightly modifies your focal plane on your right eye, but not on your left. This is just a standard clear piece of glass, which is honestly really trippy. It's kind of like beer goggles. Now, as for the projection itself, Well, it's also just not that impressive. While it can get surprisingly bright indoors and outdoors, it still requires contrast. Just like a home theater projector, black levels are only as good as your background. So if you're outdoors in the sun, or even if you're inside staring at a dimly lit light monitor, if your projection backdrop is not dark, you're really going to struggle to see. Right now I'm in studio lights and I can't see diddly crap. And of course, this strains your eyes even further, because you're trying to focus on what is that tiny little light that I really can't see? Additionally, because of the dozen-plus refractions and reflections happening to the light inside of this lens assembly, the end result is honestly slightly smeary-looking. There's a fair amount of chromatic aberration and distortion, and while it's readable and higher resolution than you might expect, it's not necessarily sharp. Now, the size of the projected image is also not great. It feels equivalent. Well, let me turn it on. Okay, so it's about there. It's equivalent to holding my phone at more than an arm's length away, and it's in a fixed location. But despite it not being impressive, it is undeniably cool. Especially when wearing the neural wristband that it comes with, which is nothing short of remarkable. You place this thing on your arm, and you can navigate through the entire operating system with subtle gestures that can be done anywhere. In your pocket, in the dark, because there's no cameras here. This is completely through your nervous system. The band actually reads electrical signals that your brain is sending to your hand and your fingers, and then translates them into precise digital commands. But what's freaky is there's effectively zero latency. Because the band is reading the signals on the way from your brain to your hand, and so the OS reacts at about the same time your fingers actually move. It's like it's reading your mind. It's not. It's reading your arm. But it's freaky. And with a little bit of practice, I can now reliably navigate through the operating system with almost zero tactile input. It's honestly incredible. What's not incredible? The operating system itself. Most of what Meta has advertised appears to be vaporware, with only a few apps actually available and even fewer that are functional. That Halo feature that they've been demonstrating to everybody is turn-by-turn walking navigation. But despite living in a metro area of more than 3 million people, it's not available in my city yet. I'm sorry for not living in San Francisco. So all I can do is search for a location inside of the glasses and then say, okay. Send it to my phone, on Apple Maps. Great! Other than a tiny little game, there is nothing that these glasses can currently do that can't be done on the Meta Ray-Bans without a display. I mean, sure, technically there is a viewfinder to help frame your shot when using the camera, but that's a bit silly given that it's so wide-angle and at your line of vision anyway. It's effectively unnecessary. You can make calls and send messages, but doing this via a tiny low-resolution screen shot into into your eyeball is far less convenient than just Pulling out your phone, or even your watch, and it's far less comfortable than using the rather excellent Meta AI voice assistant. No display needed! I mean, the voice assistant is still what powers the majority of this display-driven OS. When you turn it on, it goes, hey, do you want to use the voice assistant? Which begs the question, what the crap is the point of the display? With no eye tracking nor spatial awareness, it is a fixed screen with a fixed piece of content that does not move. It's like if your Apple Watch was glued to a pole and held two feet from your face and everywhere your eyes move, your pole moves. So it's not really augmenting anything. It's just a transparent screen shot into your eyeball in front of the real world with glasses that make you kind of dizzy. And that's where we get to the problem with Gurman's latest claims that Apple is also creating display sporting glasses, but glasses that will run vision OS. This makes absolutely no sense. Let's assume that Apple can iterate upon what Meta's done here. Add a secondary display while reducing weight. Good luck with that. Increase the 600x600 pixel resolution. Address poor battery life. Make them not look like, well, this. They're still going to be stuck with the same fundamental constraints. Light engines need space and power. Waveguides require costly optics and manufacturing. Both battery capacity and compute power is strictly limited to the size, weight, and heat tolerance of something that you're wearing on your face all day that is this size. Big, but not that big. And then there's eye tracking. I mean, I guess unless they implement a neural wristband of their own, as Meta is doing, which I don't find likely given how much Meta paid to acquire the company that makes that, in a compact pair of eyeglasses, eye tracking is still really primitive compared to what Apple is achieving currently in the Vision Pro. I mean, true eye tracking, as found in here, requires multiple high-resolution IR cameras, dot projectors, fast image processing, and constant calibration, all of which take up space, Consume significant power, and only work well in controlled environments, like a pair of goggles. In something like this, the size of sunglasses, that fidelity just isn't feasible yet, at best. You might get coarse gaze estimation or blink detection, but not the precision required for foveated rendering, and certainly not gaze-based UI selection, which, uh, hold on, that's VisionOS. Now, even Apple, with all of its silicon and optics advantages, is still playing on the same field. And right now, the field is defined by hard physical limits, not just mere innovation Now, according to Gurman, Apple will sidestep a few of these limitations by running the full-vision OS experience only when tethered to a Mac, so the Mac can handle compute. Because you're not fitting an M5, or an M6, or an M7, or an M-whatever-the-heck-in-here, right? So the glasses, when running standalone or when paired to an iPhone, will run a stripped-down version of the OS for efficiency. But then that begs the question, I mean, what is Vision OS, really? Is it an app marketplace? Is it a navigation paradigm? Because without eye tracking, without display resolution, which you won't have for the apps that exist for Vision Pro, which are mostly just scaled up iPad apps anyway, without the compute overhead to create immersive environments or to mirror your Mac's display, you know, to do all the things Vision OS does. Is this really Vision OS? If the display sits in a fixed location, like the Ray-Bans, not adapting to your environment like true AR would, which again, it won't, because we can't even theorize a technology with that field of view, much less make it a reality, doesn't this just become an Apple Watch for your eyeball? Like these meta-glasses? Uh, yeah, that's, that's not Vision OS, and that begs the question, are we just pursuing these head-mounted displays only because science fiction dictated we needed them, or because screens are how we've always interfaced with computers and so that's what we naturally try to put onto everything? Because in a world of LLMs and conversational AI, I'm over here like, What's the point of superimposing a screen into my vision if I can just chat with something? And that's saying nothing about the fact that people don't even like wearing glasses. I mean, there is a multi-billion dollar industry in contacts and laser surgery proving that. And I'm evidence of that. I got LASIK 10 years ago and it was the best thing I ever had because I didn't want something on my face. I never did. If wearing smart glasses somehow was able to provide a compelling usefulness where we would go, okay, yeah, sure. I mean, I'll put them on for a while. That might start to change the equation. But what would that be? What can these do that your Apple Watch or your iPhone couldn't? I mean, if the Vision Pro. Can't even really do anything compelling. And it's replacing your entire vision with ultra high resolution displays. How the hell will this? Who's gonna carry these around and put them on their face anytime they need to interact with something or send a message? At least you could say the Vision Pro excels at watching movies. I mean, what would these alleged glasses do better than my watch or my phone? Send messages? No. Superimpose directions? Oh, is looking at my wrist really all that hard? Aha, I've got it. I can use my smart glasses to take POV photos and videos. Guess what, bud? I can already do that with my Meta Ray Bands that don't have a display. Gurman's own article is suggesting that Meta is successfully selling glasses, that they're flying off the shelves, while simultaneously struggling with the enclosed VR headset space, just like Apple, that it's a dead end. But that is so disingenuous. Meta has sold over 20 million Quest headsets, and just 2 million pairs of glasses. Now sure, the glasses are newer, but they also do fewer things. Things that our watches and phones already handle. I mean, what's the use case? What's the value proposition? Sure, these are cool, but being cool isn't enough to be the next iPhone or even to be the next Apple Watch, because if it were, this would be a success. This is very cool. For the last decade, we've been wondering what the next big thing is going to be. What's going to replace the iPhone? But have we ever stopped to consider that the phone is basically the perfect device anyways, that it can provide all of the information that we need when we want it, but we can easily stow it away when we don't. No HMD is likely to replace the smartphone. People love their smartphones. I certainly do. And it's not going to happen at least until vision can be augmented with UI elements while you feel nothing on your face at a price that is less than or equal to the smartphone. And by the way, if that ever happens, that's assuming we'll want to live in a world where our vision can be digitally altered anyways. I don't think I want that. Technology will iterate and it will improve, but this market feels inherently limited in potential reach. Now, that's not to say that Apple can't enter it. I mean, I like the MetaRay bands. They're cool. Not everything Apple has to make has to be the next iPhone, but they also can't enter markets expecting total domination like they did with the Vision Pro and then throw in the towel the second they don't get it. That is not a winning strategy. It wasn't for the Vision Vision Pro, and it won't be for whatever pivot this glasses thing becomes. Look, these rumors, they feel like a reaction to Meta's moderate success and a response to the Vision Pro's failure more than it feels like a cohesive vision for the future. And for a company that once prided itself on knowing what users wanted before even they did, I think that's a pretty damning indictment. What do you think? Am I too old and cynical and curmudgeonly? Or am I right? Do you like your phone too? Do you want to put something on your face? Let me know by liking this video, getting subscribed, and by commenting below. But most importantly, and as always, stay snazzy. Now, if you don't mind, I have to go to the nerd convention.