I was thinking of this guy. It's bonkers.

Yeah but nobody wants that. Beating my dead horse, Second Life is legit two weeks from crossing the 20-year mark and nobody, ever, in that entire ecosystem has ever cried out for immersion. The tech industry has been fishing around for a killer app for VR since Lawnmower Man and it just don't exist.

Nobody wants Zuck's version of VR, unless you are one of the few basement dwellers for whom VRChat or Horizon is a way to cope with your social anxiety. That much is certain.

What struck me about the presentation from Apple is how much it leaned into "this is just another way to interact with a computer". Do Macbooks have a killer app? Do iPads? No, they're just a different device to do the things on you're already doing on other devices, sometimes enhanced and sometimes limited by the device specifics. I'll use my iPad on the couch for some browsing, and I think people will enjoy using the Vision from time to time to do mostly things that can already be done on other devices, and partially to do things you can only do in such a device. I would not be surprised if it isn't for you, but I would also not be surprised to see myself buying/using this regularly in a year or two, because this seems to be the first device that achieves the visual acuity needed for normal people to do fairly normal things in AR with a new interaction method that relies mostly on looking and tapping.

Neither does anyone else.

How sure are you about that? You might not ever trade in your physical sliders but this device is not really meant to replace what you already have, it's meant to drastically give people more 'room' to do stuff when that room isn't really available. I could buy 5 large 4K screens and put them on an array on my desk and it would be maybe a third of what's capable when you wear the Vision (and it'd be more expensive too). I could buy a large setup of physical devices and spend thousands to get that right... or I could just have it pop into and out of existance whenever I need to. You want most of a production studio but you don't have a large spare room? You're on the go in a hotel and you want 5 large screens to do some work? Here you go.

Hell, if the passthrough is really as good as people are claiming, I could even see a hybrid solution where you have your physical sliders but you enhance them with half a dozen movable screens and dials. They already demoed that you can just type on your Macbook and have the entire wall as your screen.

It's not that the use cases for this aren't possible in other (and often better) ways. Normally I browse Hubski on my iPad, and it's an okay experience but to type out a comment I really need to find my laptop or get behind my pc. I sometimes watch YouTube on my iPad, sometimes on my PC but it's best on my smart TV, but I really think the Vision Pro experience could knock my TV out of the park. Some devices have some killer apps but really, it's the variety of options that makes it work.

I hear you thinking "so why isn't anyone doing that on a Meta Quest" and, well, one bonkers guy is, but the whole experience is so awful that it's repellant for 99,999% of people. My impression is that Apple's relentless focus on eliminating motion sickness, having screens so sharp that reading text is actually nice, having smooth transitions in/out, and their dynamic level of immersion make a very compelling case for this device being less awful and, say, only repelling 50% of people. Which is enough of a difference that this might just be the one AR device to actually pop off.