Seeing through the Apple Vision Pro

INDIGNITY VOL. 4, NO. 24

THE WORST THING WE READ™

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All the World's a Screen

THIS WEEK, APPLE began selling the Apple Vision Pro, a computerized set of goggles that replaces the wearer's view of the world with a camera feed on an Apple video screen. The retail price starts at $3,499. 

Poised as it is at the very first turn of the product cycle, the Vision Pro currently exists strictly for tech enthusiasts and tech reviewers (who also tend to be tech enthusiasts). Normal people don't spend $3,500 for a device that no one else owns, in an unfamiliar category of devices, with an uncertain use case. Why would they? 

Apple's marketing job, at this point, is to get the people who don't ask "Why?" to answer that question anyway, so that the rest of the world sees a reason to buy the device. What is the Vision Pro for? What do you get if you use it? 

As soon as Apple released the Vision Pro, the video blogger Casey Niestat set out onto the streets of New York to address the subject. The resulting video blog was more than 10 minutes long and had the title "the thing no one will say about the Apple Vision Pro," a title whose promise of transgression clashed a little with the way Niestat's informal punctuation yielded to a sudden discovery of the shift key when he reached the A, V, and P of the $3,499 proper noun.