Today was Apple's annual WWDC conference, and though I faithfully tune in every year, I truly cannot remember the last time I left one of these keynotes thinking, "Holy crap. Apple may have just dented the universe a bit." That streak was broken today.
In the keynote, Apple announced a new MacBook Air, Mac Studio, and Mac Pro, and they previewed new features for iOS 17, iPadOS 17, macOS Sonoma, tvOS 17, and watchOS 10. But all of this was overshadowed by a gargantuan Apple Vision Pro announcement that will be both memed to hell and yet lusted for by Apple fanatics everywhere
I have a lot of thoughts.
Apple Vision Pro
Apple absolutely schooled Meta on how to properly position this product. Mark Zuckerberg spent way so much time trying to convince us we should uproot our entire lives and transplant them into his legless FarmVille-wannabe fever dream that nobody could really focus on the genuinely practical uses of AR technology. We were all just giggling. Apple didn't try to convince us we should transplant our lives into VR but instead spent their time convincing us of how we could integrate AR into our existing lives, and that's a much easier pill to swallow.
In my mind, the company that wins the AR headset race will win because they do three things well. First, the company needs to be highly adept at getting buy-in from developers to support the new technology. We just lived through the trial period of this with Apple silicon, and Apple proved it still has their developers in the palm of their hand. Second, the company needs to have pockets deep enough to eat mega losses in the first few years. Like. Mega. Apple has around $200 billion in the bank, so this should be absolutely no problem for them. And lastly, the company needs to have a really strong capability at integrating software and hardware. AR headsets literally sit millimeters from your eyes. Any quirk in how the hardware and software integrate will make the user experience really grating. But not only is Apple a company founded on the principle of closely integrating hardware and software, but it's also a company where many of their customers spend a hefty portion of their time within Apple's owned apps, which lets Apple control a bit more of their own destiny here. If anyone will be able to nail this product category, it will be Apple.
Apple said, "Your entire world is a canvas for apps," thinking it would be tantalizing for us, but that's literally the exact future I hope we all avoid. Because we know how quickly that will become, "Your entire world is a canvas for ads."
This product category is not going to catch on until it looks sexier. There's no way around it. You still just look outright goofy having this thing on your face. But we can all see so clearly where this is going: a device with all the same capabilities but looks like Ray-Bans. We're not going to get there overnight, and as a v1, Apple Vision Pro could look much worse.
For as much as Apple talked about how great FaceTiming with family members will be in Vision Pro, we saw very little about how the "digital persona" avatar feature that enables this FaceTiming will look. Having a photo-realistic digital persona for these calls is leagues better than whatever this Mr. Potatoberg is, but if Apple had nailed this, they would have showcased it more, so I suspect they're still wading in uncanny valley.
The whole Apple product roadmap of the last eight years makes perfect sense now. AirPods? HomePod? FaceID? These all had their time in the spotlight, but now it's clear they were also stepping stones that helped fill all the technology gaps needed to develop the Apple Vision Pro.
The ability to capture and relive moments of your life in VR is really exciting, and it's something I wrote about months ago as something I'm looking forward to. But every time I think about this feature I keep picturing this same sad grandpa reliving the birthdays of the grandkids that won't visit him anymore, and I cry a bit inside.
An overlooked part of the battle for headset supremacy is literally just going to be, "What company is the fastest at getting this thing to properly fit your head?" Anyone that has ever used a car bike rack knows even the best inventions fail fast when you have no freaking idea how to attach them right. Let's hope Apple was truly as intentional about this as they tried to lead us to believe they were.
EyeSight, Environments, and AR objects having fake shadows are all such distinctly Apple touches.
There is no better environment for this product than an airplane. Stop showing demos of people wearing this sex life slaughterer at work or on a couch or in bed. Just show someone with it in the middle seat on an airplane and everyone will go, "Okay, I sort of get it now."
Two hours of battery is not going to cut it, but I think opting for a lighter headset with an external battery rather than having a heavier headset with a built-in battery is the right design tradeoff. When you're taking Zoom calls from Mount Fuji, you will not even remember there's a cord an inch from your ear and a hunk of lithium in your pocket.
$3,499 sounds like a lot, but I really expected Apple to charge more. At $3,499, you're probably only appealing to Apple enthusiasts anyways, and they're price inelastic enough where I wouldn't have been surprised if Apple tried to charge twice that.
Mark Zuckerberg is not sleeping tonight. No question about it.
Literally Everything Else
The Mac Pro is finally here, which means the Apple silicon transition is finally complete. And now we can officially say this is one of the single smartest strategic decisions Apple has ever made and that the PC market has ever seen. Full stop.
Clearly Apple has a masterplan here, but the MacBook lineup just feels so messy to me. I can write the buyers guide for the 13" M1 MacBook Air, the new 15" M2 MacBook Air, the 13" M2 MacBook Pro, and the 14" M2 Pro MacBook Pro in ten words: "They will all probably work for you equally as well." It's a great problem to have this many great laptops in the lineup, but I can't help but yearn for the days of the quadrant.
The $6,999 starting price for the new Mac Pro is high, but compared to the Intel Mac Pro it's replacing, the incremental value seems substantially higher than the incremental cost.
The current M2 Mac mini is still the best value in computing. It wasn't even part of the keynote. It just has to be said again.
"Big update to the Phone app" makes about as much sense as "major advancements in the safety of free solo climbing." But Live Voicemail in iOS 17 does look kinda sweet.
I can't remember seeing a new Messages feature in any of the last two or three years where I thought, "This is an absolute game-changer," but I also don't remember seeing one where I thought, "I am never in a million years going to use this." I admire consistent, thoughtful improvements.
Still, I don't get why Apple spends time in every single keynote pretending like we all love using stickers in Messages and then takes a super valuable update like offline Maps and goes, "Nah — just quietly stick that on the summary slide."
Apple has a blank space baby, and it'll write the names of Day One and AllTrails.
Apple adding standby mode to make your iPhone look exactly like the alarm clocks it killed is so savage.
You can now adjust the astronomy Lock Screen on iPad to pick what planet you want it to show? Dope!
iPadOS has become the designated bathroom break time of these keynotes, followed closely by the Mac gaming section.
Craig Federighi announcing support for multiple timers in iOS 17 and then saying, "We truly live in an age of wonders," is the single greatest thing Apple has ever done.
Live Collaboration on iPad will remain one of those features that 0.5% of users obsess over and cannot live without, while the other 99.5% of people don't even know it exists.
macOS Sonoma is a great name. They wouldn't even have to add any new features for it to feel like an upgrade.
Steve Jobs first introduced widgets to the Mac almost 20 years ago and it's shocking it took until now to enable them on the desktop.
The feature where macOS detects when you show two thumbs up in a video conference and automatically shoots animated fireworks behind you is going to be accidentally triggered by so many confused Gen Xers. Nobody demanded this feature. But here we are now. Entertain us.
Presenter Overlay in macOS Sonoma is one of those features where I can't believe it didn't exist as an option until now. I do have a lot of questions about how quickly any of these new video conferencing features will be adopted by third-party apps though.
This is probably the largest upgrade to watchOS in at least five years and yet it still feels like a "tok" year. I don't know what Apple can do to reinvigorate excitement in this operating system, and it's looking increasingly likely that Apple doesn't know either.
The new Apple Watch and iPhone mental health awareness features are great but would be much more useful if they came with only one preloaded suggestion: “Put me down.”
Vision health? Mental health? Daylight time? Watching Apple wrestle with its own externalities is getting more and more interesting and probably warrants a post all to its own.
Soak it in, Tim Cook. This might be your finest day.
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