Vision Pro

The hardware seems faintly unbelievable—a computer as powerful as Apple’s current mid-tier laptops (M2), plus a dizzying sensor/camera array with dedicated co-processor, plus displays with 23M 6µm pixels (my phone: 3M 55µm pixels; the PSVR2 is 32µm) and associated optics, all in roughly a mobile phone envelope. But that kind of vertical integration is classic Apple. I’m mainly interested in the user interface and the computing paradigm. What does Apple imagine we’ll be doing with these devices, and how will we do it? Given how ambitious the hardware package is, the software paradigm is surprisingly conservative. visionOS is organized around “apps”, which are conceptually defined just like apps on iOS: I was surprised to see that the interface paradigm is classic WIMP. At a high level, the pitch is not that this is a new kind of dynamic medium, but rather that Vision Pro gives you a way to use (roughly) 2D iPad app UIs on a very large, spatial display. Those apps are organized around fa

The hardware seems faintly unbelievable—a computer as powerful as Apple’s current mid-tier laptops (M2), plus a dizzying sensor/camera array with dedicated co-processor, plus displays with 23M 6µm pixels (my phone: 3M 55µm pixels; the PSVR2 is 32µm) and associated optics, all in roughly a mobile phone envelope. But that kind of vertical integration is classic Apple. I’m mainly interested in the user interface and the computing paradigm. What does Apple imagine we’ll be doing with these devices, and how will we do it? Given how ambitious the hardware package is, the software paradigm is surpris