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credits)For the launch of the iPhone, I was exctatic. For the launch of the iPad, I was hopeful. The launch of the Apple Watch left me somewhat indifferent, but at least I could still see its appeal.
Now, Apple is releasing an ambitious product for which it has no interesting use case. Apple does not consider what negative effects this device could have on our lives. Quite unlike the discussion around the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (LLMs), people seem ignorent or indifferent to a future where people may be spending time isolated in a virtual reality.
For the first time, I find myself hoping the new thing from Cupertino will fail and be abandoned.
Time and time again we have seen how technology shapes our lives. I still remember the disappointment when I realized that the fantastic device called iPhone was mainly used to play a game called Candy Crush Saga.
I used an Apple Watch for a while, until I realized that there is also a dark side to having all these health data on my wrist all the time: I got worried about my sleep cycle, about warnings in the morning that my heart had been beating too slowly, about washing my hands enough, about standing up enough, about exercising enough. And then when I went running, the little devil was measuring every effort I did, encouraging me to do a little better, and "awarding" me with some virtual medal. My health helper had become a source of anxiety, and a source of worry.
The Airtag, that little thing I love. It keeps track of a lot of things for me. But I have also wondered wheter I should put an Airtag in my daughter's school bag. I don't, and I won't. I try to keep it into my head that an important goal of parenting is teaching her to make the right decisions. I keep in mind that I need to learn to trust her in making the right decisions. And I need to realize that technology will not be able to keep bad luck or bad people at bay. I guess I should not have watched that Black Mirror episode.
One more example? Ubiquitous smartphones have enabled social networks like Instagram, which enables a next level of bullying on school playgrounds that we now need to protect children from. But the inventors of Instagram only imagined a fun way to share photos.
There are many more examples, and each individual will perceive different nuisances. Point is, there are annoying side effects that are often irreversible once the technology has been introduced.
Now Apple wants to add a new device. As it put an iPhone in people's pockets and a mini-iPhone on their wrists, it now wants to put an iPhone in front of their eye balls. The goal is to immerse people in an imaginary, digital world.
Not even the developers in the community can currently see a use case where the added value is clearly visible. Apple will try to find it out on the go, as it did with the Apple Watch. It counts on the developer community to help figure it out.
For those that forgot: the Apple Watch as a "health monitoring device" as unique selling proposition only shaped up after a couple of iterations of seeing how people used it. At least that aspect was envisioned in the device from the beginning. For the Apple Vision Pro the only feable hint of a vision is that it could be a great entertainment device. Just what the world needs, an immersive entertainment device.
Whatever unintentional side effects the Apple Vision Pro will have on users, Apple will try to remedy afterwards. It did so with Airtags, that could be used to spy on other people. It did so with iPhones, where the built-in effect to try to make you addicted to the device is counterbalanced with a feature called "Screen Time".
As Michael Pollan said about wonder bread: it's selling the problem and the solution in the same package. Now Apple can wave its responsibility: you have the utilities in your hand to limit your usage, if you are addicted to your endorphine-inducing device, that is your resposibility.
How will a successful Apple Vision Pro change the way we interact with other people? Since this device is designed to isolate you from the real world and immerse you in an interactive digital world, I do not expect it to be positive.
A friend of mine a long time ago told me: "Don't trust a company to have any moral values. It is there to make money, and it is organized to make money, and anything it does will fit in the mold of making money".
I used to love Apple, back when it was the underdog. I owe my career as a computer programmer to Apple. I am grateful for it, but it's time to admit: Apple are not the goodies anymore. They may have once been, or maybe I was just being naive, but they are not anymore.
"Privacy is a fundamental human right" is a slogan that it is not really willing to defend. If it were, Apple would stop selling and producing iPhones in China, where it has made far reaching compromises. If it were, it would drop Google as a default search engine in Safari and not let the search data of the majority of its users (that do not change the default) be harvested by one of the biggest advertisement companies in the world.
Apple wants to be ecological. It is probably serious about its effort to make the iPhone more recyclable, but of course a better starting point would be to also make the iPhones last longer than one year. It could do so explicitly in its messaging by making the iPhone launch event every two years instead of every year. And thinking of it, it could even make sense marketingwise, because iPhone events have become boring. Who can, without looking it up, tell what the major difference is between an iPhone 13 and iPhone 12? The camera got a little better?
In its hunger for more money, Apple has been seeking revenues from services, after finding that there is no more room for growth from hardware sales. This means it is now trying to seduce its users into buying services they might not need. For instance, it sells the memory chips in the iPhone with an outrageous margin, because it can sell the service of disk space in the cloud to remediate the problem limited memory space introduces. The fact that this enlargens the problem of power hungry data centers is not taken into consideration. This is also another example of selling the problem and the solution, in the same package. Wonder bread.
As my trust in Apple went down, my trust in rules and regulations by public institutions went up. At least there's that positive effect. The right to repair only came after political pressure was applied. More laws are on their way to limit the power of Apple and other giants in tech. Not a bit too soon.
With all this in mind, there are two possible outcomes to consider: either Apple will succeed in slapping an iPhone on a sizeable portion of the world's eyeballs, or it will not. With its success will come more power over our lives. With its failure will come lessons, that Apple will use to gain more control over our lives. Apple has become this dark behemoth that is more and more showing its ugly side.
When I read that the device did not sell out on opening day, that Netflix and others show no interest in making Vison Pro apps, I feel for a moment like we dodged a bullet. But we haven't yet. It could still succeed, but my hope, at the moment, is that it won't.
2024-01-21:1705868581