A woman wears Apple new headset, the Vision Pro.

Apple’s Vision Pro straps to your face and offers integration of the digital and physical realms. (Photo: Apple / Design: Tina Tiller)

TechJune 7, 2023

Would you strap this ‘dystopia helmet’ to your face?

Chris Schulz

Guest writer

Apple’s Vision Pro straps to your face and offers integration of the digital and physical realms. (Photo: Apple / Design: Tina Tiller)

Watch out, Silicon Valley is trying to make wearable face tech cool again.

Its creators say it’s “revolutionary”. Apple reckons its new spatial face computer will blend digital content with the physical world in a way Pokémon Go could only dream of. It will provide an “infinite canvas” for apps, with a 3D interface guided by eyes, hands and voice gestures. Movies will be more immersive than ever.

“It’s like magic,” says the voiceover for a nine-minute commercial that feels like an extended bit from Netflix’s dystopian sci-fi show Black Mirror – which didn’t miss a beat in parodying the commercial to tease its forthcoming new season.

The Apple Vision Pro, announced during yesterday’s otherwise muted annual Apple keynote address, is a digital mask that straps to your face and promises an immersive computing experience. Expected to cost around US$3,500 (~NZ$5,800) and due for release early next year, the Vision Pro has been years in the making and is the first major hardware release since the Apple Watch in 2015.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is trumpeting the Vision Pro as his major era-defining product, something to rival the iPhone and iPad in scope and scale. It is, Apple says, the most advanced personal electronics device ever built. Cook calls it “the beginning of a new era for computing,” “years ahead” of its competitors and “unlike anything created before”.

That’s not entirely true. Silicon Valley has attempted making wearable face tech cool several times now, and it’s never caught on. Can Apple do the impossible? Here’s everything we know so far…

Apple wants this on your face as much as possible

An Apple Vision Pro user. — Strapped in; the Apple Vision Pro. (Image: Apple)

At close to $6,000, it’s a high price point for sure – but that hasn’t stopped people shelling out $1,000 for a set of Apple Max headphones or paying for a new phone upgrade every year. The Vision Pro isn’t something you only put on when you want to play VR games. Apple wants you to live your life with this thing strapped to your face, and ads show users scrolling the internet, working, Zooming, reading, chatting, cooking, watching movies and organising their photo libraries.

They even show parents working on the Vision Pro while spending time with their kids, and others having real-life conversations with people still wearing the thing. Your eyes will, apparently, fade in and out depending on how immersed you are in the Vision Pro, alerting those around you to how available you are for a convo. You can also control your laptop, phone and watch using the Vision Pro just by looking at them. That takes double-screening to an entirely new and incredibly depressing level.

A parent hangs out with their kids using the Apple Vision Pro. — Quality time? (Screengrab: Apple)

It’s not going to be for everyone

Tim Cook has admitted the price point means the Vision Pro isn’t going to be affordable for most. And many people – myself included – feel sick when using inferior VR headsets, so they’ll need plenty of convincing before shelling out for this. Analysts are predicting that this could indeed be a game-changing device, but it will be years and probably several further iterations before that really rings true.

There are plenty of fans out there

Many people are already locked into Apple’s ecosystem of products, now ranging from phones, laptops and tablets to headphones, home theatre systems and streaming devices. Those people would be hyped about an Apple fart, so rest assured they are frothing over this one. “Take my money” was typical of the hot takes I saw as the Vision One was announced. While no one’s yet had more than half an hour with this thing, The Verge called it “incredibly impressive” and praised the design, and the potential after a half-hour trial, while YouTuber Marques Brownlee is also a fan, calling it “only something Apple could pull off”.

But there are also lots of haters

Megan Stals, markets analyst at digital brokerage platform Stake, calls the Vision Pro a “beta product that’s not quite ready for the masses”. David Farrier calls it a “dystopia machine” and pointed out that it can predict what we’re going to do on it before we do. The Economist called it “incredible” in one breath, and in the next asked, “What’s it for?” On Twitter, many were wondering if this is the moment we all become the Wall-E people, strapped to our machines with nothing to do and nowhere to go…

An animated person from the film Wall-E. — Strapped in an nowhere to go. (Screengrab: Wall-E)

Yes, we’ve tried to do this before

Remember Google Glass? How about the Microsoft HoloLens? Silicon Valley has a long history of expensive failures when it comes to wearable face tech. Many have tried but it’s just never taken flight. Despite $35 billion of investment, even Facebook’s Meta Quest Pros haven’t become the VR goggles of choice. Recently, a couple of sets were floating around The Spinoff office for several days and even then I couldn’t be bothered giving them a try. Perhaps that’s the problem – I just don’t see the why in all this. I’d rather find reasons to be less connected, not more. I certainly don’t want my phone strapped to my face all day, and that feels like exactly the service Vision Pro is trying to provide.

The pros

The Vision Pro will integrate with all your other Apple products. Watching movies sounds like it will be an incredible experience. VR chats could be much more fun that staring at yet another multi-window Zoom screen.

Anyway, they could have been uglier than this, right?

A woman wears Apple's Vision Pro headset. — Apple’s Vision Pro. (Image: Apple)

The cons

It only has two hours of battery, and it’s wired, so a battery pack will need to sit in your pocket at all times. Sure, it looks modern and sleek, and it’s probably quite comfy. I guess we call got used to people wearing things on their faces during Covid. But do you really want to have a conversation with someone while wearing this? Isn’t eye contact supposed to be an important part of human interaction?

So what does Mark Zuckerberg think about all this?

He hasn’t said anything yet, but this could actually be good for him. His own Meta Quest glasses are far cheaper than Apple’s Vision Pros, so if this expands the market he could end up shifting a few more units. But he’s got bigger problems on his hands. All those billions spent building out the Metaverse appear to have been for nothing, layoffs have been announced and a pivot to AI is on the cards. Silicon Valley, huh?

Keep going!

Image: Tina Tiller

OPINIONTechJune 2, 2023

Weird: The Kindle comes with a pen now

Chris Schulz

Guest writer

Image: Tina Tiller

Amazon’s top-selling digital reading device now offers much more than just books on a screen. But is that a good thing?

All day, I think about words. From the moment I open my laptop, I tap away at my keyboard, turning letters into words, words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs. Ideally, but not always, those paragraphs become stories. That means writing, then editing, and writing some more. I kill my babies, then I write more babies, and I consider slaughtering them too.

Those babies keep me up past midnight. They wake me up at 4am. They dance around my head like wailing banshees looking for a home. They tease me, taunt me, daring me to put them in some kind of order that often remains frustratingly, tantalisingly out of reach.

Whatever I am doing, I am haunted by words. Sometimes, it feels like I live inside a real life Wordle nightmare. No wonder I never played that cursed game.

A woman sits with her Kindle reader jotting down notes. — The Kindle Scribe comes with a Premium Pen. (Photo: Amazon)

When I close my laptop at the end of the day, I try my best to cease this incessant, infinite word waterfall. I play sport. I watch TV. I swim. I let my kids beat me at Fifa. I grow things in the garden. I cook. I cuddle the dog. Anything that helps take words out my mind, to make me forget that they’re there, no matter how brief that moment is, I cherish.

Do you know what I don’t want to do at the end of the day? Write more words.

Amazon has other ideas. Its new Kindle reading device – called the Kindle Scribe, which has, as far as I can tell, nothing to do with the Christchurch rapper – comes with a pen. It’s a nice pen, sure. The Premium Pen feels good to hold. It is the right weight, the correct texture and, in slate grey, comes in an inoffensive colour. There is one button on the top, and another on the side. (You shouldn’t let peanut butter get anywhere near the buttons on your Premium Pen.)

That pen allows you do all kinds of things on your Kindle Scribe that you could not do on your old Kindle. You can start a journal, jot down ideas, create a to-do list, import and edit pdf files, or write sticky notes on the pages of your favourite books. You can edit documents, draw a quick bar graph, circle things and write “wrong” in capital letters, or pen a critical letter to the author of the book you’re reading then chicken out of sending it in the morning.

Amazon's Kindle Scribe is bigger and comes with a pen. — Amazon’s Kindle Scribe, with a bigger screen and a Premium Pen. (Photo: Supplied)

It opens up your Kindle to a whole new world. You can use your pen to scroll through pages. Press the button and your pen becomes an eraser. There are all-new menus to navigate, drop down bars to get used to, scrolling mechanisms to manage. Your pen will never run out of ink, and its battery lasts for months. It is, says Amazon, perfectly calibrated to offer “the best possible reading and writing experience”.

In theory, more is always better. But I have an iPad, and that iPad has an Apple Pencil. It does much more than the Kindle Scribe. It offers apps, games, puzzles, Netflix, Disney, Apple TV+, Facebook, Google, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter… A Kindle Scribe can’t do any of those things. It remains a device offering a screen of inky black and white. Yet, with its internet browser, and its Premium Pen, it seems to be making a cautious step towards the iPad’s direction.

Yes, you can still read books on a Kindle Scribe. I tested all kinds out on this: biographies, novels, poems, short stories and a Mediterranean cookbook full of ideas for one-pot dishes full of seafood I cannot afford. Not once while turning these pages did I think to myself, “I would like to jot some notes down here”. (It is worth pointing out at this point that several of my officemates have voiced support for a note-taking device like the Kindle Scribe, and its closest competitor, the reMarkable 1, so I may be in the minority here.)

Only once did I want to write a note, and that was to Jeffrey Bezos to tell him that graphic novels, my preferred choice of reading material for taking my mind off my own words, still look like absolute dogshit on the Kindle Scribe, just as they did on the original Kindle. I even began to jot it down. The pen flowed nicely, capturing my prose perfectly. I didn’t hate writing those words. In fact, I even forgot that I’d spent the whole day doing that exact thing.

By the morning, my anger had passed. By then, I had many other words on my mind.

Amazon’s Kindle Scribe with 16Gb and Premium Pen retails for $699; e-books are sold separately.