Apple Vision Pro and the hair/nose hard limit

Even Apple can't out-innovate vanity and facial protrusions

Hi – welcome to this, the first edition of The Angle. In case you only skimmed the ‘welcome’ note, I should let you know up front that this inaugural edition is a single-focus column, which means usually it’d only be available for paying subscribers. But it’s a special day, so everyone gets to enjoy this one to celebrate!

Also, whether you’re a paid member or not, I wanted to say ‘Thank you’ for signing up. Response so far has been amazing, which brings me a lot of joy at what has been a very tough time. Many of you are friends, and your support means the world to me. The rest are friends-in-the-making – and the same goes for you, too. ❤️

On to the good stuff: Apple Vision Pro.

As a Canadian (and one who doesn’t have a spare $3,500 USD lying around at the moment for discretionary spending), I haven’t had the chance to actually try out the Apple Vision Pro myself. But I have devoured every single piece of writing, watched every video, listened to every podcast, and generally overloaded myself with as much Apple face computer content as I possibly could.

No one is unimpressed with what Apple has been able to accomplish, that’s clear. And it’s paired with a fairly funny reluctance among tech reviewers to call any shots in advance about the device’s chances to succeed. So many of them got burned trashing the Apple Watch, iPad, or even the iPhone, that no one wants future fanbois to have another reason to fling past bad takes back in their face.

I’ve been fairly open about my skepticism regarding the Apple Vision Pro’s chances, and early response has me thinking I’m right. Again, there’s no debating that Apple has done something technically amazing with their first VR headset (a term they’ll never use, but the right one). The display tech specifically is amazing – in particular those red blood cell-sized individual pixels.

There’s another few common notes to all the reviews to date, however, and a couple of recurring complaints add up to a hard cap on just how far and wide Apple Vision Pro can go (spoiler: not very).

The two key things are both complaints that have been levied against similar headsets from Meta, HTC, Oculus and many others that have come before, and they illustrate a key point about tech that a lot of futurists or techno-optimists will happily ignore or attempt to refute, but one that remains a hard limit nonetheless: Gadgets need to fit comfortably into daily human life to gain mass market traction.

The Apple Watch is probably the most successful Apple product to date to push at the limits of this constraint, and a wristwatch is still something that itself gained mass market adoption long before a tech-heavy version came along. The iPhone’s rapid uptake is due in part to how incredibly seamless it was for everyone to work it into their day-to-day lives – right down to its single-handedness and pocketability.

The Apple Vision Pro runs up against two things that capped its adoption at early adopters and technophiles from before it ever became a tangible object: The lumpy meat on people’s faces, and their vanity.

Everyone has said that the Vision Pro is uncomfortable to wear for long periods of time, with the bulk of the device resting its weight on the bridge of your nose if you’re using the ill-conceived single band strap (which I think is an attempt to address that second hard limit – more on that soon). Even with the dual strap, which Apple included in the box as an obvious concession, doesn’t eliminate strain and puts max continuous use time at somewhere around an hour or two.

Discomfort is one thing, but self-image is another entirely. Apple has a history of turning things that could be fashion disasters into wins – the AirPods are a prime example. But the Vision Pro is always – always – going to mess up your hair, which is a non-starter for a vast swath of customers in terms of a daily use device.

Apple could – and has – ship the most amazing tech anyone has seen in a decade or more, and if it continually messed up someone’s hair, it wouldn’t go anywhere. That probably sounds a little depressing to technological utopians, but I find it positively refreshing: Not even trillion dollar company can out-spend or out-invent an incredibly human hard limit – wanting to look presentable for the other humans they share space with.

I’m not saying it’s good to obsess over your appearance, in case anyone wants to levy that complaint. It’s just nice that a consideration regarding how we show up in meat space trumps our desire to dwell in a photorealistic computing virtual utopia.

To be clear, I don’t think even Apple believes it’ll get to a billion devices shipped with this iteration of spatial computing. Tim Cook’s weird, lenticular virtual eyes are clearly looking ahead to when AR is a practical reality and this kind of thing can be done with a pair of glasses indistinguishable from the ones many of us wear every day for vision correction. But it’s weird to see them put the cart so far before the horse with this launch, and I have to wonder what the life of the Vision lineup looks like until and unless we get to that AR future.