The Vision Pro launch has more or less done exactly what I had always hoped for, which is to build a huge wave of awareness and curiosity that elevates the spatial computing ecosystem and could ultimately lead to mass-market consumer demand and a lot more developer interest that VR has ever had. Now it’s up to the industry to create enough user value and demonstrate whether this is in fact the future of computing.
Apple’s relentless and uncompromising hardware insanity is largely what made it possible for such a high-res display to exist in a VR headset, and it’s clear that this product couldn’t possibly have launched much sooner than 2024 for one simple limiting factor — the maturity of micro-OLED displays plus the existence of power-efficient chipsets that can deliver the heavy compute required to drive this kind of display (i.e. the M2).
Micro-OLED displays differ from any other previous consumer display technology because they are manufactured on top of a silicon substrate (similar to how semiconductor chips are made). To put the insanity of micro-OLED displays in perspective, the Vision Pro panel has a 7.4x higher pixel density than the latest iPhone and nearly 3x the Quest 3.
The bottom line for me is that we can see a relatively near future where carrying a MacBook Air and a Vision Pro in your backpack could give you a reasonably good workstation, one that delivers enough benefits in the form of productivity gains that you might be willing to wear a headset for a few hours in a café, on an airplane, or even on your couch at home. (This perspective is of course made in complete absence of value-for-money considerations).