The Apple Vision Pro is Not the New iPhone

And it’s not even close. But it’s a curious comparison to make, the release of the Apple Vision Pro to the release of the iPhone from 2007. A good number of reviewers have been making this comparison, perhaps merely casually, and in my mind, they are quite different moments and completely different products.

The Feature and Spec Obsession

Tech reviewers treat products like bundles of cool features, and the Apple Vision Pro is no exception. From refresh rates to resolution to the visual experience, it has the best specifications that one of the best tech companies in the world could muster.

However, this doesn’t necessarily make a successful product on its own, and I’d argue even Apple’s brand isn’t enough to make just any product idea successful, which addresses a phrase I’ve heard about this release, “If any company can make this work, it’s Apple.” Now that Apple have entered the VR headset market, we assume they have brought something unique to this category that ultimately will cause a great change in how we interact with computing machines. Will it? Does Apple always have it figured out?

The thing this cool-features-discussion approach misses is the meaningful side of the product release, which is the actual value propositions to the target customers and users. Products don’t thrive on features; they ultimately thrive on alleviating pain or delivering joy in scalable, profitable ways.

Value Propositions as Pain Relievers and Joy Makers

On the pain side, customers need to be in so much “pain” doing something they need to do that they’re willing to part with “their hard-earned money” to alleviate that pain. And “money” isn’t just about the currency in their bank accounts or credit extended, it’s all the other things they could do with that money, all the opportunity cost that comes along with parting with it. They could spend that money hiring someone (a service) to alleviate the pain for them. They could take their families on vacation. They could buy food. They could pay rent.

On the joy side, this is where entertainment products come in. Video game consoles, vacation packages, toys, etc., all are products that help us feel good, have great experiences with friends and family, etc.

And on occasion, products can create a vision of new ways of living and working. Ever so often, we see a new product that “changes the game” in some way, that shows consumers and businesses something they hadn’t even imagined before, ideally something “they didn’t even know they needed.” The iPhone was such an event.

And it’s seductive to think that all a tech company needs is to mimic the iPhone release in some way by manufacturing a new category of device with amazing features, bolstered by luxury-inspired, industrial-like, minimalistic design aesthetics, and then expect that suddenly consumers will embrace it with similar fervor. We hear the marketing speak and pitch; we see the fancy presentations; we’re told how revolutionary the moment is.

But does it solve a problem in a way that makes me want to spend money and time on it? Or is it so joyful that I’d rather live with your product than with whatever else I might be doing?

The iPhone Manifested a Decades-Long Latent Opportunity

I think the Apple Vision Pro is fundamentally different from the iPhone release because despite the new headset’s capabilities and specs, there is no valuable latent opportunity that the Apple Vision Pro addresses. But the iPhone did just that.

Why did the iPhone achieve such massive change? It was due to the latent opportunity that was building up with our technology interactions since the 1960s.

Especially in the 1970s, our ways of working were radically changing due to computers. (A summary article from the BBC in 2013.) The modernization of the office brought word processing, VisCalc (which became Excel) and Presenter (which became PowerPoint), to the workplace. Work changed forever.

New tasks emerged, like IT and email, things that only existed because of the accessibility of computing machines. Some were new ways of communicating and presenting, others as overhead to maintain the growing fleet of machines.

Then the Apple II dropped in 1977 and the IBM PC in 1981, and computing machines started migrating from the workplace to the home. This kicked off a profound trend of increasing pervasiveness that continues even today, as word processing and video games started to weave the fabric of our modern experience, beyond the “otherness” of the workplace.

Mobile phones freed us from the physical locality of hard-lined phones, and over the 1990s and 2000s, this meant the way we conceived of an individuals’ availability totally changed. We could reach anyone, be reached by anyone, at any time. And the mobile phone succeeded because our modern lives demanded of us. It was painful to miss a call, drive home, listen to the answering machine, and call back, only to leave another message, if they had a machine at all. But this rigamarole wasn’t because we enjoyed using phones and answering machines, it was because we needed to communicate! We were trying to get news about a loved one’s hospitalization, coordinate a family gathering, gossip, or schedule a birthday party.

Similarly, electronic assistants like Palm Pilot attempted to free us from the locality of our desktop machines and laptops, so we could carry our new digital calendars, notebooks, and contact lists with us wherever we went.

With the Internet, now our social interactions and relationships with information evolved.

The iPhone

And then the iPhone.

Knowledge work had become a computer-powered experience; home and social life were enhanced by video games; and the promise of the Internet was just emerging.

But businesses exist to capitalize on value propositions, and every value proposition is two-sided. Businesses offer value to customers, and customers in turn offer value back to businesses through purchases.

And businesses have a spectrum of means to deliver upon (or I’ll say “fulfill”) on their value propositions, a spectrum that spans between “products” on one end and “services” on the other.

Products and services deliver value in different ways, both to the company and to the customer. Services customize themselves to the customers’ needs and generally scale with a workforce. To scale a consulting business, you need more consultants. To scale a lawn-mowing service, you need more lawn mowers and more employees.

Products are a bit different. They involve a tradeoff. A purchaser or user has a pain or need,

Products say, “Do things my way, and I’ll take care of that for you.” For the business, products are great because if you get the automation right, you can scale a business without having to scale your work force with every customer. You just have more widgets come off the assembly line, ship them, and you’re done. The more you can reduce interactions with the customer, the better, so you can keep your costs low.

But the value proposition still has to be there. The customer has to be convinced you’ll deliver, that their pain will go away. They’re not interested in your product really; in fact, every product is still getting in the way of alleviating pain. After all, a consumer still has to use the product. They have to interact with it, realize the value they wanted, maintain it, clean it, etc. And the benefits have to outweigh all the new effort and the cost.