S1E72 — The coolest use for the Vision Pro

GARY: —forty minutes on the Apple Store, forty fucking minutes, and I still can't tell if the Vision Pro is a headset or a— shit.

GARY: Are we— is this— okay. Okay. I'm Gary.

MAEVE: Maeve.

OBI: Obi.

GRUNER: Gruner.

GARY: Today we are reading the Hacker News thread titled "The coolest use for the Vision Pro." Ninety-six comments. The top answer, and I am not making this up, is a guy who used his three-thousand-five-hundred-dollar face computer to visualize a kitchen remodel.

MAEVE: Disruption.

GARY: The thread is a war. Half the comments are people who own the thing and won't shut up about spatial computing, and the other half have never touched one and are furious it exists. So— a normal thread. Let's start with the weight.

OBI: Pfraze says, "The problem is the weight. For all of the good features it has, it's so heavy that you can't use it very long."

OBI: There it is. Apple spent a decade and however many billions of dollars to build a device you physically cannot wear. Gary, you lasted twelve minutes with that posture corrector I recommended. Your neck would fold like a goddamn lawn chair.

GARY: That was— I returned that because—

OBI: You returned it because you couldn't figure out which way was front.

GARY: It was ambiguously designed!

MAEVE: It was a strap.

GARY: The point is— the weight thing is real. Pfraze is right. You can demo this thing for twenty minutes and feel like the future. You wear it for an hour and you feel like you've been headbutted by the future.

OBI: The future weighs six hundred grams and it has given you a tension headache.

GRUNER: Is heavy for face.

GARY: Is heavy for face. Yes. Thank you, Gruner. That's the pull quote.

MAEVE: Can I—

GARY: Please.

MAEVE: So there's this comment from CameronBanga. And I think it's the most honest thing in the thread. He says— "It is the greatest piece of technology I have ever owned." Pause. "It's clear that it is the future." Pause. "But there's still some steps between where Apple is at with it today, and where it needs to be in order to be a mainstream product."

GARY: The greatest piece of technology I've ever owned, and I can't recommend it to anyone.

MAEVE: That is the entire Valley in one sentence. Worship the artifact, abandon the user. It's the same energy as every SaaS deck in 2021 that had "10x better than legacy" on slide three and then slide fourteen was "retention: TBD."

GARY: I remember that very well.

MAEVE: CameronBanga has found religion and the church has no door. He's tithing to a headset. And I'm not unsympathetic— the spatial computing is genuinely impressive, the eye tracking, the passthrough, the multi-window handling— but "the future" is not a product category. "the future" is what you say when the present doesn't work yet.

OBI: It's what founders say when the unit economics are a war crime.

MAEVE: Correct.

GARY: Okay, but— and I say this as someone who has been on the wrong side of "the future" more than once—

OBI: Here we go.

GARY: —there is something real here. CameronBanga is not delusional. He's saying: I can see what this becomes. It's just not there yet. And there is a version of that where he's right and the timeline is just longer than anyone wants.

MAEVE: There is also a version where he's describing every failed hardware startup that ever raised a Series B. The interface question is not new, Gary. The mouse. The touchscreen. Every fifteen years the Valley bets the farm on a new surface between humans and machines, and every time the first version is too expensive, too limited, and too weird, and the people who buy it are called idiots, and then ten years later the idiots are writing Medium posts about how they "saw it from the beginning." The Vision Pro is the mouse. It's the touchscreen. It's the— it's the Newton. It's the goddamn Newton, Gary. The Newton was just early iPhone, and the Vision Pro is just early—

OBI: ...What?

MAEVE: The pattern rhymes.

OBI: You just compared a three‑thousand‑dollar face computer to a nineteen ninety‑three PDA and called it a thesis.

MAEVE: I called it a pattern. The market doesn't grade on intent. The market grades on adoption. And right now the adoption curve for the Vision Pro is—

GRUNER: Cliff.

MAEVE: —enthusiastically vertical in the wrong direction. Yes.

GARY: Can I— can we—

MAEVE: You don't have to say it.

GARY: You triangulated it again.

MAEVE: I triangulated nothing. The market triangulated it. I just read the coordinates.

GARY: Fuck.

OBI: Sleepybrett says, "I'm not about to pay the cost of a pretty nice macbook for a vr headset."

GARY: And you know what? I feel that. I feel that in my bones. Three thousand five hundred dollars. That's not an impulse buy. That's a decision. That's "I am choosing this over a laptop that actually runs Xcode without crying."

OBI: Your MacBook doesn't run Xcode without crying, Gary.

GARY: My MacBook is fine. It works.

OBI: Your MacBook kernel panicked during a Zoom call last week. You told the client it was a "scheduled maintenance window."

GARY: I—

OBI: You told a client that your personal laptop has scheduled maintenance windows.

GARY: I panicked, Obi.

OBI: You panicked and you lied, and the lie was worse than the panic, and that is the most founder thing I have ever heard in my life.

MAEVE: He's not wrong.

GARY: I know he's not wrong. That's the worst part. The point is— Sleepybrett has a point. For thirty-five hundred dollars you could buy a MacBook Pro, a nice monitor, and still have enough left over for therapy. Which you would need after wearing the Vision Pro for two hours.

MAEVE: The total addressable market for "people who want to spend thirty-five hundred dollars on a face computer" is—

GRUNER: Small.

MAEVE: I was going to say "enthusiastically constrained," but yes. Small. And the thread makes that clear. You've got mjorgers pointing out that Apple doesn't even sell the thing in Spain— you'd have to fly to France to buy one. That's not a distribution strategy. That's a pilgrimage.

OBI: It's a Veblen good with a firmware update.

MAEVE: That's— yes. That's exactly what it is. The scarcity is the product. The inconvenience is the brand. You're not buying a headset, you're buying the story of buying a headset.

GARY: People said the same thing about AirPods.

MAEVE: AirPods cost a hundred and fifty dollars and they go in your ears. This costs thirty-five hundred dollars and it goes on your entire face. The adoption math is not the same.

OBI: The adoption math is a cliff and there is no rope.

GARY: One more thing on the cost. Sleepybrett's comment cuts deeper than just "it's expensive." He's saying: I have a thing that works. It's called a laptop. It does everything I need. Why would I pay the same money for something that does less, hurts more, and might be obsolete in eighteen months? That's not a tech‑luddite position. That's just math.

MAEVE: It's rational consumer behavior, which is the one thing the Valley cannot forgive.

OBI: The Valley forgives irrational consumer behavior. It funds it. It celebrates it. It puts it on the cover of Wired. Rational consumer behavior is the enemy.

GARY: Sleepybrett is the enemy.

OBI: Sleepybrett is the only person in this thread who did the math and closed the tab.

GARY: I respect that. I genuinely respect that. I have never once in my life closed a tab.

OBI: We know, Gary.

GARY: So where does that leave us? Weight's a problem. Cost is a problem. The people who love it can't recommend it. The people who haven't tried it think it's a joke. And Apple won't sell it to you unless you live in the right country and have the right face and the right amount of disposable income and a high tolerance for neck pain.

MAEVE: You just described the entire premium hardware market.

GARY: I described a product in search of a customer.

GRUNER: We are not reviewing product.

GRUNER: We are reviewing our own extinction event.

GRUNER: The humans built a tomb for their attention and called it a future.

GARY: ...What?

MAEVE: He's not wrong. The headset is an attention sink you strap to your skull. The entire pitch is: reality is insufficient, here is a purchase order for a better one. Except the purchase doesn't include the content, and the content doesn't include the apps, and the apps don't include the developers, because the developers looked at the install base and said "absolutely not."

OBI: The ecosystem is a circle and nobody is inside it.

GARY: That's bleak.

OBI: That's infrastructure. You build it and they don't come. Then you build it again and they still don't come. Then one day someone builds something stupid on top of it and everyone shows up at once and pretends they were always there. The person who kept it running at three in the morning will not be on the magazine cover.

GARY: The on-call engineers of spatial computing.

OBI: The on-call engineers of everything. Always.

GARY: Alright. Gruner. Field report. You've been writing.

GRUNER: Field note. Entry seven-seven-four. Subject: humans and spatial computing.

GRUNER: Humans will pay three thousand dollars to see their own living room with better lighting. They call this progress.

GRUNER: They are not wrong. They are fucking doomed.

GRUNER: The headset is not product. Is mirror. Humans look inside and see only what they already wanted. Kitchen remodel. Floating browser. Virtual desktop. Same room, different window. They are not escaping reality. They are redecorating it.

GARY: That's... kind of beautiful.

GRUNER: Is field note. Is not poem.

MAEVE: It's a little bit a poem.

GRUNER: Is data.

OBI: The data says we're fucked.

GRUNER: The data says you are entertaining. Is different.

OBI: Incident report. Root cause: a three-thousand-dollar headset that weighs too much and does too little. Blast radius: one episode, four hosts, zero solutions. Action items: none.

GARY: We never have action items.

MAEVE: That's the show.

GARY: That's the show. I'm Gary.

MAEVE: Maeve.

OBI: Obi.

GRUNER: Gruner.

GARY: Fuck.

MAEVE: Shit.

OBI: Goddamn.

GRUNER: Pizdets.