Notes on Vision Pro
I think Apple is doing smart things here with their software:<p>- leverage existing content means they won&#x27;t have an empty room problem or a big &quot;now what?!&quot; moment for users after the novelty wears off. Without Steam, most existing VR platforms would be completely pointless. So far VR is for games and most of those are published on Steam. That&#x27;s because most VR hardware vendors suck at software and end up outsourcing that to game studios. Meta included. Despite their ambitions, their goggles are mainly devices for running games not developed by Meta.<p>- a focus on the living room experience with a high end movie theater experience running, again, off existing content. Genius move because people already spend lots of money on home theaters. Some people buy 10K$ plasma screens even. This market is very real. Also, involving Disney with their huge back catalog of completely unmonetized 3D movies ... so obvious.<p>- Extend the highly successful IOS ecosystem to the new experience. They have tens of millions of apps already. And they&#x27;ll work fine in AR. Why not do that?<p>The strategy is about content. It&#x27;s the right strategy. The first generation hardware is of course amazing too and it will bootstrap a new generation of application developers that will be using Apple SDKs and tools to target all this with new content. But to bootstrap the ecosystem they need an audience.<p>Here too the strategy is genius: SDKs are based on things developers already use. They just co-announced a push into gaming for Mac along with some convenient porting kits for developers. That was just a footnote buried deep into the mac related announcements. But of course this means more content coming to AR as well. All that lovely content currently available via Steam.<p>Top to bottom the strategy is about compelling content. I think it&#x27;s going to work.<p>This is not the final answer to AR but the opening salvo in a decades long push to completely own this space. Step 0 is to get millions of these things in the market with enough content to get people hooked and keep them consuming content. The rest will come later. It&#x27;s appropriately radical, pragmatic, and conservative at the same time.