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Just after the Mac’s 40th anniversary last February, Apple Vision Pro (AVP) launched. Both devices were/are first steps in a long journey. And both were/are prohibitively expensive – the original Mac weighing in even heavier in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars.
AVP’s price tag has been its biggest sticking point. But it’s the wrong thing to focus on. AVP is Apple’s way of planting a flag for a first-generation device, and to demonstrate what’s possible at any cost. Future generations will get cheaper and lighter – a typical Apple product lifecycle.
V1 can also be seen as a dev kit. Buyers are mostly fanboys, wealthy early adopters, and developers (‘Pro’ is in the title, after all). The latter will view it as an early-mover advantage in starting to build muscles for spatial app development – a potentially valuable skill if all goes well.
So on those levels, what is Vision Pro? Where will it go next? And how does it fit into Apple’s future-proofing plan? This is the topic of a recent ARtillery Intelligence report. As such, it joins our weekly report excerpt series, with this installation focusing on Apple Intelligence’s impact.
Intelligent & Ambient
AR’s current stage coincides with the rise of AI, and that’s a good thing. AR and AI already go together in several ways, as we explored in a recent report. For example, the vision of all-day smart glasses that annotate the world in intelligent and ambient ways is heavily reliant on AI.
As AR continues to evolve from handheld to headworn, AI functions will become more ambient and automatic given that these devices are hands (and keyboard) free. That’s where the “conversation” in conversational AI factors in, and we’re already seeing this elevate smart glasses.
Given that natural convergence, a key question is how Apple is thinking about AI. It answered that question to some degree with Apple Intelligence, which brings more capable AI into the mix. Among other things, this addressed a longstanding bottleneck in Apple’s capabilities: Siri.
Though Apple Intelligence will cut across Apple products, there’s one device where a decent voice assistant represents a make-or-break moment: Vision Pro. Its gesture-based inputs have been widely lauded, but voice will also be a key part of the equation as there’s no keyboard.
As a still unproven – and quite expensive – product, Vision Pro has the challenge of feeling comfortable and natural. So voice-assistant failures – which are all-too-common for Siri – are bound to disorient already-hesitant users. That’s where Apple Intelligence could save the day.
First-Party Advantage
Another question that emerges is Apple’s edge over competitors that are similarly blending AR and AI. For example, Google’s Android XR is built around Gemini, and its ability to tap into Google’s knowledge graph for key functions like mapping, shopping, and object recognition.
But when it comes to AI that fuels any AR endeavors, Apple will be advantaged by its vertical integration. This is simply because it will have a more cohesive corpus of first-party data to engender strong AI training and personalization. That taps into more than a billion iOS devices.
Though Google’s knowledge graph can fuel lots of AI training, it doesn’t have the same vertical integration that Apple has. The Android world is a more fragmented mix of hardware from various device manufacturers, which makes it harder to gather reliable usage data.
Why does that matter? In the age of privacy reform, the key term is “first party.” Data usage restrictions kick in whenever you have to reach outside of your own direct customer interactions to track anything. That brings us back to Apple’s edge in owning the entire stack.
Though this particular angle isn’t discussed as much as the gadgetry and other elements of Apple’s AR endeavors, it could be a critical factor. It traces back to the same vertical integration that sits at the center of several Apple advantages (device continuity, elegant integrations, etc.).
This could be the ace up Apple’s sleeve for AI-driven AR. That will apply to Vision Pro in the near term, and some form of smart glasses in the longer term. The latter is still a question mark, but given the trajectory of smart glasses overall, Apple will likely jump into that race at some point.
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