The Vision Pro is officially a dud
Last year, I was expressing clear doubts about the interest of Apple Vision Pro:
Still no clear use case, still no precise demographics. That tech enthusiasts will buy it makes no doubt, but they are called innovators and early adopters for a reason: they're not the core market. And Apple is the largest company on the planet; they can't afford to only cater to enthusiasts anymore.
Even earlier on, back in 2022, I was failing to see the proper problems to be solved by the whole metaverse madness:
For now, Meta's VR narrative looks very much like how we were explaining home computers in the sixties. Part naive, partly held up by a vision of the future that just speaks of the past.
Fast forward to today, and tech magazines and websites have fully acknowledged that it was just hype all along. To the point of being somehow brutal with Apple product push:
Boone Ashworth
The fact that Meta might end up winning this race they started and brutally lost ("had to disinvest from") while Apple was trying to top them is pretty fascinating, too.
But for the rest of us, why does all this matter?
If you're a non-trillion-dollar company floating in an endless sea of cash, and yet scrutinized every day by analysts for signs of weakness, you might want to time your innovation much better. This means ensuring that you launch any new technology around a core 'problem-to-be-solved' that will also have some obvious scalability down the road. And if the starting problem doesn't seem scalable, it should then serve as a launchpad to another potentially large-scale problem that needs to be solved, but is not yet there.
Effective, scalable problems are usually linked to a slow-moving, unstoppable market evolution. It can be demographics (life expectancy steadily increasing year over year, and population aging), or it can be a critical bottleneck building up (the more electric vehicles get to market, the more batteries will have to be recycled or upcycled), or, as a worst-case scenario a strategic bet of a foreseeable market disruption (if generative AI takes off in the music business, then...).
But starting with a sexy technology, hoping that the market will find a cool problem to solve with it on its own, is undoubtedly the worst thing to do.
