I can't has cheezburger

macOS Sonoma has had a bug since its release. I’ve been dutifully reporting the bug to Apple and the bug reports have gone ignored for months now, so it’s time to run to the press (okay, I’m being generous calling this the press) and see if other people see the same thing. (Also, I reached out to Apple Support to have them escalate to engineering last week since support teams tend to do a better job of following up)

Generally, Mac apps handle text input just fine, even when you’re typing very fast (this is an AppleScript typing keystrokes with a 0.01 second delay between them:

Now, let’s try typing text into the Messages app:

Initially, it looks okay! But shortly Messages stops responding to individual keystrokes and has noticeable delays between them.

If you want to really see issues, try having an image in the text field:

As you can see here, something is seriously wrong. The text input is heavily buffering, and this is while using a much shorter snippet of text; the one I was using in the first two examples basically locked up the Messages app.

I have two Macs running Sonoma, one Intel and one Apple Silicon; the issue happens on both. It’s not specific to my iCloud account. I can log in as a different user with no apps installed and still reproduce the issue. A friend was able to reproduce the issue too.

The Messages app is clearly under some load when it lags like this; you can see its CPU spike and sometimes the app will even hang when this is happening.

If you work for Apple and know an engineer on the Messages team, see if you can get this issue on their radar.

If you don’t work for Apple but you use Messages on your Mac, I apologize if you were previously living in ignorant bliss not knowing about this, but now you can’t un-see it. In that case, now your best bet is to spread this message far and wide in hopes that we can make enough noise that Apple will notice.

The good news is this performance regression seems to be isolated to something in the Messages app itself. Other Mac apps, and even other Catalyst Mac apps seem unaffected.

A couple weeks ago, many parts of the US experienced a spurt of winter weather, and one of the side effects of this was that a lot of electric car owners in cities faced some obstacles. The colder temperatures reduced their cars’ battery capacity and made recharging slower. That, and likely the general desire to get cars fully charged to be prepared for the weather, caused long waits at fast charging stations, and some car owners had their batteries go dead, creating headaches.

And of course, as this made its way through the news cycle, it continued to sow more doubt into the US’s transition to electric vehicles. If you’re in the market for a car and considering electric but you remember a news report about something bad happening with electric car owners where they ended up stranded, you might just give up on the idea of an EV altogether even if you don’t remember the exact details.

Indeed, EV adoption is running into some obstacles in the US. We are woefully behind on installing enough public chargers that EV owners aren’t anxious about their ability to keep their vehicle charged while using it. If you have a private place to park and charge your car every night, electric cars are mostly a net win because now you don’t even have to worry about going to a gas station periodically. But for those who don’t have that luxury, or when traveling out of town, this is a huge problem.

There’s a big push to get more DC fast chargers installed, but they’re expensive. They cost a lot of money and because they’re charging your vehicle using extremely high voltages and currents, they need specialized equipment and connections to the grid.

Instead, I wish we’d install an absolute shit ton of Level 2 chargers. These are the same chargers you use at home, hooked up to 240V, charging at up to 50 amps. Hell, even Level 1 chargers would be okay too; those would be the same but using 120V, though they are charging at a much lower amperage and take substantially longer to fully charge.

These chargers are cheap. Ones for home use cost just a few hundred dollars because the smart components for charging a car are inside the car itself; the charger provides power and it does some lightweight negotiation with the car to kick off the process. We could distribute commercial grade Level 2 chargers that contain a simple payment terminal to let people charge at low cost. Or we could just blanket cities and parking lots with them and bundle the cost of charging with the cost of parking.

And you can install Level 2 chargers just about anywhere you have electrical service. Worst case scenario, you need a bigger breaker box to accommodate the extra circuits you’re adding, but this is still much more straightforward than what it takes to install a fast charger.

Level 2 chargers are a good deal slower. For most cars it would take 8–10 hours to charge it completely. But in most cases, we don’t need super fast charging that gets your car to 80% in a half hour; we just need to get our cars charged while we’re running errands or while we leave our car parked overnight at a hotel, for instance.

If chargers are so ubiquitous that “parking spot” becomes synonymous with “charging spot,” anxiety about charging vanishes. In day to day use, you stop needing fast chargers because cars usually spend the bulk of their time parked, and if they always have a spot to charge they’ll be okay.

There’s still value in having fast chargers for people on long road trips and there’s nothing bad about continuing to build out that network, even in cities. Sometimes fast charging is what is needed. But it doesn’t need to be the default.

Here’s a rough comparison: if you had $1 million budget to install chargers, you could afford 20 to 50 fast chargers (depends on a lot of factors, like how many locations you’re installing them). But you could install 500–1000 Level 2 chargers, and maybe even more depending on conditions. As an EV owner, I’d rather be in a city with Level 2 chargers everywhere, as opposed to a moderate number of fast-chargers.

If we did this and we got to a point where car charging is ubiquitous and nobody has range anxiety, then inexpensive EVs with smaller batteries become an option. With smaller batteries the environmental footprint of an EV improves considerably since less material needs to be mined to make a tiny battery. And a small, lightweight car won’t need a huge battery to give you range of around 100 miles, and since the battery would be small, it can charge very fast even on a Level 2 charger (my Audi Q5 plug-in hybrid has a tiny little 14.1 kWh battery that Level 2 charges at 30A in under 90 minutes, for instance). Smaller, lower-range EVs could start seriously outcompeting comparable gas vehicles on cost, to the point where someone on a budget might buy an EV to come out ahead, instead of just well-to-do people buying them as is the case right now in the US.

Combine that with increased adoption of micromobility vehicles like e-bikes and scooters, as well as tweaking city designs to be less car-centric and support more walking and public transit, and we could put a serious dent in our transport-related CO2 emissions, and fast.

If Facebook’s algorithms recognize you as anything like me, you’ve likely seen these ads for Sidio’s colorful looking milk crates that make it look like everything you might want to store can look way cooler than it actually is.

One of my toxic traits is that I can be very disorganized, but I also believe in my heart of hearts that no disorganization problem is so severe that it can’t be fixed by buying more organizing gear. So at the end of last year when I had a bunch of home office budget at work that I had to use or lose, I decided to treat myself to some of these crates.

The Bad

First off, there’s a reason I used work budget to buy these: these crates are incredibly overpriced and I was only really into buying them because I had a budget that I couldn’t think of any other uses for.

Now, they do routinely have offers (more on that in a second), and if you shop at the right time you can get pretty steep discounts that bring the prices down to just on the upper end of what’s reasonable. And once you’ve purchased the initial set of crates, adding incremental crates over time is fairly reasonable. I’ve thought about refactoring all my basement storage to use Sidio crates and that probably would set me back a couple grand (but my basement would look so much cooler).

And if you want some of these offers, then all you have to do is place one order from them and you will get fucking bombarded with text messages from them advertising their latest bullshit. I have transacted with Sidio a total of three times, starting in late 2022, and they have sent me 75 very thirsty promotional text messages. And to their credit, I did affirmatively opt-in; it wasn’t one of those implicit opt-ins where the opt-in is buried in the fine print of me doing something; they asked me and I said yes. Also, I gave them my Google Voice number instead of my real number so that helps a bit. I don’t mind occasional promotions from companies, but there needs to be some proportionality to how much I’m doing business, and this is way out of whack.

Once you cave into the upsells and necessary accessories and place an order with them, they are incredibly leisurely about shipping your stuff to you. Usually it’s a good week or more before the item actually leaves their warehouse, and they are shipping cheaply using ground FedEx shipping. I don’t need Amazon-speed shipping or anything but I would expect them to be able to pack up my order and get it to me in a week-ish, at which point in time you have some large cardboard boxes showing up that you will then need to tear down after you get them unpacked.

Finally, I’ll share my nitpicks with the crates themselves. Despite being marketed as this highly standardized system, there are weird product inconsistencies, like the fact that lids for their half-height and full-height crates don’t fit one another (edit: it looks like their 2.0 lids have addressed this and are fully interchangeable). They think their products are a little more self-explanatory than they actually are, and include no assembly instructions, leaving me to guess at the right method. There’s never a ton of assembly, mind you, but a quick video or one-sheet would leave me a lot more confident. And one final nitpick: the lid latch mechanism is really pretty unsatisfying given the price point this product is at. It’s got a lot of friction. I would love a satisfying click that comes with just the right amount of force.

The Good (I swear, there is some good)

Despite all those gripes, I really do love these crates.

I like that they’re American-made (and that helps me tolerate their relatively high costs), and they feel incredibly sturdy and high-quality.

They come in really fun colors, which I’m an absolute sucker for. It makes them kind of whimsical. And their color variety is incredible; even if saturated colors aren’t your thing, you’re likely to find colors that you’ll like.

If you’ve got some regular milk crates (the long ones, not the square ones), these are made to stack alongside those too. That’s useful if you want to standardize your storage system around one set of box dimensions but you aren’t keen on spending $28 and up on a full-sized crate (without lid).

Another thing I love about these crates: they work quite well with most cubby shelves, like the ones IKEA makes. The crates are deeper though, so they’ll either stick out in front or you’ll want to leave some room in back, but I really like how nicely they fit.

Finally, the ecosystem is awesome. They’ve got the crates themselves with lids, but you can get accessories like dividers, wheels, straps, labeling plates, and a handful of other things. They’ve even got waterproof crate gear and collapsible crates now.

I love using these crates for highly organized storage, but they’re also handy for the car. When I am picking up cat food I’ll load it all up into a crate instead of using bags, and the crate is stable enough that I don’t hear stuff shifting around as I drive. They’re great for road trips as well; i can pack clothes and supplies into them and they make loading and unloading the car super easy.

Over the years I’ve acquired a lot of plastic storage solutions, and they vary a lot in quality. I’ve got plenty of Sterilite brand bins and containers I bought from Walmart 20 years ago, and while they’re still intact, they’re often really flimsy and feel only marginally better than cardboard boxes.

I’ve tried to be a lot more deliberate in products I choose, and I like the idea of being able to buy something for life, and Sidio’s crates feel up to that challenge. Not only that, but they’re fun and delightful to look at, and that’s something most storage products don’t do that well (in fact, lots of products are getting less colorful over time, like cars).

I review things pretty sporadically on here; I don’t do these reviews as some kind of knee-jerk need to constantly generate content or weigh in on every single thing; I like to be very careful in considering the things I acquire, and for non-consumables, I want to acquire things that are made to last and that I will enjoy throughout its life. Despite my litany of complaints, Sidio’s storage products feel like they live up to that.

And as I said, they do offer crates in a more subdued palette if that’s more your jam than the colors I pick, but where’s the fun in that?

Because I contain multitudes, I am both kind of bearish on the Vision Pro’s likelihood to really get traction as a product, but I did get up around 4:30am this morning (edit: yesterday morning; I was tired last night and didn’t get to posting this) and manage to order one despite being in the midst of a power outage in my home (which has since been restored).

The preorder experience was the smoothest I think I’ve ever had from Apple in recent memory. Usually it’s chaotic and I’m waiting several minutes past 5 to even see the Apple Store app acknowledge that it is indeed 5. Not this morning. I was let into the store seconds after it turned 5 and I had an order confirmation email at 5:03. Not bad for a device that required me to also do a face scan. That ease of ordering leads me to believe demand is pretty soft, as I thought it might be. But turns out supply is even softer, and within an hour the store started showing ship times into March.

The reactions in my Mastodon feed are an interesting mix. For some Apple enthusiasts it was a no-brainer of a preorder (surprisingly, Alex Cox was not one of those people, but a bunch of people chipped in and fixed that). For others, it makes absolutely no sense and they’re sitting it out.

And there’s this third group I’m seeing, who are trying to come off as though they’re in that second camp, but I can hear this wisp of regret in their toots as they try to insist they aren’t feeling FOMO. And the thing is, I believe them, but also it feels like this group of people feels like they’re betraying their inner tech enthusiast by not being a day one adopter of this thing.

I continue to think that not buying a Vision Pro right now is the correct default move. It’s not priced for ambivalence, and as the first gen product, this is going to be the worst Vision Pro Apple makes. Hell, I wouldn’t even be too surprised to see its replacement announced this year with an M3 chip.

The Vision Pro as it will arrive on people’s doorsteps on February 2 is going to be a very limited product. There’s a handful of stuff it can do, and it’s very likely that there are features it lacks that you’ll be surprised it lacks because your imagination filled in the gaps when you were looking at promotional materials.

And Apple is going to be really supply constrained this year anyway. The most optimistic estimates suggest Apple might be able to ship a million of these in 2024. So if your heart isn’t up for trying one of these out, it’s for the best. A Vision Pro isn’t of much use if it just sits around collecting dust in your house.

I think Vision Pro has serious risks that might keep it from being a decent sized platform:

• Not even Apple’s designers can pull off making you look cool wearing one
• Based on iPadOS which is kind of limited and only recently has started supported app window-type workflows
• Can only install App Store apps
• No one’s going to want to make apps for Vision Pro now that they know how hostile Apple is to developers, especially w.r.t. trying to take that 30% cut of revenue
• It’s an isolating kind of device to use still, and is only kind of portable
• It’s hard to show it to your friends to let them try it, especially if they need prescription lenses, so it’ll be an uphill battle selling people on the thing
• It’s still unclear what the killer app is for any VR type headset (remember, other companies have been making these for ages and they have yet to take the world by storm)

And with these various risks in mind, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to see how things play out first.

As for me, I ordered for a few reasons:

• Its virtual Mac display feature sounds like a thing I’ve always dreamed of having. I wish it could be a virtual 5K display instead of 4K, and I wish that it was a wired connection, but word on the street is it works great.
• I’ve been waiting for years for Apple to make a Studio display that’s larger than 27" 5K and I figure dropping 4 grand on this slightly different Mac display product instead will surely jinx that product into existing this year.
• It’s not every day Apple enters a completely new product category like this, where fundamentals about how you interact with it are brand new. This feels comparable to iPhone, and I had to hold off on that because I wasn’t an AT&T customer at the time. I’m just kind of excited about seeing the first version of Apple’s entrance into a new product category.

But the thing is, regardless of how you’re feeling, your feelings are valid! 🥰

On the face of it, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Rabbit’s R1 device is quite different from Humane’s AI pin. They got presented in considerably different ways, and Rabbit got a considerably more positive reaction, being possibly the most interesting thing announced at CES.

Both companies presented their products pretty differently. Humane spent years giving off this air of mystique surrounding the company, playing coy about what they were building and letting out some teaser concepts gradually over the past year until eventually releasing an bafflingly un-compelling product intro last month.

Rabbit’s keynote came off as a little more scrappy and humble, and its CEO (and the product itself) had a lot of personality. Rabbit’s presentation made a bit more sense, trying to sell the “why” before showing the “what”. That strategy worked (or maybe people just responded to the $199 price with no subscription fees), and it sold out on its first day.

These two devices and companies aren’t so different, though. They’re both rooted in this idea that you can sell an entire product as a wrapper around AI.

Both companies say “we don’t do apps”. Instead, the AI is just there to do what you need the computer to do, and you don’t need to think about how it’s going to do that thing. They sell this as a principled stance on what makes a better product, but I doubt they really believe that. The reality is that it’s damn near impossible to build a brand new app platform in 2024. So instead of a futile attempt at making an app platform, they just tell you you don’t need one. Whether users need (or just want) apps is a whole other story though, and the fact that both devices are being pitched as ones you use in addition to your smartphone should tell you how much confidence you should have in these.

Despite both companies selling devices with AI at their core, neither company seems to have AI as a core competency, and instead they seem to be using off-the-shelf AI tech from OpenAI (Rabbit has trained a model on using apps, but it’s unclear how much of that tech was developed in-house). Both companies lean heavily on just saying “AI” and hoping your imagination runs wild with ideas about things you can do. Both companies’ demos try to show off things that seem nominally impressive in a demo, but no requests ever get too deep in asking the AI for things. There’s never an interaction where you have a long dialogue with the AI about what you’re trying to accomplish. At best, you can give a command to the AI, and then maybe refine it once or twice. The latest large language models are a leap forward in terms of how you can query them like a human, but they’re still a far cry from being able to be talked to like a competent human assistant. Eventually, you become frustrated after you’ve asked enough things to the AI that seem reasonable to a human but the AI can’t handle, and you realize there is no magic, and that it’s just yet another computer tool where you have to communicate to the computer in a particular way to get results, only now the results aren’t guaranteed to be correct.

Both of these companies and products should be setting off your bullshit detectors.

The presentations themselves should be your first clue. Both companies try to ape Apple’s keynote style, and both fail miserably in their own unique ways. Apple’s keynote presentations aren’t great because the slideshow uses a black gradient, or that the speakers are casually dressed either on stage or in a suspiciously clean office space. Apple’s presentations are great because they rehearse until they’re polished, and they are constantly refining the structure of presentation for maximum impact (also, Apple’s products tend to be materially compelling)

Humane’s product demo sounded rehearsed (if very stilted) no one ever asked whether they were covering the most important things first. Seriously, in the first minute or so of the presentation you learn it comes in 3 colors (referred to as “colorways” which I know is technically correct but it’s so pretentious), and its batteries don’t last all day but are hot swappable so you can achieve “all-day” battery life. Who the fuck thought those were the facts worth leading with? Rabbit’s CEO thought a little more about the structure of the presentation but didn’t put the effort into rehearsing.

Both companies are also riding on the credibility of more reputable companies. Humane hired a lot of ex-Apple employees which automatically piques the curiosity of plenty of people, and Rabbit developed their device with the help of beloved design firm Teenage Engineering. This isn’t inherently a bad thing (and I don’t think either company has leaned too heavily into this), but it’s worth being mindful of. I’d have dismissed Humane entirely if not for being full of Apple alumni, and I don’t think I’d have had any interest in Rabbit’s device if it didn’t have the unmistakable cuteness of Teenage Engineering (also, Teenage Engineering doesn’t work with just anyone).

Humane did the classic vaporware move of spending years being “stealthy,” but not so stealthy that they wouldn’t shut the hell up vaguely hyping up their product. Lots of great products get developed in stealth mode, like iPhone. The critical difference here is that you didn’t hear a goddamn peep from Apple until they had a compelling product to show the world, and it was indeed compelling.

Rabbit, on the other hand, is playing it a little different, instead coming right out the gate announcing an imminent ship date in March of their first devices. That really shows up Humane if it’s true, but also this is the level of shipping optimism I get from just about every Kickstarter campaign I’ve ever seen where someone who has never made a physical product tells you they’ve got the entire thing built, and all they need is funding and they’ll start mass production, and so you back them. Then you start getting email updates. First it’s fun stuff like “wow, look at how they make these molds!” but then pretty soon you realize they’re getting a crash course in “manufacturing shit is harder than we thought!”. Then come the delays. First it’s just this one little thing, then they’re back on track, and then the complications keep coming, and eventually the updates get less frequent. I will gracefully proclaim myself an asshole if March comes along and they start shipping without a hitch, but their shipping projections ring just a little too optimistic. Also: apparently customers’ credit cards are charged at the moment of preorder, not when shipping, which is a massive red flag. Finally, Rabbit’s “no subscription fees” model screams “bait and switch” because the AI processing isn’t happening on-device; it’s happening in their cloud service which costs real money to run, and I don’t even think this $199 retail price covers the cost of making it.

The entire premise of trying to sell AI as a product is bullshitting people. The latest AI tech makes great demos! It’s super fun to play with ChatGPT, and sometimes it can really impress me and do things of real value that save me time, but it’s mostly a demo and it has a huge problem making up shit. We had the same hype problem with autonomous vehicles which we thought were around the corner a decade ago. Tech execs got dollar signs in their eyes and imagined autonomous vehicles disrupting everything but didn’t bother with the pesky reality that the tech didn’t really exist. Companies are repeating that mistake now with AI, trying to sell you on a vision where you have a virtual assistant that you can talk to like a human but they’re supercharged with a computer’s speed and capabilities. And yes, that would be really transformative, if this tech could actually do this. Instead, we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment.

AI isn’t a product. It’s a technology, and when a company’s central selling point of their product is “AI,” that’s a clue that they don’t have a product.

We’re addicted to perpetual growth, and the addiction is quite literally destroying the world.

I constantly see the folly of the forever growth mentality in tech. Investors kept hyping up Netflix throughout the 2010s as they kept growing at an unsustainable pace, then they put on their surprised Pikachu faces and panicked when the growth slowed down. Eventually Netflix had run out of new humans who conceivably wanted to subscribe, and has now pivoted toward squeezing more money out of existing customers by steadily increasing prices, stuffing in ads, and shaking down people sharing their Netflix login (despite the fact that plans were already priced by the concurrent stream).

Capitalism is fueled by this craving for growth. A company is either growing or it’s dying. If you have a 401k, you’re betting a big chunk of your future on the ability for your money to keep compounding year over year for decades, which by extension means that every company with investors grinds away at growing forever to appease shareholders. If your employer’s revenue stops growing, you might not be able to keep your job (and even if they are growing, good luck securing a raise that keeps up with the rate of inflation).

This constantly growing appetite for more isn’t a natural thing. I don’t need to consume 5–10% more food in 2024 than I did in 2023. My home doesn’t need to keep accruing more square footage every year. I’ll have roughly the same number of doctor and dentist visits this year as I did last year.

We’ve let ourselves get duped into working for and feeding this massive and demanding monster, and it wants so much. If I want a few extra bucks to help cover rising costs, I need to earn my boss a ton more extra than that. If I want to be able to retire, the richest people and corporations in the world need to be able to get obscenely wealthier.

And this system stops us from doing things that would be inherently good. Putting an upcycling center in the neighborhood would be really cool; we could re-use things, repair existing stuff instead of throwing it away, and get educated in being more resourceful. But most neighborhoods don’t get places like these, because the person who owns the building it would go in wants a lot of money, and also it would be difficult to staff it with paid people who have the skills to run one, because even though it may be possible for me to repair my toaster oven instead of replacing it, it needs to be cost effective and a worthwhile repair price wouldn’t cover the staff’s time. But somehow, procuring virgin materials and producing a brand new toaster oven, then shipping it a world away, then selling it to you is surprisingly cheap.

There’s got to be a simpler way. We could just promise to take care of each other and I have to think we’d be able to do that, and we’d all be putting a lot less work in, and we’d have more time for ourselves.

Instead we grind needlessly because we’re stuck doing it because we built these completely synthetic constructs that force us to do that to survive. We produce way more than we need to. We overcomplicate everything. We’re making the world uninhabitable for ourselves in the process.

I’m going to expand on this rant a little more in the coming posts.

Just a couple of things you may have noticed:

• I switched to a different theme that I thought looked kind of fun. Some day I might actually take on making a custom theme for myself, but this one was an off the shelf one made by Automattic.
• I added dark mode support as well (finding a plugin that actually worked was surprisingly tricky too!).
• Per a reader request, publish dates appear on posts.

For this year, I’ll be targeting publishing 50 posts total, and I don’t think I’ll have any problem hitting that number. Some themes that have been resonating with me lately include the concept of degrowth, getting more into making things of my own and doing projects of my own, 3D printing in particular (I just acquired one at the end of last year so expect a fair amount of stuff on that topic), and curmudgeonly takes on the tech industry.

2024 will be a good year.

Vision Pro is coming soon; perhaps even in the next month or so!

The months between January and June 2007 were absolutely loaded with excitement and anticipation for the iPhone, and every excuse a tech blogger got to mention it in the title of a post, they did because it would reliably get clicks.

The Vision Pro isn’t getting quite that level of excitement, but I am excited about it nonetheless because it’s not every day that we see Apple make a big bet on a brand new computing platform.

Low Volume

First off, Vision Pro will be a super low-volume product. That isn’t me speculating; it’s fact. Apple’s likely constrained by the fact that only Sony makes the tiny 4K displays that will go into each eyepiece, so the total number of Vision Pros sold in 2024 will likely be less than a million. For comparison, Apple sold about 1.4 million iPhones the year the iPhone was first released.

It’s not that the Vision Pro will be a flop; it’ll probably sell out, but even if it does, this is still a very long game for Apple. This is probably comparable to when Apple started selling the Mac in the 80s, except I’m not even 100% sure that the long term plan is that visionOS is expected to replace other platforms like the Mac eventually was to replace the Apple II at the time.

Spatial Is The Feature

Apple hasn’t positioned Vision Pro with any particular “killer app.” Instead, Vision Pro’s OS is an adapted version of iPadOS. It’s being advertised as a general-purpose computer, but the thing that’s unique about it is that you’re no longer constrained by screen real estate. Instead, your entire field of view is your screen, and you can plop apps down anywhere.

And as someone who has literally 60 apps open in his dock right now (not even kidding), that’s a really exciting paradigm shift. It’ll make using a computer feel far more comfortable, ergonomic, and immersive. I think reviewers are going to dismiss a long list of material issues and limitations and nonetheless talk about how amazing it felt to put on that headset.

But there’s a big ass catch: visionOS is based on iPadOS.

iPadOS

iPadOS has spent its entire existence failing to live up to its potential. Before the iPad was announced in 2010, people anticipated all sorts of cool new concepts like having multiple apps open at once, a more sophisticated home screen, new gestures and other interaction primitives, and having an answer to the question “surely you aren’t just going to dump a big keyboard on the touch screen, right?” And Apple shied away from every single one of those challenges, instead letting the iPad’s larger screen size speak for itself and allow for different use cases.

But iPadOS has matured. We’ve seen two major leaps forward in the past four years: 1) iPad adding cursor support in iPadOS 13.4 which, combined with the Magic Keyboard, makes the iPad look an awful lot like a regular computer, and 2) Stage Manager, a new UI mode where the iPad is even more desktop-like, with multiple windows on screen at once (and proper support for an extra display).

But iPadOS has evolved at a glacial pace. It gives me serious doubt that visionOS, its derivative, will gain the sophistication for the Vision Pro to be a proper workstation.

Even if Vision Pro’s UI evolved rapidly and got rid of all these interface limitations, we’re still stuck with a deeper fundamental problem, which is that everything is sandboxed and you aren’t even allowed to install your own apps onto it.

My Killer App: Mac Virtual Display

I literally am buying the Vision Pro for one and exactly one use case: to use as a virtual display with my Mac.

I’m sure I’ll play around with some of the other apps too, but I am particularly excited about the prospect of being able to sit in my hammock chair or my couch and use a virtual 4K display (and in the future, possibly more than one virtual 4K display), getting the feel of being at a proper desk even when I’m not at a proper desk.

This is a long shot hope, but one evolution of this feature that I would love to see is for future versions of macOS to natively run with visionOS so that Mac apps aren’t just running inside of a fake screen in its own window, but rather they’re able to be displayed independently alongside other visionOS apps.

I continue to stand by what I said before WWDC: Vision Pro is a long shot. Seeing what they announced at WWDC affirmed my stance that this is a long shot. I’m not even certain that the Vision Pro form factor is the actual form that Apple’s imagining for its spatial computing vision, but they’re nonetheless carrying forward with an initial product.

This is a product that probably will need years before it even sees a price point that puts it within reach of mainstream users (probably the $2000 threshold). And even once it hits a price point that mainstream users can stomach, it’s still not clear to me whether most people want it.

Also, Apple needs visionOS to have a vibrant ecosystem of apps, which will be an uphill battle for a device they sell in small quantities. Developers were happy to put up with Apple’s bullshit in 2008 and 2009 because they got access to a massive market in exchange for that bullshit. Nowadays, even though there are billions of iOS devices, developers struggle to make money.

But “long shot” doesn’t mean “doomed to failure,” and I think Apple does its most interesting stuff in situations like this where their success isn’t guaranteed and they have to work to prove themselves.