Over the past six months I’ve talked myself in and out of buying the Apple Vision Pro more times than I can count. But when the time came, I ordered it. Here’s why.
I’m often embarrassed about buying things I want, but I’m working harder not to be. We should be working towards all people being able to live a life where they can fill not only their needs but also sometimes their wants. Humans should be more than their needs and I’m lucky enough to already be living that life.
But why do I want it?
I’m a tech enthusiast, but that’s not why I want it. Tech is a tool and it’s still not clear what exactly the uses are for this. It doesn’t mean that they’re not there, it just means the uses are not yet totally clear.
But I’m also a new-things enthusiast. There’s clearly some kind of paradigm shift here– similar to both the Mac and the iPhone before it. But while it’s an open question as to whether the Vision Pro finds its iMac or iPhone 4 moment, I’m excited about being part of the journey. That journey may go nowhere, but there are worse places to go than nowhere.
I get why we feel shame about talking about money, but I wish we could figure out a way to do it better. Money is a tool. Yes, it’s a tool that is unevenly and often arbitrarily distributed, but that’s not the tool’s fault. It’s the fault of those who created the system determining how to hand out the tools. I get for some people it’s impossible to make the distinction between acquiring and utilizing money and I’m definitely not calling them wrong for not being able to do that. But for today I’m not going to focus on how I acquired the money to buy this, but rather how I planned for this over the course of the past year.
In late 2022 it became clear that A) the announcement of this thing was imminent and B) it was going to be expensive. My late-2022 guess was that it would be around $2500 and would come out in extremely limited quantities by the end of 2023. In November 2022, I started saving $200 per month with the goal of having $2800 by December 2023. Worst case scenario, the headset does not get announced or I don’t want it and then I have to figure out how to spend the money I’d already saved. Oh well.
But as we all well know, this sucker turned out to be $3500 with a release date of early 2024. I was saving too little for it–nearly $1000 too little– and needed to come up with a plan to close the deficit.
So I bought Apple Gift Cards. As much as I had saved when they went on sale at Amazon, Target, and Best Buy. I was able to buy $3100 worth of Apple Gift cards for around $2500.
The remainder wasn’t all that interesting: coming out in February meant that I had a bit longer to save $200 per month for it and my wife begrudgingly with enthusiasm gave me some cash for it at Christmas.
Was all of this a bit ridiculous and painful? Most definitely. But not as ridiculous as buying a $3500 headset. And honestly, making this process a little painful was probably good to ensure that I was all in on this.
There were two immediate uses I have for the Vision Pro: Mac virtualization and entertainment.
I have a personal Mac Studio and a work MacBook Air but I only have one Studio Display for the two computers. The Vision Pro solves two problems that I run into on a regular basis:
It’s not often, but I sometimes need to run both my personal and work Macs at the same time. Currently I have to do this by using the Studio Display for my Mac Studio and using the built-in display for my MacBook Air. The 13-inch screen size of the MacBook Air makes this less than ideal.
The biggest problem Vision Pro will solve is having to hot swap the Thunderbolt cable between my personal and work Macs. This is definitely a small annoyance, but sometimes I go back and forth between the two computers a dozen times a day. That really adds up.
My wife and I like to relax at night by watching a movie or TV for an hour or two. Most nights this is together, but two or three nights per week she catches up on Real Housewives or Vanderpump and I watch a show or movie she’s not interested in or sports. Most of the time I’m nice and let her watch it on the TV while I watch on my iPad. But now, I’m going to have the biggest screen in the house!
For me, this was the canary in the coal mine. When Apple didn’t have a launch event for the Vision Pro, I decided not to get it. If Apple– the undisputed marketing champion– couldn’t find a reason to have a launch event for this thing, then it probably meant they had no idea what it was for. I was not interested in paying $3500 for a device that Apple–who’d been using this thing for years– did not have confidence in marketing its features.
But over the course of the next week, I changed my mind. Most people who used it seemed to be saying they were also buying it. Yes some were developers who “need” it for development, but there was a palpable excitement for it. Even outside of practical, work-related reasons. People who have used it, bought it. That’s a good indicator that something is there.
I’m cautiously excited. Not in a definitive this is going to change my life and the world way, but in a I’m curious where this is going way. I wasn’t sure that was going to be enough, but in the end it was.