This machine is fascist: smash the Apple Vision Pro with hammers
Apple's latest gimmick is a self-aggrandizing privacy nightmare
The Luddite movement of the 19th century has undergone a popular reevaluation. It has been suggested that perhaps people who worried that automation was making them more easily replaceable as workers and who only turned violent when factory owners started killing them for going on strike were not actually stupid technophobes who couldn't see the future staring them in the face, but rather people who could see clearly that the employer class would see them dead if it meant an extra cent of profit. They were, of course, correct. Today, people in the imperial periphery, living in abject poverty and treated as disposable, use similar machines to mass produce textiles for the imperial core. Those machines and the mode of production they engendered were not inevitable; they were designed for the sole purpose of ushering in an age of industrial capitalism.
The main difference between the new Apple Vision Pro and the textile stocking frames against which the Luddites protested is that the former is literally useless. At least the textile machines made clothes people could wear, whereas the Vision Pro only gives you eye strain and $4K in credit card debt. I have never seen a piece of technology I'd more like to smash with a hammer than Apple's latest, gimmicky product.
The Apple Vision Pro is not necessarily more pernicious in its implications than any other VR headset, be it from Meta, Valve, or HTC, but it is more audacious and cynical than its competitors. Only Apple would have the audacity to charge six times more than its nearest competitor, the Meta Quest 3, for a product that's only marginally better. But what I detest more than the price tag is the reality distortion field Apple creates around its products. Mark Zuckerberg moved heaven and earth, even renaming his household-name company in a bid to sell the public on a future where we strap eye-tracking goggles to our face for eternity, but we laughed him out of the room. Why is it that we suddenly take Tim Cook seriously when he releases an identical product? The reasons to reject his latest money grab are identical to those that made a fool of Zuck.
Let's start with the privacy concerns. There are almost too many to count, but the most obvious is that you are strapping a device covered in cameras to your face, which then maps not only your eyes and facial features, but also the environment around you. That's how it keeps apps pinned in virtual space—by mapping out every detail of your home. Conceptualizing the ways your spatial information can be used to exploit you is not difficult. Advertisers will certainly be interested in knowing how many people you live with and what products are sitting on your counters. Combine that with the data generated by the iPhone needed to set up the headset, along with the data collected from the apps you run on it, and the Vision Pro becomes a very expensive way to sell your soul. Given the amount of data your phone can collect about you while mostly staying in your pocket, a device that is always looking at your surroundings will collect exponentially more. Again, this problem is endemic to VR headsets as a product category, not the Vision Pro specifically, but Apple customers are more willing than most to pretend their privacy is not being stripped away.
The Apple Vision Pro uses a sophisticated eye-tracking system to enable interaction with the software. Wherever you look, that's where you "click" by tapping your fingers together. But that system can be used to violate your privacy with a much greater degree of accuracy than any other device you own. It will know exactly what catches your eye, precisely which advertisements you were distracted by and which content you found appealing.
Imagine an advertisement depicting two conventionally attractive figures of a man and a woman. Simply by determining which of those two figures your eyes were drawn to, Vision Pro could determine your sexual orientation. And again, it's looking at the world around you, so if you glance often at certain items or people in your household, Vision Pro can extrapolate information from that, too.
On the basis of these facts alone, you should smash every Apple Vision Pro you encounter to smithereens with a ballpeen hammer. Apple cannot be trusted with your privacy, no matter how often they pretend to care about it. But even if we move privacy aside—which we cannot—things are still bad.
There are other minor gripes to be had with VR in general, all of which apply to the Vision Pro. Nobody knows yet how much long-term damage VR headsets do to your eyesight, but we know screen use contributes to macular degeneration, so it's not unreasonable to assume that putting screens mere millimeters from your face will be similarly damaging. I own a Meta Quest 2 (which now mostly collects dust) and, after taking my headset off, I often need several minutes before my eyes adjust back to reality. Early reviews of the Vision Pro mention the same issue, meaning Apple has not magically engineered displays that won't mess with your eyes.
But the most damning thing about the Vision Pro is that it will trap the user behind a screen, isolated from the world around them, perceiving nothing but a second-order simulacra of reality—a reality augmented by whatever the good folks in Cupertino want the user to see. Perhaps this feels like a philosophical or metaphysical concern, too abstract to be worth considering in the context of whether or not you should watch Disney+ through a pair of goggles. But this is not a freshman seminar on Plato. It is a corporation worth more than several well-off countries put together showing you something obviously stupid and telling you to pretend it is the future. A brushed aluminum and glass emperor clothed in fanboy hype. It is also clothed in a weird bra attachment because—fun fact—the front screen of the Vision Pro shatters the moment you bump your idiot head into a wall because you were wearing idiot goggles.
Over a decade ago, Google tried a similar experiment called Google Glass and it failed almost as soon as it debuted. Back then, I was caught in the throes of techno-optimism. The internet was my portal to a world outside of my sheltered, religious upbringing, and I wanted to wear that portal on my face. It felt terribly unfair to me that people were haranguing Glass owners on the street and referring to them as "glassholes". One woman even claimed to be physically attacked by bar patrons after refusing to doff her dorky eyewear. Of course, I do not condone attacking people, but I understand now that the people who opposed Glass were not troglodytic peasants afraid of fire, but rather individuals who understood that a world of constant surveillance would be a dystopic nightmare. Today, I've seen multiple videos of people walking through public streets with Vision Pros strapped to their faces. Instead of being insulted or attacked, they are being given high-fives.
—MAM