Computing on Purpose

I bought the Apple Vision Pro twice.

By now you've heard everything there is to hear about it. Groundbreaking. A technical masterpiece. Absurdly expensive. A commercial flop. Tim Cook's magnum opus, or his Achilles’ heel, depending on which take you read. All of it is sort of true, and none of it is what I actually want to talk about.

The first time, I got the M2 version just to try it. I returned it. It was buggy, it was heavy, and it was uncomfortable to wear for long periods of time. But I never stopped thinking about it. I got my money back and moved on—but the joy of using it just kept bouncing around in my head.

There's something genuinely great about going about your business in 3D space, windows floating wherever you put them, the whole room becoming your desk. And the 3D photos hit me in a way I wasn't prepared for. A spatial photo is the closest thing to being back inside of a memory – the depth, the distance, the sense that you could almost lean into it. Some spatial photos bring tears to my eyes.

But that's not the thing either. To explain it, I have to rewind.

Before we all carried the internet in our pockets, even before we carried laptops in our backpacks, there was the family computer. One machine, usually in a shared room. In my house it started out in the kitchen. You went to it. You sat down to do something, and when you were done, you got up and went about your life. Computing was somewhere you went, not something you were always inside of.

Then mobile phones became computers, and computing stopped being a place you visited. Now compare that to the way you use your phone. You know the feeling. You catch yourself unlocking it to do nothing in particular. You just find it in your hand. Standing in line, lying in bed, mid-conversation, halfway through a thought—the phone fills the gap before you've consciously decided you wanted it filled. It's not really a decision anymore. It's a reflex. And the phone is built to be exactly that: always there, always on, frictionless, waiting in your pocket for the smallest crack of boredom to slip through.

The Vision Pro is the opposite of frictionless, and that turns out to be the whole point. You have to pick it up. You have to put it on your face. It is a production. You cannot absentmindedly glance at the Vision Pro the way you absentmindedly glance at your phone. The form factor everyone complains about—the bulk, the weight, the ceremony of strapping it on—forces you to use it the way we used to use the family computer. You go in to do a thing. You're there on purpose. Not out of compulsion, but out of intention.

That's it. That's the thing I love. Using the Vision Pro feels like walking back into the family computer room of the early 2000s. There's a door you have to walk through, and walking through it means you've chosen to. When I'm in there, I'm working, or watching something I actually meant to watch, or sitting inside a memory. I'm not grazing or distracted. I came here for a reason, and when the reason is done, I take it off and I'm back home, from the place I was just visiting.

So I bought it again. The M5 version. It's still bulky. It's still uncomfortable. I develop red marks on my forehead if I wear it for too long. Despite that, this time I kept it, because it does something none of my other devices do: it asks me to mean it. In a life where almost every screen is engineered to require nothing of me, this one requires a deliberate yes.

Here's where it gets complicated, though.

Obviously this form factor is going to improve. That's the whole arc of technology—each version thinner, lighter, smaller, less of a hassle, until one day it isn't a headset at all. One day it's just glasses, or contact lenses with a display. Something you put on in the morning and forget you're wearing. And the part of me that loves what the Vision Pro is right now gets a little nervous about that day.

I know how this sounds. I understand the irony of praising a device whose entire premise is strapping screens to your face, and then getting precious about screens even closer to your eyes. But there's a difference between a screen you have to choose to enter and a screen that's always in front of your eyes. Right now the friction is a feature. It's the door. It's consent. It's the reason every session has a purpose: a start, and an end.

So what happens when the door disappears? When the headset becomes a pair of glasses or contacts you wear all day, the friction is gone—and with it, the intention. The thing that makes the Vision Pro feel like the family computer room is that you don't slip into it unnoticed. Take that constraint away and I'm not sure what's left to stop it from becoming the phone all over again, except now the screen never leaves your face and the smallest crack of boredom has an even faster way in.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe whatever comes next finds a way to keep the intention without the inconvenience, and I'll feel silly for having worried. I hope so. But I keep coming back to the same uneasy question, and I don't have an answer for it. The best thing about this device is the part everyone wants to engineer away. So when they finally do—when spatial computing stops being a place we visit and goes becomes a system we're always inside of—will we have built something better than the phone, or just a more intimate way to lose ourselves to it?