Why the Apple Vision Pro is like the Tesla in Matthew Ball’s new/old book

On the second anniversary of the publication of Matthew Ball’s The Metaverse: And how it will revolutionize everything, I spoke to the consultant and essayist about the second edition of his book, out Tuesday, which has been revised so heavily that it required a new ISBN number and a new name: The Metaverse: Fully Revised and Updated Edition: Building the Spatial Internet.

The new edition is also about 70 percent rewritten, thanks to more than two years of radical and rapid changes in fundamental technologies that include the metaverse and spatial computing, particularly artificial intelligence, blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies, and head-mounted displays, he said.

Even the name change was not without consequence: It was made last October, before Apple released the Vision Pro, which the company calls its first spatial computing device and which Ball describes as the most important or second most important head-mounted display in the technology’s 70-year history.

“At that point, the book was essentially finished,” Ball said. “It was far too early to know whether or not the name would stick, let alone the impact it would have. And so, of course, it was fundamentally different to write a book after that name change, not to mention the many other innovations in the marketplace.”

There has been a lot of talk and hype about all three technologies over the past two years, but the irony is that all three technologies had been in development for many years, even decades, before they recently exploded onto the market, Ball said.

The Apple Vision Pro deserves a certain, complicated but special attention, Ball said. Apple filed its first patents on technologies related to the device in 2006, months before Apple even introduced its first iPhone, which became the profit machine that turned the company into a $3 trillion company.

Since then, smoke signals from the notoriously secretive company have suggested there will be plenty of demo units, and heated debates have raged internally about whether the device is ready for a public launch. Vision Pro was finally unveiled to the public in February.

But the path to getting there was radically different from the development process of the iPhone, which was cobbled together from third-party technologies and then transformed into something special through its user interface, app store, form factor and eventual ecosystem. The Vision Pro, on the other hand, was almost entirely designed, engineered and built by Apple itself, a sign of how the company was, in many, many ways, building a groundbreaking device that literally only it could create.

“This is essentially the second leg of the market (for head-mounted displays),” Ball said, alongside Meta’s Quest headset line. “And so it’s obvious that there’s a lot more testing going on, a lot of theses being played out.”

The resulting device is the bare minimum Apple could afford, knowing its $3,499 price tag and at-first-glance unremarkable form factor would always keep it from becoming a mainstream device. But building it and bringing it to market was critical to the company’s long-term strategy, an approach not unlike the one Elon Musk took when launching Tesla, Ball said.

“So this is not just about building an ecosystem for developers, figuring out what consumers want, and playing around with pricing, features, weight, form and fit, and things like vision, but it’s also about building the infrastructure to be able to drive down costs,” Ball said.

“I think it’s more like Tesla (early development),” Ball continued. “The Roadster was over $100,000. The Model S was, I think, $98,000, and Elon’s reasoning from the beginning was, ‘We need to improve our technology, we need revenue to do that, we need scale to improve our manufacturing costs, with the goal of getting to the $35,000 Model 3, and starting with the Model Y SUV in between.’ And the question is, how quickly will (Apple) get to that goal? What will the market look like when they get there?”

The Vision Pro has its weaknesses, and not just the painful price, Ball said. The road to acceptance is far rockier than with smartphones, which for many people were the first computer with Internet access, reasonably affordable (especially with subsidies from network operators), easy to carry and unobtrusive, and Despite it It took three decades for it to be adopted almost universally.

Vision Pro represents what Ball calls a “rapid leap forward” after many years of technological advances and hard work in development. This is comparable to the other two rapidly changing technologies that are now the focus of the second edition of the book.

Artificial intelligence, for example, has been the subject of scientific research and science fiction speculation for most of the last century. Pioneers like Alan Turing and Marvin Minsky did groundwork in the 1940s and 1950s. Then ChatGPT debuted in late 2022 and the AI ​​gold rush began, quickly propelling Nvidia into the $3 trillion club and dragging Microsoft and a number of smaller picks and shovels along with it. Today, companies can hardly talk about themselves without talking about their AI-driven initiatives, products and use cases.

Likewise, blockchain and cryptocurrencies have been around for 15 years, since the groundbreaking white paper on Bitcoin
Bitcoin by an as yet unknown author.

However, the last few years can be seen as a difficult puberty for blockchain, as many complicated legal, regulatory and operational issues had to be resolved and the value of cryptocurrencies fluctuated wildly. However, Ball also said that it would be a mistake to underestimate the improvements in the crypto/blockchain world.

“There was the financial recovery, where the total value of cryptocurrencies went from $3 trillion to $800 billion. And now it’s back to $2.7 trillion,” Ball said. “And that’s despite interest rates falling from 0% to decades-long highs. We’ve seen new regulatory approvals, we’ve seen legal clarity, we’ve seen new products being reinvested. Stablecoins have been widely accepted. (New European regulations) now mean that app developers can actually freely integrate token economies and NFTs into their applications.”

As befits a long-time industry observer who is anything but captivated by his subject, Ball reminds us of blockchain and cryptocurrencies: “At the same time, I still think it’s very difficult to argue that any demonstrable or foreseeably probable value is created by traditional metrics, whether as a store of value, as a currency, or by creating new products that generate revenue, or by creating new products that save costs and can justify non-speculative value in the multi-trillion dollar range.”

Essentially, he says, quoting from his recent interview with Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney, blockchain is “probably decades away from its best and is currently ruined by fraud and speculation.”

Now that the book has been republished, Ball is back to other pursuits. He lives between New York and Miami and advises various companies, including some in the entertainment industry. He devotes a little time to his role in an exchange-traded fund of the same name, the Roundhill Ball Metaverse ETF (ticker symbol: METV).

And he writes a handful of longer essays each year about technology and related topics, such as the 4,500-word piece published on his website in June that delves into the real causes of the decline of movie theaters (hint: it’s not about streaming or the Marvel Cinematic Universe). As with everything movie-related these days, a sequel is on the way soon on his website, matthewball.co, and in his email newsletter.

And you don’t have to be a fortune teller to predict that Ball will soon have reason to write another update for The Metaverse, while the constellation of technologies that make this possible continues to advance and gain in importance. It may be the closest thing to guaranteed work in the metaverse of the future.