Apple Has Bowed Out of Cultural Moment-Making
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The early aughts were a dark time: frosted tips, cargo pants, Star Wars prequels. Major cities considered curfews to keep people safe from the Black Eyed Peas, who were phunking with hearts via constant Clear Channel Radio FM airplay. Then that era ended on June 29, 2007, at 6 p.m. The first iPhone was released.
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Apple sold a million phones in its first weekend and, over the rest of that year, an additional 12 million units. iPhones quickly changed the entire cell phone market, revolutionized social media, and created whole industries – e.g. rideshare services. Steve Jobs’s baby was somehow both king and the kingmaker. It lived at the center of the technological universe but felt socially relevant as well. Everyone had a weird electronica song by Mr. Scruff on their phone, which felt like a design object – something beautifully considered, but nonetheless mass market.
The Apple Vision Pro, the VR headset the $3T megacorp is billing as a “spatial operating system,” went on pre-sale last Friday. It’s a big deal, sure, but a million units haven’t moved at $3,500 a pop. That would be impossible because Apple didn’t manufacture a million units. Apple made roughly 160,000 to 180,000 units, which were all purchased over the weekend.
It’s been an odd rollout because the headsets that aren’t supposed to be called headsets are not in stores and won’t be until February 2. That strategy more or less eliminated the possibility of a “craze,” but the same might be said for the price point and shipping times: five to seven weeks.
“Popular iPhone models also sell out immediately upon pre-order, and shipping times typically increase to several weeks within hours,” wrote Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo in a Medium post. “However, unlike Vision Pro, iPhone models usually continue to see a steady increase in shipping times 24 to 48 hours after pre-orders open, indicating that demand continues to grow.”
If demand doesn’t grow significantly for the Vision Pro and the product remains little more than a very slightly cheaper alternative to multi-monitor gaming setups, trading stations, or home theaters, Apple will have hit a solid double. But that is, in and of itself, unusual. Apple is historically the Mark McGwire of technology companies (McGwire hit less than half as many doubles as home runs because of his, umm, unique physical attributes).
On the Monday morning following the pre-order launch weekend, the scene was muted at the Apple store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Granted, it was a work day, but the floor was at about a quarter capacity, and there was no obvious indication that Apple had given the heads up on the ultimate heads-up display. An employee told SPY that the orders were just coming through online and that no one anticipated an OG iPhone-sized line on release day.
A Look Back at the iPhone Rollout…
According to The Guardian, 6 out of 10 Americans surveyed said they knew the iPhone was coming six months before release.
Thousands of people waited outside Apple and AT&T stores days before the phone’s actual launch.
Police officers patrolled crowds queuing up for the first iPhone’s release, preparing for commotion similar to the one surrounding the release of the PS3 the previous year.
When the iPhone hit the market, it sent everyone scrambling. It eventually killed the Blackberry and mainstreamed the touchscreen smartphone as a category that competitors attempted to replicate. Samsung’s first version of the Galaxy hit in 2009 and Google launched its Nexus One in 2010, popular devices, but ones that sell only a fraction of what the iPhone does. Even the primary technological distinction – iPhones run a closed operating system, iOS, and Androids are based on open-source software. The iPhone is in its own league, and everyone else is an Android. Those companies ran to play catch up in 2007, and they’re still running.
And that’s where the difference between the iPhone and the Vision Pro becomes clear. Where the iPhone demanded a response from Apple’s new competitors in the phone space, it’s not clear that the Vision Pro demands a response from those already in the VR business, namely Meta and Sony (Blackberry’s 2008 release, the touchscreen “Storm,” was its dying breath). The next Meta Quest VR headset release isn’t on the calendar (the Pro, which was intended to follow the 3, was reportedly axed because of inferior functionality). Apple might be taking over the VR market in the same way it took over the phone market – new iPhones now sell 200 million units in their release year – but it’s not a very big or very competitive market.
What Steve Jobs and prior iterations of Apple did well was make it feel like those who didn’t adopt early had missed the boat. Jobs’s iPhone announcement is as ingrained in the public consciousness as Nixon’s post-Watergate presser. And he referenced the iPod and original Mac computer as groundbreaking developments for the company. What would he make of the Vision Pro launch? Hard to say. The tech is cool, but not in the way that changes a culture.
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