After nearly 20 years of work, Apple has revealed its AR/VR headset, the $3,500 Vision Pro. It’s impressive in many of the ways you might expect. The industrial design is refined—the front is a single curved piece of glass, and touches like a digital crown allow the user to seamlessly transition from VR to AR. Thanks to 12 cameras, 5 sensors, and 6 mics, you can control the system with your eyes, voice, and hand flicks, and the UI lives in your space, where apps reflect like tangible objects catching real light. Even people walking by will fade into your view when you’re immersed in media—and the headset will reveal your eyes to show when you’re looking back.
For many at Apple, it’s a day for celebration. But following conversations with several people with knowledge of the situation, I’m left with a different impression. The product we’re seeing today is not the best it could have been, I’m hearing, as it suffered from infighting between Apple executives and its own design leadership.
Many in the know are in a state of mourning for design at Apple. Even as Apple continues to employ an unparalleled roster of design talent, those talents have less and less say in company strategy, which is eroding its design dominance. As one person put it to me, bluntly: “Apple is no longer a design-led company.”
What went wrong?
Apple became the company it is today because it made products that people fundamentally desired—things people felt like they needed, even if they couldn’t afford them. That was the result of a crystal-clear product strategy that reimagined what was possible when design and technology fused into a single entity, not what other companies were doing or what Wall Street wanted next.
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