I Know What the Apple Vision Pro Is For
A dispatch from Jurassic Apple Park
I have a new piece out today in New York magazine, with the same subject as this email. A lot of the discourse around the Vision Pro, the mixed-reality headset Apple released in February of this year, revolves around the question (as Kevin Roose put it in the Times on Tuesday):
What is this for? How will it improve my life, or make me more productive than other things I could buy for $3,500? What can I do on it that I can’t do on my laptop, or a big TV?
I share Roose's skepticism about the AVP, but I also think I found a surprising answer to his question.
Writing this piece -- which is at its heart not so much about these cybernetic luxury snowboarding goggles from the 24th century, and more about what “digital accessibility” actually means, and how it works under the hood, and what's at stake when companies decide to commit to it -- also gave me a chance to visit Cupertino, and do the tech-journalist thing of visiting Apple Park, with heavily negotiated interviews with a few engineers and senior comms people, and drink way too much coffee at the visitor center/Apple Store across the street from the entrance. Apple Park -- particularly from the outside, peering through the elegant but very serious-looking high-tech fences, and somehow at once wild and hypermanicured flora on the other side--really feels like the visitor center of a Tim Cook-era Jurassic Park, which I briefly thought I was clever for thinking (and was perhaps subliminally suggested to me by the AVP’s flagship demo, the Jon Favreau-produced Encounter Dinosaurs app, screen-shotted above), until I googled it and found that there is an entire actual Jurassic Park movie that is more or less set in Apple Park.
When I was still in elementary school, my dad gave me his old Mac 512K, and if there's any brand that connects the two of us, it's Apple -- media tech news and general geekery is one of our primary avenues of communication. Writing this piece also gave me a chance to do some extremely fun research into the history of accessibility at Apple, back to the John Sculley era (a name my dad evoked in tones that other fathers might have reserved for a legendary baseball manager or something, I don’t know, I can’t make sports-team metaphors because my dad talked about MacWorld Expo every year instead of the World Series). Only a fraction of that history made it into the final edit, but a little goes a long way, and maybe Substack is a place that I can admit that I wrote this piece of magazine journalism for you, dad!!
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Since I last sent out one of these newsletters, some other writing-related things have happened that I'd like to mention:
The Country of the Blind has been out for nearly a year, and last month it was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Autobiography (I choose Memoir). The Pulitzers announce the winners and the finalists simultaneously, and during the heady week of the announcement, two friends surprised me by expressing their condolences: bittersweet, i.e., sorry you didn't actually win. This struck me as a remarkable response for a friend to have -- you guys, this is only good news!! Anyway the paperback comes out July 23, and is available for pre-order, so if you've been holding out for the cheaper, floppier edition, the time is now.
The book also got onto a bunch of year-end best-of lists, including the New Yorker, the Atlantic, NPR, the Washington Post, and others. I did (what felt like) every blindness-specific podcast in the country, and many mainstream pods besides. I made a futile attempt to collect much of this press on my website.
Other things: I reviewed Ashley Shew's Against Technoableism for the NYTBR. I wrote a guest essay on blindness and AI for NYT Opinion. In the 2024-5 academic year, I'm going to be a Koeppel Fellow in Journalism at Wesleyan University, as a part of the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life and the spiffy new Merve Emre-helmed Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. If you're driving to (or from) Western Mass to Middlesex County, CT, on a Tuesday or Thursday this fall or spring, please give me a ride.
Andrew, congratulations on your Pulitzer nomination for your memoir. Honestly, I am not surprised at all. It's actually quite validating to me as a reader, since I was of the opinion that yours was one of the best - if not the best - memoir I had read all last year. And I read prolifically, rotating through one book to the next.
I truly appreciate your voice. I have read through some of the notes I took on your memoir, the segments that struck me the most, and what makes your story fantastic is that your message is both timely and timeless. I strive for the same as I work through the fourth draft of my own memoir.
I am not a journalist and don't have any professional degrees related to writing or editing, nor do I have any prestigious bylines. That can be intimidating to a person who questions whether her work is "good enough" for the market today, even excellent. I just don't know, but what I do know is that in reading your book, I not only gained insight into the craft of writing memoir, but I also became a more attuned reader - and human. You made me think. I like that best of all.
Keep putting your superb work out there, Andrew. I am in your corner.
Interesting article. I knew nothing about the AVP. Was it originally designed with the gaming market in mind? Can people see through it and walk around wearing it or do you need to be stationary to use it? I sent my son a link to the article because his roommate's mom has albinism. Son Andrew and his roommate are both software engineers but I don't think either of them are into gaming.
I wonder how older people who did not grow up with computers do with the APV? There are a whole lot of baby boomers entering the disability years. I've noticed even people a few years younger than I am (I'm 68) seem to catch on to computer stuff a bit quicker.
Glad to see there's another family where father and son bonded over computer geekery and not sports. We're just not a sports type of family either. Conversations with my son and husband, a retired software engineer, always seem to devolve into computer speak somehow.