Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Beijing, June 12 (Xinhua) Apple's Vision Pro, a headset released last week, is not its best design, but the design team lost the battle with the top executives and had to compromise, according to people familiar with the matter. Foreign media pointed out that the launch of Vision Pro indicates that Apple is no longer a design-led company, and designers have lost their voice.

The Vision Pro is a compromised product. Apple's research on augmented reality (AR) can be traced back to 2006. After nearly 20 years of hard work, Apple finally released the Vision Pro, which sells for as much as $3500 last week. It is impressive in many ways, and the industrial design is very exquisite: the front is a piece of curved glass, and the digital crown allows users to seamlessly transition from VR to AR. With the support of 12 cameras, 5 sensors and 6 microphones, users can control the system with eyes, sound and gestures.

For many at Apple, this is a day to celebrate. But according to several people familiar with the matter, the Vision Pro that people see now is not the best, because it is the product of infighting between Apple executives and the leadership of its design team.

Many people familiar with Apple's new era regret the current situation of Apple's design team. While Apple continues to hire unparalleled design talent, its corporate strategy is weakening the dominance of design, causing them to have less and less say. Someone pointed out bluntly: "Apple is no longer a design-led company."

Apple is where it is today because it makes what people want in their hearts, even if they can't afford it. This is the result of a very clear product strategy. When design and technology merge into a single entity, this product strategy reimagines what is possible, not what other companies are doing or what Wall Street wants next.

However, Vision Pro has become a weather vane for Apple to enter a new era. In this day and age, Apple will be more engineering and operational than design. There are signs of a decline in the status of Apple's design team. According to previous reports, it is an open secret that Apple CEO Tim Cook's contempt for design led him to clash with legendary designer Jony Ive, which led to Ivy leaving Apple in 2019. In the Jobs era, Ivy won the support of Jobs, and product design was often given priority.

Ivy's departure highlights the decline of the design team. The decline of Apple's design team also drove away another senior design executive, Evans hankey. She worked on a close Apple design team for 20 years and became Apple's vice president of industrial design, overseeing Apple's product design. But she left in 2022 and was replaced by chief operating officer Jeff Williams. Williams is not a designer, but an operations expert, closer to CEO Cook.

Semi-finished products under Cook's leadership, Apple adopted a different business strategy from the Jobs era: using Apple's huge scale to launch products with user stickiness. This product may not be a semi-finished product, but it will certainly take years of design iterations and technological breakthroughs to consolidate.

With the release of iPhone, Apple solved the core user experience problem of smartphones. Over time, iterations have made the platform better and better, from thinner and thinner to keyboard tactile and waterproof to App Store. But the earth-shattering value of iPhone doesn't need these iterations to prove, because it's so different. Despite its late start in smartphones, Apple has completely redefined this category. IPhone launched three generations ahead of its competitors, which will take years to catch up. However, Vision Pro does not show this lead, which is due to Apple's lack of design leadership.

The Vision Pro fails to reflect Apple's strengths. Ivy has reportedly imagined Apple's head Show as a separate consumer product, while Apple Vice President Mike Rockwell (Mike Rockwell), who is in charge of Apple's AR / VR business, wants it to run from the base station (more similar to the early Oculus Rift head display) to provide more fidelity images and become a product that creative professionals may use. From this, we can see that there is a game between two approaches within Apple: Ivy focuses on experience, while Rockwell gives priority to clarity. However, every successful Apple product currently focuses on experience rather than clarity.

Although all the tech giants have built excellent technical demonstrations, no one has been successful in the AR / VR field so far, and developing AR headers is particularly difficult. For example, Carl Ledbetter, Microsoft's director of design cooperation, is in charge of the development of hybrid reality holograms Hololens 2. He has described in detail the tolerance of the Hololens projection system for the epidermis (1/1000000000000 meters), which determines whether users are shocked or disgusted.

Microsoft knew that Hololens was expensive and bulky, and initially targeted the enterprise market, but eventually found that the military was its biggest customer, although the technology was not yet fully applicable to soldiers. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has made a significant investment in VR / AR Touxian, but it has not made significant progress in promoting the concept of meta-universe. In addition, Magic Leap has shifted its focus to medical applications, while Google has stopped selling Google Glass AR platform to corporate customers.

Google Glass has been discontinued in AR / VR, and Apple seems to have overtaken its competitors, but its solutions are more or less the same as those of other companies. You can see a similar sports bar-style user interface through Vision Pro, and the room is full of small windows that have been around for years. Since even Apple is unable to break through the physical limitations of weight and power consumption on headsets, it can only use a cable to connect the headset to the battery pack.

There are reports that Apple is still trying to solve the problem of Vision Pro overheating. The technology, which requires the integration of incredible cameras, sensors, processors, displays and energy management, still looks out of reach. No matter how you look at it, Vision Pro is not a real consumer product and is not mature enough.

This is not to say that Apple cannot succeed where others fail. The company has certainly done this before. But judging from the Vision Pro they showed, Apple didn't fundamentally reinvent the headline category as it did with Mac, iPod or iPhone.

Design is the foundation of Apple's success. Many people may have forgotten that when iPhone was released, IT professionals didn't want to deploy Apple products in the enterprise at all. BlackBerry and Microsoft devices were all the rage at the time. But by winning the support of consumers, or perhaps CEO, Apple forced its way into the enterprise market. Apple won with its perfect design, just as it did on generations of iMac, iPod and iPhone. Even like the AirPods, it may be the most covert AR product in the world (with 3D sound scenes and audio transmission).

On the contrary, the launch of Vision Pro feels more like Apple Watch, a product with low sales and no clear goals at the beginning of its launch. But with the passage of time, as technology advances, its features snowball, including new health features and a clearer interface. Don't forget: when the Apple Watch launched, its screen couldn't even display the dial all day, and the most expressive device worn by most people was turned off.

However, its industrial design has proved to be a reliable iterative platform. Apple Watch is now an important business for Apple. It has great potential and is expected to become a computer dedicated to human long-term health. No wonder Apple's leadership hopes this will work again with Vision Pro.

The design makes Apple Watch come from behind. Indeed, Vision Pro looks better than any product released by its competitors. The eye-catching lens and knitted headband look like major ergonomic improvements to the head display design. This headshow is also solving serious user experience problems. For example, how can we communicate with the giant computers installed on our faces through EyeSight reverse perspective or FaceTime group chat?

However, this has never been Apple's own measure to beat its competitors, because it has only launched a slightly better version of the same category of products, not the best. Apple executives called the Vision Pro "Apple's first space computer". But after watching its demo, consumers may still not understand why Apple makes the computer or why it needs to be bought.

Past products have shown that Apple is best when it comes to a product that feels impossible to make in any other way and allows people to live in a new way through an improved design. This is because Apple has traditionally been a design-leading company, and there is only one real competitor: Apple itself.

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