MATT BOLTON…
THINKS THAT THE VISION PRO LAUNCH IS IN AN AWKWARD SPACE BETWEEN THE PAST AND THE FUTURE
The future and present are totally at odds with each other
At the time of writing, there’s a story that the Vision Pro’s virtual keyboard is borderline unusable. Supposedly, people who’ve had access to it say that you can only really peck at letters like it’s your first time interacting with the concept of ‘buttons’. Of course, the Vision Pro works with Bluetooth keyboards, so there’s a workaround for this (which was always going to be superior, let’s face it) when you’re in mixed reality mode, though this won’t be such a great fix if you’re fully immersive in its VR mode.
Looking at the absurdity of a floating virtual keyboard that you’d need to type on by hitting air got me thinking, though. First I considered that with speech recognition improvements, part of the idea is probably that you never need to type anything in the future. All your logins would be managed, and you can just say anything else you want.
Then I thought ‘Well, sure, that’s the future, but what about right now? We’re only halfway towards that world, and right now part of the pitch is being able to do Mac stuff too, otherwise it’s not that much of a useful tool.’ Which then means that I thought ‘That’s the problem, isn’t it? You can’t launch the future of computing without connecting to the present of computing, and in this case the two are totally at odds with each other.’
When the iPad launched, remember it was introduced with a keyboard dock and iWork apps as a big feature. The future of the iPad as a productive device would then eventually involve a larger rethinking of interfaces for touch (GarageBand’s virtual instruments led the way in this a year after the iPad’s launch). But, back at that first showing, Apple was happy to connect the past to the future simply by showing magazine browsing on the sofa, and a traditional screen-andkeyboard mode for work.
We’re seeing the same kind of thing with the Vision Pro now – a screen and virtual keyboard to provide a broader concept of productivity than seeing 3D objects or environments alone can provide – but the problem is the virtuality. The iPad had an actual keyboard that worked just as well as a Mac one, so the bridge to the past was stable and familiar. The Vision Pro’s bridge to the past is like that one from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where you just have to step out and hope you don’t fall.
Which makes me wonder: is the potential of the Vision Pro connected to its ability to abandon the idea of a keyboard at some point, and maybe even soon? Is the virtual keyboard an extra element that’s more prone to problems than to helping? I suspect Apple already knows the answer to this, and probably has a million different options. (It occurs to me that teaching Vision Pro owners to use a virtual stenotype keyboard would probably have a better result than recreating a QWERTY one.)
I reckon the end result is the same either way – the virtual keyboard should be a feature for weird legacy needs, not a standard part of the system. And I’ve no doubt we could get there in the end; the question is whether we’ll ever reach this good and natural destination of the Vision Pro, or whether the rickety nature of the bridge to the past we have to cross first will put us off too much in the meantime.
ABOUT MATT BOLTON
Matt is Managing Editor at TechRadar.com, and previously worked on T3, MacLife and MacFormat. He’s been charting Apple’s ups and downs since his student days, but still hopes to hear “one more thing”.
For tech watchers, January means one thing and one thing only: the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and a trip to Las Vegas. Once there, attendees can discover all kinds of weird and wonderful gadgets, spot emerging tech trends and discover what some of the world’s biggest companies plan to waggle under our noses over the year ahead. As usual, Apple was conspicuous by its absence, but that didn’t stop it from being the talk of the show – and not solely because it announced the on-sale date of its new Vision Pro (see p10) just as CES delegates were gathering. Across the booths, halls and myriad meeting rooms of CES were all kinds of devices that will either work with your Apple gear, or have been designed to compete with it (like the Rabbit R1, left). Plus there was the usual mix of jawdropping TVs, smart home innovations, robots, car stuff, and even personal electric aeroplanes – you’ll find our favourites over the next three pages. So grab a questionable liquid from your new AI-powered juicer and let’s begin…