IT Essentials: New year, old Vision (Pro)
Stumbling forward into January
Starting a new year isn’t always easy. Most office workers have had at least one week off, and emerge blinking into the fluorescent lights of January with the same reactions as a mildly concussed sloth.
It makes late December and early January a ripe time to sneak in a few unsavoury announcements – things you’d rather just sweep under the rug and pretend didn’t happen. A shame for Apple, then, that it’s difficult to hide anything at the world’s most-talked-about company.
The iPhone-maker has, according to reliable industry rumour, allegedly scaled back or entirely canned its Vision Pro VR headset: a product which, I noted 12 months ago, faced an awfully tough challenge in its intended application.
Now, a year on, Apple has apparently sold a mere 500,000 units since launch and the Vision Pro is set to go the same way as Google Glass and Meta’s metaverse experiments.
In Apple’s defence, “experiment” is the key word there: the Vision Pro was launched at the company’s developer conference and never really intended to be a consumer product, even if the marketing told a different story.
The world’s most valuable company has had a few false starts in the last year, the other obvious one being Apple Intelligence – which isn’t even rolling out all its features worldwide until later this year.
Clearly, even all the money in the world doesn’t prevent the occasional stumble. But that’s the beauty of a new year: a chance to reassess, reset and set new resolutions - whether you are a slightly stunned sloth or a trillion-dollar tech giant.
Recommended Reads:
Starting a new year is hard enough, so we’re kicking off with a nice, easy read on debunking myths about AI in the legal sector. This excellent piece, by lawyer and AI expert Jonathan Armstrong, delves into the hype and reality of artificial intelligence in the courtroom.