Apple does not seem to see this image as frightening.
Reviewers Greg Bruce and Zanna Gillespie watch in horror as Apple fantasises about our helmeted future.
SHE SAW
When Greg and I started dating in 2010, he had a smartphone - an iPhone 3 - which he used to get directions to the restaurant he’d reserved for our second date. I thought it was absurd. Did he really need that thing? Why hadn’t he looked up where we were going in advance? Why would anyone need or want access to their emails on their phone? The idea of having internet access on the go seemed to me a stupid, unnecessary development. Historically, this is how I’ve met technological leaps.
I suggested we review the Apple Vision Pro ad because it blew my fragile mind. What was I seeing? What was it saying? What is the era of spatial computing, actually? If this was the future, it looked frighteningly like the Spike Jonze film Her, and the likelihood of Greg falling in love with his OS seemed exponentially higher.
It opens on the Apple Vision Pro goggles, behind which a woman’s face appears. She’s likely digitally generated because, as the ad tells us, these sleek goggles use “advanced machine learning to represent you realistically” when using Facetime. In other words, it presents an image of you that’s not you but looks and sounds just like you. Spooky. The applications of this tech seem vast and terrifying.
A female voice announces that the era of spatial computing is here. The music abruptly stops and the screen goes black. It feels monumental. We are entering a whole new world.
In this world, you use your eyes to navigate - ophthalmologists, please weigh in - you can connect your MacBook just by looking at it. It’s dangerously close to mind-reading. If social media has taught us, some of us, to not share everything we think and feel online, will Apple Vision Pro teach us to be vigilant with our eye movement? Do not look at Facebook … doh … do not look at that ad … doh … do not look at that buy now button … ugh. Will our most primal desires be catered to before our frontal lobe even has a chance to initiate impulse control?
Throughout the ad, Apple works hard to sell us on the idea that Apple Vision Pro won’t remove us from the real world, it will merely enhance it. But if smartphones and the pandemic have taught us anything, it’s that many of us quite enjoy retreating from the real world. When the virtual world looks and feels so much like the best bits of the real world, who needs the messiness of actual humans?
No one, it appears. There’s an eerie solitude in all of it. A lone dad sits on a couch watching a 3D video of his kids playing outside. They turn to the camera and say, “Hey, Dad,” in unison. It feels like they’re dead. It feels like everyone’s dead and each person wearing these goggles is living in a post-apocalyptic world desperately trying to recreate the old world in their living room. There’s a sense of nostalgia, except it’s for a world that still exists outside of the Apple Vision Pro goggles. At least for now.
HE SAW
This nine-minute advertisement for a product I hope never to have to use feels like the end of something. I’m not sure what exactly, but the two words that spring most readily to mind are history and hope.
The ad squeezes a huge amount of information, imagery and bold adjectives (“stunning”, “magical”, “profound”) into its nine minutes, every frame of which was no doubt discussed and workshopped at Apple HQ for months or years, but the word that had crystallised in my mind by the ad’s overreaching conclusion was not an adjective but a noun: dystopia.
A series of attractive young adults with unnaturally perfect posture sit alone on couches in a series of improbably perfect living spaces. On their heads are enormous, ugly, alien helmets, described by the ad’s narrator as “compact” and “beautiful”. The helmet enables users to see the internet as if it’s in their home, which we have to presume is something people have told Apple they would like, but it’s notable that nobody in the ad uses it to engage with Twitter.
There’s a creeping sense throughout that something awful is happening, and that’s because it is: we are witnessing the construction of a world in which humans are reduced to living in their own heads. They can see other people, but interact with them only briefly, and appear to see them primarily as sources of content, to be filmed and watched later in 3D, providing the user with all the benefits of people’s presence without the annoyances of their actual presence. If ads were classified by genre, this one would be horror.
As a representation of the parlous state of late capitalist society, I found the ad deeply disturbing, but as a work of art I found it wildly stimulating. By its end, I was reeling, full of thoughts and feelings. I couldn’t help but think, for instance, about the history of human progress and its purpose and logical endpoint, which appears to be the creation of the Apple Vision Pro.
The ad feels like an exclamation mark on the current rush of technological development: a world in which we’ve all got iPhones in our pockets, AirPods in our ears, MacBooks in our bags, and we’re shouting at voice-enabled generative AI while driving our Teslas at high speed across a scalding hot earth that is bereft of resources and polluted beyond repair.
But we don’t care, because, with the turn of a dial on our headsets, we can replace the hideous world we’ve destroyed with the breathtakingly beautiful one created by Apple. The world around us is a hellscape but, inside our helmets, everything is perfect.
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