Wednesday's Market Minute: A Home With A Home Screen Is A Downgrade

You navigate with your eyes. You use your hands to touch things, and your voice to dictate. You see your world and everything in it. Experiences take place in real time, right in front of your eyes.
In the ad for their new augmented reality goggles, Apple AAPL describes these abilities as “magic.”
They’re not. They’re just existence.
My God – objects cast shadows! Is this an SNL skit? Or is Tim Cook really trying to sell a worse version of reality for thirty-five-hundred United States dollars? At least Mark Zuckerberg’s glasses take you to a place where 15-year-old boys disguise crude jokes in their usernames.
Apple tries to get in front of the obvious social roadblock of wearing a machine that’s a mechanical composite of dystopian future-fictions by assuring customers “you’re not isolated from other people.” Uh, no – you are isolated. One of you is being a normal human being, the other is at home with a giant scuba mask on and a power cord spooling out the back of their head.
Is this the best on offer from the supposed corporate cradle of consumer innovation? Recreating the scene from Minority Report in which Tom Cruise ensconces himself inside a memory of his son? Recall, this is not a happy movie. This is not a happy man. This is not our goal. Have we not already realized the productive limitations of virtual engagement, with depression rates at an all-time high following an almost two-year long experiment with the Quarantine metaverse?
In Apple’s Vision, movies and games will undoubtedly be more engrossing, and there’s sure to be some fun applications. But don’t be fooled, this is not a revolutionary experience. This is another phone. It’s just the biggest one yet, and you’re going inside of it, instead of it into your palm.
A reality with a home screen overlayed across your actual home is not an augmented reality, it’s a diminished one – much like our AI breakthrough is inferior in its creative capacity to humans. And before that, the great revolution of blockchain ended up being nothing more than an unnecessary downgrade of an existing financial system. There’s a pattern here, as the commercial even boasts that Vision offers a “brand new way to browse the web”: repetitive and unnecessary.
Our great breakthroughs of tech have been remarkably disappointing the past four years, Apple’s Vision will likely add to this list.

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