I’ve Heard Internal Dissent Too

There was a good if unsurprising story from the New York Times last weekend which helps explain why Apple is constantly rumored to be putting out an XR headset soon… only for us to then get subsequent reports that the release has once again been delayed.

As it turns out, there’s quite a lot of internal dissent within Apple about whether the company should be involved in XR at all:

[As] the company prepares to introduce the headset in June, enthusiasm at Apple has given way to skepticism, said eight current and former employees, who requested anonymity because of Apple’s policies against speaking about future products. There are concerns about the device’s roughly $3,000 price [emph mine!], doubts about its utility and worries about its unproven market.

That dissension has been a surprising change inside a company where employees have built devices — from the iPod to the Apple Watch — with the single-mindedness of a moon mission.

Some employees have defected from the project because of their doubts about its potential, three people with knowledge of the moves said. Others have been fired over the lack of progress with some aspects of the headset, including its use of Apple’s Siri voice assistant, one person said.

I say “unsurprising” partly because we’ve been tracking Meta Quest headset sales for the last few years, and its sub-20 million install base is really a bad sign for a larger XR market. If Meta can only move 20M units on headsets selling under $500, why would Apple think they could do well selling an HMD that is 6x that price?

I’m also unsurprised there’s reported dissent at Apple, because I’ve heard implicit objections around XR myself while preparing my book.

For instance, an insider at Apple I spoke to echoed dana boyd’s concern that VR may be inherently biased to be difficult for females to use:

One problem women’s IPD, which stands for interpupillary distance.

“Literally the distance between your eyes,” this Apple insider explained to me. “The IPDs of women on average are smaller than men. So if the IPD is wrong, that is enough to cause discomfort by itself.”

Talking further about the tendency of VR to make many people nauseous, this colleague even aired a theory related to evolution: Humans do not have an extremely good sense of smell or hearing, compared to many predators. Our vision, however, is quite good, and it’s evolved to detect when we might be ingesting poison.

“So if the visuals are not matching what we feel, if the visuals either have too high latency or they’re too blurry with the screen door effect, it’s wrong.” (By “screen door”, they’re referring to the subtle grid of pixels we see even while wearing high end XR headsets.) And dumb humans that we are, “”[O]ur body’s only response to that is to upchuck.”

While declining to mention anything about Apple’s official roadmap, this insider said: “Apple is a very thoughtful company and they will only get into a space if they think they can do a good job of it.” 

That suggests a highly mass market product — as in, most of the population — which VR and metaverse platforms are not.

“There’s a lot of people who think Second Life is magical,” as they put it to me. “There’s a lot of people who go. ‘I would never do that.’ And so typically, if you want to make a really broad base consumer product, you want to find something that almost everybody feels is magical.”

None of our conversation suggested Apple is leaping into XR or the Metaverse.  

Even more key, Apple’s corporate culture also doesn’t seem to value online immersion.

In sharp contrast to most Silicon Valley companies after the COVID pandemic, for instance, Apple generally disapproves of remote work. Even the Apple insider I spoke to was required to make the long trek to Apple’s corporate HQ most days of the week.

“Apple has a strong face-to-face culture,” they told me, shrugging during our book interview over Zoom. 

That was last year. This month, the company started cracking down on employees who don’t come into the office at least three times a day. 

And since Apple puts such a premium on face-to-face, what makes you think they’d prioritize a technology that puts literal blinders over those faces?