Economics of Vision Pro Development

Jan 18, 2024

Vision Pro is weeks away and it’s going to work. In the process, a new chapter in computing will open as other companies learn how to compete with Apple.

Now, for the last decade, the VR/AR space has kind of sputtered along. Why should this be any different? It’s because Apple has a unique software advantage none of their competitors can match. For now.

For a platform to succeed, it has to shrink the journey between what a developer imagines, and what they can actually ship to customers.

An important approach to this is software abstractions. Abstractions package complex functionality into a tidy box. The box hides the complicated details, hopefully making it easier to use.

When you see a button in a user interface, that button is an abstraction over things like drawing, text layout and gesture recognition. Once upon a time, every developer had to build their own button abstractions. But that’s a waste of labor: for 90% of apps, buttons can and should look the same and work the same.

So developer platforms started to package things like buttons into libraries. This way developers could skip past the tedium of building common things, and get to work on stuff unique to their applications.

Which brings us back to Apple.

Apple has a vast set of libraries and frameworks for solving every sort of computing problem. And millions of developers already know how to use them.

To get started building software for Vision Pro, developers will use the same approach they know for building iOS apps. The same language, the same design patterns, the same tools.

That’s a short learning curve.

Back in 2019, Apple released the first version of SwiftUI, their next-generation framework for user interfaces. SwiftUI is declarative. You provide a high-level description of what you want the interface to do, and then the framework produces an interface to match.

In the past, every detail of the interface had to be specified down to the pixel level. SwiftUI provides default appearance and layout behavior, and as a result, it can adapt that behavior to new platforms. Like 3D platforms.

As a result, all the teams who adopted SwiftUI will have an advantage moving to Vision Pro.

Because the software complexity costs for building on Vision Pro are so low, we’re going to see all new apps that have never been tried before.

Now, Vision Pro itself is expensive. But the first chapters in new computing paradigms often are. The first Macintosh, when we adjust for inflation, cost over seven thousand dollars.

But what happened? The price came down, and the example it set allowed competitors, like Microsoft, to build their own approach to a mouse-driven interface. Developers saw the best ideas to borrow for their own apps, and the desktop computing revolution took flight.

There’s loads of leverage for experimentation with Vision Pro, and the more that happens, the more likely it is we’ll see a new chapter in mass-adopted computing across multiple platforms.