evan's thoughts


Less is More

I think if you offered me the choice to be more immersed into a computer at any point in my life, I’d probably ask where I could sign up and how. I spent years dreaming about future more immersive computing experiences, where the computer / digital world can replace and surround my physical one almost exclusively. I am doing much better now and don’t think this way anymore haha, but all this to say the Apple Vision Pro was everything I ever wanted in a computer. To an extent it still is. I remain one of the few users actually putting the device on most weeks, if only to watch TV. As much as I adore my Vision Pro, almost seven months into ownership I have found it is not the life changing device I wanted it to be. The Meta Ray-Bans are though.

I received a pair of Meta Ray-Bans back in April as a gift from my dad. He works in construction as a consultant, and a contractor he works with gave him a pair. He didn’t really have much use for this, so he gave them to me (after I asked lol). I wanted to mess around with a pair but I wasn’t willing to spend 300 bucks on a device that only replaced existing use cases (ironic given the Vision Pro, I know). I first received them when we met in Sedona for my cousin’s wedding, and for the rest of my time there I just could not take them off. They were unobtrusive but intuitive, and have become maybe my favorite product I use on a regular basis since my Apple Watch.

Let me take a step back and explain why, but to do that I have to explain exactly what these glasses are and what they’re good for. Meta has done a decent job of showcasing the camera aspect of these glasses just in general. If you use Instagram semi regularly, i’d be shocked if you haven’t seen a story that says “Taken with Meta Ray-Bans” at the top. They are great at taking candid photos, and recording short vertical videos within optimal lighting conditions, such as well lit interiors or any time outside during the day. While not as good as a modern phone camera, the quality loss is more than acceptable enough given the convenience factor of the camera itself. What I mean by this is that, when you are wearing these things you are often taking photos you otherwise wouldn’t due to the convenience and accessibility of them being on your head. It’s less a discussion of “my phone does this better”, and more “if I only had my phone I wouldn’t have taken this to begin with”.

The camera is not by any stretch excellent though. The (remarkably well designed / organized) Meta View app does a lot of processing on the images similar to most phones, to the point where the images themselves look as if they’re shot on an iPhone X or similar quality phone, but the camera can not handle any form of low light at all. This is expected, and is the main time I end up taking my phone out of my pocket. Wearing them, I find myself reaching for my phone similarly to how i’d reach for my DSLR or mirrorless (especially on the iPhone 16 with its camera control button), when I want to get an excellent / fine tuned shot of something rather than every time I want to take a photo. However you probably know all this, it’s what Meta shows off. There’s almost no comparing them to the camera of a modern iPhone though, or even any modern budget smartphone. I’ll always bring my phone with me to take photos, even though I have a cellular watch. I stopped bringing my AirPods though.

I don’t have a car anymore. I ended my Model 3 lease for a bunch of reasons 2 years ago, and live car free in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, basically one of the only areas of this city it’s feasible to do so. Wearing my AirPods when I walk / bike around to listen to podcasts is great, and makes them an even more essential part of my everyday life. Their transparency mode is great and their microphones are excellent, but its just not comparable to wearing nothing over your ears at all! The “hidden” and killer use case of the Meta Ray-Bans are the speakers. They have two tiny speakers that shoot straight at your ears, allowing you to listen to anything from your phone without any form of earbuds or bone conduction. This allows you to speak to its voice assistant (which is just decent by the way) read text messages, listen to music, podcasts, take phone calls etc. It’s very hard to hear what someone else is listening to, unless you blast them to max volume and are in a very quiet room close to them. This is the killer use case for these things, as essentially a pair of headphones built into your glasses. It’s a lot safer for walking / biking in a city as I can hear a car better than any passthrough will offer me, and walk into a coffee shop / talk to someone without taking them off my ears.

The Ray-Bans are part of Meta’s strategy to offer low cost consumer devices with really solid product stories, ultimately building to a commercialized version of their Orion Prototype. Their goal is to take individual features they expect you’d use in the Orion if you were wearing it every day, chop those out, and sell them as a fully fledged end to end product that you can buy today. The camera, the audio, and the voice assistant are 3 of those features versus the hundreds if not thousands that i’m sure can exist in the Orion. Importantly, the operating system Meta has shown in Orion currently does not exist, either on the Ray-Bans or their Quest headsets, which perform a similar function but with gaming / entertainment instead.

Apple has the opposite strategy. They have built what is an incredible feat of engineering with visionOS, and their goal is to build products that fully commercialize that entire operating system today. Every app, every use case that will exist in an eventual Orion equivalent from Apple can be built today in the Vision Pro. Because of this, it feels to many that the Apple Vision Pro exists to be a developer kit for an eventual “Apple Glasses” rather than a complete product with well thought out user stories. In my last full post, I said that I believe visionOS to be half a decade ahead of Meta’s Quest OS (which has now been renamed Horizon OS). The gesture / eye tracking control, windowing system, and native SDK’s blow the Quest’s makeshift Android out of the water, especially if we’re targeting Orion as the end goal. My opinion has not changed here, but after experiencing the other half of Meta’s product strategy, I believe this was a deliberate decision they made rather than a simple oversight or being “less innovative”.

That might not matter for Apple. The iPhone released and was one of the most disruptive and successful consumer products in our lifetime. Regardless of whether or not you have an iPhone, you are using one of its descendants. It is a product that was so successful, that society has reshaped itself entirely around it and its capabilities. If I were Apple though, I would still be a bit worried, if only because we are not yet in the “iPhone 1” phase of this market. If we look at AR glasses as analogous to the iPhone, everyone rushing towards this product are currently building Blackberries and Palm Tréo’s, waiting for the supply chain / tech issues to resolve themselves so they can sell these devices for under ten thousand dollars. In that analogy, Apple just revealed their plans for Multitouch in 2004 or so.

The iPhone had an actual year head start over Android by the time it launched, and even when the first major Android phones started to hit the market, they were years behind in terms of usability and interfaces. They only managed to fully catch up to the iPhone consumer experience in terms of speed, performance, and design almost a full decade later, and now only excel in a few areas over the iPhone (notification management being an important one). What I mean to say is that if this space is actually transformative, Apple and Meta are going to release the iPhone equivalent at about the same time. They’re going to use the same control methods (Meta has apparently retooled their neural sensor band to use the same tapping gesture as visionOS instead of a phantom limb) and they’re going to have the same UX conventions with windowing and app design. At Meta connect, they showed they are finally adding Android app support to the operating system, starting the process of plugging the gaps between the Horizon OS / visionOS SDK’s.

We’re many years out from the actual product versions of these devices. When I used the Apple Vision Pro for the first time I was floored. I went home with mine absolutely ecstatic, and I still really enjoy using the product if only as a way for me to cosplay what the future of computing is like. However the product is not improving. If anything, it’s actively becoming worse. 50% of what I do in this device is watch YouTube videos, because I can’t corp manage it to do work / take Teams meetings from it, and I can’t use more than one monitor on it with my Mac (I know ultra wide is coming). Without work as an excuse, I have been using it almost exclusively as an unbelievably overpriced bedroom television / airplane monitor since I purchased it. Now the unauthorized YouTube app I use is going away, without a release date for the official one in sight, and the unofficial PlayStation Remote Play app keeps stuttering because of the way Apple devices handle communicating with each other. Meanwhile almost every day I find more use cases for the Meta Ray-Bans. These aren’t necessarily competing products today, but before the end of the decade they will be. I believe the Apple Vision Pro released relatively early in this race so that Apple could garner a more robust app ecosystem compared to Meta, by utilizing the strengths of iOS to their advantage. Developers have not responded in kind.

Post Meta Connect and my experiences with the Ray-Bans, I believe the two companies are a bit closer in this eventual category than they were back in February. If you had to ask me which of these companies devices I am putting on my face every day though, unfortunately it is not the Apple product. Meanwhile the Ray-Bans are so great at what they do that I bought myself a second pair. Hopefully, Apple learns from this and releases a real competitor, and not just AirPods that can take photos.