The New Vision Pro is going to be Apple’s Lisa — not its Macintosh
The Vision Pro launch seems to be reminding everyone of the 1984 Macintosh launch. Maybe rightly so. However, I seem to have drawn more parallels between the Vision Pro and the ‘83 Lisa and what this means for the future of Apple’s spatial computing devices.
Introduction
The Apple Vision Pro is just days away from its official release. By the time you are reading this story, it might have already reached your nearest Apple Store (US or otherwise). For the longest time, since June last year when they announced it, I have maintained my fair share of silence about this new product. So why now, just a few days before its store launch?
It all started two weeks ago when I started reading Steven Levy’s ‘Insanely Great’ as part of my 2024 Reading Challenge. Insanely Great is about the history of the first Macintosh launched by Apple in 1984 and what it meant to build the first commercial bit-mapped GUI computer. Interestingly, I noticed that the 1984 Mac was not the first-ever bit-mapped GUI machine in the world.
Barring the XEROX PARC’s Alto, there was a machine launched by Apple themselves, exactly 12 months before the Mac, which introduced the new GUI interface to the world bidding farewell to the mainstream text-based user interface. This was the 1983 Lisa. The main inspiration for this story as to why I think the Vision Pro resembles the ’83 Lisa more than the ’84 Mac. Here’s how I decide to break this to you…
- The ‘Pro’ Naming & the ‘Pro’ Price
- The learning curve for visionOS
- The Mac of Apple Vision Family… when?
- What will define the success of the Vision Pro?
- Haiku Time: The iPhone at the iPod, The Vision Pro will devour the…
Just a quick detour… if you like such kind of tech stories, consider signing up for my email newsletter. It’s 100% FREE and will remain for all my lovely audience.
The ‘Pro’ Naming & the ‘Pro’ Price
While watching the Vision Pro being announced during WWDC’23, the nomenclature of this new spatial computing device seemed offbeat to me. I wasn’t aware of any other Apple product that launched with a ‘Pro’ before its base variant’s launch. During iPhone launches every fall, they always announce the non-Pro iPhones before announcing the iPhone Pro models. Even the Apple Watch Ultra debuted after eight generations of base variant Apple Watches.
The ‘Pro’ listing made me think about whether Apple had plans for a base variant of the Apple Vision. Back in the ’80s, when Apple decided to start the work on their first bit-mapped GUI machine, the Mac and the Lisa teams were working simultaneously. The Lisa was supposed to be heavy with all the pricey components like memory and storage needed for the GUI, more like the Mac Pro of the current Mac Lineup.
On the other hand, the Mac was supposed to be for the masses — the computer that would be your ideal assistant for all creative and somewhat professional tasks, something like the MacBook Air of today’s time. Jobs was even aiming for an early Mac launch, even before the Lisa. Looking back, I feel this would have killed Lisa. Why you ask? Well for starters, the Lisa was almost 4x more costlier than the Macintosh.
The ’83 Lisa launched at a whopping price of $9,995 (about $30K in today’s time) while the ’84 Mac was about $2,495 (about $7K in today’s time). But think of Lisa more like a Mac Pro. It had 1MB of RAM, a 12” monochrome horizontal display, and weighed 22 kilograms!
While our MacBook Air of the ’80s, the OG Macintosh had 128kB of RAM (that’s one-eight of Lisa’s RAM), a 9” square monochrome display and weighed 7.5 kilograms. Also, let’s keep in mind that these two machines were being developed almost simultaneously and launched just a year apart.
It wouldn’t be wrong to say that the Macintosh team stood on the shoulders of the Lisa Team. A lot of the engineers working on Lisa later joined the Mac team and stopped them from making the same mistakes as Lisa had. A lot of the software was also ported on the new machine that was set to launch on January 24, 1984, and make a dent in the universe.
Reading this made me feel that comparing the Vision Pro to the 1984 Macintosh would be like comparing apples to oranges. I have observed more similarities between Lisa and the Vision Pro. Most importantly, the naming — the new spatial computing device has a ‘Pro’ in it.
While this naming might simply suggest the expensive hardware technologies being used in it, one can only wonder if this device is meant for the masses or just the early adopters. Giving Apple the benefit of the doubt, would they launch a $3500 “Pro” device entirely for the masses? I think differently.
The learning curve for visionOS
With every new-looking tech device, comes a new user interface. And with every new interface, comes a new learning curve. This new interface for the Vision Pro is called visionOS and once again reminiscent of the ’84 Macintosh and the ’07 iPhone, it requires you to use your fingers to navigate.
If you have watched the Vision Pro announcement video during WWDC’23, you might have noticed that the only way to control things in your spatial environment while wearing the Vision Pro is with your hands and eyes. Use your fingers to pinch, zoom, and scroll and your eye movements to select.
Absolutely no other joysticks or controllers. But why not? Wouldn’t it be more precise to control and select using a joystick/controller? Once again, we have to look into the past because not all modern problems require modern solutions.
As Bill Gates once told me, “The number of buttons on a mouse is one of the most controversial issues in the industry. People get religious.”
— Insanely Great by Steven Levy
As I said earlier, with every new device comes a new interface and consequently a new learning curve. And that applies to accessories that you might use with your main device. So having a joystick or controller in your hand would not just increase your friction to daily drive that device but also require you to learn how it functions after you are done charging all those controllers and devices.
So instead of multiple learning curves for a single device, Apple has focused on making a single device with a single learning curve. Does that mean navigating visionOS with your eyes is going to be easy and precise? Heck, no!
Stop rolling your eyes… you are triggering everything in the menu!
For those of you who might not know, Bill English is credited as the co-inventor of the computer mouse along with Doug Engelbert. While Doug listed out ideas, Bill made working prototypes of these mice out of wood. Yes, you heard it right — the first computer mouse was made out of wood. We are talking about the ’60s when these two gentlemen used to work at SRI International.
Text-based user interface was the only way of using computers back then. Ever wondered how Doug and Bill got people to use the computer mouse back then? 90% of testers learned it while using them (I believe these were the Tech Reviewers of those days). But what of the ten percent? Did they eventually learn to use the mouse? If so, how?
The befuddled ten percent were presented with a little exercise called Fly. The logic of Fly was simple: there is a fly on the screen that is bothersome and should be exterminated. The mouse controls a fly swatter. Use it to kill flies. Go. “After ten minutes,” said Bill English of those who used this remedial training program, “they would be perfectly at home with the mouse.”
— Insanely Great by Steven Levy
This is exactly the kind of demos we need and expect from Apple and the visionOS app developers. Early adopters are going all-in for the Vision Pro. However, there might be a bit of a bias early on as most early adopters being well-versed in tech might not see the same flaws with the interface as some normal users do.
It’s going to take both the users as well as Apple some time to come to terms and work towards a middle ground, to make the next-generation Vision devices better.
Unlike Bill and Doug at SRI International, Apple under Steve Jobs had a more radical way of doing things. Want to make users learn the computer mouse? Kill the arrow keys on the keyboard.
This was probably the most controversial decision made for the personal computer as it didn’t land well for programmers and other technophiles who had developed a special fondness for these keys in their daily lives and tasks.
I hope Apple doesn’t adopt any such forcing devices for the Vision Pro, apart from the sans-controller part, and allows users to slowly transition to this new interface.
But we are missing out on the main topic of this story… if the new Vision Pro is a Lisa then what is the Macintosh of Apple’s Vision Family and when is it coming?
The Mac of Apple Vision family… when?
The Macintosh 128K (called so after its daring memory capabilities) came out just a year after the Lisa launched. The personal computer that, in the eyes of Jobs, was so insanely great that it would make a dent in the universe. All of that, in one-fourth the price of Lisa and one-eight of Lisa’s memory capabilities. A true product for the masses. A show-stopper.
We all are waiting for that to happen with the Vision family of Apple’s spatial computing devices too. Yet this is the only question, I cannot answer. I have no idea when Apple will launch the next Vision device or whether it will be a non-Pro variant or another Pro variant. I have no idea what it will look like either.
It was not until 1991 that Apple was able to muster the wherewithal to compress the Macintosh experience into a notebook-sized computer. It was called the PowerBook, a conscious nod to Alan Kay’s Dynabook. At one of the early Macintosh retreats, Steve Jobs had written on a blackboard, “Mac in a book in five years.” He was only off by a few years.
— Insanely Great by Steven Levy
That was Jobs’ vision for the Macintosh. Recently, my favorite YouTuber Luke Miani mentioned in a video how apart two generations of Apple’s portable laptops looked like and I was mind-blown (because I am a Gen Z). With the Macintosh Portable (1989) on the right and the 1991 PowerBook 100 on the left, have a look at them yourself:
This is what we should be expecting from Vision Pro in the upcoming years. But hey, wait! We were talking about Lisa and Macintosh from ’83 and ’84, why jump suddenly more than half a decade into the future? Let’s talk about the great successor of Lisa… the Macintosh and the Mac of the Vision Family.
Well, I have been keeping a secret from you all along… the original Macintosh of ’84, despite being a show-stopper, was a Flop.
What will define the success of the Vision Pro?
Okay, now that all secrets are out, you can once again put all your trust in me as we try to uncover the reasons why the OG Macintosh 128K failed. If you have been paying close attention and are a bit tech-savvy, the hint is in the name itself — the 128kB memory (RAM).
This was in no way, acceptable for a personal computer with a bit-mapped GUI, multitasking capabilities, and a mouse as an accessory. Even 1MB was barely enough on Lisa, what are we to say about 0.128MB on the Mac?
But those are hardware constraints, that can always be solved with future upgradability options. And so, just after eight months, the Fat Mac a.k.a Macintosh 512K (because of the 512kB memory) arrived to save the OG Mac user’s failed aspirations. It became a serious business computer.
Serious Business Computer. Business Computer. Once again, the vision to make a personal computer for the masses failed but this time the hardware was not a constraint. It was rather the fact that the software applications for the Mac were lacking in quantity. And this is where we digress rightfully to come back to the present times and talk about our dear Vision Pro & the suite of visionOS apps.
All along the designers of Macintosh had said that they could not predict the nature of the revolutions it would ignite — that task would be up to its developers.
— Insanely Great by Steven Levy
What would eventually define the Vision Pro’s (or any future Apple Vision device’s) success would be finding its technical ikigai — its true functional purpose, the reason why people would flock to their nearby Apple Stores and BestBuys to get this spatial computing device.
This ikigai would have to come from either Apple’s suite of apps (though, I doubt it) or from a third-party developer. visionOS app(s) that would revolutionize the way its users do their daily tasks making them more precise to the dot or simply faster or both (more in the next section).
For the Macintosh (not the OG 128K one), these apps came both from Apple as well as third-party developers. From Apple, it was the HyperCard authored by Bill Atkinson in 1987 that went on to occupy the central place in the world of Macintosh.
It was more or less like a databse system, say like Notion. Linking ideas across the system became easier and prepared users for the storm we now call the World Wide Web a.k.a Internet.
From third-party developers, it was PageMaker by Aldus in 1985 (Aldus was later acquired by Adobe), that turned the Fat Mac (and its successors) along with Apple’s LaserWriter printer into a desktop publishing computer.
A Desktop Flat-File Database System to store records (HyperCard) and a Desktop Publishing System (PageMaker). What’s it going to be for Apple Vision? Time shall tell.
Anyways, the magic number is Three.
It took the iPhone three generations to create a worthwhile mark in the smartphone industry.
The Apple Watch took three generations to figure out that it was meant to be a health and fitness tracker.
I am hoping the Vision family of devices too continues this tradition of setting sail after three generations… or hopefully, earlier.
Just a quick detour… if you like such kind of tech stories, consider signing up for my email newsletter. It’s 100% FREE and will remain for all my lovely audience.
Haiku Time: The iPhone ate the iPod, The Vision Pro will devour the…
Why don’t you take a guess?
Who, me?
Yes, you, who is writing this 3,500-word story talking about Macs and Vision Pro!?
Alright, alright, I think Apple is coming for your Television!
And how cliché is that? Just because Apple showed off how beautiful TV shows and movies look in three dimensions while watching with the Vision Pro and just because they are partnering with Disney to get all their movies and shows ready for the Vision Pro launch…
Yes, just because of that, I think that Apple is coming for the television market. To think about it logically, the iPod touch was a mistake. It was bound to die with the all-powerful iPhone with a sim-card slot, just existing alongside.
Laughing at the irony that Apple discontinued the iPod touch in the same year, they decided to take away sim-cards slots from iPhones in the US.
The AirPods too (with courage) killed off the headphone jack on the iPhone.
But Apple is above that killing game now — they are in no mood to kill their own products anymore. They tried controlling your TV screens with their Apple TV setup boxes using tvOS. Still, it seems that Samsung, LG, and other TV makers earning a larger profit out of the TV hardware felt like a betrayal to Apple akin to squeezing lemon in someone’s eyes (though lemon juice does prevent Apple slices from browning, but I digress).
What I mean to say is: it seems that Apple wants complete control of the setup while you are watching content on the Vision devices. Making a television has already been deemed unprofitable by Jobs and so the Vision Pro arrives to stay true to that vision of profit and control. There is even a patent for Vision Pro that goes as far back as 2008.
But my opinions don’t mean much.
When the Vision Pro finally arrives in 2024 (US and Worldwide), it won’t be competing against just curved, transparent-to-opaque, or hologram televisions that you saw during CES 2024 (shoutout to all the amazing tech startups there) but also the plethora of devices that have camera lenses on them and processing power within them now.
I am talking about the technology behind Humane’s AI Pin, Rabbit’s R1, and Circle to Search with Google (on Android smartphones). These companies have made it a point to ingest as much AI as possible and spit out the best they have whereas Apple still seems to be lagging in the AI game.
How insanely cool would it be to just circle something in the air with your fingers while wearing the Vision Pro and do a visual search!?
A part of me is also rooting for Apple to level up multi-tasking on Mac using the Vision Pro to visualize multiple displays. While Apple hasn’t allowed for this natively, third-party developers seem to be having a gala trying out a bunch of new experiences for visionOS.
Here are a few posts on X of different visionOS apps being developed, that caught my attention:
The Vision Pro doesn’t have to do 1000 tasks. Not even a 100. Maybe not even 1. What if having a spatial environment to work in did all the wonder for you specifically?
Hear me out: The Pre-Lisa era had computers working on a text-based interface which meant that to find a single file, saved on the machine, you would be asked three questions by the interface and a single wrong answer, like a typo for the file name, would yield no results so you would have to start again.
That all stopped with the introduction of GUI on the Lisa. The file you wanted sat right in front of you on the desktop (or within directories, if you wished). Just click to open.
While I generally don’t like to believe in Jobs’ reality distortion field or his skills in Maths after the 128kB memory he asked the Mac Team to put in the OG Macintosh, I still have to quote this:
“Even if it took you three days to make it a single second faster, it would be worth it,” Jobs hounded him. “If ten million people use the computer, in one year alone, that’s about 360 million turn-ons. How many lifetimes does 360 million seconds equal? Fifty? Would you take three days to save fifty people’s lives?” Kenyon wound up shaving not one but three seconds off the start-up time, sparing a hundred extra souls from the Reaper.
— Insanely Great by Steven Levy
Where do you think the answer to Vision Pro’s success lies? More importantly, which predecessor will it devour… cause you know, my Haiku is still missing a piece.
The iPhone ate the iPod,
The Vision Pro will devour the __________
Wonder what Apple kills next?
Conclusion
Further into the future, if we wear eye-phone goggles and other virtual reality apparel, the menus may appear before us in space, and the pointing device will be … our fingers. — Insanely Great by Steven Levy
Mr. Steven wrote those words in the concluding chapter of his book, thirty years ago. I can’t believe how wrong he was with the name. Eye-phone goggles… seriously?
Names aside, this story would have been impossible for a Gen-Z like me if Mr. Steven hadn’t written this book to consolidate a good history of the Macintosh while recounting both its predecessors’ and successors’ efforts. All the quotes in this story are nothing but little things I highlighted in the book while reading it.
A highlight I didn’t understand where to exactly insert in this story, is the one below — when Mr Steven asked Joanna Hoffman, the first Macintosh marketer, about the OG Mac’s failure, years later:
She laughed. “It’s a miracle that it sold anything at all. This was a computer with a single disk drive, no memory capacity, and almost no applications. People who bought it did so on seduction. It was not a rational buy. It was astonishing that Macintosh sold as many as it did.”
Nope, I am not trying to sound bitter. Just a tale of caution. We can hope that the Vision Pro turns out to be somewhat of a rational buy for the early adopters and that the reviewers hold back nothing during feedback.
Apple is about to ship its first new product (and not just an accessory) since Jobs left us. And that itself is a huge task in itself. For all those working at Apple, if you happen to read my story, here’s another highlight from the book dedicated to you all:
Perhaps the most telling epigram of all was a three-word koan that Jobs scrawled on an easel in January 1983, when the project was months overdue. REAL ARTISTS SHIP.
In an attempt to complete my 2024 reading challenge and sound like a tech aficionado during parties and gatherings, I picked up Levy’s ‘Insanely Great’ and ended up drawing parallels between two generations of completely different products. I would love to be wrong just as much as I would love to be right. In case, I ruffled the feathers of a robot parrot built by a true tech-savvy who has completed more reading challenges than me, I apologize.
If you like such kind of tech stories, consider signing up for my email newsletter. It’s 100% FREE and will remain for all my lovely audience.
However, I shall not take back my Haiku at any cost, and it will be open for all those who wish to complete it, in the comments below.
If you liked reading this story, you might also enjoy some of these…
