He was very aesthetics obsessed person so I don't think he would be enthused by its design. Its really hard to know what he would think. The category of headset would probably be of little interest to him. The iPad launch back in 2010, if you notice the similarities between it and the Vision Pro, most people demoing it were seated. He likely would push the computing and entertainment aspect of it the most.
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What would Steve have done differently?
- Thread starter tomtad
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Steve Jobs would be in charge of the development process right from the start, driving resources and making both big and small decisions. It would not run using this obviously makeshift M1 + R1 set of chips. He would have asked the silicon team to make a full blown single chip solution for higher efficiency.
If you read the accounts about Vision Pro development, Tim Cook is a hands off guy. He lets his team debate and make the decisions. Cook comes in very late in the dev process to sign off. Jobs knows what he wants with high detail. And he gets involved in the deep end.
Apple debated internally whether to have a pair of lightweight glasses with a wireless base station or a heavier all-in-one. But they made a late change to the latter, which is probably why we’re seeing this weird chip combo and poor battery life.
If you read the accounts about Vision Pro development, Tim Cook is a hands off guy. He lets his team debate and make the decisions. Cook comes in very late in the dev process to sign off. Jobs knows what he wants with high detail. And he gets involved in the deep end.
Apple debated internally whether to have a pair of lightweight glasses with a wireless base station or a heavier all-in-one. But they made a late change to the latter, which is probably why we’re seeing this weird chip combo and poor battery life.
He would've delayed it until it was ready. The version we saw is likely 3 or 4 iterations ahead of where the Apple Watch Series 0 was when Tim Cook said "just ship it". It does look like a very mature and polished product. But it's still too heavy by all accounts and the external battery would've given Steve a fit, probably throwing it out of his office in a flaming trash bin. It could use another year or two of iteration.
That doesn't mean that I think Tim made the wrong decision to ship it now. I think this approach of releasing a beautiful design with an experience years ahead of its time, and iterating it in public over the next few years will work just fine. But Steve was a perfectionist and I don't think this product would've gotten the green light just yet.
I'll also say that Steve was a visionary. He would've seen a decade ahead that conversational AI was the future of UI. This is why he acquired Siri as his final act, long before anyone knew how big voice assistants would become. Tim is an incredible operations manager who understands the supply chain and how to manage people but he's no visionary. He completely missed where conversational UI was going and ignored it and let Siri die slowly until it was obvious to almost everyone that it was the future.
With a decade of focused development behind Siri, Vision Pro would have been shipped with a robust voice assistant, with generative AI so convincingly real, you'd think you were speaking to a real person. Combined with vision UI and gesture control, announcing this with demos of people interacting with an intelligent AI by voice, glances and gestures would've been the kind of moment the iPhone unveiling was: something so advanced it would look like it was teleported from a decade in the future.
That doesn't mean that I think Tim made the wrong decision to ship it now. I think this approach of releasing a beautiful design with an experience years ahead of its time, and iterating it in public over the next few years will work just fine. But Steve was a perfectionist and I don't think this product would've gotten the green light just yet.
I'll also say that Steve was a visionary. He would've seen a decade ahead that conversational AI was the future of UI. This is why he acquired Siri as his final act, long before anyone knew how big voice assistants would become. Tim is an incredible operations manager who understands the supply chain and how to manage people but he's no visionary. He completely missed where conversational UI was going and ignored it and let Siri die slowly until it was obvious to almost everyone that it was the future.
With a decade of focused development behind Siri, Vision Pro would have been shipped with a robust voice assistant, with generative AI so convincingly real, you'd think you were speaking to a real person. Combined with vision UI and gesture control, announcing this with demos of people interacting with an intelligent AI by voice, glances and gestures would've been the kind of moment the iPhone unveiling was: something so advanced it would look like it was teleported from a decade in the future.
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Yes, Steve was a perfectionist, but didn't he also say "real artists ship?" I think releasing it now and iterating it in public is the right decision, and I think there's a good chance Steve would have agreed with it.