Fruit Ninja has a juicy history that stretches back more than a decade, but Samantha Turner, lead gameplay programmer at the game’s Halfbrick Studios, says the Apple Vision Pro version — Super Fruit Ninja on Apple Arcade — is truly bananas. “When it first came out, Fruit Ninja kind of gave new life to the touchscreen,” she notes, “and I think we have the potential to do something very special here.”
In a video sent to employees this week, Apple executives Mike Rockwell and Alan Dye discussed the product’s development, as well as potential growth areas for the still-nascent technology. Bloomberg News obtained a transcript of the conversation, which came just before Apple began accepting preorders for the Vision Pro on Friday.
When asked about some “cool” ways that people could use the $3,499 Vision Pro, Rockwell cited health care, training and education as key areas.
Apple seems to not want you to notice the battery. The external battery pack barely appears on the product page on Apple's website, showing up only at the end of a photo gallery at the bottom of the page. And in demo sessions this week, Apple told journalists they were not allowed to snap photos or capture any video of the hardware, an unusual rule for a press briefing. Instead, the company had its own photographer take photos during the Vision Pro demos. Every photo you’ve seen this week of reporters sitting on a couch while wearing the headset were shot by Apple.
Notably, the battery pack doesn’t appear in any of them.
YouTube and Spotify declined to say why they bowed out of supporting the $3,499 device. Spotify doesn’t offer an app on competing headsets, such as Meta Platforms Inc.’s Quest, though YouTube does. Spotify also has been embroiled in a fight with Apple over App Store policies, but the decision on the Vision Pro isn’t related to that, according to the person familiar, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private.
Regarding Netflix’s pass on Vision Pro, a little birdie informed me that until this week, the Netflix iPad app was available for those with access to Vision Pro hardware, and it worked just fine. This birdie still has the Netflix iPad app installed on their Vision Pro. Perhaps people at Netflix would disagree with just how well it worked — I don’t know — but I get the strong impression that the decision was political/strategic/spiteful, not technical. [...]
This isn’t a dealbreaker — watching Netflix through Safari should be OK (albeit without offline downloads, a huge factor for using Vision Pro on airplanes), and many people think of YouTube as a website, not an app. But there’s no way around it: this is a bad look for Apple, not for Netflix or Google. The buck stops with Tim Cook on this. He should have been on the horn with Ted Sarandos and Sundar Pichai and worked this out. It’s his company that’s launching a $3,500 headset.
Apple Video Partners already pay a 15% commission rate to Apple when customers sign up through IAP and their customers are allowed to transact within their app on things like rentals and purchases using the payment method on file with the company, if the customer had already signed up with a payment method outside the app.
News Partners, meanwhile, also qualify for a commission rate of 15% from day one, instead of year two, as with other subscription offerings.
Developer uncertainty regarding the viability of selling Mac software is the last thing needed for a platform that is already facing a dearth of new original native software. Apple doesn’t have to make a platform-destructive money-grab policy change to ruin the Mac. They can ruin it simply by planting the seed of doubt that they might.
While being immersed in a new destination, travelers can capture the moment in a multitude of ways in order to create a rich memory.
What’s important about BBEdit’s approach is that the company has implemented the tech in a way that should be of the most use to its customers, particularly developers. The manner of this hints at the kind of narrow and defined implementations that will emerge as the most useful business cases for the tech.
Minimalist design, though sometimes plain-looking, doesn’t exactly mean “boring,” especially when they take inspiration from some of mankind’s creative achievements to give these products an interesting visual and functional spin.
Before Spotify, when presented with a new album, we would ask: why listen to this? After Spotify, we asked: why not?
It’s hard to overstate what a challenge this posed to music criticism. As consumers of criticism, we came to Pitchfork to ask one question — is this worth listening to? — and got an entire education in return. But once that question lost its meaning, we had fewer and fewer reasons to seek out criticism on a daily basis.
Happy Apple Vision Pro pre-order day.
Someday, we will either look back at this day fondly as the start of the spatial computing era…
Or we will look back at this day through a footnote in Wikipedia, together with OpenDoc and Pippin.
:-)
~
Thanks for reading.