Not That Many Unhappy Returns?

Last week, The Verge and the shambling leftovers of Gizmodo were both eagerly trying to make a news story about the huge wave of unsatisfied customers returning their Vision Pro headsets to Apple stores. It was interesting to watch as it took over the corners of social media that I still follow: apparently, the feverish mass hysteria leading up to release had finally broken, and people everywhere were furious to discover that the emperor had no clothes. It’s just a VR headset. It seems magical… until it doesn’t. Damn!

As far as I could tell, the source for these stories were a couple of posts on Reddit and Twitter, and a smattering of “Apple fans” that weren’t entirely unbiased, and not necessarily the representative sample they’d have you believe. Last week, it was made to sound as if there were an epidemic of returns. This week, I’m hearing that the return rate is actually estimated to be less than 1%, which is kind of low for computing devices.

I will tell you that I am an “Apple fan” who is most definitely biased, but I still couldn’t tell you which version is correct, or even if it does or should matter to anyone outside of Apple. All it tells me is stuff I already know:

VR headsets aren’t for everybody, and a lot of people will find them uncomfortable.

There is not yet a use case for the Vision Pro that makes it a must-have outside of die-hard early adopters and people developing software for it.

A lot of people have more credit cards than they have patience, and they wanted a take-home demo instead of the 30-minute in-store one.

Even though I’m both literally and figuratively invested in Apple, and I am the owner of an infrequently-used Vision Pro, I don’t feel like I need to go out of my way to defend it. Even die-hards like me will acknowledge that it’s not for everyone, and it will need some significant hardware revisions to get traction outside of the die-hards.

So what bugs me isn’t that people are talking trash about my shiny new toy. It’s that if I, a layperson, know enough to have a realistic idea of this device’s appeal, how come the writers and editors of tech blogs don’t?

I’ve repeatedly made fun of The Verge‘s review of the Vision Pro, but because it’s largely irrelevant to me, not because it’s inaccurate.1 Screaming “BIAS!!!” whenever I read a review I don’t agree with is something I’ll leave for trolls on YouTube and comments sections. But I do get concerned when it seems like they’re working hard to make something a story when there’s no real story there.

I won’t claim to be entirely high-minded about it, since it’s mostly because I’m a fan of gadgets and devices and computers finally being able to do the things I imagined they’d someday be able to do when I was a teenager. And since Yahoo seems to be hell-bent on destroying Engadget, there’s not a lot of reputable, sufficiently-funded options out there.

But I think it’s worth at least mentioning that the companies that tech sites are covering are the companies that are gaining increasingly outsized influence on everything. There needs to be some real journalistic rigor happening, beyond just product reviews and attempts to turn Reddit threads into news stories.

For instance: I still don’t understand how the hype around Elon Musk every happened at all, much less was allowed to grow to the extremes it did. I’ve seen a lot of comments to the effect that he was misleadingly insightful until he suddenly went batshit insane — the phenomena of those bumper stickers on Teslas that say “we bought this car before we knew he was an asshole” — but I’m not buying it. Every time the guy opens his mouth, a flood of red flags comes pouring out. There were plenty of people writing for papers and blogs who came into frequent contact with him, years and years before he bought a social media site to prove to the world what an asshole he is. So why were they perpetuating the “real life Tony Stark” nonsense instead of calling him out?

Anyway, as I said: I’m not actually trying to draw a real connection between anecdotal stories being turned into “news,” and the rise of our corporate-ravaged cyber dystopia. I’m just saying that the audience for tech journalism is much wider and more relevant than it was even ten years ago, and we should keep that in mind.

In my opinion, a much better story than “Are People Returning Their $3500 First-Generation VR Headsets?!” is “Is Apple Committed to the Vision Pro as a Long-Term Computing Platform?” Granted, that’s a little harder to glean from Reddit posts and a few tweets, but it seems to me to be far more relevant. You’ve got a lot of people who spend a lot of time seeing every new product that comes out, dealing with companies a lot both directly and indirectly, and overall spending a lot more time immersed in consumer technology more than I’d be able to.2

It seems like they’re in a unique position to see trends, make insightful observations about how things fit into company’s overall strategies, and make predictions about where the technology might be headed. That requires making observations that go deeper than companies’ PR, not just in the vacuous gainsay “Apple doesn’t want me to call this a VR headset, but that’s what this is and you can’t stop me!!!” version of “keepin’ it real,” but in having a frame of reference that goes beyond the past six months and actually trying to put new developments into the proper context. That kind of coverage seems a lot more useful than filming a video wearing it on the subway or while cooking or skiing. I’d rather get a clear-eyed and realistic assessment — even if it’s one that I don’t agree with — of what it means for computing in its current state and how it might evolve, than a warning that it might mess up my hair.

1
Earlier I did say that it was misleading, if not outright wrong, to say you can’t share your content in the headset with other people, since you can cast it over AirPlay to a TV or iOS device. But the spirit of the criticism is valid. It is an almost entirely personal and private headset. And it seriously needs to have support for multiple accounts and not just its insufficient guest mode as currently implemented. ↩︎

2
Or would ever want to. ↩︎

1 Earlier I did say that it was misleading, if not outright wrong, to say you can’t share your content in the headset with other people, since you can cast it over AirPlay to a TV or iOS device. But the spirit of the criticism is valid. It is an almost entirely personal and private headset. And it seriously needs to have support for multiple accounts and not just its insufficient guest mode as currently implemented.

2 Or would ever want to.