The Pursuit of Your Reality

After Apple’s AirPods Pro 3 came out, there was a very eerie thought that popped into my mind. One that still concerns me as more and more XR (virtual, augmented, and mixed reality) devices come out. The AirPods Pro 3 feature in-ear live translation, meaning that if you are in a foreign country / interacting with a foreign language, you can use them to translate live, instead of doing the awkward typing into Google Translate and showing them the phone or playing the translation out loud like a dumb tourist.

If both parties are wearing these new-fangled devices, they can essentially speak with each other without learning a lick of each others language. Pretty crazy, right? Almost a marvel of technology. Except that this showcases precisely the direction Big Tech are heading, and it’s looking more sinister, like Big Brother and the thought police, every time they release a new product or feature.

Here’s my reasoning. With this new feature, Apple is basically killing any reason to learn French or Japanese or Swahili. Why would you spend months and years trying to learn the ins and outs of French (like I have and it’s fucking annoying) when you can just download the language like the Matrix? That’s pretty cool. So there’s a massive incentive to just keep the AirPods in at all times. Interact with the locals. Feel the culture the way native speakers do! You are basically one of them! My friend told me not to go to certain parts of Italy because they only speak Italian. I no longer have to heed this advice, because I can just use the nifty AirPods and live-translate all the nonnas talking shit about my Montreal fashion. Brilliant.

After this comes things far worse. The point is control of your entire reality, right? The ears are the start. What’s next? The eyes. Wait a minute…Apple’s Vision Pro was released in 2024, and they’re transitioning to smaller frames by 2027 to compete with Meta. Okay, so now my eyes and ears are controlled by Apple. This means that all auditory and sensory information is being processed, stored, studied, downloaded, uploaded, sold, repossessed, manipulated, and more — all against me. My reality is essentially in Apple’s hands. When it comes to touch, taste, and smell, these are rather negligible, except touch. I wouldn’t be thrilled if Apple created some tongue or nose devices, and I don’t think the general public would be either.

Touch, on the other hand, has been Apple’s bread and butter since forever. They started with making the keyboards digital instead of analog. This was the original iPhone’s biggest selling point — “Wow! No more clanky buttons that take up the bottom 40% of the screen. Terrific. Innovation!!” Then they moved into the weird 3D Touch and quietly took it away. Whatever. With the Vision Pro, Apple made your eyes the actual vessel of touch, the orchestrator of action. You can use your fingers of course, but your eyes were the sole focus for the product. The amount of computation and processing that went into making it track your eyes and render information is both astonishing and absurd. And cool, but that’s not the point.

The broader point becomes the walled garden, the cheeky fence Apple built around all their customers. If you aren’t aware, you cannot easily switch from an iPhone to an Android. Frankly, there’s no phone called “Android” but all the companies (Samsung, Google, OnePlus, Nothing) are grouped into this bucket. This is the biggest selling point of Apple itself, the social aspect. No one wants green bubbles. No one thinks that non-iOS stuff is cool. You look like a loser when you buy non-Apple, or poor. This obviously all incorrect, as some Samsung phones are significantly more expensive than iPhones. But telling anyone that misses the point. Apple’s walled garden means you keep buying Apple. And with this pursuit of your reality, you can only buy Apple, because the AirPods will only work with the Vision Pro and vice-versa.

Samsung and Google will do the same things. They will make their entire ecosystems revolve around the consumer having multiple of their products. It’s not surprising at this point. Though, the point isn’t to extract money anymore. It’s to extract reality. That’s the endgame. When your entire reality is dependent on Apple or Meta or Google or Samsung or OpenAI or Microsoft. Because why wouldn’t it?

You can’t function without your phone. That’s for sure. But the phone is very frictiony. It lives in your pocket, you still have to take it out and access it. Missed calls and notifications happen all the time. What if, instead of the phone, I just had glasses on all the time? It’s much easier. I’d never miss a notification or call again, since I’d be always wearing my glasses. Now there’s a high incentive to always have my glasses on, and make sure they’re charged, and blah blah blah. See how easily this happens? It just has to be the right product at the right time.

With the way the iPhone is going, and how Apple is completely and utterly out of ideas (I’d love to resurrect Steve Jobs to show him what Apple is now, I think he’d have a heart attack), the onus is on a new company to take centre stage. The opportunity is ripe and delicious right now. The iPhone can be superseded, and at the moment, no one seems to want to take this step. Maybe that’s a good thing. I personally won’t be engaging in the XR hype until I really have to — either work or family demands I take the plunge. Until then, I’ll be on my phone, typing in notes with my fingers and putting the slab of metal to my ear to take a call like a caveman.