Thursday, February 1, 2024

Hello.

The date is Thursday, February 1, 2024, and the time is just over 24 hours before my scheduled pickup of my personal Apple Vision Pro device at the nearest Apple Store to my school district, Apple Deer Park (Deer Park, IL). Although this is my first “official” writing about the Apple Vision Pro, I have been thinking about this platform for months and formulating exactly what I might do as an educational leader to both learn from and document this experience.

For the sake of what I expect to become a larger story, my name is Matt Fuller, and I am the Assistant Superintendent of Technology and Innovation at the Barrington 220 school district northwest of Chicago. This is my tenth year in this district, but I have been in similar technology education leadership roles in a few school districts for just over 25 years—and all my districts have used primarily Apple devices. I am also honored to have been named an Apple Distinguished Educator in 2007, and I have been active in that community since then.

I began my school technology leadership role informally in the PowerBook era while I was a music teacher and band director. At that time, there was no such thing as a “Technology Director,” just a few of us teachers who were using computers in our classrooms. In my early teaching positions, I was always happy to help my peers use computers, troubleshoot issues, teach staff how to use technology, and in my case, I helped my district administration write some grants to get more technology in my district. These early leadership positions led to increasingly formal technology leadership positions, and 25 years later, I find myself in a highly innovative school district in a community that values education and is willing to allow us—and even expects us—to try new learning and teaching ideas regularly.

This introduction brings me to the point of this writing. Tomorrow, Friday, February 2, 2024, is Apple’s much-anticipated release of a brand new computing platform, the Apple Vision Pro. To say that this device has intrigued me since the earliest whispers and rumors of its development began around five years ago is an understatement.

As is the case with most Apple technology, this device is not Apple’s invention, but rather Apple’s interpretation of a product concept that has been around for a while—Apple’s take on an Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality (VR) headset. From the very beginning, Apple has been intentional to not refer to this device as an AR/VR headset. Instead, Apple is positioning this device as a “spatial computing” device. As of today, when visiting the Apple website to check out the Apple Vision Pro, you are greeted by the tagline, “Welcome to the era of spatial computing,” along with the date for tomorrow’s Apple Vision Pro launch.

This idea of “spatial computing” is what has intrigued me the most about the possibilities of the Apple Vision Pro. As an educator, my interest in devices—and technology in general—is in a tool’s ability to create. Until now, I have had virtually no interest in AR/VR headsets because they appear to primarily be entertainment devices. I am not a gamer, I don’t spend much time watching TV or movies, and although I have no issue with users who value these pursuits, they do not interest me. However, I love creating things, and to me, the creation process leads to learning, and learning is not just what excites me, but has been a primary focus of my life as far back as I can remember.

As a brief aside, back in 2007 when I first read Daniel Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, I was fascinated by his message, and I appreciated the workbook-style of each of the main chapters. At the end of each chapter, I challenged myself to follow at least two of Pink’s recommendations. One of his suggestions was to read the book A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster, a game designer for the early video game company Activision. Similar to now, I had little interest in video games in 2007, but the “theory of fun” idea intrigued me, especially coming from a discipline where the success of the product depends on its customers having fun. One of my takeaways from that book is that Koster defined “fun” as “the brain’s reward for learning.”

I immediately identified with that description and from that point on, I adopted Koster’s definition of “fun” as my own. Similarly, many personality trait assessments I have taken over the years always seem to result in learning being among my top priorities in both my life and work. To be clear, as a non-gamer, the fact that a game designer has provided me with a definition of “fun” is an irony that is not lost on me.

I take the time to discuss these personality insights to hopefully help explain my personal perspective and specific interest in the Apple Vision Pro. My intention is to use the occasion of the release of the Apple Vision Pro as the starting point to document my thoughts about how this device and platform can be potentially used as a creation and learning device for education.

This goal will not preclude me from using its other features, but I see its entertainment capabilities as interesting additional features rather than primary functions. This morning as I listened to the Apple Insider podcast, the host mentioned that just four Apple TV episodes were ready in 8K 3D format. Among the choices, I will likely take a look at Prehistoric Planet Immersive, a docuseries “from Jon Favreau and the producers of Planet Earth…that transports viewers into the daily lives of dinosaurs.” I also suspect I will try a game or two, but I will likely wait for a recommendation before I decide which game(s) to try.

At this point I feel like I should take some time to discuss exactly what led me to the decision to pursue the Apple Vision Pro as a potential creative and learning device in the first place. Spoiler alert…it was Keynote, Apple’s productivity app for presentations and much more. 

Apple’s first Vision Pro announcement came at WWDC—Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on June 5, 2023. Even then, Apple’s press release headline heralded, “Introducing Apple Vision Pro: Apple’s first spatial computer.” Before the time the announcement was official, the "rumor mill” had already been buzzing that an AR headset announcement was imminent. I watched the WWDC video live that day, while I was also feeling like a proud parent because one of my district’s Tech Team members had won the lottery to attend the WWDC event live. With Justin in Cupertino and me in Barrington, I felt that I had the next-best-thing to a front-row seat at the event since Justin had been texting photos and other information before, during, and after the event.

As the first images were transmitted of the idealized world that Apple created to help the world visualize the Apple Vision Pro and how it might be used, we first saw the floating interfaces of apps such as Notes, Safari, Messages, and the Music app in a physical workspace with the user doing work on the Apple Vision Pro. To my eyes Apple’s actor appeared to be doing research on Safari and capturing information on the Notes app while Messages was set to the side and the Music app played in the background. Entertainment, personal photos, and communicating with FaceTime were shown next, but the FaceTime experience was enhanced by a user presenting using the Keynote app.

I have maintained for years that Keynote is my favorite Apple app of all time, and I have always used it for far more than presentations. To name a few of my uses for Keynote in addition to telling stories though presentations, I have also used Keynote as a portfolio, notebook, travelogue, sketchbook, visual art design tool, room design tool, illustration tool, and I extensively use Keynote as a video production studio for titles, special effects, animation, and other video-related uses. In short, Keynote has been my go-to creativity tool since it was first released on the Mac in January 2003. Now 20 years later, Apple is highlighting my favorite app on a brand new platform on the first device of a new product category.

Thus, Keynote sold me on the idea of the Apple Vision Pro.

Of course, this information was being presented from the perspective of developers—with little any concrete device information for users. For a new product to be successful, there must be a reason for it to exist—a problem to solve. For a technology platform, there need to be apps to run on said device. That being said, the presentation was exciting and engaging, but Apple needed to first present this in a developer context. Thus, there were still many, many unanswered questions in June 2023, but I saw the Apple Vision Pro running Keynote, and that planted the seed for me enough to be optimistic about this new product’s future.

Over the next few days at WWDC, a very select few “influencers” were allowed to experience the Apple Vision Pro in what was described as a highly controlled and well orchestrated demo environment. I remember the first set of impressions being described as impressive with a few characteristics that were breakthrough-level ideas, some ideas that seemed not-ready-for-primetime, and other functions already being panned as potential areas where Apple didn’t do enough. From a non-developer standpoint, I waited along with the rest of the world for Apple’s next announcements that would get this product into the hands of consumers like me “early next year.”

I would be remiss at this point to not mention the issue of pricing. From the very beginning, Apple was clear about pricing by reporting that the Apple Vision Pro would start at $3,499. Although no specifications were provided or decisions were shared about exactly what would be included in the first boxes sold, the message seemed clear that this device would be expensive and likely out-of-reach for most consumers. Of course, the high pricing became a part of the overall narrative, but my feeling was that Apple had done the right thing to not shock the world later after showing the features of this new product that were still in development.

Almost immediately, perhaps I entered some sort of “justification mode” to help me deal with this high cost. After all, within the last few weeks I had engaged in yet another personality trait quiz connected to a new book that had identified me officially as a “tightwad.” However, I could not help but remember that shortly after I first became a district-level administrator back in 1999, I had purchased my first “pro-level” laptop—a PowerBook G4 (the one with a bronze keyboard)—for the Education price of $2,599. I went directly to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) Inflation Calculator at the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics and found that $2,599 in June 1999 is equivalent to $4,782 in 2023 dollars. Thus, the Apple Vision Pro is a bargain! (And I also decided that I’d not take a vacation in 2024.) I am also well aware that I am privileged to be able to make this purchase, but ultimately this is a choice I am making based on my spending preferences.

For next few months after WWDC, I remember how pundits would occasionally refer to the impending release of the Apple Vision Pro, and we would occasionally hear about Apple’s process for allowing developers to test their apps. In some cases, developers got access to a device, and in others they used a virtual environment. But again, these were developer-facing situations, not necessarily information that was aimed at helping a purchaser make a decision.

From my point of view, the milestone was Apple’s January 8, 2024 announcement with the headline, “Apple Vision Pro available in the U.S. on February 2.” At this point, I knew that if I wanted to be among the first to experience the Apple Vision Pro on the first day of release that I would need to follow Apple’s directions on Friday, January 19, at 5 a.m. PST—7 a.m. CST—to be a part of the pre-order on that day. Although I had not made the final decision to pre-order by that time, I used the announcement to formulate my final opinion. For the reasons I have already expressed above, I made the decision during the week of January 8 to both pre-order the device and focus on its potential creation and education functions.

During the time between the pre-order and launch date, January 19–February 2, 2024, I have been very selective about what what I have listed to, read, and watched. In some respects, I wanted to be as “prepared” as possible for the launch, but I also wanted to be able to experience the “surprise and delight” of the moment. I had already made the choice to opt for store pickup and the fitting experience that was discussed so the relative stress of waiting for a shipment to arrive was already off the table. However, as I sit the day before the launch, it appears obvious that my custom ZEISS prescription lenses will definitely not arrive on time to take them to the Apple Store for my fitting. This detail seems like Apple should have avoided this obvious gap in the satisfaction of the experience, but I will address it as necessary when I write about the store experience.

I also made the decision to not watch or listen to anything about the physical unboxing experience. I’m a huge fan of going through that process so to the extent possible, I’d like to watch that unfold in real-time rather than see reviewers engage in various unboxing rituals.

Ultimately, I hope to see where this path leads me. I want to enter with an open mind, even though it seems impossible not to have some preconceived notions

Finally, I intentionally started this writing as a Pages doc saved on iCloud. I hope to be able to make some or all future entires on the AVP device, but I also don’t want to make this a goal since I don’t know how exactly I will incorporate the best features of AVP into my workflow.

Tomorrow is the day. Although I failed to mention it until now, I installed a countdown widget on my iPhone Home Screen that corresponds to my Apple Store appointment.

The new era begins tomorrow.


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