Interferences

An Apple Vision Pro Product Review

Ein jeder sieht, was er im Herzen trägt. —Goethe, Faust

1.

So Freddie Mercury van Helmont was all like:

me and who

And then I was like:

me and who haha

And then Degrowth_PAWG came in and posted that one gross picture of Madonna and Britney making out, and of course she was like “me and who” too, but oh, hi, sorry, yes, I didn’t see you. I was just thinking about an exchange I had recently on Elon’s hellsite. Haha. Well I mean not so much thinking, but reviewing, just centimeters before my eyes, with these new Apple Vision Pro glasses I’ve been wearing for the past week. Everything’s so different now, here in my enhanced reality. It’s almost as if it’s enough to call up a mental image before one’s mind, in order to cause it to appear as a concrete visual representation. My will is now my act. Amazing!

But I’ve got to be honest with you. I am not in Apple’s pocket and my duty here is to tell you the complete truth. So here it is, folks: while these goggles do have some impressive functionalities, on the whole my experience with them has been nothing short of a nightmare. My advice to you is simple: Do not buy this product!

2.

I was among the first —perhaps the very first— to strap on the glasses here in Europe. I had made special arrangements with my buddy Craig to bring over a pair directly from Palo Alto the day after their big launch. Regrettably, Apple has locked most of the device’s functions for use outside the United States. But that does not mean they are to no purpose on this side of the ocean. Quite the contrary, for reasons I do not at all understand, wearing them outside their intended zone of use seems to draw out strange powers from them that have not yet been described, let alone accounted for.

Someone, I mean, is not telling the full story. For although Apple claims that here in France the Apple Vision Pro glasses are but an inert assemblage of titanium and laminated glass and so on, in fact they are quite full of life here, though a very different sort of life than the one I’ve read about in customer reviews from the States. It is a life moreover that seems either not to have been intended by the Apple engineers themselves, or to have been intended by them as a dark secret experiment, about whose monstrous purposes I can only begin to speculate.

Things were great, at least, for the first two days. I could walk down the rue de Meaux and, though this was not supposed to be possible yet in Europe, could see as I walked a cartographic representation of that same street, and a blue line that represented the path of my walking, and a moving blue dot that represented me. This is going to revolutionize walking! I thought. And if it started to rain I could pull up a Paris weather report and see a raincloud icon at the same time I was seeing the raindrops and feeling them on my head. Amazing! I again thought. It was as if reality itself had grown another layer.

By the morning of the third day —so, February 6, 2024—, I found myself so eager to put the glasses on immediately after waking that it almost scared me. It seemed to me as if I needed them, as if I had woken up with something akin to a terrible thirst. I wore them all day as I went about my business, much to the dismay of the Parisians, who, I noticed, seemed to have called me “monsieur” three times more than usual, in that officious and passive-aggressive way they do when they disapprove of your conduct or your attire or even just your brute physiognomy, but wish to conceal their disapproval in a technically courteous form of address. I didn’t care. Nothing could have induced me to take those glasses off. And when I got home that evening, and finally removed them as I settled into bed, after three minutes or so I began to cry — to cry that deep disconsolate sob of the child who suddenly sees the world lain bare, the indifferent world deprived of all meaning and hope. I must have sobbed that way for forty-five minutes or so before finally drifting off to sleep.

The next morning I put them on right away, and neither did I take them off that night when I went to bed. Other than for showering, my Apple Vision Pro glasses have not come off for five days now.

What I have described so far would already, in itself, have been most worrisome: both the inexplicable functionalities of the glasses outside their official zone of use, as well as the sudden and intense dependency that I had already developed after just a few days. But I have scarcely even begun my relation of the peculiar things that started to happen to me after the third day, which I would now give anything, even my immortal soul, to be free of! No, that’s not quite right. Ever since February 7 —the day the “interferences”, as I’ve come to call them, began— it has seemed to me that I already did give up my immortal soul, at the moment I first put these glasses on, and indeed that I am already paying for that solemn Faustian bargain.

Allow me to explain.