It has been a busy week for tech news. I spent Monday and Tuesday in Cupertino for Apple’s WWDC.

Below I have notes from being on the ground for the Vision Pro’s unveiling, plus what my demo experience was like. Also: more from inside Meta’s first in-person all-hands in years where Mark Zuckerberg reacted to Apple entering the headset wars. 

The vibes at WWDC

Moments after Apple’s WWDC keynote on Monday, I found myself standing outside of the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino, facing a circle of Vision Pro headsets on stands for the media to photograph. Moody, instrumental music played as people scrambled to get a glimpse of the company’s first major new product in years.

After a while, the throng started to subside, and I noticed a few of Apple’s top execs trickling into the room, including VP of design Alan Dye, Dan Riccio, and Mike Rockwell, the leader of the headset project from the very beginning. A gaggle of Apple PR and security guards started to quietly make space around some of the headsets next to me while photographers got into position. Tim Cook was about to come out and pose for the cameras.

Given how he wore the Apple Watch for its debut, I thought Cook might put the headset on for photos. As he emerged from a hidden break in the curved walls around us (Apple really likes curved architecture — even its staircase railings are curved), I watched his face change into a smile as he got in view of the cameras and posed next to one of the headsets. He didn’t put it on and has yet to be photographed wearing one.

The reason for this could be purely technical; the front-facing display wasn’t working during a demo of the headset that I tried the next day, nor was it working for anyone else who reported on getting a demo this week. Another potential reason I’ve heard is that Apple PR didn’t want the CEO being memed relentlessly on the internet, like Evan Spiegel wearing Spectacles or that infamous photo of Mark Zuckerberg walking past an audience of people wearing headsets in 2016. It’s hard to make a face computer look cool, even for Apple.

Whatever the reason that Cook went ski-maskless this week, my conversations with sources have me thinking that he may not be as excited about the device as Apple would want you to believe. Like others, I’ve heard from employees involved in the project over the years that the headset has been super divisive internally and that Cook is lukewarm on the thing at best. 

That’s maybe because he sees the Vision Pro as merely a stopgap to AR glasses. If the headsets of today are analogous to a desktop computer — clunky, a bit isolating, and expensive — the thinking is that AR glasses will be the next smartphone because they’ll go everywhere with you, literally augmenting your world. For a numbers guy like Cook, that’s a much bigger market opportunity.

My Vision Pro demo

As I promised in my initial Vision Pro reaction earlier this week, here are some more notes on my experience of trying it for about 30 minutes:

• Beyond the quality of the display itself, there is another key part of using the headset that Apple seems to have nailed: navigation. I was very skeptical of this when I first learned that the headset would use advanced eye tracking, but I was impressed by its precision and responsiveness. Using your eyes and a combo of finger gestures to move through visionOS starts to feel natural pretty quickly. 
• There were some critical parts of the device that I and others weren’t allowed to demo, including the virtual keyboard and Siri. The button for taking spatial photos and videos also didn’t work, nor did the ability to scan my face to create an avatar of myself (Apple wants to call them “spatial personas”). That last bit probably has to do with the front-facing display not being ready.
• Apple built an incredibly high-res, 3D camera rig it used to show demos of spatial video clips in the headset, including a scene of sitting courtside at a basketball game. It’s a visceral experience compared to the other VR demos I’ve had. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple tries to ink a deal with the NBA to let people watch games in the headset this way. (The rumor is that Eddy Cue is itching for a big sports deal after losing NFL’s Sunday Ticket to YouTube.)
• The demo I and others received was very guided. I wasn’t allowed to take pictures or videos, receive footage of what I saw, or even record audio of my demo for note-taking. I have a feeling this is because Apple knows the software for the headset is going to change a lot before it ships.
• The room for my demo was brightly lit and temperature controlled with cold air blowing consistently from an AC unit in the corner. That probably helped the headset not feel warm on my face, though others have commented on feeling heat during their demos.
• I was told that the space Apple constructed for the demos was only operational for this week. It was essentially like an Apple Store but nicer, with lounge areas, refreshments, and headsets on display to look at. (Just don’t touch!) You can see the space briefly in Good Morning America’s segment with Cook, in which he responded to the question, Do you think the Vision Pro is affordable for average people? with, “I don’t know.”

Other notes from Apple Park

• I spotted the usual cadre of senior Apple exes, including Eddy Cue and Phil Schiller, mingling near the front of the keynote stage with VIPs like the venture capitalist Ron Conway. Karlie Kloss was also there. 
• Jony Ive was noticeably absent, though I suppose he could have theoretically sneaked in and out somehow. He certainly wasn’t in the headset viewing area after the show. Even though he doesn’t work at Apple anymore, I figured he would attend, given that the headset was his baby. The front-facing display was his idea, for example, and he pushed for Apple to ship it with a portable battery instead of a stationary power supply. 
• The handful of outside developers who were invited in to build early for the headset in recent months didn’t see what the full device looked like and worked on air-gapped computers. Apple also gave them talking points for engaging with the press, including instructions to forward questions about the terms of their business relationship to Apple.
• I’m not sure if Apple has announced this internally yet, but I’ve heard that the plan is for employees to get a $500 discount on the Vision Pro. 
• I saw an overwhelming number of employees suddenly share on Twitter and LinkedIn that they worked on the headset after the keynote, which was unusual given Apple’s penchant for secrecy. It’s clear there was pent-up energy among the rank and file to finally talk about it in the open. “It’s an iconic moment in the history of geeks — let them have their moment!” one former senior member of the team told me. “The secrecy thing is obsolete.”

Zuckerberg’s reaction

Over in Menlo Park, Meta employees gathered on Thursday for their first in-person all-hands meeting since early 2020. A noticeably enthusiastic (and swole) Mark Zuckerberg kicked things off, talking about the recent layoffs and “year of efficiency” push, according to a video of the presentation I watched. After he gave the vision for the company’s AI strategy, his voice got more upbeat as he started talking about the upcoming Quest 3 headset.

“We’ve made some major advances here. And a lot of those advances, you know what they do? They go toward making the device $500!” he said emphatically as the crowd cheered. “For millions of people, this, not some other headset, will be their first experience of mixed reality,” CTO Andrew Bosworth proclaimed later in the meeting. 

Meta clearly sees itself as the Android to Apple’s iOS in the headset wars. A cheaper, more mass-market version of the Vision Pro is likely at least two years away from being announced, based on my conversations with sources, and even then, it will still likely be priced far above whatever Meta has in the market at the time.

Apple has certainly proven that it’s capable of winning new markets by coming in with higher price points than the competition, and I know the company thinks it can bring the cost curve down this time, too. This could, as many have pointed out since my story about Zuckerberg’s reaction yesterday dropped, be his Steve Ballmer moment. 

If I worked at Meta, Apple not shipping a headset after all these years would be my biggest concern. The largest consumer electronics company in the world has now validated the space, as they say. Apple ultimately wants developers to come up with the killer use cases for the Vision Pro, and it’s counting on the idea that people will want to use ported, 2D iPad apps before that ecosystem gets going.

Meta, for all its legless fumbles, has had plenty of time to figure out what it thinks the Quest is for. I’m not saying it has achieved making the Quest a good way to socialize over the internet, but it’s at least trying with Horizon Worlds and other social networking tie-ins at the OS level. Its library of games is well established and growing considerably this year. It’s also farther along with other specific use cases like fitness — it’s easier to exercise without a battery cable attached to your headset.

“There’s a real philosophical difference in terms of how we’re approaching this,” Zuckerberg, who, in contrast to Cook, can’t be stopped from wearing his headsets in photos, told employees at the Thursday meeting. “And seeing what they put out there and how they’re going to compete just made me even more excited and, in a lot of ways, optimistic that what we’re doing matters and is going to succeed.”

More from Meta’s all hands

From Zuckerberg:

• “Going forward, one constraint that we’re going to have that’s pretty fundamental is we are not going to grow teams as quickly. So our culture will have to adapt to that constraint, and I think that can be healthy… When you go to take on a new project on your team, more often now, in order to support that, we’re going to need to shut down another project.”
• “AI is and will continue to be actually the largest single investment that we make in the company. I think last year that we spent about $15 billion on AI infrastructure capex. It’s just a huge investment. We’re also still going a hundred percent on the work on the metaverse, but I think people don’t quite understand just how deeply and how long we’ve focused on the AI work.”
• “I see all these other companies working on this with this idea that there’s like one singular, big AI that we’re going to interact with. And that’s just not quite how we see it. I think that there are going to be lots of different AIs that people want to interact with.”

From chief product officer Chris Cox:

• Instagram’s Twitter competitor is coming soon and will integrate with ActivityPub. He showed screenshots. “We’ve been hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run, that they believe that they can trust and rely upon for distribution.” The crowd liked that jab at Elon Musk.
• “If you look at the last quarter, the app on earth that added the most people was WhatsApp, followed by Instagram, followed by Facebook.”
• WhatsApp’s growth has been “golden” in the US specifically, “growing outwards from urban centers like New York, Miami, Chicago, LA, where you have high penetrations of international populations. This is especially a big deal because we’ve always had a hard time competing with iMessage in a heavily iPhone country like the US.”
• “We’ve started reversing one of the most important trends for the company and our users, which is how we’re doing with young adults on Facebook in the US and Canada. I ran the Facebook app for years and could not reverse these trends. You are doing it, Facebook team.”
• Twelve percent of teens on Instagram are sharing to its Notes feature, which is a bit like the AIM status of old, every single day. “That’s four times the participation rate for sharing in feed.” It’s managed by a team of 10 people.
• “We think we’re at about 50 percent of TikTok’s time spent globally. That’s up 21 percent [from] a year ago.”
• “Broadcast channels, which is in beta right now on Instagram, is killing it. It has absolutely blown past our expectations in terms of people liking the product.” The NBA has over 1 million participants in their channel. The feature is rolling out to everyone in a “couple weeks.”

And a couple quotes from CTO Andrew Bosworth:

• “The famous Intel CEO Andy Grove is most known for saying, ‘Only the paranoid survive.’ In our industry, if you are not investing in future disruption, you tend not to survive that future when it comes.”
• “There’s no doubt that our bets on the future have also shaped how our biggest competitors are thinking about their futures.”

Another interesting tidbit from the meeting: Meta has built an internal AI chatbot called Metamate that uses company data to help employees summarize meetings, write code, and debug features. Employees will be able to create their own prompts and share them with colleagues. 

The company is starting to roll it out internally to a small group now. I wrote in a previous issue that Meta was talking to Microsoft and OpenAI about powering this tool, but now I’m told that it landed on using its own separate, in-house model.

Google puts the kibosh on remote work

If you work at Google, get ready for pings from your manager if you aren’t coming into your designated office three days a week. The company is cracking down on remote work, as I first broke on Wednesday, and there will be backlash from employees. “I’ll go work at Walmart as a greeter before I move back to the Bay [Area],” one director told me.

“We know that a number of people moved to fully remote work for many good reasons, as we all adjusted to the pandemic,” Google people chief officer Fiona Cicconi wrote in an internal memo I was sent. “For those who are remote and who live near a Google office, we hope you’ll consider switching to a hybrid work schedule. Our offices are where you’ll be most connected to Google’s community. Going forward, we’ll consider new remote work requests by exception only.”

Meta recently instituted a similar three-day-a-week reminder for employees. Salesforce, meanwhile, is trying a different tactic and will donate $10 to charity per employee who comes into the office for the next two weeks.

People moves

• Eric Young, previously a VP of engineering at Google, is Snap’s new SVP of engineering.
• Michele Catasta, Google’s former head of applied research for X, has joined Replit as VP of AI.
• Matthew Idema, previously Meta’s VP of business messaging, has joined Aurora Solar as president and COO.
• Ben Taft and the rest of his team at the Mira AR headset startup have joined Apple.
• Jeff Blackburn, former Amazon SVP of media, has joined Roku’s board. 
• Susan Wojcicki, former CEO of YouTube, has joined Waymo’s board.

Interesting links

• Elon Musk appears to be off the invite list for Sun Valley this year.
• Jony Ive sits down for McKinsey’s quarterly interview. 
• Lex Fridman interviews Mark Zuckerberg.
• Marc Andreessen’s big essay on AI just happened to drop the same day that Coinbase was sued by the SEC.
• Linda Yaccarino already has one of her tweets hanging on the wall at Twitter HQ.
• An ex-ByteDance leader named Yintao Yu claims the CCP at one point had “god user” backdoor access to user data. 
• A partial transcript of a call between Reddit and one of its most popular developers about the company jacking up API pricing. 
• Decoding the internal Binance messages that the SEC released transcripts of.
• The gestures developers can use for controlling their apps in xrOS, I mean, visionOS.

​​That’s it for this week. If you aren’t already subscribed to Command Line, you can do so here.

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