Apple’s new goggles aren’t for normals. Not yet, anyway. So why does Apple want to show them off?
Every big, new Apple Product Launch follows a template, one the company pioneered and perfected with the iPhone and then the iPad.
First, long-running rumors and speculation about a mystery device — a version of existing products made by competitors but presumably much better because Apple is making it — percolate among the Apple-obsessed tech set. Then a somewhat clearer picture emerges, courtesy of reporting by mainstream media outlets. The hype crests as Apple unveils The Product at A Big Deal launch event, and then customers flock to buy The Product by the millions.
And that’s kind of what’s happening with the new “mixed-reality” headset the tech world expects Apple to unveil at its developer conference on June 5, in what would arguably be its most ambitious launch since the iPad in 2010. There has been reporting for years about Apple’s efforts to make the devices, and now outlets like the New York Times and Bloomberg have given us a pretty good idea of what to expect.
But this one feels different. The coming headset reveal seems deflated and muddled, without anything like the anticipation that accompanied earlier products. There are also real questions about whether anyone will want to buy what Apple is reportedly selling: an ungainly piece of equipment that will cost around $3,000, make the wearer look extremely uncool, and with a utility that is completely theoretical.
It’s a weird place for Apple to be: It has put billions of dollars into this tech (its competitors are doing the same) in the hope that this will be a platform on the level of the next smartphone and that Apple’s headset will be the equivalent of the iPhone. But even headset boosters don’t think the device Apple will likely show off in June will be anything like the iPhone former CEO Steve Jobs unveiled in 2007.
In the best-case scenario, it’s an early version of tech that hints at the promise to come, when we get a better, cheaper, lighter version … someday down the road.
So on the one hand, Apple is set to unveil a device that could say a lot about its future and the future of consumer tech. But it’s also a bit of a daydream, which will make it very hard to determine whether it’s a hit or a dud. And in the meantime, Apple will very much remain the company that sells iPhones, which is a very good business to be in.
Okay. So what, exactly, should we expect from Apple’s headset? And, more importantly, what does Apple expect us to do once the company announces it?
What is Apple’s new headset actually going to do?
In private meetings this spring, Apple has been showing off the headset. The device looks familiar, since it resembles and functions the way earlier headsets created by rivals like Meta and Microsoft do. It’s also novel because it will do things other headsets don’t, for better and worse.
While Apple CEO Tim Cook has previously hinted about creating a computerized version of glasses — lightweight and unobtrusive things that look like real-world objects many people already wear — the new Apple headset is not it. It’s a relatively bulky thing that straps onto your face and requires so much power that users will have to wear a battery pack on their waist or in their pocket.
The headset is supposed to have two different functions. One is a virtual reality mode, where users see a complete digital landscape — similar to the VR Oculus devices Meta has been making for years. There other is a so-called mixed reality mode — although there’s speculation Apple may use the term “extended reality” when it talks about this — where users can see the real world through the headset, but also see and even interact with digital objects projected onto the real world. That’s an idea that headset startup Magic Leap promised, when it showed off a video of a whale rising out of a school gym nearly a decade ago, but never really delivered.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24691545/whale.png)
Magic Leap
Apple is likely to add two tweaks it thinks will distinguish its headsets from the pack.
The first is a “copresence” feature, which I’ve heard described in a couple different ways. In one, someone wearing a headset can share video of the thing they’re looking at with another person wearing a headset, and they can both experience the same thing at the same time. Say, you’re walking on the beach, and you want someone who’s across the country to virtually join you while you walk. The other version is closer to something we’ve seen before: You put on a headset and talk to a computer-generated avatar of another person appearing in your field of view.
And perhaps most confusingly, Apple is supposedly going to place exterior screens on the front of headsets, so people who aren’t wearing the headset can see a video display of the eyes of the person wearing the headset. Does that sound like a straight-up nightmare to you? Me too. But people who’ve heard Apple’s pitch say the company thinks it will make the device more social and less dystopian than the zombie-with-computer-on-face image that Mark Zuckerberg proudly showed off in 2016 as part of a marketing push for his Oculus headsets.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24691555/zombies_.jpeg)
Facebook
What will you actually do with these things once they’re on your face? Good question. Mark Gurman’s reporting for Bloomberg has suggested that Apple intends to port lots of its existing iOS apps to the new device — but the likes of a calculator app certainly won’t convince anyone to use it, let alone buy it. Last year, the New York Times reported that Jon Favreau, the director behind Elf and Iron Man, as well as the creator of the Star Wars series The Mandalorian on Disney+, was going to make content for the device. I’ve also heard, but haven’t confirmed, that Disney itself will be making stuff for the headset; a Disney rep declined to comment.
All of which suggests that Apple is being quite literal about announcing the new device at its developers conference: It’s hoping that once it shows this thing off to the world, other people will think up fun or at least useful things to do with it, and build up apps to make that happen. That will make the headsets more popular, which will then encourage more developers to build cool apps, which will make them more popular. Repeat.
But … why?
This is where things get very strained if you’re trying to imagine Apple creating another dent-in-the-universe product like the iPhone — or even just a thing that many people buy, like the iPad, and later on the Apple Watch (more than 100 million sold) and AirPods (hundreds of millions sold).
That’s because, despite the collective efforts of Google, Meta, Microsoft, and other tech companies, no one has been able to convince very large numbers of people that virtual reality headsets or augmented headsets or any kind of headsets are things they want to use. That’s different, by the way, from selling headsets; they have been able to do that over the years. Tech research shop CCS insights predicts that consumers will buy 11 million headsets in 2023 alone — a tally it describes as a “slow year.”
But they have never really taken off beyond a gaming novelty or an industrial tool some workers are obliged to use. You can see the disappointment in the behavior of the companies that launched them. Google, which kicked off Big Tech’s augmented and virtual reality phase with its Glass device in 2012, eventually conceded that they were too weird for normals to wear and tried turning them into devices for industrial use; it is formally pulling the plug on the gadgets this fall. Microsoft launched its HoloLens AR headset in 2016 but never broke through; the company has recently been reduced to issuing blog posts insisting that it still cares about the device.
Meta, meanwhile, has poured billions into goggles of all kinds and insists it will do so for years to come. But earlier this year, a Meta executive conceded that consumers don’t love the devices Meta is selling them: “We need to be better at growth and retention and resurrection,” Mark Rabkin, the company’s vice president for VR, said in February.
So how is Tim Cook going to convince consumers that this time is different? It’s going to be tough. For starters, while Cook has been a highly successful CEO — under his tenure, Apple’s stock has soared, and the company is once again approaching $3 trillion in total value — he is not a charismatic salesman in the Steve Jobs mode.
And even Steve Jobs would struggle to sell the benefits of AR or VR goggles. That’s because, by their very nature, you can only see what they do when you wear them yourself. And if you stand on a stage telling people how great they are, you’ll just look like someone onstage with a computer strapped to your face.
“I call it the ‘TV on the radio’ problem,” says Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz: It’s hard to describe a “television” to an audience that has never seen one and is listening to you talk about it on the radio. Abovitz thinks Apple will solve this by sending devices out for hands-on demonstrations at its hundreds of retail stores.
Meanwhile, Cook, who initially dismissed the idea of goggles in favor of glasses, now says he was wrong, and that, theoretically, goggles could be awesome. Here’s his test run for his pitch, which he floated to GQ magazine earlier this year:
It could empower people to achieve things they couldn’t achieve before. We might be able to collaborate on something much easier if we were sitting here brainstorming about it and all of a sudden we could pull up something digitally and both see it and begin to collaborate on it and create with it. And so it’s the idea that there is this environment that may be even better than just the real world—to overlay the virtual world on top of it might be an even better world. And so this is exciting. If it could accelerate creativity, if it could just help you do things that you do all day long and you didn’t really think about doing them in a different way.
I mean, maybe? I’m in favor of collaboration. But I’ve spent three years being forced to collaborate with people using technology, and my strong preference right now is to collaborate with them in person whenever I can. And when I do have to call or Zoom or Google Meet with people, I already have tech that lets me do it. Like a phone, or a computer.
Asking me to wear a device to do it better — and asking someone else to do the same — means that it has to be way, way better than what we have now.
And maybe Apple’s headsets will be way, way better at this. (At various points, people who worked at Meta have tried to tell me that the company’s devices are actually pretty good for collaboration, just like their boss says they are. But their hearts have never seemed into it.)
Reports suggest that even Apple executives aren’t fully on board for this launch — and that’s not anything we’ve ever heard before as Apple prepares one of these things. (To be fair, that could also indicate that Apple in 2023 is a different company than it used to be, where very little of the company’s inner workings ever showed up in print — to say nothing of dissent.)
The most logical argument is that Apple doesn’t really think it will sell tens of millions of these things, in this form, at $3,000 a pop. Rather, it thinks the initial buyers will be developers, hobbyists, and Apple super fans. And Apple believes it will learn a lot about the device’s potential once they’re out in the wild, with real people testing them and providing feedback. And that years down the road, when costs come down and the tech improves and there are multiple killer apps for this stuff, Apple’s headset will take off.
Industry experts say Apple may have no choice but to put out AR/VR tech that’s not completely refined because it needs to see how the things perform in the real world and to see how developers and consumers react to them.
“There’s nothing to replace being in the field, being in the dirt, just grinding it out,” says Abovitz. “I think they’ve been on the sidelines way too long. At some point, you have to go into the wild.”
That is decidedly not how Apple has done things in the past: Normally, Apple announces a product, then tells you you can buy it very soon, and sales go up and to the right.
Apple boosters will note that the original iPhone wasn’t a gangbusters hit from the get-go: It took a price cut and the eventual introduction of the App Store to really get things going. The Apple Watch also took a while to find its footing: Apple initially positioned it as a fashion item, but most people ended up using it as a high-tech pedometer, so now Apple markets it as a “fitness” product.
But the phone, the watch, the earbuds — and going very far back, the iPod — these were all things that had real-world analogs and real-world use cases, and didn’t require people to make word salad to pitch them. Maybe the goggles simply require a different timetable before they’re really, truly ready, and Apple is starting now because it has to eventually. But I’d feel more confident about the prospects for this tech at show time if I thought the show was ready.
How the legislation to avert an economic crisis would affect student loans, food aid, the IRS, and more.
House Republicans took the debt ceiling hostage — but now Speaker Kevin McCarthy has agreed to set the hostage free for a relatively small ransom payment.
The deal struck by negotiators for President Biden and McCarthy on Saturday night is no major overhaul of American public policy. The White House managed to avert sweeping cuts to domestic spending, which will instead effectively be held at something close to the status quo (though a cut when accounting for inflation). And on a set of other policy issues where Republicans made big demands, Democrats granted only some limited concessions.
The deal certainly includes some policy changes progressives do not like — they’d prefer domestic spending not be cut at all, and they dislike new work requirements for food stamp beneficiaries ages 50 to 54, among other things.
But if you keep in mind that Democrats and Republicans were always going to have to negotiate over spending levels at some point this year (to avert a government shutdown this fall), it’s not clear that Republicans’ use of the debt ceiling as a bargaining chip even got them anything they wouldn’t have won later anyway.
Rather than an extremist GOP’s attempt to force Democrats into unthinkable concessions or else trigger an economic crisis, the outcome here looks a whole lot like an ordinary congressional deal reached with the help of an imminent deadline.
Can such a deal pass the GOP-controlled House? There has been some grumbling from the right, though few are talking about an outright revolt against McCarthy. The bill could face a challenge in getting to the House floor because of the House Rules Committee, where McCarthy granted some seats to the far right. But there are ways around that, and if the bill does make it to the House floor, it will likely pass with a combination of Democratic and Republican votes, and Senate passage is a sure thing.
If House Republicans can get to yes, it will signify a shift in the party compared to the last major debt ceiling showdown in 2011. Back then, the GOP majority brought to power in the Tea Party wave sought extreme spending cuts, including big changes to Medicare and Social Security. That GOP conference also proved chaotic and nearly ungovernable by its leaders.
Yet true-believing anti-spending ideologues have seen their influence dwindle in the Trump and post-Trump eras. GOP leaders decided early on not to demand any Medicare and Social Security cuts in these talks, and the eventual deal leaves Medicaid untouched, too.
Most in the party would still like to be seen as spending cutters, but in practice the energy is around culture war fights. That made the current deal — which uses various gimmicks and accounting tricks that will let Republicans claim they made substantial cuts to domestic spending, while letting Democrats avert many of the actual consequences of those cuts — possible.
The Biden White House, meanwhile, deflated liberal commentators’ and activists’ pleas that the president use executive authority in some way to effectively raise the debt ceiling on his own. Officials saw various practical, legal, and political drawbacks that made them very reluctant to go down that road. Instead — after climbing down from an initial stance that they wouldn’t negotiate at all — Biden’s team engaged with Republicans in hopes they could get a reasonable deal. And they think they’ve succeeded.
Here’s what’s in the deal. —Andrew Prokop
How big are the budget cuts?
The deal negotiated by the Biden White House and House Republicans cuts some domestic programs in 2024 and limits spending growth to 1 percent in fiscal year 2025. That will still amount to a cut, after accounting for inflation.
Almost two-thirds of the $6 trillion federal budget is mandatory spending on programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid that will happen without any action by Congress. The rest is determined by Congress, and that is the bucket that will be affected by the debt limit deal.
The cuts are going to land disproportionately on programs that help the poor and on administration, which also affects the people who rely on government programs. Some discretionary spending — on the military and for veterans — is actually going to increase. But the rest, including funding for child care, low-income housing, the national parks, and more, will be subject to a cut for the next two years.
The exact cuts are supposed to be set by legislation that Congress will pass later this year. Should lawmakers fail to pass those spending bills, automatic spending cuts of 1 percent across the board would occur instead. (The incentive for Congress to pass the spending bills is that these automatic cuts would include the military, which all parties involved want to exempt.)
Assorted accounting tricks could also reduce the actual spending cuts and hold federal spending effectively flat — though in a time of inflation, flat spending is really a cut when considering the purchasing power of each dollar.
This might sound familiar: In 2011, an earlier debt limit crisis led to the Budget Control Act of 2011, which set spending caps for the rest of the decade. In this case, the spending limits apply only for two years.
And while this cut is shallower than the automatic cuts of the last decade, it applies to programs that already have been feeling the squeeze: According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, spending for discretionary domestic programs (excluding veterans’ health care) is 10 percent below 2010 levels when adjusted for inflation and increases in the US population.
The long-running neglect has led to shortages in the services they provide. Child care assistance has fallen for the better part of two decades. The primary grant program served 373,000 more children in 2006, even though now there are an additional 1 million American children living in poverty. Likewise, 3 out of 4 US families that should be eligible for federal housing assistance don’t actually receive any aid because there is no funding available. Cuts to the Social Security Administration have been going on for years, while wait times for assistance have been increasing. Investments in water infrastructure have been stagnant, even after clean water crises in Flint, Michigan, and Jackson, Mississippi.
Cuts were inevitable — even to social programs that were already underfunded — once Republicans took control of the House and therefore the appropriations process. The question was always how much of the major programs Democrats could protect given Republican threats to hold the debt ceiling hostage. —Dylan Scott
What are the new work requirements, and what are they likely to do?
The debt ceiling deal includes increased work requirements for the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP, commonly known as food stamps) and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF, or cash welfare), both of which already include substantial work requirements.
One thing notably missing? Work requirements for Medicaid, which had been a key demand of House Republicans.
SNAP has a set of general work requirements, and a narrower set of requirements for nondisabled adults without dependents. The changes in the new deal concern the latter. Currently, childless adults between the ages of 18 and 49 who do not have a physical or mental condition affecting their ability to work are generally required to work or volunteer for 80 hours a month. If they fail to, they face a time limit: They can only receive SNAP benefits for a maximum of three months over a three-year period. The debt ceiling deal expands the age range for these rules to apply to 50- to 54-year-olds.
While that change may not seem significant, it could have a major impact on people applying for disability support unable to work. People get sicker in their 50s, and SNAP has historically been a major source of support for applicants during the long process of applying for disability benefits.
Possibly offsetting these changes are new exemptions from work requirements for houseless people, veterans, and former foster children. A White House official told CNN that because of these exemptions, the total number of people subject to work requirements will be roughly the same after the bill. Advocates for SNAP counter that many houseless people and veterans should have already been exempt from work requirements under current law, which is being misapplied.
TANF, meanwhile, was created by the 1996 welfare reform law, replacing a program that offered guaranteed cash for low-income parents with a block grant giving $16.5 billion annually to states to spend on anti-poverty programs (though in practice the money is used for all manner of things). Because its appropriation has never been adjusted for inflation over its 27 years of existence, the program has effectively been cut in half over time, and now only about 21 percent of poor families with children get help from it.
States getting money from TANF have to meet a work-participation standard, requiring that 50 percent of families and 90 percent of two-parent families receiving benefits are working. However, these percentages can be reduced if the state has seen its TANF caseload fall over time (or if the state reports spending more of its own funds than is required by federal law), which is known as a “caseload reduction credit.” Thirty-two states have used these credits to reduce the work participation percentage they have to hit on TANF to 0 percent, as of fiscal year 2021.
Currently, these credits are calculated by seeing how much caseloads have fallen relative to fiscal year 2005, meaning states can get credit for nearly two decades of reductions. The debt ceiling deal changes this baseline to fiscal year 2015, which is laxer than what Republicans wanted (fiscal year 2022).
While in theory this could incentivize states to push TANF recipients toward work, the last time a change like this was tried in 2005, it did not result in a higher share of recipients due to states exploiting other loopholes. In other words, while the new policy undoubtedly tries to chip away at the welfare state, its actual impact may be a bit muted. —Dylan Matthews
What does the student loan provision mean for borrowers?
Here’s the bottom line: You’re probably going to need to start paying back your student loans again at the end of this summer. The pause on loan payments, and the hold on interest accruing on that debt, is set to end after August 29, with interest on loans beginning to accrue again on August 30, if the current proposal becomes law. That’s 60 days after June 30 — the same deadline that the president and the Education Department had set for repayments to begin, if the Supreme Court had not made a final decision on the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness plan by then.
The court still hasn’t made a pronouncement on that plan, though a decision is expected in June — and it’s not likely to be positive for the nearly 43 million Americans who owe some kind of student debt. Should they rule against the plan, the debt ceiling deal would prevent the president from issuing a ninth extension of the payment pause, which began in March 2020. —Christian Paz
What actually changes about energy permitting?
The biggest surprise of the deal might be its approval of the 300-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline, which will carry natural gas from West Virginia to southern Virginia.
The pipeline, held up for years by federal lawsuits, has long been a top priority for Sen. Joe Manchin. But the pipeline’s role in debt ceiling talks largely flew under the radar. The deal would give a green light to outstanding permits for the pipeline and shields its construction from court intervention, to the frustration of environmentalists worried about the pipeline’s impact on rural and low-income areas and the 1,000 streams and wetlands along its way.
There are a few other modest changes to permitting for energy projects in the deal, mostly affecting the bedrock 1970s-era environmental protection law, the National Environmental Policy Act. It sets a one-year deadline for agencies to complete an environmental assessment, and a two-year deadline for the more thorough environmental impact statement, an expensive review requiring community input. (Progressives argue that, rather than time limits, federal agencies need more staffing to complete reviews quickly.)
Neither Democrats nor Republicans are going to walk away from the debt ceiling compromise feeling satisfied. House Republicans didn’t get a majority of their demands, such as fast-tracking fossil fuel infrastructure and repealing clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act. Democrats didn’t get any major wins in expanding transmission lines, an important piece of infrastructure for the clean energy grid. Instead, the deal agrees to a study on transmission, punting the bigger issues holding back transmission lines to another time. —Rebecca Leber
What’s up with unspent Covid aid?
Republicans have been fixated for a while on clawing back money that Congress authorized during the pandemic but that has not yet been spent. They secured a win in the debt-limit deal, with the White House agreeing to reclaim some of that funding in the name of reducing spending.
The deal exempts some of remaining Covid funding, including money set aside to fund a next generation of vaccine development as well as funding that pays for Covid vaccines and treatment for uninsured Americans. “It is really important that these were protected,” said Jennifer Kates, director of global health at KFF.
Obviously, billions of dollars have been spent over the past three years on assistance to people and businesses, as well as funding for vaccines and other public health efforts. So what’s left? There has not been a thorough public accounting for what money is left for specific projects, according to Kates. But with the pandemic winding down and important funding streams unaffected, public health experts don’t sound too worried about this aspect of the deal. —DS
Are the IRS cuts symbolic or significant?
The scope of the IRS funding cuts in the debt ceiling deal was notable: Roughly $20 billion of $80 billion that Congress previously approved will be repurposed for other programs in 2024 and 2025. This will help Democrats offset some of the deal’s cuts to domestic spending.
White House officials have told Reuters that the short-term impact could actually be minimal, however, since the funding for the agency was approved over 10 years. Effectively, that means that the IRS might not feel these funding cuts in the near term, and that lawmakers could put in more requests for agency funding when needed in the future.
Making these cuts, though, allows Republicans to claim a win on the issue: They’ve long targeted the IRS and argued that its resources should be clawed back. —Li Zhou
The White House and congressional Republicans have reached a deal in principle to raise the debt ceiling, which caps the total amount of money that the US can borrow to fund the federal government. The tentative deal would also cap government spending for two years.
The full details of the bill have not emerged, but it defuses fears that the US could default on its loans, which would likely cause a massive economic crisis. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen previously warned that a default could happen as early as June 5.
A simple majority of 218 votes will be needed to pass debt ceiling legislation in the narrowly divided House, where Republicans hold a 222-person majority while Democrats control 213 seats. Some members from both parties are expected to defect, and Republicans are currently divided over the bill.
Follow here for all of Vox’s coverage on the debt ceiling crisis, including what a deal might look like.