A friend asked me this morning whether Apple Vision Pro is a good enough substitute for business class airplane tickets.

The short answer is: no, especially not on red-eye flights. It will never be able to substitute the ability to lay down flat and actually have a good night’s rest. The “no” is more qualified for daytime trips. If you weren’t planning on sleeping anyway, you would probably be able to do a lot more on your Mac with an AVP in economy than without one in first class. That qualified “no” turns into a qualified “yes” for shorter flights in business class — say, American coast-to-coast — where you don’t even have the option of laying down flat and even if you did there isn’t much time for sleep even on a red-eye.

Keep in mind that a cross-Atlantic business class ticket is more than twice the cost of an AVP, and once you spend the money on it it’s all gone. You get to keep the AVP, and even use it on land. Ben Thompson has made this point several times on Dithering, and even had an episode called Vision Pro on a Plane. He also noted that the number of people able to afford AVP but still regularly fly economy is small, but not zero. I can confirm, as I am one of those people: I have taken more flights in the first two months of this year than all of last year, and will take many more in the months to come, so the investment was worthwhile. Your own milage may vary.

P.S. I can confirm that you can charge AVP while in use. The battery seems to have been designed for that very purpose, since the UCB-C charging port is on the same side as the cable going to the headset so that you can have two cables on the same side of the battery while it’s in your pocket. And even economy seats have power outlets these days, unless it is a very short flight where battery life wouldn’t even be an issue.

P.P.S. A great thing about AVP is that it isn’t a large electronic device, so you don’t have to put it away during takeoff and landing. In fact, an interesting use case would be for people afraid of flying. I imagine the fear is elevated during takeoff and landing, and wouldn’t it be nice if they could watch a movie at Joshua Tree instead?

P.P.P.S. If you are to bring an AVP onto a plane for purposes of entertainment, one thing to remember is pre-downloading things you are going to watch. It is amazing that we can text and surf the web while flying, but in-flight internet is bad for anything else.

• I gave Readwise a shot, and it just wasn’t for me. With age comes aversion to things that are too finicky and precious.
• Spaced repetition is overrated outside of studying for exams, and I am saying this as someone who used the Palm Pilot version of SuperMemo.
• We tend to underestimate our brains and overestimate technology, the latest example being generative AI which is at best a veneer over actual intelligence. We also tend to overestimate verbal intelligence over any other, and the two biases go hand in hand.
• You can read Chris Arnade’s Walking Phoenix and recoil at his depictions of American destitution, but don’t forget that those empty souls are just the tip of the iceberg — the submerged part is all online.
• When did “Happy Monday” become a phrase people say out loud?

Happy Monday!

One very good use case for ChatGPT is… actually chatting. Who knew?

I was waiting for someone at a restaurant and had 10 minutes by myself — a rarity these days. Instead of scrolling through one social network timeline or the other, I opened up the ChatGPT iPhone app, and learned that the only Leonardo painting in the Western hemisphere was right at my doorstep. Also learned that there are only 20 paintings by Leonardo and more than 300 by Rembrandt, and a few other tidbits.

Are any of them true? Well, trust but verify as they say, but why should I trust it any less than a random X account? Or worse yet, a non-random threadboy — now there’s a useful word I saw just recently — who posts unsourced graphs and opinions-as-facts.

Now sure, X and other social networks have upsides, like bonding with fellow humans over topics of joint interest. But these are for the most part shallow connections, empty calories for our socialite stomachs. A more stable and sustainable equilibrium for most people, certainly for me, could be real-life interactions for socializing and algorithms for tickling the mind without any pretense that we would be buddies. Social networks try to be both but are not great at either, the same way pickup trucks try to be both a car and a truck but are mostly gas-guzzling parking spot-hogging behemoths, and at the same time the most popular vehicles in the US. So, a perfect analogy.

From this perspective, ChatGPT’s forgetfulness is an excellent feature. It remembering prior conversations would bring it a step closer towards parasocializing, making it even worse than human social networks. I have no doubt that the feature is coming any month now, if it’s not already here. If and when it comes will the the point when X/Threads/Bluesky et al should sound the alarm — or introduce friendly algorithms of their own.

Three or so years ago I started a blog post draft titled “Twitter as a dark forest”. Unsurprisingly, I never finished it — and now I can delete it knowing that someone has formulated the issue better than I ever could have, and earlier. There is even a book out which, yes, I’ve ordered. (↬Waxy.org)

After a few weeks of owning an AVP, my use has settled into four categories:

1. Personal entertainment (15%)
2. Travel productivity (15%)
3. Open office shield (20%)
4. Demoing in guest mode (50%)

Apple should be giving me a commission.

The American feedback-industrial complex is getting out of hand. “Overall, how satisfied were you with your recent ATM experience?” asked an email I received today. Really, Bank of America?

Trying out Readwise this week. I am still undecided, though leaning towards “not for me” and for the reason why look no further than their video explaining how to use RSS: I am about 20 years too old to appreciate the style, and the anachronisms are infuriating.

I am attending a medical conference in Valencia, Spain this week — more thoughts on being back in Europe after 7 years coming up — and all I could think about while sitting in the auditorium, looking at slides and listening to the speakers was that these kinds of events would be the perfect use case for AVP.

The congress center in Valencia is top-notch, with comfortable seats and plenty of leg room. Even so, laptops are unwieldy, especially if you need to balance one while holding a coffee cup in one hand and a phone for taking photos of the slides in the other. This is even harder when you are crammed against the seat in front of you, which is the more common situation for large conferences. And if you use the laptop for anything other than touch typing — say, pulling up a paper that was just mentioned while it was still fresh in your memory — you will have to be focused on the screen and nine times out of ten an important slide will pass you by without your noticing or, even worse, noticing and pulling out the phone quickly only for the slide to change just as you were about to snap a photo.

So imagine if there was a device that could let you take photos, write notes, and do some web browsing all while still paying attention to what matters, the talk itself. If a friend and colleague was the one on the stage you could even take an immersive video. And before you say that the virtual keyboard is useless, Apple’s Magic Keyboard is lighter than an abstract book, more durable than a laptop if and when dropped, and works beautifully with AVP.

If I were one of 30,000 attendees in a large conference, say ASCO or ASH annual meetings, I wouldn’t even mind trying this out. Alas, this one is on the small side, with a few hundred people sharing the same room and hallways, and the embarrassment factor was just too much for me to pull it off. But I thought about it, and I’m hoping to try it out by the end of the year, shame be damned.

Matt Brichler’s view of AVP matches my own. For example:

… you may wear the headset at your desk, but you aren’t going to wander around the office with it on. And as we now know from using the headset, we know this wouldn’t even be useful since all your windows would be back at your desk so you’d be wearing the headset for no reason at all in the break room.

Even at the desk, AVP is not something I’d wear all the time. Just yesterday I was trying out the headset at work, in a tiny conference room I booked just for the purpose. A coworker came in to ask a question and I reflexively took it off — it just felt like good manners. To Apple’s credit, putting it back on is so seamless and window placement so stable that I didn’t groan internally for having to replace it.

AVP’s use as a personal entertainment device in unquestionable, and I look forward to catching up on many movies, TV shows and PS5 games in which no one else in the family has shown any interest. That alone is sufficient reason not to return it.

But why I bought it in the first place was to do work while traveling, and even though there are signigificant and valid concerns about its use as a “productivity device” — the quotes are there because I have developed an aversion to productivity as a concept — I think I will be able to deal with the many tradeoffs, some of which are:

The screens. As high-resolution as they are, they are dimmer then my 5K LG UltraFine and their simulated 4K virtual Mac display Henceforth VMD, because “VD” has other connotations. is just not as sharp. Marco Arment’s observation in the most recent episode of ATP was spot on: to be usable, the resolution should be one notch lower than the default 2560x1440, which significantly decreases the usable space, at least until dual VMDs become supported. Still, it is higher than the default resolution of my 13" MacBook Air and AVP native apps floating on the side can relieve some of the screen real estate. I will see how this pans out the next time I’m back on the plane — as early as next week.

The input. When using the VMD in an environment — Mt. Hood has been my preferred place of work — the keyboard tends to be occluded and blurry, and the display floats slightly higher than the physical screen. This is suboptimal, even if you are a very good touch typist (I am merely adequate). Dictation will be my friend moving forward, but the devil is in the editing: AVP is marginally worse at it when using the VMD and insurmountably worse in the native apps.

Fantastical is a good example: the native AVP app is wonderfully done, and I’d rather have it floating on the side of the VMD while focusing on actual work. Alas, entering a new meeting using the native app has been painful and each time I defaulted back to MacOS. Considering Fantastical’s origin as an applet for entering appointments using natural language, this is kind of sad. Should I not be able to tell it what to do with my appointments and have it rearrange them? I hope the AVP market is large enough for Flexibits to consider replacing the “+” icon with a microphone, and have voice be the main input method in realityOS.

The apps. Or lack thereof. This, I hope, will solve itself over time, because having OmniFocus float off on the side would save much VMD space. But here again is a conundrum: the floating window would be OK for checking off tasks, but I still rely on too many Omni automations and Keyboard Maestro shortcuts to ever fully switch to the native app. Again, having better voice input would help.

The native apps themselves have so far — slight differences in design aside — been like having several iPad minis float in front of you. And for what it is, it works. So it seems that Apple has finally found the right way to multitask in iPad OS; too bad it can’t be done on the iPad itself.

The comfort. I have a strong suspicion my face scan when ordering got the shield size wrong, and there is at least one person who’s had the similar experience of too much pressure on the cheekbones that was relieved when he redid the scan and tried on an adequate mask at the store. The same video mentions an essential part of fitting that I haven’t been doing: realigning the displays each time I fiddled with the dual bands and the AVP position on my face. Proper alignment made the high-resolution VMD much less blurry; the difference in the chunky native apps was not an obvious, though I suspect it would decrease motion sickness if there was any before.

The portability. That $200 case is just too big. It would take up the entire space of my backpack, and I don’t even carry my backpack when traveling for business. So, some rethinking is in order in how I pack everything which is one of those infrastructure things I’d rather not have to deal with, but from limited home use of AVP it seems like it will be worth it.