Apple launches its $3,499 virtual reality headset: Apple Vision Pro

Apple on Monday unveiled its most ambitious hardware effort since the iPhone: a $3,499 headset that features virtual reality and augmented reality technology.

Apple announced the headset, called Apple Vision Pro, at its Worldwide Developers Conference held at its Cupertino, California, headquarters. The company also announced new versions of its Macbook laptops and updated operating systems for most of its hardware.

Apple CEO Tim Cook introduced the headset at the end of a lengthy presentation using the “one more thing” phrase that co-founder Steve Jobs liked to toss in when dropping major new products.

“This is a day that’s been years in the making,” Cook said.

The headset becomes the most recent entry into the wider VR market, which includes Meta’s Quest, Valve’s Index and a handful of other competitors. Apple said it will be available early next year.

Apple showed a variety of uses for the headset: 3-D apps, immersive movies, educational content, web surfing and video games. 

Apple’s Vision Pro immediately becomes the priciest and most advanced VR headset on the consumer market, featuring a variety of different features including the ability for the headset to adapt to a user’s environment.

The headset also allows users to look through the headset and change the display using their eyes, hands and voice. The display on the headset adapts to a users’ surroundings, but can also extend into an immersive environment, adjustable by the user. Unlike other AR headsets, the technology uses a feature called “eyesight” allowing a users’ eyes to be visible and detect when others are approaching the user.

The headset comes at a pivotal time for both Apple and virtual reality technology. Apple remains a behemoth in the tech world, valued at almost $3 trillion. But in spite of products like the iPad, Apple Watch and AirPods, technologists and industry analysts have wondered for more than a decade whether Apple can make another category-defining product on the order of the original iPhone. 

VR tech, meanwhile, has been around for decades without ever breaking through to mass mainstream appeal. More recent investments by other tech companies into VR experiences — sometimes called the metaverse — have generally been regarded as middling at best. No company has managed to create a must-have case for headsets, a truly irreplaceable daily need that only that technology can satisfy.

Still, Apple has a proven ability to push the public to adopt new technologies. The iPhone was not the first smartphone, but Apple made having one at first a mark of status, and eventually the way tens of millions of people conduct the logistics of work, romance and travel. And its products have catalyzed and occasionally reinvented whole industries. Its smartphone put social media at the world’s fingertips, the App Store launched millions of companies, and iTunes upended the music business.

Now it has to fight it out with Google and Meta for dominance. Meta, named for Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s ambition to usher in a virtual-reality metaverse in which people will socialize and work, is the market leader at the moment. But that market is unproven. While Apple sells more than 200 million iPhones each year, the entire market for headsets comprises fewer than 9 million units per year.

If Apple’s headset proves capable of succeeding where other VR headsets have not, it would give the company a major foothold in what some tech analysts still see as an area of future growth. The consultancy McKinsey & Company said in a report that the metaverse could create $5 trillion in value by 2030. 

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

Move over Twitter, Apple's Journal app is the blogging revolution I've been waiting for

We saw a landslide of updates, additions, and launches at WWDC 2023. Still, one of the more compelling lifestyle additions to iOS 17 is what kept me up last night.

Journal, to me, is the epitome of Apple's genius on full display, meshing everyday phone usage with wellness, creating seamless connections between apps – and perhaps, even tapping into humanity's near-desperate urge to share in our social media-driven world.

Currently, there's been no mention of the app allowing you to share or publish your Journal entries; in fact, Apple was far more interested in reassuring us of how private and personal Journal will be thanks to end-to-end encryption and on-device processing.

In my view, though, Apple has a momentous opportunity here to completely disrupt the microblogging space; if not, at least, it might inspire somebody else to.

This new Journal app also isn't a massive surprise, with rumors abuzz since April, and journaling apps are by no means unique to app stores, whether on Apple devices or some of the other best phones and best tablets.

Having an app like this built-in to the iPhone, however, may inspire more people to take up journaling as an outlet, which was found to reduce stress in a 2018 study from The Pennsylvania State University. Plus, the app genuinely does look unique, certainly in how it stands to capitalize on Apple's other applications and features. Journal, it seems, could finally marry the gap between pen-and-paper journaling and digital software alternatives.

In addition to logging your thoughts and activities per all forms of journalling, the app will use on-device machine learning to create personalized prompts, referring to recent activity on your iPhone from photos to workouts and location data – fantastic for those of us that struggle with writer's block. It's also a smart addition to Apple's growing health and wellness app library, offering the opportunity to add commentary to your well-being tracking.

With this wealth of features, a visually appealing aesthetic, and the current state of the social media landscape, it feels like the only thing missing is the ability to share content – even if only with friends and family, for now.

Sites like Twitter and Tumblr thrived in years gone by for providing people the platform to express their day-to-day thoughts, interests, and feelings, often in bite-size or multimedia posts. Much like some of the best blogging sites, the popularity of the medium has fizzled over time, and many platforms have transitioned to focusing on very specific audiences and use cases.

Whether it's nostalgia or the fact that my handwriting is too bad for pen-and-paper journaling, I miss the old days of blogging. All I could think while watching WWDC's Journal showcase was how cool it would be if someday, I could quickly pull together a shareable journal or blog entry using photos and user data visualized into beautiful graphics, express my thoughts, and then share to my Instagram story a neat little package of content.

Apple might even make it a gated service only for those using Apple devices a la iMessage, which capitalizes on software FOMO (fear of missing out) to drive up sales – though of course, my preference would be it creates something non-exclusive.

There's a perfectly legitimate argument that what Apple is really doing here is another example of the "Sherlocking" phenomenon it's become pretty notorious for over the years, where Apple launches features that obviate the presence of popular third-party apps or add-ons, highlighted by the DoJ escalating an antitrust probe against the company following fears of anti-competitive behavior.

Personally, I love the fact Journal will integrate so seamlessly with other iOS apps and the Apple aesthetic, but it speaks to a potentially bleak future for apps such as Day One, which recently addressed the rumors of Apple Journal in a blog post.

The app's founder, Paul Mayne, highlights the news as an opportunity for Day One to differentiate itself – and interestingly enough, mentions shareable journals as one way the team hopes to do so.

This is the kind of competition we should be vying for, realistically; but Apple has ringfenced so many of its own apps in a way that makes it nigh-on impossible for anyone but them to do what they're doing with Journal.

It's worth mentioning Apple did say it'll be offering an API for developers that will allow them to leverage Journal's personalized writing suggestions in their own apps, but it's unclear what the scope of this is as of yet.

For better or for worst, if the key features in Journal are appealing to you, you'll be hard-pressed to find it anywhere else, and despite my better judgment and fears of anti-competition, I can see an exciting future ahead for modern-day journaling if Apple gets this right.

Don't forget to check out more of the features coming to iOS 17 on your iPhone – here are 10 of the best.