Apple Goggles. Still stupid.

As a long-time F1 fan and early reporter on Apple, Inc., the long-term strategic link-up between Apple and F1 pleases me.

If these 2 behemoths happen into a creative partnership with the Beatles, I’d begin to suspect the Hand of God was actively entertaining the global spread of my most keen interests.

Until such time, the focus here is on Apple and F1.

Of which, I am hopeful.

With about a billion high-margin, top-quality screens in use around the globe, what magic might Apple + F1 conjure? We’ve seen glimpses of higher-quality streaming for races. Netflix’s Drive to Survive, now shown on Apple TV, hints to the potential for Apple-only content. Multiple driver feeds, better pre- and post-race coverage, possibly. 3D maps of tracks has started rolling out. A billion users, a billion screens, Apple’s trillions of dollars —- that’s a lot of potential content.

But, please. Stop with the Goggles.

Apple Goggles, er, Vision Pro, is a product that essentially nobody uses and that nobody will ever use. Because it’s dumb.

Costly, cumbersome, guaranteed to make the user look stupid — or worse, slavish — Vision Pro remains a product in search of a function.

And always will.

Yet, Apple, in their corporate hubris, believes they have finally stumbled upon a use. A use worth paying for! Watching F1 races!

Good, Lord. No.

Those of a certain age no doubt still harbor a soft longing for cyberpunk, for a cold, dark matrix, for the neuromancer. And the Apple Vision Pro entices men with the notion of, at long last, entering, literally, the “cybersphere.”

Except, it comes 40 years too late.

Imagine today’s John Cusack standing outside a 65-year-old divorcee’s window, cranking out Peter Gabriel. It’s worse than wrong, it’s sad. Same with the Apple Vision cyber-matrix-neo-dark-web-fantasy. Too much time has passed, too much knowledge gained, much of it the hard way. Nobody wants to enter the matrix because nobody wants to be hidden amongst the digital (or amongst the physical-made-digital.)

Everybody wants to be seen!

Being seen, seen on screen, by as many as possible. That is the pinnacle of our age. Putting goggles on doesn’t put you into the center of the sphere, it hides you away. Which nobody wants.

And Apple isn’t even offering this little! They are offering you a radically less comfortable way to watch an F1 race.

Who approved this?

But, the technology! THE TECHNOLOGY!

Yeah, sure. Like the Tyrrell P34. Look it up.

I’ve covered Apple over the years and am hopeful, given the quality of their technologies, and the size of their wallet, that they will accelerate F1’s footprint & ecosystem. And deliver some cool F1 content, much of it user driven, of the sort that was never imagined because until this moment, the tools to imagine it did not exist.

But strapping a mask over our eyes? No one will do this. It’s awful.