(Preview) Apple And Its Lack of Vision, The Transformation of United Airlines, Q&A on Grok, Meta, and Streaming Economics
- Ben Thompson’s core diagnosis is that Apple built a compelling immersive medium, then sabotaged it by editing Vision Pro broadcasts like television. Rapid cuts and replays repeatedly break presence; during one fast break, a camera switch left him so disoriented that he “literally missed the basket.”
- The strategic mistake compounds itself: Apple’s expensive production choices make each event worse while ensuring there are too few events. Dedicated presenters, announcers, multiple cameras, and bespoke editing deliver “10 things that are way overproduced”; Ben would prefer “10,000 things that are pretty good.”
- A single baseline or courtside camera at every game could give Vision Pro the differentiated use case that its roughly $4,000 price currently lacks. Let viewers hear the crowd, watch warmups, and consult the arena scoreboard as an attendee would: “Put a camera at every game. That’s it.”
- Basketball is the proof case because television struggles to convey the physical scale, grace, and control visible near the court. Ben argues that immersive video can approximate the breathtaking sight of Giannis or LeBron in transition—provided Apple lets viewers “luxuriate in that feeling” instead of constantly relocating them.
- The larger opportunity is a marketplace for remote attendance at increasingly scarce live experiences. Apple already has smaller cameras, a live-production pipeline, and capable hardware; selling access to events could attract users, after which developers follow. “It’s not a chicken or egg problem. It’s a one-way street.”
- Andrew Sharp’s conversion from Vision Pro skeptic underscores the gap between product quality and product-market fit. He calls the hardware’s experience “undeniably really cool” and, in his book, the decade’s coolest new hardware, yet declined Ben’s offer to buy him one because he would use it only once every six months. Ben separately calls it “one of the best 30-minute demos of all time.”
1. Television succeeds by admitting it is not attendance
Ben traces televised sports from NBC’s first college-baseball broadcast—one camera plus radio commentary—to a Dodgers-Reds game three months later using two cameras. The medium quickly learned to exploit changing perspectives because “you’re not there.”
Modern television perfects that substitution: the Super Bowl might use “like 130 cameras,” football replays arrive seamlessly, and producers can jump from the live play to an all-22 view or close-up of a disputed catch.
His framing is not anti-TV. Football may be better on television, and familiar devices such as college football’s “crying coed in the stands” are part of a distinct experience built around a flat, 2D panel.
2. Immersive basketball can recover what television loses
Basketball is Ben’s strongest specimen because courtside viewers perceive “the physicality and power” of giants moving with extraordinary grace. Giannis or LeBron coming down the court can be breathtaking, while television only partially communicates how a great player controls an entire game.
He recalls attending Game 1 of the 2015 Finals and feeling LeBron’s fingerprints on “every single second.” Vision Pro can create a “legitimate facsimile” of that presence despite pixelation, imperfect peripheral vision, or occasional tearing.
3. Repeated camera cuts destroy the product’s defining illusion
The Bucks-Lakers presentation let Ben approach a suspension of disbelief—then “boom, it would cut to another camera angle.” Replays and perspective changes did not help; they forced him to reorient inside an immersive space.
One switch during a fast break was so disruptive that he missed the basket. Andrew’s pushback—really an amplification—was that Vision Pro is already disorienting enough to require adjustment, only for Apple to change the view again “the entire game.”
Ben sees the same error across Apple’s catalog: an MLS year-in-review had “57 gazillion cuts,” while a Metallica concert switched cameras precisely when the feeling of actually being there became convincing.
4. Overproduction simultaneously worsens quality and restricts supply
Apple begins the game with a dedicated studio show, but Ben would rather inhabit the arena and watch warmups. At a Warriors-Cavaliers Finals game, he and a friend noticed Kyrie Irving had not missed during warmups, predicted he “might go off,” and then watched it happen.
Multiple cameras, dedicated announcers, presenters, and studio production all add overhead. Ben’s complaint is therefore economic as well as aesthetic: Apple went roughly a year without new installments, leaving nominal “episode one” releases with no visible episode two.
5. Volume could turn Vision Pro from demo into platform
Ben’s prescription is austere: place one camera at every game, retain the crowd and PA audio, and let viewers read the arena scoreboard. “I don’t need a play-by-play announcer.”
He would choose “10,000 things that are pretty good” over 10 polished productions—even if the latter were excellent, which he says they are not. Breadth would make otherwise inaccessible events routinely available.
Live experiences are becoming more distinctive as digital media becomes commoditized. Vision Pro cannot reproduce an Eras Tour crowd, “crazy teenage girls,” or friendship bracelets, but it can sell some of the scarcity and immediacy of being there.
Andrew supplies the adoption evidence: he calls the hardware’s experience “undeniably really cool” and perhaps the decade’s coolest new hardware, yet Apple has not justified spending $4,000 because he would use it only once every six months. Ben separately calls it “one of the best 30-minute demos of all time” and argues that first establishing the core use case will win users, after which developers follow.
Full transcript
Hello, and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp, and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how are you doing?
I'm doing pretty well, Andrew. I don't know. I've been playing around with my headphones. I have regular headphones on now.
Mm.
I did get a haircut over the break. I thought the regular headphones were making me look very bald. It was unfortunate. But I didn't put in the in-ear ones. Then I look at you, and you're wearing your stupid AirPods.
I can't decide if this is the least professional-looking setup ever, or if you've gone full circle and it's actually the most professional. I'm not sure.
Do we need to have a more unified look? Should you be wearing AirPods, or should I switch to the over-ear dorky look that you're rocking today?
No, I have the in-ear monitor things, but the problem is they always fall out of my ears. I need to fix them. I need to get new ones.
Well, what you need is—
Like custom-molded ones or something like that.
—AirPods. You know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah.
But I will continue wearing these purely out of spite until the end of time.
It does irritate me that during COVID, everyone started doing these hits from home. You'd watch ESPN, and the reporters were doing these hits from home, and they all looked terrible.
Mm-hmm.
Why? We have much better video equipment, and we're not even publishing video. It drives me up the wall.
Yeah. Get your shit together, legacy media. For now, Sharp Tech will hold people down as far as aesthetics are concerned, headphones notwithstanding. But in any event, it's great to be back. Ben, we've got a lot to work through today: a robust mullet section, but we will begin with Apple and the Vision Pro.
Oh, literally the front of the head. Nice. I like that.
1. The Vision Pro NBA Test
Indeed. Here we are, pass-through vision all the way. Todd says this came in 10 days ago, and he wrote in and said, “After Ben saw the Apple immersive video sizzle reel in June of 2023, Ben wrote, ‘The company was fairly mum about how it planned to make those cameras and its format more widely available.’ But I am completely serious when I say that I would pay the NBA thousands of dollars to get a season pass to watch games captured in this way. Yes, that's a crazy statement to make, but courtside seats cost that much or more, and that 10-second clip was shockingly close to the real thing.”
It was more like 3 seconds, by the way, I think, now that I think back to it.
And that's all a reference to immersive video in the Apple Vision Pro from your original Apple Vision Pro article in June 2023. “Fast-forward 30 months,” Todd says, “and it's finally happening.” Here he links to a press release from Apple headlined, “Los Angeles Lakers games on Spectrum Front Row in Apple Immersive tip off January 9.”
So, Ben, it finally happened, but did it really happen? You have now soapboxed about this feature on a bunch of different platforms. Great to see you on TBPN this week, and you also lit into Apple on Dithering. Do you have a CliffsNotes version of your complaint about the Vision Pro NBA broadcast for the audience here on Sharp Tech?
Wait, I thought this was my long-form opportunity, and you're telling me to cut it down?
Feel free to go long-form. You did go long-form with an article, an open letter to Apple, on Monday this week.
That is the biggest testament to how strongly I feel about this, because I am aware no one in the world cares about the Apple Vision Pro except maybe me. So I'm giving valuable real estate—
It really cracked me up. Just for the record, earlier this week you described yourself as being on a one-man crusade to resuscitate the Vision Pro. There was overwhelming agreement from the Stratechery and Sharp Tech audiences with your takes on the Vision Pro, but I really enjoyed one guy who wrote in and said, “Ben, that was quite good writing about a product literally nobody cares about.”
So here we are again, talking about a product that no one uses.
Well, I cared about things before they were cool. Thinking back to the App Store, I was focused on those issues a ton before they became mainstream.
Yep.
10 years in advance.
This is caring about things long after they are cool, so you're going to get both sides of the equation. But I have to write what I'm interested in, number one. And number two, I'm more fired up than ever. I'm not just fired up about being right and being irritated—
Hmm.
—that, yes, I wrote this take before. I wrote it when the Vision Pro came out. I wrote it when they released that year-in-review MLS video, which was atrocious.
Yeah.
It was published by a YouTuber on crack. It was unbelievable. Just 57 gazillion cuts. Even on the same play, you didn't even know where you were. It was discombobulating.
Mm-hmm.
I wrote about the Metallica concerts. Super cool, except that when it got really cool, when you felt like they were there, they started cutting to different cameras.
2. Apple’s Content Problem
The core mistakes Apple is making with all these videos are actually intertwined. Mistake number 1 is that there haven't been enough of them.
Yeah.
They went, like, a year without anything. It's like, what are you doing? They published these things that were like Chapter 1 or Episode 1, and then a year later you're like, “Is there an Episode 2?”
Is there a Chapter 2?
What's going on here? So, number 1, they haven't had enough content for the Vision Pro.
Mm-hmm.
And number 2, the problem with the content on the Vision Pro is it's cut for TV.
Right.
3. Television Rewrote Live Sports
What is TV? I actually went back and looked at the history of sports on TV, and the first-ever broadcast was a college baseball game on NBC at Columbia in New York City. They had 1 camera, and they had the radio broadcast.
At the time, it was pretty amazing. You can watch something and not be there. What a concept. I'm not being sarcastic. I'm saying I'm sure that was absolutely amazing.
I mean, relative to radio, which people had been relying on for decades at that point.
Well, immediately, the next game that NBC did—the second-ever sports broadcast on TV in the U.S.—was a Major League Baseball game, this time in Brooklyn: the Brooklyn Dodgers versus the Cincinnati Reds. What did they figure out in that intervening 3 months between broadcast number 1 and broadcast number 2?
What?
2 cameras.
Mm.
Because you have this ability to give different perspectives, and that's important because you're not there. When you're there, it's a 360-degree, every-sense immersive environment.
I still love going to baseball games. I go to multiple baseball games a year. What's the whole thing? Part of it is you go in, and it's the concourse, and you're in your seat, and there's the guy selling drinks or popcorn or whatever it might be, and you're talking to the people next to you.
The last game I went to was the Brewers beating the Cubs in Game 5. It was a fantastic experience, all the better; it almost sucked because there were a lot of Cubs fans there.
Yeah.
But the Brewers won, so you've got to rub it in their face. That's part of the experience: being there. Even if you go to a game in the middle of summer, it's a beautiful day, you're sitting outside, and you can talk, be on your phone, or do whatever you want to do. It's a full, immersive—
Baseball is a vibe. There's no question.
It is a vibe, but even if you go to a football game, I went to the Packers versus the Steelers in Pittsburgh. So I was the annoying Cubs fan, right? You're there, and I—Tucker Kraft was amazing that game. I had a Tucker Kraft jersey on, and I'm pointing to it. I'm sitting in the front row of the section—
And see, this is the stuff that would never be possible, even if the Vision Pro did get it right. But yes, it's all part of the experience.
It's part of the experience. Again, the funny thing about going to a football game is that you do see more. Football is kind of interesting because you see the whole field. You see stuff develop in certain ways.
You also don't see good close-ups of things, like what's happening, with all these crazy cameras that they have. But it's an experience of being there that TV can't capture.
Yeah.
4. A New Way To Watch
TV is a 2D flat panel in front of you. What they've done brilliantly is create an entirely new way to experience a sporting event, or any sort of event, that accepts this isn't real life. But because it's not real life, there are lots of things we can do.
Right.
For the Super Bowl, I talked about how they have 130 cameras or some crazy amount. Football, again, is so well-suited to TV. You can show the play, and then they always show a replay of the play right away, and it's cued up. It all seems so seamless.
They show the All-22 view, or they show a close-up to see if the guy actually caught the ball or not, and then we can have a debate: Was that a catch? Was that not a catch? Whatever it might be. In baseball, you see the replay, or you see those videos of the massive—like, in the playoffs, when there's a game-winning home run and everyone's going crazy. Sometimes they'll show it on Twitter, like the production-truck view of that.
Yeah.
It's like, “Cut to camera 3, camera 5.” It feels totally seamless. As a viewer, that's our expectation, and it's part of what makes it great: we get to see the—
College football is going on right now. No one knows because they put too many teams in the playoffs and completely killed the product. But whatever.
Well, and there's a 2-week gap between the semifinals—
I know.
—and the finals. Suboptimal as far as momentum is concerned.
What is the classic college football shot?
A shot of 2—
The crying coed in the stands.
Coed in the stands.
That's right. That's just part of the college football TV experience, right?
Mm-hmm.
All this takes advantage of the fact that it's actually a really brilliant example of accepting that this is an inferior product if measured on the basis of being there in person.
Yeah.
But let's lean into what is possible given technology and what we could do. You end up with—
We can move around the stadium, up and down the field, in ways that fans sitting in a seat cannot.
That's right.
And so, yeah, there are obviously some advantages—
Some things, like football, I would argue, are better on TV.
Oh, sure.
Right? With a big group of people. That varies. Basketball, I think, is probably the best one in person, especially if you're courtside.
Mm-hmm.
There's so much of the physicality and power and incredible grace of these giants striding across the court.
Right.
That's just impossible to really get when you're watching on TV. But it varies by sport for sure. They're totally different experiences. What makes the Vision Pro amazing is that it actually gives you a legitimate facsimile of being there in person.
Mm.
You get that feeling. When you've got this in the Bucks-Lakers game, you could be sitting there, and Giannis has the ball. Giannis taking the ball down the court on a transition or secondary-transition opportunity is one of the most incredible basketball experiences you will ever have, particularly if you're close to the court.
Mm-hmm.
It's impossible that someone this large and this powerful moves the way—
Moves that fast.
—that he moves.
Yeah.
It's breathtaking. LeBron James is a very similar experience. A thing you get when you're at a game that's hard to get on TV is the degree to which certain players control the game.
Mm-hmm.
The all-time great example was—I never felt this more tangibly. I think it was the 2015 Finals, Game 1, where the Warriors had this huge breakthrough. No one expected them. Suddenly, they're in the Finals. They're playing the Cavs, who seemed overmatched.
LeBron's control of that game was so tangible. I was there in the stadium, and every single second of that game had his fingerprints on it.
Mm-hmm.
You can get that through TV a bit, but in person, it's like you can sort of feel that.
You feel it. Yeah.
I will lean on basketball. It's the sport I know the best. It's the one I've had the most experience with, including courtside experiences, and I know what it's like being there. You get—
Also the sport that Apple was trying to broadcast with this product here, unsuccessfully.
Right.
Mm-hmm.
5. Apple Keeps Breaking Immersion
You get that feeling. What was so frustrating about this presentation was the exact same thing that frustrated me about every other Apple Immersive Video that I've seen.
Instead of being able to luxuriate in that feeling and lose the sense that, yes, it's a little pixelated, yes, in your peripheral vision it's not perfect, and yes, if you move your head really quickly there might be a little bit of tearing, you could get the suspension of disbelief that you were there.
Mm-hmm.
And the moment you would start to feel that, boom, it would cut to another camera angle. It would switch to a replay. It was so frustrating, and it was kind of uncomfortable to watch. There's one thing in a fast break where I'm on one camera and it suddenly switches to another camera, and I literally missed the basket because I was discombobulated as to where I was.
Well, that's the thing. Hearing you and reading you describe your experience, it seems like something that would drive me completely insane. As immersive as the Vision Pro can feel, it's still disorienting, and so you have to adjust to whatever the view is. Then, as you make that adjustment, it switches again. It apparently was like that the entire game.
The entire game.
It's maddening that they would do it that way. The sizzle reels you were complaining about earlier—watching that, with the jump cuts and everything else, even watching it in 2D, I feel like I'm getting vertigo. I don't know who that is supposed to appeal to.
All of it comes back to Apple's penchant for over-engineering and overproducing this content, which flies directly in the face of your recommendation literally 30 months ago to just put 1 camera on the baseline or courtside and allow people to experience the game that way. That still makes sense.
Well, here's the thing. It's not just that they're making it worse. They're also exacerbating problem number 1, which is not having enough content.
Not enough content. Yeah.
When you start this broadcast, there's a dedicated studio show for the Apple Vision Pro.
Why do I want this sort of B-list studio presenter giving me a presentation about the—
You know what I like to do when I'm at a game?
Watch.
I like to watch the players warm up.
Yeah.
To use another Warriors-Cavs example, I was at Warriors-Cavs—I think it was Game 5, the game that Draymond was suspended for.
Oh, okay.
I remember I was with another guy. These were the worst seats I ever had. We were literally on the second-to-last row at the top of the stadium for this game.
Mm-hmm.
I know it was the second-to-last row because we got towels for that, and we went to the bathroom, whatever was behind the store towels. But anyhow, Kyrie did not miss a shot the entire warm-up.
I was going to say.
It was—
Unbelievable Kyrie game.
No, but you could tell. Before the game, my buddy said, “We've seen Steph warm up, whatever. It was nuts.”
Mm-hmm.
He's like, “Kyrie might go off tonight.” And he 100% went off that night. He made some crazy shots. Being in the stadium and seeing that happen, seeing him warm up, talking about it, and then seeing him actually do it was amazing. It was the totality of the experience.
Guess what would've been less amazing? “We're going to put you in a little room before the game so you can watch some presenter talk about what's going on.”
Listening to some C-list broadcasters. Yeah.
Yeah, it's nuts.
It is. It's more overhead for Apple to do it that way.
That's the thing.
Which is what's so insane.
To have multiple cameras, to have a studio show, to have dedicated announcers—all of this makes it worse and also reduces the amount of content available. I don't understand. All I want, and I'm more convinced than ever that I'm right about this—even if I'm not right—is to put a camera at every game. That's it.
Yeah.
Just—and nothing else.
I don't need a play-by-play announcer. I can listen to the crowd. I can listen to the PA announcer. I don't need a scoreboard. I can look up at the scoreboard, which is, by the way, what I did in this game.
In this game, they did have a score bug. It was way at the bottom, so you had to look down weirdly to see it. I just looked up at the scoreboard around the ring—
The jumbotron. Is that right?
In the stadium. Yeah. Well, I looked at the ones around the edge, right?
Oh, okay.
Like where you normally look if you're sitting courtside. That's where you look anyway, because it's a pain in the neck to look up that high. And so they could solve both problems. They could, I think, have a better product, and they could have way more stuff.
This is why I'm super worked up about this. It's not just that I think I'm right and I'm disappointed I'm not getting what I want. To me, this is a reason to buy the Vision Pro. I would rather have 10 things that are way overproduced—even if they were awesome, and they're not awesome—
Yeah.
Even if they were awesome, I would rather have 10,000 things that are pretty good, and I can experience all these things that I couldn't otherwise.
Mm-hmm.
And the funny thing is, the whole world is conspiring to make this an opportunity. Everything digital is commoditized. There are a gazillion things. Why was— We talked about this with Taylor Swift and the Eras Tour.
Right.
There's something about live experiences. Now, is the Vision Pro the same as being there with a bunch of crazy teenage girls and getting friendship bracelets? No. But live events and something that's happening in the moment are increasingly rare and increasingly special.
I think Apple has the capabilities. They've built all the pieces. They made these cameras, which, by the way, are dramatically smaller. It's actually pretty amazing how small they are compared to the way they used to be. You could see them dangling from the basket and things on those lines. They built this pipeline. They've now shown they can do it live.
They have these devices that are incredible experiences. They could build a marketplace to sell live tickets to basically everything on Earth. They could—
Well, and they would also have users for the Vision Pro, which they don't currently have, and then who knows what flourishes from there, from that foundation.
Once you have users, you'll get developers. That's the thing. There is no chicken-or-egg problem. It's a one-way street. You need to get users first, which means you need that core use case. And to me, this core use case is there. The only thing standing in the way is Apple's refusal to—
Loosen the reins.
To overengineer, to over— Right, overengineering. That's why I put it on the front page. I'm like, look, I already wrote this in the Daily Update. Maybe you're not subscribers, whoever's in charge of this, and you didn't read it. Can someone please—
6. Apple Must Save The Vision Pro
Let me address it directly to Apple. Directly to Cupertino: please, for the love of God, save this device.
I mean, just for the record, I care about the Vision Pro and will always enjoy talking about it because it was a product that I thought was stupid. Reading about it and hearing people like you—
You don't want it to succeed.
—and John Gruber rhapsodize about it, I was like, “These nerds.” But then I tried it, and the experience of using that hardware is undeniably really cool. And as a tech podcast—
No, it remains one of the best 30-minute demos of all time. It's mind-blowing.
Well, totally. You and I are on here talking about software, cost structures, and regulation. If I think about the coolest piece of new tech hardware that has been released this decade, it's pretty clearly the Vision Pro, in my book.
Now, Apple has not given me a reason to spend $4,000 on a headset to date. And you offered to buy one for me, and I was like, “You know what? I don't want to waste the company's money on something that I'll use once every 6 months.” So I would be a customer, and there's just no content for me to consume.
Related to all this, though, I'll read this note from Aaron. He says, “Guys, I wholeheartedly agree with Ben's takes on live events and where the Vision Pro has gone wrong. His solution is lower cost, higher volume, and a differentiated viewing experience. It's so baffling a decision that I can't figure out what could possibly be driving it. One of Ben's axioms”—paraphrasing here—“is don't assume people are stupid. Assume they are smart. So, assuming the Apple executives sort of know what they're doing, what is the possible steel-man argument for why they've hitched the Vision Pro to this terrible wagon?”
7. Apple’s Strategy Needs Explaining
Can you make a steel-man argument? Do you have theories on why Apple is here?
All right. And that is the end of the free preview. If you'd like to hear more from Ben and I, there are links to subscribe in the show notes, or you can also go to sharptech.fm. Either option will get you access to a personalized feed that has all the shows we do every week, plus lots more great content from Stratechery and the Stratechery Plus bundle. Check it out, and if you've got feedback, please email us at email@sharptech.fm.