The Remarkable Story Of Boll & Branch - An Interview With Scott Tannen Plenty of hype and talk have been devoted to all three technologies in the past two years, but Ball suggested the irony here is that all three have been in development for many years, even decades before their explosive recent adoption, he said. The Apple Vision Pro deserves a certain, complicated but special level of attention, Ball suggested. Apple filed its first patents on technology related to the device way back in 2006, months before Apple even announced its first iPhone, which became the profit engine that turned it into a $3 trillion company. Along the way since then, smoke signals out of the famously secretive company suggest plenty of demo devices and ferocious debates raged internally about whether it was ready for a public launch. Finally, in February, the Vision Pro went public. Getting there, however, was radically different from the development process of the iPhone, which was cobbled from third-party technologies, then transformed into something special by its interface, app store, form factor, and eventual ecosystem. The Vision Pro, by contrast, was designed, engineered and built almost completely by Apple itself, a marker of the many, many ways the company was building a boundary-pushing device that literally only it could create. “This is essentially the second real mainstay in the (head-mounted display) marketplace,” along with Meta’s Quest line of headsets, Ball said. “And so it's evident that a lot more testing is happening, a lot of theses are being played out.” The resulting device is the absolute minimum machine Apple could allow itself to release, knowing that its $3,499 price tag and on-the-face form factor would always keep it from being a mainstream device. But getting it built and in the market was vital for the company’s long-term strategy, an approach not unlike Elon Musk’s in launching Tesla, said Ball. “So part of this is not just about building the developer ecosystem, understanding what consumers want, and playing around with price points and feature and weight and form and fit and things like eyesight, but it is actually building up the infrastructure to be able to get the cost down,” Ball said. “I think it's actually a lot more like Tesla(’s early development),” Ball continued. “The Roadster was north of $100,000. The Model S was, I think, $98,000 and Elon’s point from the get-go was, ‘We need to improve our technology, we need revenue to do that, we need scale to improve our manufacturing cost with the goal of getting to the $35,000 Model 3, and in between starting with the Model Y SUV.’ And the question is, how fast will (Apple) get there? What will the market look like when they get there?” The Vision Pro has its shortcomings, and not just the painful price, Ball said. The route to adoption is far rockier than it was for smartphones, which were the first computer with Internet access for many people, reasonably affordable (especially with carrier subsidies), easily portable and unobtrusive, and still took three decades to reach near-universal adoption. The Vision Pro represents what Ball calls “a rapid leap forward” after many years of tech advances and hard development work, much as happened with the other two quickly transforming technologies now spotlighted in the book’s second edition. Artificial intelligence, for instance, has been the subject of scientific research and science fiction speculation for most of the past century. Pioneers such as Alan Turing and Marvin Minsky were doing foundational work in the 1940s and 1950s. Then ChatGPT debuted in late 2022, and the AI gold rush was on, rapidly elevating Nvidia into the $3 Trillion Club, and pulling Microsoft and a host of lesser “picks and shovels” providers along too. Now companies can hardly talk about themselves without discoursing on their AI-driven initiatives and products and use cases. Similarly, blockchain and cryptocurrencies have been around for 15 years, since that paradigm-setting white paper on Bitcoin Bitcoin by a still-unknown writer. But the past couple of years can be thought of as something of a difficult puberty for blockchain as many complicated legal, regulatory and operational issues were worked out, and the value of cryptocurrencies oscillated wildly. But Ball also said it’s a mistake to underestimate the improvements in the crypto/blockchain world. "There was the financial recovery, where it went from $3 trillion (in combined crypto value) down to $800 billion. And now it's back up to $2.7 trillion,” Ball said. “That is despite going from 0% interest rates to multi-decade highs in interest rates. We have seen new regulatory approvals, we have seen legal clarities, we have seen new products come in renewed investment. Stable coins have been widely accepted. (New European regulations) now mean that app developers can actually integrate token economies and NFTs freely into their applications.” Befitting a long-time industry observer who’s anything but captured by his subject, Ball reminds that, with blockchain and cryptocurrencies, “At the same time, I still think it's very hard to argue that there is demonstrated or foreseeably likely value created through any traditional measure as a store of value, as a currency, or through the creation of new products that generate revenue, or through the creation of new products that save cost that can justify non-speculative value in the multi-trillion-dollar level.” Basically, he says, quoting his recent interview of Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney, blockchain “is probably decades from primetime, and presently ruined by scamming and speculation.” With the book now out again, Ball is back to other pursuits, living between New York and Miami, consulting with a variety of companies, including some in the entertainment business. He spends a small amount of time tending to his role with an eponymous exchange-traded fund, the Roundhill Ball Metaverse ETF (ticker symbol: METV). And he writes a handful of long-form essays each year on technology and related subjects, like the 4,500-word piece released on his website in June looking at the real causes of movie theater decline (hint: it’s not streaming or the Marvel Cinematic Universe). Like anything to do with movies these days, a sequel is on the way soon from his matthewball.co website and email newsletter. And it doesn’t take a soothsayer to predict Ball will soon have reason to start penning yet another update to The Metaverse, as the constellation of technologies that are making it become real continue to leap forward into widespread use and value. It may be the closest thing any of us can get to guaranteed work in the Metaverse of the future. Follow me on