Apple recently announced their brand new mixed reality headset, the Vision Pro. In this episode, Marcell and the team take a look at its capabilities, and what it can mean for the world of customer experience. Packed with TikTok reactions, conflicting opinions, bad jokes and thought-provoking drawbacks, this podcast is a must-see exclusive!
Episode Summary
If you haven’t heard, the AVP is essentially a wearable MacBook that people will be wrapping around their heads, the mousepad replaced by their eyeballs. The headset aims to integrate the physical and virtual realities by creating an iOS-based overlay on top of the world around you, and seamlessly combining the two “interfaces.”
This also opens up a wide range of opportunities for entertainment, work, productivity, memory capture and content consumption. While a short overview is given of the technology in this podcast, the meat of it focuses on the CX side.
After giving their initial thoughts on the Vision Pro, and, having reacted to a plethora of questionably trending videos on the Internet, the team dove into a discussion about how Apple’s new tech can change consumer behaviour and expectations in both the retail and banking industries.
Mixed Reality Retail
Something we’ve discussed multiple times on CXI has been how VR and AR could create innovative retail experiences that draw more customers to the physical store. With the Vision Pro, Adam brought the conversation into the luxury retail space. Because at the end of the day, this thing costs a whopping $3500. So, the customers able to purchase such an expensive pair of glasses are also the ones buying Teslas and shopping at Selfridges (who, by the way, have their own great formula for success).
While the target market of the Vision Pro may therefore be relatively niche, it will still exist. In which case, the onus is on luxury retailers to develop apps and accessibility features that will accommodate to a customer base who will be browsing and purchasing on their sites with this new technology. Or, get left behind when the future arrives.
For detailed examples and cool ideas as to how this could play out in different settings, watch the video here.
Vision Banking Pro
In the opposite corner, Alex wasn’t as much of a fan of the Vision Pro. Though he’s still a gadget geek and would love to try one for himself, he doesn’t think the initial appeal should be enough for anyone to drop 3.5 grand on the headset. In his opinion, the current features available don’t justify the price tag, as the capabilities it offers are all already available, just not on your head…
So it came as no surprise when Alex also disputed the possibility of the AVP launching a new era of banking technology. Finances are a huge part of our day-to-day lives, yet we try and spend as little time as possible handling them. And while users of the AVP could achieve that with advanced Open Banking techniques and greater oversight, that won’t be the incentive for (most) people to get it. In essence, only if mixed-reality headsets become highly commonplace could we expect to see any real focus being given by banks to utilising the technology.
To discover more and learn about the Apple Vision Pro, check out our full episode – available on all your favourite channels. Now including YouTube!
This article summarises podcast episode 92 “Will Apple’s Vision Pro Reimagine Customer Experience?” recorded by CX Insider.
Written by Marcell Debreceni
Full Episode Transcript
Marcell: Is the physical world becoming obsolete? Will mixed reality headsets ruin society? How might customer experience change as a result of these new innovations? Today on the CX Insider podcast, we find out. I’m your host, Marcell, and in this special episode we’ll be unpacking the news about Apple’s brand new vision pro headset and analysing the reveal from a customer experience perspective. So in this new series, the team and I will be reacting to trending videos and stories on the Internet around burning topics and linking it all back to the world of CX. Now enjoy this first episode brought to you by ACF Technologies, the global Leader in Customer Experience Management Solutions. Today I’m joined by Greg, Alex and Adam. And for this first episode in this new series, we’re going to be talking about the Apple Vision Pro, which got announced earlier this month, which is pretty crazy. It’s Apple’s very own VR headset. And, you know, it’s kind of heating up this competition with Meta with their meta quest as well. And it’s got quite a massive price tag at $3,500. And I mean, that’s a huge asking price, isn’t it? They’re trying to integrate seamlessly this the physical, the digital world, and it’s causing a lot of controversy with people, you know, kind of not liking it, liking it, thinking it will take off. So to get started, what do you guys think? What are your initial thoughts when you first saw the announcement about this?
Adam: Well, I on purpose haven’t watched anything. So you initially saying that it’s $3,500. My initial reaction is, wow, that is an insane amount of money. So it better be pretty good tech. Compare that to, say, hardware like Oculus Rift, for example, which is a VR headset, but that’s like £400. So does it have two, three grand’s worth of extra tech in it? Maybe it does. And obviously, Apple fans are incredibly loyal. And we all know that Apple fans aren’t necessarily scared by large price tag because they expect an amazing customer experience, amazing brand experience, good build quality and all the things that come with it. But yeah, I deliberately haven’t watched anything on it, so I’m intrigued to see a little bit more about it.
Marcell: That’s kind of the question. Is it worth it? Because what did you guys think on price?
Alex: It’s too expensive for it. I think, to catch up at the very large audience. I don’t think it’s going to happen. It’s basically your phone in your eyes, basically, right? It’s not like giving you anything.
Marcell: It’s just a computer on your head.
Alex: Yeah, it’s basically in your head and it’s in front of you. They’re not giving you anything extra. So I don’t think it’s going to pick up as much. And I do think it’s kind of a marketing gimmick for now, as you said, to compete with Meta and put something out there.
Adam: Well, you don’t want to be walking down the street with a headset on, do you? You might you might walk into something. Yeah.
Alex: No, you can still see, right? You can still see in front of you.
Marcell: You can, yeah. It kind of comes up in front of you and then you can have like a full overlay or you can see like windows that come up over the real world and stuff.
Alex: Like basically you can wear it all the time. Like you can see through it.
Adam: I could see something like that catching on. If you think about other trends, like I saw the equivalent of AirPods in not actually AirPods, but I saw little in-ear headphones in like 2014 and at the time everyone’s like, Why would anyone want to wear a little Bluetooth headset? Sony made one and it didn’t do particular well because Sony are shocking at marketing in comparison to Apple. And obviously you go on a train now, everyone’s got AirPods in. It’s just the norm. You even see taxi drivers. You know, my friend was in hospital recently. He’s sitting there in hospital not very well and he’s got his AirPods in. Everyone always wears the AirPods VR headsets, you know, people look at them before no one’s ever used them, but they then boomed. So I can definitely see some of that catching on. And also even things like Overear headphones, you know, you see these gigantic over-ear headphones, you think, why would someone wear them? Loads of people wear them and no one judges you. So give it a bit of time. It’ll probably be the norm seeing someone walking around with it. Yeah, well.
Marcell: That’s what they hope for. Yeah. What about you, Greg?
Greg: Yeah. I watched the developer conference like the first, the first day and like, I watched the whole thing and actually I, I think although it has a really high price point, I think the value is there. I think it will. I think this is the first VR tech that I think probably has the potential to really start to get traction. I don’t think it’s going to happen immediately. Like you say, I think it’s going to take some time. I think actually it could be interesting to see how it how it unfolds in the business space, like in the B2B space. The one thing they’ve done with Vision Pro is they’ve added a lot of really powerful use cases that are going to help with like work collaboration. If your company feels like spending two, $3,000 on a brand new laptop, for example, versus let’s get you a vision pro, I think that use case could take off.
Marcell: Especially since remote working has become so popular now, allowing people to have these like really massive workspaces on their head. And it increases this kind of distant collaboration just to the new level. But yeah, so we’ve got a quite a mixed bag there. Some people think it will take off, some won’t. But let’s see what people on the Internet are saying. So we’ve got a few videos to react to and maybe that will stir up some different opinions.
Marcell: The following shows a virtual conversation between two friends with one wearing the Apple Vision Pro and being bombarded with all sorts of apps popping up over their screen while trying to have a heartfelt chat. There’s not much worse than explaining a joke. So if you want the full experience, head over to our YouTube channel and get stuck in.
Adam: Yeah. Yeah, fair enough.
Marcell: Have like ads popping up everywhere
Adam: Notifications. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.
Greg: But that could be the reality. Like, that is where tech meets the real world. And like you were saying…
Alex: I think not.
Greg: It’s not really going to work in a person-to-person environment that well, probably the use case is more for a remote virtual connection.
Adam: Random one on that because that definitely could happen. And we were talking about remote working and working from home. One thing that I’ve noticed and I’m sure everyone else has noticed is generally if you’ve got multiple screens, you might be on a Zoom call or a teams call and then your other screen goes. It could be an email or another team’s message and you’re looking like that if you’ve got a camera straight in your face and it, does the software pick up your eye movements?
Marcell: Yeah, very much.
Adam: Like this over there. And you’re like, Adam, look at me.
Marcell: Yeah. Yeah, that’s rude.
Adam: You’re having a conversation with someone face to face, which is reliving every bit of eye movement, every little bit of interaction you pick up on.
Marcell: It tracks your eyes like, very precisely.
Alex: That’s how you pick up the apps, right? With your eye movement.
Adam: That’s incredible. So you’re literally navigating the iOS screen, but like, just looking.
Marcell: Yeah, look at a search bar and start speaking and it’ll start typing like what you want to search.
Adam: If you have three and a half grand.
Marcell: You can see it all. You don’t even have to look at it because it’s in your vision. You can like pinch it in the corner here and then it’ll still like.
Adam: That’s incredible.
Greg: Adam’s getting his checkbook out. Yeah.
Adam: I love that. So, yeah, Yeah.
Marcell: Leads us into our next video, though.
Marques Brownlee: First time Apple ever showed the vision pro headset to the world. In real life, they used this shot, this sort of stabilised, orbiting, short shot, rotating around a head and then looking through the headset inside. And I started seeing it bubbling up on Twitter. But you might have caught that. It’s actually a reference to this shot in Ready Player One.
Wade Watts (Ready Player One): He gave us a place to go, a place called: The oasis.
Marques Brownlee: It’s basically the exact same shot. What is it supposed to mean that they’re referencing that movie? Like Ready Player One is actually a pretty dystopian movie where right after that scene they explain how people got way too into the virtual world to the point where they were literally neglecting their kids and correlating it too much with real life. So maybe it’s a warning. Maybe it’s a coincidence.
Greg: MKB is a legend.
Adam: Oh, no, yeah I watch him. He is so good.
Greg: He gets everything so right.
Adam: He does. Ready Player One by the way, the books are definitely better than the film. Yeah, the books. Brilliant. I think that’s a clever reference because everybody loves the film and obviously the book was great. They’re not really marketing the fact that people got to wide into it, the marketing, the fact that it was cool, kids would love that. You know, you got the metaverse, you’ve got everything virtual. It is that escape, isn’t it? Very clever marketing.
Greg: You think it’s intentional?
Marcell: 100%. It must be.
Adam: Yeah, 100%, definitely.
Greg: Yeah.
Adam: They’ll probably get sued by Spielberg.
Marcell: The following video contrasts the Vision Pro Reveal trailer with an episode of Black Mirror in which the ability to replay memories has created a dystopian society wracked with anxiety and personal conflict. Once again, you can tune in to the full episode on YouTube at Insider podcast and experience our reactions in full.
Greg: There’s always going to be these these unknowns in terms of like how these technologies are going to affect like people in long term, because you can’t possibly do a long term study without…
Marcell: Doing a long term study.
Greg: Yeah.
Marcell: Same thing with social media.
Greg: Yeah, we’re seeing that on play now in society, aren’t we?
Alex: That’s why we destroy stuff first.
Greg: Then it also brings in to the conversation the idea of deep fake technology. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So basically, like, you can effectively create any scenario with any individual. Someone asked on a podcast the other day how long until we literally cannot rely on video footage in the legal system? And they said, Well, we’re pretty much there. Yeah, just not enough people know how to do it basically. Like, but as soon as Deepfake technology becomes really open and accessible to like the everyday person.
Adam: But no, in terms of on the video and the video recordings, I actually really love that idea that you can go back into it and see a life event. Obviously it might be a little bit nostalgic sometimes and probably quite upsetting, but yeah.
Marcell: But at the same time, it’s like you have to record that in the first place to get there. And then I saw a comment of someone saying like, realistically, it would just be like, you’re there at your kid’s birthday. And he’s like, Dad, why are you like, take the headset off!
Adam: Be in the moment!
Marcell: Yeah, exactly. Like when you go to a concert, then they’ll just be holding their phones up.
Adam: Yeah, just put your phone down. Or you’re going on holiday and you’ve just got a headset on the whole time recording it. Yeah, no, that would be weird.
Alex: That’s the thing is a lot of unnatural habits from it. Like is if you’re alone, you do everything alone. Watching a movie alone, working alone, doing everything alone. You can use it and you might use it, but at the moment you’re with someone or there’s someone else there. You’re not going to use it for those same things that you would like. You’d use a phone, for example.
Adam: Yeah, I think the use cases that I could definitely see this working virtual office and all of us just stick this headset on and it’s like being in a social environment and you can just turn your head and go, All right, Marcell, how are you doing? Look left and right, because the whole working from home that everyone loves. But do we really love it? Do we miss a lot of human interaction? Do we miss the banter? Because you definitely do. And we’ve discussed this many times that when you get new colleagues, you don’t really know them. And also things like messages on instant messages can be misconceived. They can seem rude or brash. But if you’ve got this headset on and you can see, Oh my God, Greg’s he’s rammed. I’m not going to message him right now. Yeah, that’s really cool. And I think gaming is a huge one. Yeah. Yeah. Gaming I think, could be massive for something like this.
Marcell: Speaking of that, like, you walk through the office, you see, like, Greg has like a bunch of notifications all floating around.
Adam: And you can see he’s rammed, like, literally above his head.
Greg: Like exploding steam coming out my ears. Yeah, that’d be cool. It’s true, though. Like, it’s going to increase connection between employees.
Alex: Would you wear the thing for eight hours though?
Greg: No you won’t but you don’t. For example, you probably won’t need to wear it because you don’t put your headset on necessarily in like all day. If you’re not on a call, you’re just doing a much higher quality version of it. Yeah, that’s I think it’ll probably start,
Adam: 20 years from now. We did a video podcast and I remember when he came onto the call, I was like, Whoa, he had a, he had an 8K webcam and it freaked me out. I was like, Oh my God, It’s like he’s in the room. But it’s really weird because that’s the human interaction that we are missing. But if this can get us that kind of level, although is there a counterargument to that that if we all ended up with this in 20 years time, are we ever going to go outside? Oh, yeah. Yeah. It’s weird.
Marcell: And it’s like those technologies. We already are fully capable of having these calls and these like worldwide communications and things. This is kind of just adding another layer onto that, another barrier in a way, and a very expensive barrier as well. Even if it’s for work, like it’s a really big investment and are the capabilities that it brings actually worthwhile and worth that investment? I don’t know, maybe in the future when it comes down in price, but that whole workplace environment idea is what the metaverse is also trying to push. And the next video we have is actually from Zuckerberg himself talking about his views on the Apple Vision Pro. So let’s find out what he thinks…
Alex: I want to say, like I think the software of it and what comes out software-wise is what will happen going forward. But the hardware that comes with it at the moment is just a gimmick I think is not going to go forward. Like I get frustrated now that it’s hot and I’m wearing a watch, like I’m not going to wear that thing for ten minutes.
Marcell: Like a big computer on your head that’s going to overheat, right? It’s going to make your head hot like it’s not good.
Adam: I do find it really funny, though, that when I was growing up and your parents would teach you to not sit too close to the TV, yet now it’s in your eyeballs. You get the equivalent of a full thing.
Alex: Yeah, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t hurt your eyes, though.
Marcell: How do you know? They could only test it for a short amount of time.
Alex: Yeah, but it’s about the–
Adam: Are you telling me my parents lied to me?
Alex: Well, what is the technology? What it’s projecting is just light. Whereas before it wasn’t light. It was the three different types. It was RGB.
Adam: Right, I get you. Yeah.
Mark Zuckerberg: I do think that this is a certain level of validation for the category. I think having Apple come in and share that vision will make a lot of people who are fans of their product. Really consider that. You know, of course, the $3,500 price. You know, on the one hand, I get it for with all the stuff that they’re trying to pack in there. On the other hand, a lot of people aren’t going to find that to be affordable. So I think that there’s a chance that them coming in actually increases demand for the overall space. And that Quest three is actually the primary beneficiary of that, because a lot of the people who might say, hey, now I understand maybe what mixed reality is more and Quest three is the best one on the market that I can afford. And it’s great. And there are a lot of features that we have where we’re leading on that could be quite good.
Greg: It’s a really good point about the price pricing because if you wind back to even five years ago, maybe more like ten, if we had said people will be paying £1,200, £1,300 or whatever it is for the latest whopping iPhone, you’d be like, no way. Yeah, they’re doing it. They’re flying off the shelves. People are buying them like. Like they’re hotcakes, like technology will always move at that pace. In my opinion. There will be expensive. There’ll be ultra premium. Like Zuckerberg said, in the short term, you probably will get an adoption of like the competitive, cheaper products. But that always happens. But people end up gravitating back to Apple because their quality of product is so good.
Adam: Yeah, I think I think he’s right. You’re right, Greg, because I remember when the iPhone came out and I think it had a price tag of £500 and at the time Nokia were the market leader. Where are they now? They literally took them out and he’s absolutely spot on with that is it will raise awareness of everything which means more competitors will appear Samsung will have an equivalent, then it will be the LG and then it will be the Chinese brands like Oppo and then like the guy we watched earlier. There’ll be comparison videos and people like, Actually, I don’t need that function or I’m an Android fan, I don’t like iOS. So yeah, it will just raise awareness. 100%.
Greg: Yeah. Think about, like, even, like face ID. One of the most talked about topics in the news at the time was we’ll never adopt face recognition technology. Like it was all over the news. And literally in the same year, Apple just went, Yeah, it’s the only option now to unlock your phone. Everyone’s like, Yep, fine. Okay. And now, now you.
Speaker6: Wouldn’t even now.
Greg: Every phone has face ID and it’s basically like the default thing. And it’s because, like, the technology just got adopted. Yeah, no one really knows or is scared or is aware of it. Like you say, low adoption. So then when it does, it just tips.
Adam: We’re just sheep.
Greg: Yeah, we’ll be doing our next episode with the headset.
Marcell: Yeah. It’s interesting though, because like, that happened with the iPhone and that blew up straight away, right? But then you have stuff like Apple Pay, which took quite a longer while to get integrated and people using it all the time. Maybe this will be one of those that takes longer, Right? But by the time that it is getting much more widespread, that’s when there’ll be these more options. And so it’ll be a lot more accessible.
Adam: For the first time I used contactless payment wasn’t Apple Pay or Google Pay, it was just the normal card was at the 2012 Olympics at a vending machine. I was like, this is seriously cool. So yeah, you’re looking at what, ten, 12, 11 years later? If you expect everyone now to just take contactless payment. In fact, most people now say they don’t want cash. So maybe in ten years this will just be the norm. You’re right. Yeah.
Marcell: That leads us onto our basically the big discussion of this episode, which is going to be about linking this back to the B2B space and the customer experience. Obviously this is quite a high level concept at the moment, but like we’ve said in the future it might be commonplace and then if that is commonplace for customers, then it brings all sorts of new behavioural challenges and changes the customer journey and everything. So we’re going to be taking a look at that, kicking off things with retail. So Adam, you’ve talked a lot on the podcast before about mixed reality and AR and VR in the retail environment. Now that obviously is a lot more online shopping, but customers are still hungry for that in-person experience. So how do you think that technology like this widespread VR, could alter the customer experience in retail stores? And how could retailers maybe adapt or improve their service offerings and everything to accommodate to that?
Adam: Well, I think they have to first of all, depends exactly who it is. If it’s a transactional retailer, Poundland, they don’t need to or maybe not a Primark, but if you are a luxury retail brand, you definitely need to adopt it. One, because if you’re selling luxury products, this is a luxury product. You know, the people that are going to be spending 3500 pounds on something like this, they’re the ones that will spend £3,000 on a bag. It’s to be ahead of the game and actually automatically offer a virtual store or a virtual service where their customers are.
Adam: 100%. And I think you’d be quite ignorant to ignore that. I mean, really bad idea. There are some cons Retail shopping has really suffered recently for all sorts of reasons, but there’s also reasons why it is still there. And one of that is when you go to buy a physical product, we like to touch things. We like to feel things. You know, if you’re buying clothing, you like to know what the fabrics like. Is it some cheap polyester that’s going to make you sweat or is it 100% Egyptian cotton? You know, all these kind of things, and you’re not going to get that in a virtual reality. The other industry that I would definitely talk about this as well will be things like automotive and luxury, large goods, you know, automotive. You want to buy a Tesla, why don’t you go put one of these on and sit in the Tesla?
Marcell: Yeah. You see what it’s like.
Adam: Walk around. See? Yeah. See the finish of the dashboard. Even better when you configure up your car and you’re choosing whether you want the walnut dash, the aluminium brush dash, whatever you just configure in the app and you’re sitting in it and you can see it and you can actually…
Marcell: Like tweak things here or there, like customise it.
Adam: 100%.
Marcell: And hear the different sounds because you get the custom horn sounds in Tesla as well.
Adam: Right?
Marcell: Test them while you’re in there.
Adam: Any vehicle manufacturing a Mercedes, BMW, you always got these customisable options, the cars so you could get in the car. You can get a true feel of it, the sound of the engine. If it’s not electric, obviously that’s going to slowly die down. But there’s so many industries, you know, automotive. I’m even thinking of things like estate agents, you know, you want to look at buying a house. They do these virtual tours on Rightmove. They’re not virtual tours, they’re just slideshows. Yeah. Imagine doing a proper recording of a five bedroom house. Look around the house and getting a real idea how high the ceilings, you know, what’s the daylight like?
Marcell: The photos are always misleading anyway.
Adam: Yeah, of course. And, you know, estate agents lie on the floor with a giant fisheye with a fisheye lens. Well, this is huge. So I actually think in terms of a customer experience, in terms of increasing your reach market, I think this is absolutely the way forward. And I think if you ignore it, it’s a bad, bad idea. And if you don’t evolve with the times, you die.
Greg: If you isolate just like customer service, for example, virtual customer service currently that is predominantly telephone. We were talking earlier about a lot of our telephone, email, chat, for example. That’s a lot of the virtual. We are moving towards video as a world, basically that’s like the next step and with things like 5G, etcetera, it’s just going to become much more normal to use that tech. So. Any brand really hesitant to using video. In my opinion, all you’re doing is preventing the stepping stone, which is going to be virtual reality. Fast forward 1015 years. Let’s say you want to speak to someone about a Tesla, for example, and you do pop on a vision pro at home and they have one at work and you are literally basically as good as face to face. And it’s ultra high definition. What does that do from a customer experience perspective? To me, it replicates the best possible scenario, which is you’re in the same room. All brands really want to do one thing, which is try and bring their customers closer to their brand and have a more effective and better customer experience. So if that’s your goal, technologies like that 100% can.
Alex: But the interactions, I don’t see it like for example, in a customer service, you’re, you’re not actually there with the person. You’re just it’s the same as a zoom call. There’s no difference having a zoom call on your laptop than having it here. It’s the same thing. He’s not he’s not seeing me more from empathy point of view. Sure, the other person is not seeing anything different. If they have the glasses or if they’re in a zoom call, they still see the same thing. It’s just in front.
Marcell: Because the vision pro creates an avatar of your face for FaceTime because obviously you’re wearing it. So there’s no cameras to look at you. It’s not even actually you that is they’re seeing, but like a generated version of yourself. So that actually kind of reduces it. If you’ve already got your MacBook there, then you know, is it really like necessary to have all that?
Alex: That’s the thing. Like in retail, I see applicability when it comes to this kind of stuff. I’m sitting in a car and I can actually sit in a car, but with anything else like.
Adam: What I just did think of though, I guarantee you there’s going to be obscene amounts of filters and stuff for people’s faces. No one’s actually going to look like on there. No one’s going to want their face and go, don’t want that wrinkle there that I slightly later than that one beautify me.
Greg: Yeah, definitely. Yeah that’s true.
Marcell: Which is obviously a bit of a fine line of like the whole society question again of like, how is this going to make things even worse or better?
Greg: You’ve also got to as a brand, you’ve got to be really honest with yourself, which is what you’re saying about what are the actual use cases that actually make sense If you’re looking at how do we create a deeper connection, a better customer experience or interaction, there probably are three or 4 or 5 use cases within anyone’s customer service model that probably actually make really good sense to invest in. Like you were saying, if you end up trying to like force this technology into a use case that doesn’t really need it, you’re wasting time and money when actually you could just focus on probably one or 2 or 3, let’s say, where it’s actually going to affect the bottom line.
Marcell: So for example, in banking, Alex, there was a recent article from Forbes that was essentially scrutinising that exact idea of like in banking, is this potentially applicable? Is it worth looking at? Because it seems that kind of new technologies that have been arising always in banking, at least they take after other industries. So once they’re kind of popular in entertainment and retail and stuff like that later, then banking will start to adopt the same kind of things. If it does become popular, then that trend will probably continue with this. But do you think that in banking it the Vision Pro has any possible applications?
Alex: You know, like I think when it comes to B2C banking, there’s nothing value added there because it’s like, what do we do in our everyday banking transactions? We check our balance, we check the transactions we did. We pay money to someone, we check something very superficially. So I don’t think there’s any use case that will force any change or people to adopt that technology more When it comes to banking, the same way you use your phone to check your balance and make payments and so on, it will be the same thing you have that there. If you have it on you, you might do that, but I would not pick it up to go to the bank.
Adam: No, no, no.
Alex: Yeah. No. Or make a payment and so on.
Adam: So if they did like you know, with open banking, there’s a huge amount of apps now that like aggregate the information from multiple bank accounts, credit cards, that kind of stuff. If you put this on, couldn’t they get to the situation where you could have multiple banking apps open at once so you could go, Right, I’ve got my current account over here, which is what I pay my mortgage out of. And then over here I’ve got my everyday spending and over here I’ve got the wife’s credit card. You could do all of them in one place and with open banking, surely you could get them to interact with each other.
Marcell: So you can just have them all open and pinch and like, visually transfer money.
Adam: That makes it faster.
Alex: It will happen if you have the technology, but it’s not something that’s going to push you to say, Ah, if I had that technology, oh. I’d be a millionaire, you know. Like you wouldn’t do like, whereas if I want to buy a Tesla and I want to see the Tesla, you would say, if I had those glasses there, I could actually see the Tesla without going.
Alex: Let’s say your investment banker and do all these charts and you want to project manage stuff between you and your. You have the ability to stand in front of the chart and move it and see it around, which again is not something extremely different, but it’s a similar thing. But yeah, true. Those are the kind of things that you’re going to be able to do. Like if there’s two of you together and you’re. Look investments and you want to see graphs and stuff and you analyse it from a different angle. You want to bring them all in front of you.
Adam: What about like a customer experience to a branch or to a person that would normally have been in a branch because branches are closing? Not all of them. Obviously, if I was buying a house and I’ve got you as my mortgage advisor, do you think there’s any advantage of having maybe video interaction with Alex, the mortgage advisor? Well, with video calling, you don’t think this brings another level?
Alex: No, because it’s still video call. That’s why I was saying before, it’s the same as a zoom call. It doesn’t change. Yeah. No.
Adam: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fair point.
Alex: Culturally, we’re reducing the interaction we have with our bankers or the bank branch and so on. So if the interaction is reduced because of technology, you’re not going to get this to interact more.
Greg: I think slightly differently. I think the value is exactly in those conversations. So banking has moved to a place for the last few years where the higher complexity, most valuable transactions between customers and brands are major life events. So like buying your first home, mortgaging remortgaging savings, investments, they’re all like major life decisions, major life events. And I think technology like that plus video, I think that only enhances that experience. It may not look like it right now. That technology like Vision Pro is any different to video. I guarantee five years from now it will feel massively different. It will feel like you’re basically in the room with the person way more than video, but it won’t be used for 90% of the interactions or use cases to open a current account and used to go in to a branch. Meet the branch manager. Bank manager. It was this big to do. You’d have a cup of tea, you’d sign the paperwork and you’d leave.
Adam: It’s now flipped the other way, hasn’t it? It’s now how quickly can you do it?
Alex: Even traditional banks do that now. Yeah. Get a card. Yeah, you’re right. Don’t need to speak to anyone. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Great, isn’t it?
Greg: So. So if you think about. If you think about that. Right. And you think banking five years, ten years from now, those higher value transactions between customer and brand, they’re still going to exist. They are the things that really make a difference in our lives. If you’re trying to differentiate your brand, trying to build stronger customer connections, those technologies are only going to enable it. What do you think?
Adam: Knowing Apple, although it isn’t really anything, well, it is different, but there are that technologies elsewhere maybe not as good, but they’ll almost want to set it as a brand new trend. Yeah, do you know what I mean?
Marcell: Yeah. I mean, they dominate every space they’re in. Yeah.
Adam: They will want to say that.
Marcell: Zuckerberg’s totally spot on that this will just increase the popularity and the reality of it much more.
Greg: Yeah but we’re five years too early. Like it’s five years too early in the sense of the next one, two, three, four, five years’ version…
Adam: In five years we’ll get to buy it for £700.
Greg: It just be like this on your. Yeah. Your one eye. Yeah. Yeah. But you’re right like it is, it is early. They probably will bring out other versions of it to make it more accessible. That’s why I think it’s going to play out more in the business space because it’s so expensive and it’s very advanced technology.
Adam: You get some influencers on it, you’re done. Yeah, KSI or whatever will be on it. Yeah, they will.
Greg: They are businesses now in their own right, aren’t they like content creators are businesses?
Marcell: So and that will open up a whole new world as well of content creation, which will be interesting to see. But as a final verdict, we’ve talked around it a lot. You know how it can impact the customer experience and what the future might look like as a result of this new Apple Vision Pro. What do you guys think? Would you buy one? Yes or no?
Adam: You got any voucher codes?
Greg: 80% off?
Adam: Me personally, I probably would purchase one, but I wouldn’t purchase it at 3500, 1500 to 2 grand, probably if it was really revolutionary.
Alex: I mean, like you said…
Adam: Alex is probably going what is Adam on about?
Alex: No, no, I like gadgets as well and I would love to try it and play with it. Yes.
Adam: I think I actually think I would use it.
Alex: My price would be on 1K.
Greg: Would it? $1,000?
Adam: That’s the thing as well. It’s 3500 dollars. I bet you it’s 3500 pounds.
Alex: You would buy that 1,500 or 2 K.
Adam: I would.
Alex: I wouldn’t. 1K, maybe? No. And especially the thing. I don’t think that’s going to add value to my life now. Like in what to sit and look at a 4K video I never look at videos.
Adam: I love the idea of having a…
Alex: Do you watch movies on your own?
Adam: Independent watches, we call them. Me and the other half. Yeah. She wants to watch something that I’m not interested in. I’ll watch something else.
Marcell: Yeah, we’ll be there together on the couch. But you’re watching different things.
Adam: Yeah, I’m watching some horrifying sci-fi things.
Speaker6: Hours with a heavy thing on your head.
Adam: Oh, it can’t be be that heavy.
Alex: I don’t know. I don’t know. I haven’t tried.
Adam: Yeah, it’s not like it’s going to mess my hair up.
Alex: Can be that comfortable. It can be that comfortable either.
Adam: I don’t know. I mean, Apple have got a lot of money.
Alex: So will something else. You won’t be able to walk out the house because you’re going to have a line here.
Marcell: You walk outside, you get a sunburn.
Greg: So Adam’s in. You’re not in unless it’s under a thousand. I personally think I wouldn’t buy it for my personal setting, like I don’t. But that’s because I love technology. I work with it every day, but I also like try and keep a large distance between myself and getting over consumed by technology. Don’t watch a lot of TV. Try and spend more time outside and all that sort of stuff. Could you use it for work? I’d 100%, yes. I know that means I don’t buy it. The company buys it, which is a slight plus. But if someone said, Would you try that for work? I would. We literally have a hybrid working company, so I would 100% get it to use it. What do you think? Because you’re the youngest one in the room.
Marcell: Well, I kind of agree with that. Like having grown up with technology so much and using it all the time, I try and kind of disconnect outside of that as much as I can. So putting a computer on your head is kind of counter-intuitive to that, so I probably wouldn’t get one, but for work, I think it could be cool, but at the same time it’s like that’s really what it seems like to me, is that it’s cool, right? But is it really going to add that much value like you’re saying Alex, that much more productivity when you know, if you just have multiple monitors, you can have the different windows up and stuff like that, you can kind of already do it. So I guess we’ll just have to see how popular it becomes.