Introducing the New i-Cringe Max

Eight reasons why we just say ‘no’ to Apple Vision Pro

Aw, would you look at this? Two friends enjoying a meal together and not a cell phone in sight… 

Our dystopian nightmare hellscape has arrived—and with impeccable timing no less. As crises unfold around the world, along comes Apple with a $3500 escape hatch from anxieties over inflation, housing shortages and impending war. I propose we band together and tell Apple where it can put its mixed-reality headset. 

Maybe you’re thinking… new technology can’t be uninvented. You can’t wish it away. This is true, but the fruits of technology can bomb spectacularly. Ask the inventor of the Amphicar. 

Getting past Apple’s marketing juggernaut won’t be easy. These masters of manufactured FOMO will stop at nothing, including scarcity and urgency tactics, to entice you. But there’s also something called JOMO, the joy of missing out, a concept introduced to me by my smart friend Tom Siebert. When JOMO takes hold, the act of refusing becomes the “high-status” opinion. Here are eight solid reasons why we need to JOMO the crap out of Apple’s latest abomination…

1. It’s a major turn-off 

VR contraptions are how male virgins recognize each other in the wild. As a dude, you might as well wear Crocs and shorteralls. It’s literally the last thing we need during a fertility crisis. 

2. Think of the children! 

There is zero chance these headsets don’t fry your kids’ brains, wreck their dopamine receptors in two minutes and zombify them 20 times faster than an iPad. Scott Adams put it exactly right: “If this ‘drug’ was in pill form, it would be illegal without extensive clinical trials.” Gen-Z teenage boys are already too scared to talk to girls and spend too much time on smartphones. Do you want them out of your basement or not? 

3. Elites: one. Useless eaters: zero.

Like Smart Cities, carbon trackers, digital IDs and relentless universal surveillance, VR is Davos Man’s wet dream. Klaus Schwab’s vision of the future is not far off from a Ready Player One scenario, a world reeling from poverty and collapse in which people find comfort and sanctuary in a VR utopia called “OASIS.” Klaus believes you’ll be happy with your UBI, eating lab-grown meat in your skyscraper rabbit hutch, so long as there’s a TV screen strapped to your face. 

4. Your squalid hellacious future 

Technocrats sell the illusion that a high-tech utopia is safe and sterile, but evidence shows the virtual world isn’t quite so sunny. The Daily Mail ventured into Zuckerberg’s metaverse and found it to be “swirling with gang rapes, child grooming and graphic content.”  IRL, the VR experience exhausts your limbic system, destroying your productivity and eventually society. Nothing left for you but safe injection sites and a low-paid job on a high-protein cricket farm. 

5. It will normalize bullying

The Vision Pro headset is basically a 35-hundred-dollar ‘kick-me’ sign. Wearing one signals strong “nerd who got stuffed in trash cans every day in high school” vibes.  The guy in a headset behind the wheel of a Tesla Cybertruck might look cool (to some) but this dude leaving a port-a-potty with a trail of toilet paper stuck to his shoe is asking for a wedgie. 

6. Big Tech is your narcissistic frenemy

She might be charismatic, attentive and lots of fun but deep down, she’s pathologically selfish and doesn’t care about you at all. Big Tech pushes technology on you it wouldn’t let its own children use. It scolds you about your carbon footprint while its executives circle the globe in private jets and extol the value of virtual travel on the poors. Bay Area tech billionaires live in hillside gated mansions—where crime don’t climb—while San Francisco descends further into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. As Oprah would say, when someone tells you who they are, believe them.

7. Safety

Obstructing your vision while distracting yourself with screens is the surest path to a Darwin Award. This woman running face-first into her microwave wearing VR goggles says it all. With crime spiking in US cities, VR headsets are an invitation to muggers. Right now, as we speak, there’s a dude out there blissfully unaware he’s about to make history as the first person to get smoked by a bus on account of his Vision Pro. 

8. Apple is now cringe AF

In the annals of our tech overlords indulging in toe-curling antics, I thought nothing could beat Bill Gates dancing on stage at the Windows 95 release. Alas, no, Apple outdid Gates’ goofy White Man’s Shuffle with this pageant of leaden acting, corny dialogue, humblebrags, audacious greenwashing and all-out baloney. The spot features Octavia Spenser playing Mother Nature as omniscient, omnipotent ESG Commissar who gets treated to a smorgasbord of eco-virtue signals by Apple’s executive team. CEO Tim Cook debuted the video on X with a cringey dad pun…

A real force of nature! Get it? Nyuk nyuk nyuk. Steve Jobs might have been a jerk but within his own fiefdom, he curbed Big Tech’s predilection for dorkiness. Right now he’s face-palming in heaven.

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Do you see now, friends, why we cannot give Apple this win? We’ve enabled Silicon Valley’s fantasy world long enough. It’s time it got a wake-up call and maybe even an aggressive culling, which Elon Musk proved possible by firing 70 percent of Twitter 1.0 staff yet still maintaining a functioning product. It might just induce a return to the Valley’s glory days of the 70s and 80s—an embodiment of the capitalist spirit at its best, epitomized by garage start-ups and unironic dreams of making the world a better place.