Brian Merchant: Forget the metaverse. For $3,500, Apple offers a new way to be alone
Remember the metaverse? No? Well, you're not alone.
It seems but a faint memory now, but before AI mania swept Silicon Valley, the concept that everyone would soon be strapping on headsets and logging on to an "embodied internet" to do conference calls and standup comedy was center stage in the tech world — thrust there by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Yet even at the peak of its hype cycle, polls found that most Americans had never even heard the term "metaverse." It didn't take.
To Apple, that's just as well, seeing as how it now aims to wipe the metaverse away completely. This week, the most giant tech giant , a $3,500 "spatial reality" headset, its first major new product in half a decade. That's an absurdly hefty price tag — attendees at Apple's developer conference — and still something of a big deal, seeing as
