Welcome to Lowpass! This week: Karl Guttag explains what’s wrong with the Vision Pro, and CVS wants to get rid of “these large unwanted machines,” a.k.a. its Redbox kiosks.

Getting schooled by AR/VR optics expert Karl Guttag

When Magic Leap tried to woo the tech world with flashy demos a few years back, blogger Karl Guttag was among the first to call their bluff. When Humane announced its AI Pin last year, Guttag immediately deemed it a “$230 million AI twist on an old scam.” And when Apple released the Vision Pro in February, he concluded that the device simply wasn’t capable of replacing high-resolution desktop monitors, and in some aspects even had worse optics than Meta’s much-cheaper Quest 3 headset.

Guttag’s somewhat obsessive and extremely geeky blog posts on the optics of AR and VR headsets, which often include numerous test patterns and charts, have gained him a devoted following among spatial computing industry insiders, including key executives of some of the biggest companies in the space. 

Hugo Barra, who previously led VR efforts at Meta and Xiaomi, recently called Guttag “an amazingly talented expert in display devices.” HTC’s VR leader Alvin Wang Graylin told me that he is a reader of Guttag’s blog, and called him “quite savvy on optics.” And Google’s former VR head Clay Bavor told me he is a “huge fan of his work.” 

“Everyone reads his stuff,” said Moor Insights & Strategy analyst Anshel Sag.

Guttag has also faced quite a bit of a backlash from Vision Pro fans, but he remains unfazed. “Companies will tell you about all the wonderful things about their products,” Guttag told me during an interview earlier this year. “I’m telling you the rest of the story.”

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