How Apple Builds the Future

When Apple unveiled Vision Pro, its first new hardware platform since the Apple Watch’s launch in 2015, it was the first time most of us had seen it. And yet, if you’ve used Apple products at all over the past decade, the product’s design was almost déjà vu.

A curved pane of black glass. A brushed aluminum body. A cloth headband and a braided power cord. Upraised, rounded rectangle buttons. A Digital Crown. 

The Vision Pro wasn’t an iPhone, or an Apple Watch, but its design was clearly related to both. There was an uncanny feeling that you’d seen this thing before, that you almost could have predicted what Apple was building if you’d looked in the right spot. 

The Digital Crown—the small round knob on the right of the Apple Watch—was lifted straight from horology, when the watch first launched in 2015. As an analogue to the crown used to set and wind a traditional watch, it was a way to anchor the Apple Watch to its mechanical ancestors, launched alongside the first generation’s solid gold case. For the button-averse Apple, it was almost a surprising bit of physical excess.

Then the Digital Crown gained a second life as a volume knob on Apple AirPods Max in 2020. It began its third life on Monday, as the way to dial the real world in or out on the Vision Pro headset. The Digital Crown went from an homage to a default new Apple input control.

If you’ve ever worn a watch before, you know instinctively how to use the Apple Watch crown. Now that familiarity is paying off for Apple again: If you’ve ever worn an Apple Watch, you already know how to use at least one part of the Vision Pro. The learning curve of virtual reality is high, and Apple can bring it down a bit with familiar design elements. That familiarity is part of what makes the Apple ecosystem so sticky.