A spatial Boardroom
There's a bit of Apple Store in every Vision Pro.
Of all the apps optimized for Apple Vision Pro, Keynote might be my favorite. There’s an Easter egg hiding inside.
Keynote allows you to rehearse your presentations in immersive Environments that fill your field of vision. When you open a slide and tap the Environments button, you’ll see two options: “Conference Room” and “Theater.” Theater is a virtual recreation of Steve Jobs Theater, and Conference Room is… an Apple Store Boardroom!
The first time I saw a clip of the Conference Room Environment on Apple Vision Pro, I assumed Apple had essentially lifted a 3D model of a real store Boardroom from its blueprints and stuck it inside Keynote. This theory quickly fell apart after I dug in a bit. Developer Dylan McDonald of Sun Apps captured the high-quality screenshots from Keynote in this article so that I could take a closer look.
The Keynote Boardroom has windows, which, if we were playing Guess Who?, would immediately turn over most of the board. Very few Boardrooms face an exterior wall, and some are underground. We can also surmise that the Keynote Boardroom is a bit older, since newer Boardrooms have wood paneling behind the television displaying your presentation, not black fabric. (Compare the photos of Apple Regent Street and Passeig de Gràcia here.)
That theory is a bit shaky because the Keynote Boardroom has a tan rug, and older Boardrooms often included sage green or dark gray rugs, but it’s ultimately unimportant. I’ve decided this Boardroom represents a composite model of every Boardroom ever built, not any one in particular.
Of the stores with Boardroom windows, essentially none have panes as large as those in the Keynote Environment. The closest match I’ve found is Apple Kärntner Straße in Vienna, Austria, where the windows are on the opposite side of the room:
The closer you look, the more oddities you’ll spot. The Keynote Environment has an upholstered bench under the windows. Instead of Apple Park photography, the wall artwork features scenes from Half Dome in Yosemite. There’s no sofa, lounge chairs, or coffee table — just some upholstered cubes on the console table. (Presumably these are now made of synthetic digital leather.) Even the drawer pulls on the credenza are at the top, opposite a real store!
How about the chairs? Apple Store Boardrooms have Maruni Hiroshima Armchairs. Perhaps Apple didn’t secure the rights to distribute 3D models of this fixture, so the chairs have been swapped for… something else. I can’t identify these chairs, and I’m not sure they actually exist. Their design is somewhere between a Bok dining chair and a Muuto Cover Armchair, but falls short of both. Maybe they’ve been designed to look like everything and nothing at the same time.
The retail references in visionOS don’t end there. If you’re using Vision Pro with FaceTime, Webex, Zoom, or other video conferencing apps, your Persona can appear to others with a virtual background of either Mount Hood or a Boardroom. Dylan was able to extract all three Boardroom backgrounds from visionOS, each of which has unique wall artwork and a different camera perspective. These images are oddly labeled “office,” not “Conference Room.”
These little surprises in visionOS are absolutely great. Every device ships with a tiny bit of Apple Store inside. For a product so tied to the retail experience, it feels fitting.
Store wallpapers
Speaking of beautifully-rendered Apple Store scenes, my friend Filip has put together a collection of incredible wallpapers for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The five wallpaper sets — Pudong (Genius), Pudong (Pickup), Hongdae, Georgetown, and Williamsburg — feature scenes we’ve discussed here, like recent Apple Pickup and Genius Bar renovations.
The dynamic wallpapers are my favorite. It’s fun to watch the stores change their layouts and lighting based on the time of day. These are must-have wallpapers for anyone that enjoys this newsletter, so I encourage you to check them out.
Privacy details
Last week Apple shared an in-depth Vision Pro Privacy Overview document. Near the bottom, there’s an interesting section that explains how customer data is managed during the in-store demo experience. Here’s an excerpt:
For those who choose to demo Apple Vision Pro in the retail store, the Specialist will take your glasses and utilize a lensometer to identify which demo optical inserts are needed. Then, the lensometer will output an encrypted QR code. As soon as the demo optical inserts are identified the data is purged from our systems.
I failed to fully grasp the privacy considerations here in my review of the demo experience. The QR code is not only a way for Specialists to quickly identify optical inserts, it’s an encrypted intermediator between your health data and the employees (and other customers!) The Specialist never needs to collect your actual prescription, and Apple isn’t harvesting the data either. It’s smart, and very thoughtful.
Featured image
Apple 南宁万象城
Photo via @我在星巴克喝冰吸生椰拿铁.
I worked at the Uptown Minneapolis store, which had full windows on that same side, in its Board Room, which was also the first in the world…