Why Steve Jobs would love Apple's Vision Pro headset

• Walter Isaacson wrote the biography "Steve Jobs," chronicling the life of the late Apple cofounder.
• Isaacson, who had special access to Jobs, thinks Jobs would have loved Apple's Vision Pro headset.

The late Apple CEO and cofounder Steve Jobs would love Apple's new Vision Pro headset if he were alive, Walter Isaacson, who wrote Jobs' biography, said Tuesday during an interview on CNBC.

"He would love it. I think he always wanted to go into new fields ever since he decided to make the iPod in the early 2000s, which was an unusual thing for, you know, a computer company to do, and likewise with the iPhone," said Isaacson, who is also the CEO of the Aspen Institute and a history professor at Tulane University.

Apple unveiled its new mixed-reality headset on Monday at the company's World Wide Developer's Conference. It's the company's first major product announcement since the Apple Watch, which was revealed almost a decade ago in 2014.

The Vision Pro, which will cost $3,499 and be available for purchase in early 2024, will allow users to view and interact with content in a mixed-reality environment by just using their eyes, hands, and voice.

Isaacson said that technology is advanced by new human-computer interfaces, or as he described it, how we "closely connect ourselves to our computers." And Apple's new headset, which the company says is built upon a "spatial computing" operating system called visionOS, is a new platform that does just that.

"When he (Jobs) saw Siri, that was a great leap in human-computer interface, and this is one of the next big leaps in that," Isaacson said.

Isaacson also said that the new Vision Pro headset showcases how Apple is tackling AI, despite the fact that the specific words "artificial intelligence" or AI were not mentioned a single time during Apple's big reveal event.

Isaacson said that Apple is thinking beyond just chatbots powered by generative AI, and focusing more on real-world applications for AI.

"AI is not just chatbots that do it with text. AI is things like these mixed-reality headsets that can process visual data from cameras and turn it into something intelligent you can interact with," Isaacson said. "Real-world AI, as opposed to just text chatbot AI, meaning robots that can navigate in the real world, which is what this headset will help us interact with… That's the real future of AI."