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I think a lens worth looking at that suggests this is a misstep is:
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Apple has only ever convinced people to bring a new device with them once, with the iPod.
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They realized that a wallet sized device that could playback your entire music collection would be a huge hit, and convinced people to effectively carry around a second wallet (plus headphones). This was the first and only time they convinced people to carry around a new device on a daily basis, and it was relatively easy since jeans had two front pockets anyways.
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Around the same time, cell phones started also filling the role of second wallet, for a period, some of us even carried around 3 wallet sized devices. Then the iPhone just combined two of them (eventually all 3 kinda).
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Macbooks / laptops, are basically just the equivalent of textbooks in our bookbag, iPads are just a fancier version of that book that can also work with a pencil. Apple Watch just replaced our regular watches. No other Apple product (or anyone else’s for that matter) have convinced us to carry a wholly new form factor of device around with us.
- The Vision Pro replaces … nothing … like the iPod it’s a wholly new device to carry with you, but unlike the iPod the form factor is not a natural extension or replacement of an existing form factor. The closest they come is glasses, and this is what I think Google Glass got right, they aimed at a form factor that could be worn like glasses all day without too much distinction, whereas the vision pro is more like a pair of heavy ski goggles. It’s a hard and uncomfortable ask to get people to wear it in almost any scenario.
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wait… why would you want to carry it with you??
Why do you carry your laptop with you?
What is the purpose of the Vision Pro? Is it just a VR Headset? Then sure, it sits at home like your video game console. But paying $3500 for that is insane when you could buy a Quest and a gaming PC.
Or is it a work focused AR device like Apple is pitching, in which case, it should go everywhere your Macbook does, at home, at the office, on trips, etc. Hard to imagine people wanting to lug a bulky headset with them for those purposes.
I’m also getting at the idea that the true revolutionary moment for AR will be when we can use them and carry them with us everywhere, like watches / phones / wallets / glasses. Unlike the iPod / iPhone / Apple Wallet, Apple is releasing this well before that point.
If the AR floating windows/screens work as they advertise, then it replaces 1-2-3 screens, in whatever configuration you want them in. You connect it into a gaming PC and use the augmented floating windows as virtual monitors. Then use a mouse or whatever, it’s more about the windows.
Later you want to see a movie. Minimise all your virtual monitors and deploy a big ass monitor to watch it in a big screen, without moving from you comfy gaming setup.
I’ll wait until third party apps implement this feature and the price gets at least halved. I’m the only one I’ve seen that has mentioned this use case but I honestly feel like it has potential.
If the AR floating windows/screens work as they advertise, then it replaces 1-2-3 screens, in whatever configuration you want them in.
Right but how much does a screen cost these days? (I guess the apple ones are still absurdly expensive, are they still charging $1000 for a monitor stand?)
Also I doubt that these things work anywhere like that. The resolution is nowhere near good enough. Also I’ve worn the quest and your face gets sweaty pretty quickly. The weight on the front of your head is very noticeable, and they give you headaches after a while if you don’t get sick first. They can be fun for the right types of gameplay but that’s it.
Also, SV doesn’t really care about VR gaming. What they really care about is AR, and they care about it because they want to put advertisements like everywhere. Every building: Ads all over it, Every wall in your house: Ads everywhere. Every interaction with your loved ones: Ads. This is the future they dream about, but it sucks and they have never come up with any real reason for us to put their face huggers on.
And it only supports mirroring one screen from your Apple device… Kinda useless.
Yes, I understand this dream, I just also understand how far away we are from this. Wearing a VR headset like this is sweaty and uncomfortable, and you’re not going to do it for nearly as long as you might look at a monitor and TV. The weight would need to be at least like 1/4 what it is to feasibly be comfortable to wear for 8+ hours a day.
A heads up display that could overlay useful information onto the world around you would be amazing.
- Provide directions.
- Point out businesses that are hard to find in a crowded city.
- Give real-time measurements and placements for construction (this is already a thing).
- Pokemon Go
The problem is that the apple vision is huge and bulky. They need to shrink it down to the size of big nerd eyeglasses. Microsoft did the same thing with their whatever it was called. I played with it a few times at different tech demos. It was garbage from the start because it was heavy, uncomfortable, and the refresh rate was intolerably slow. Apple’s is a slight improvement in a few categories but it still completely misses the point of what AR should be.
I agree with almost everything you said except that the Hololens was pretty remarkable for the time and magical when I got to use it at work, tiny FOV and crappy refresh rate regardless. Walking around a normal cluttered open plan office, watching youtube in a web browser as it followed me, then pinning it to a wall, walking elsewhere and pinning some of our architectural models to tables and stuff, and then walking back around the building and them all still being exactly where I put them was a pretty wild experience. The Quest 3’s AR stuff still doesn’t feel quite as magical due to the distortion, lack of peripheral vision, and noticeable ski goggle feeling, nor does the world tracking seem quite as good (though I still think it’s impressive for a $500 consumer device).
The Hololens is also entirely limited by it’s choice of using transparent displays but that’s also what makes it safe to use in industrial and now military settings.
That’s not what Apple wants it to be or is advertising it as at all. They don’t expect people to be wearing it all the time when they’re out doing things.
It’s meant to be a supplement to laptops/desktops, then eventually a replacement (I don’t think headsets will ever fully replace traditional computers though).
It’s first and foremost a VR headset with really good AR and video passthrough. They’re not glasses. Apple just doesn’t want you to think that it’s VR because they’ve decided they always have to be “special.”
Honestly I kind of agree with op’s submission. Apple just didn’t have a real plan for what they wanted it to be. It sits in an awkward niche between AR and VR and it sucks at both as a result.
Why in the world do you think this is supposed to be a mobile product? Just because it can run on a battery doesn’t mean they intend for consumers to wear it around town.
My impression is that it’s for use in the home and/or office. I wouldn’t walk around town with anything worth thousands of dollars out on display and I think most people are similarly minded.
What purpose does it serve in an office that your MacBook doesn’t?
What purpose does a MacBook serve that an office from the 1980’s wasn’t equipped to handle?
AR devices in an office serve the same purpose as existing tools, but there are ways that they can improve efficiency, which is all the justification office tech needs. Shit, my monitor costs 2/3 the price of the Vision Pro, and an ideal piece of AR hardware would be immeasurably better. Meetings in virtual space would negate how much meetings suck remotely. Having unlimited screen real estate would make a huge difference in my line of work. Also, being able to use any area in my home or out of it with as much screen real estate as I want would be huge.
I’m not saying that the Vision Pro does all of those things, but it does some of them, and I’m 100% okay with it being the thing that introduces the benefit of AR to those without imagination.
Shit, my monitor costs 2/3 the price of the Vision Pro
Two professional 27" 4k dell monitors cost ~$800 combined. You overpaid like a mf if you spend $2000 on a monitor.
and an ideal piece of AR hardware would be immeasurably better
Let me know when someone announces one.
Meetings in virtual space would negate how much meetings suck remotely
Lol, citation needed.
Having unlimited screen real estate would make a huge difference in my line of work.
Agreed, as long as using those screens didn’t require wearing a pair of ski goggles that will die after 2 hours.
Also, being able to use any area in my home or out of it with as much screen real estate as I want would be huge.
An understandable point… I would argue that it’s a much better practice for your mental health to have a dedicated space that you work to create a clear mental separation between home and work but it may work if that space is virtual.
and I’m 100% okay with it being the thing that introduces the benefit of AR to those without imagination.
Those benefits don’t take imagination they just take having seen a sci Fi movie in the past 20 years.
Two professional 27" 4k dell monitors cost ~$800 combined. You overpaid like a mf if you spend $2000 on a monitor.
Sorry, but you don’t understand the needs of the market that we’re talking about if you think that a pair of ~$400 dell monitors is equivalent to a high-end display. The difference between $800 and $2500 amounts to a few days’ worth of production for my workstation, which is very easily worth the huge difference in color accuracy, screen real estate, and not having a bezel run down the middle of your workspace over the 3-5 years that it’s used.
blah blah blah
I already said that I’m talking about the Vision Pro as a first step in the direction of a fully-realized AR workstation. As it currently stands, it’s got some really cool tech that’s going to be a lot of fun for the guinea pig early adopters that fund the development of the tech I’m personally interested in.
blah blah blah I’m an Apple fan boi who will project whatever sci fi utopia I have in my head onto an over priced Quest Pro if it has an Apple Logo.
Dude the last thing I needed for my “talking to an idiot online” bingo card was “(ignores point) aPpLe fAnBoY”
They’ve only (in this century) produced a new product people take with them once, iPod. Except for the iPhone. MacBook Air. iPad. Apple Watch. AirPods.
So you’re 16% correct, and falling.
You clearly didn’t understand the same point that everyone else did. Maybe reflect on that rather than assume you’re the only one able to do percentages.
It’s not about the product, but the kind of device. Before the iPod, people didn’t really carry around computer like devices with them in the pockets, did they?
Maybe you’ve heard of this device that plays music on tiny headphones, great for listening while walking. It was called a Walkman. Came out in 1979. By the time the iPod came out, there were plenty of digital music players; I carried a Rio Volt (CD-ROM full of MP3s), but the Nomad was the one CmdrTaco compared iPod to.
Many people carried Palm Pilots, Newtons, cell phones, pagers, portable games (GameBoy, Game Gear, Lynx), film & digital cameras. I used to carry so many gadgets. Sharp/Tandy PC-3 was a great little calculator/computer, so was HP-35s.
Apple’s done an amazing job of making vastly better versions (eventually, in some cases; I waited for gen 3 iPod with USB), and folding multiple things into a device, and competing with themselves. So now most of those devices are gone, and we just carry an iPhone (or lame knockoff). I have a bunch of portable game devices, which live on my desk because why carry them? iPad rolled over the MacBook for portable computing. And now Vision Pro is going to roll over that (in a couple versions, probably).
The “one-hit wonder” assertion just requires someone to have lived a cave since 2006.
Genuinely curious, do real people actually use ipads?
Yes. It’s Apple’s second most profitable platform. If I go out to a café (which admittedly was before pandemic), half the people have one, much more than laptops now. In business, it’s a super common way to take around documents, presentations, etc. The kids really love them.
I’ve been in love with it since launch, it’s a magic book.
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I keep remembering the Apple Watch release in parallel to the vision pro’s release. The first Apple Watch was so awkward and had no real purpose other than an extra notification display. But over the years the Apple Watch found its footing through iteration and iteration and is now a great health tracker with a bunch of cool uses.
In 6 or so years the Apple vision headsets will be awesome… but so should competing VR/AR.
The difference is that the Apple Watch was not that awkward compared to actual watches.
It was the size of a mid to large sized normal watch, and it’s battery lasted roughly a day and could be charged overnight next to your phone.
The Vision Pro is not the size of a pair of glasses, you can’t wear it nearly as long, nor can you use it like them. It’s not asking people to replace an existing device with a smart one, it’s asking them to use a whole new thing.
Competing VR/AR is and was awesome already. No need for a massively overpriced spying device to “innovate” on a working concept.
To me, this seems like a big misstep for Apple. Granted I’m no fanboy, but I’ve appreciated Apple’s design and products over the last few decades. This to me just seems half baked. And that’s not something I expected from Apple’s hardware. I personally don’t think I’ll ever wear a computer on my face for more than 30 minutes at a time. Even if the weight goes down dramatically, it’s just not a convenient experience. The last thing I need with my technology is more inconvenience.
Well less than 30 minutes at a time is good because the Vision Pro battery only lasts around two hours and you can’t swap batteries without turning it off.
You can do a lot of things with the Vision Pro that you can’t do with other headsets, but I don’t understand why anybody would want to manage their calendar events in VR, and it seems like there are a lot more things that you would want to do with the Vision Pro that you can’t. If it were really an AR device like a modern Google Glass it would make sense, but with that form factor and a battery life of two hours it can’t really become part of you like that.
I think it really comes down to what developers do with it in the next couple of years. If they don’t devise some really interesting and meaningful experiences unique to the headset hardware I think it’s a dead end product no matter how much Apple pours into it.
Not to argue with you, but was there ever a ‘failed’ apple product ? Genuinely curios.
The Newton famously failed, the Lisa failed, the original Homepod, Apple Maps was a pretty big flop and has only found success through anti-competitive bundling.
Also the Apple Pippin. And third-party Macintosh clones. And the Twentieth Century Macintosh. And the Apple III.
Especially before Steve Jobs took over Apple again they had what feels like more flops than successes.The Apple QuickTake camera.
The Hifi too
Are you aware that you can plug the battery into a power source and use the headset for as long as you want while the battery charges at the same time?
You can, but few people will. It’s not the image Apple wants the device to have. In their promotional videos, the people are constantly wearing the headset and never plugged in.
Apple products were never really ergonomic, so having over half a kilo dragging down your face seems to be a normal continuation of their design language. The battery on a cable however and the outside-facing screen seem like obvious bad design decisions that just contribute to the unpleasant weight distribution.
And it tries to sell a VR device as an AR device without any real killer use case other than integrating it nicely into their other products. Alone from the tech it’s impressive. Their new R1 and M2 chips do great work and the price reflects how much effort was put into it. But that alone doesn’t sell the device.
Even the positive reviews were mixed and pointed out grave flaws.
In my opinion, for this to take off it actually needs to provide significant advantages for people to accept wearing a comfortable sensor suite plus computer on their head in front of their eyes. We haven’t seen any of this yet… from any product in the space.
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I think something with this, too (and that you sorta hinted at), is that it doesn’t seem to provide any additional benefit to what we already get with the iPhone, iPad, Mac ecosystem. That’s an ecosystem with a huge and established user base. Obviously this could change as developers step in to do the heavy lifting, but… Will they want to? Is it a good investment to spend thousands of hours on an app that a fraction of users of an already niche product will use? I think it’s very telling that some of the biggest developers (like Spotify and Netflix) opted out of Vision Pro.
It’s going to take some very talented, very risk-tolerant developers to make a $3,500+ headset go anywhere. And as of now, Apple is providing very little incentive.
It feels extremely brute forced.
I would have assumed that they had waited until they had transparent displays that were better than everyone’s, or had some unique way of combining passthrough and normal cameras that were better than others, but they really just announced basically a Quest Pro with some 3DS displays slapped to the outside. I’m pretty sure everyone at Meta’s reality Labs division sighed a pretty big sigh of relief, I suspect they were all worried that it was going to be an iPhone launch where everyone at Blackberry realized they were working on completely the wrong tech, and instead they just witnessed them launch a fancy and expensive version of what they’re already making for the mass market.
oh god, where do I even start?
first of all, the whole article reeks of bias and entitlement. “I don’t like VR so other people shouldn’t have it!!”
then, it all sounds like this guy never even tried any VR headset, or maybe he puked copiously after his first test.
and he’s constantly baiting and switching: “tim cook only interest is in squeezing money from us rather than releasing new products!!”, and right after “tim cook released a new product and it SUCKS!! even my mother said it!”
I bought a Rift CV1 in 2016, I’ve been waiting for some real VR since the first time I tested a rudimentary headset at a tech convention in 1996 playing Doom and some other VR game. it’s sick. I love it. I spent 10 hours a day in the headset during the first month, then I discovered simracing and it was an absolute blast. But the CV1 suffered the lack of direction outside of gaming. the screens were way too low resolution, it needed a powerful PC, it needed cameras, it needed joysticks, had no pass through so all of this stuff really didn’t make it for an optimal experience outside of gaming. I’ve ever since dreamed a way to use VR to work, and it seems like apple did it… or at least is in the process to.
Apple is not Google, so the Vision Pro is not going away. they’ll keep on refining it and bring it forward because that’s the future. you can’t judge it by now, we’re 5-10 years ahead of mass adoption of this tech, but we can already see what’s going to become.
unfortunately the tech suffered a big, big blowback caused by the boom of cryptocurrencies… we’ve all been waiting for more powerful graphic cards in order to cheaply manage VR, but nVidia was more concerned about making easy bucks selling to bitcoin farms rather than serving their loyal customers… and so VR took a hit around 2020 due to lack of cheap availability.
Facebook created the quest in order to detach their product from the whims of a terrible company like Nvidia, and that has somehow helped. but the Quest is and remains an entertainment product, not something that you can rely on for working.
I think the Vision Pro will be a revolution for those doing 3D modeling, or even programming. When the guy in the article says “you’ll get isolated in your tech!!” I think he knows he’s full of bullshit, because cubicles DO exist and people working at a PC screen is now more isolated than ever.
maybe his job is typing rants from the couch of a hotel on his iphone?
Good or not, it’ll always be a walled garden, so supporting them just promotes their bullshit.
That and the price is the problem, in my opinion at least. What it can do looks quite impressive I think and has some nice ideas not really done commercially at the consumer level before.
But, I suspect it’ll be another iPhone. It will rule the roost for a short time and then someone will come out with a comparable product, for noticeably less that will work with other hardware too and connect with other non-apple software.
But, I guess for those in the ecosystem (who already have big pockets already for this kind of thing) it looks really good.
There’s already competing products just like with the iPhone. If this thing succeeds, it will succeed despite that, not because of it.
I don’t know. I saw some reviews, and in the consumer space at least I’m not aware of a device that is putting stuff in shared space fixed in a location and can make virtual screens with the rest of your vision maintained. It’s these things I expect to be copied and homogenised pretty quickly.
There are apps for the Quest that can do that.
Tried the Vision at the mall today, though, and it’s pretty awesome. I had an experience I’ve never had in VR yet - when shown heights, my body actually reacted as if it was real.
You people crack me up. Such a small little bubble you live in while pointing fingers about being in a bubble.
If you can’t see the purpose of an eco system that sucks.
To lock customers in, to make others feel excluded, all leading to more profits… It’s simple, everything they do is to try and make you buy their shit by making it inoperable with everything else…
I completely forgot about this thread.
This made me laugh out loud. Apple doesn’t give a shit if you or anyone else feels excluded. They are not sitting around thinking about how to exclude people rofl. Allowing a product to make me feel excluded is wild as fuck.
Yes they want you to buy their product so they make their other products work well with each other. OMG like OMG. What a business idea.
I wrote out a bunch of other stuff explaining how designing and engineering works well if it’s focused and can be good but damn it’s not worth it. Sorry you can’t see light through the bubble.
Sorry you’re riding that Apple dick so hard 🤷🏻♀️
lol can’t even formulate a reasoned argument. Go right into that insulting. Sound like a trumper.
Yeah, I’ve said this plenty times before, there’s no reasoning with the dick riders. They love to be abused and will die defending their megacorp God. It’s pretty pointless… It’s like arguing with an Elon rider…
It’s crazy to me how many of you people don’t understand this - most people like the walled garden. It’s fine if it’s not for us techies. That’s not who it’s for.
I don’t think people like the walled garden. I think they don’t know what it is even. They assume they can’t buy a competitors headset/watch/tv because it won’t work, and often they’re probably right because apple refuses use open protocols. But I don’t think they draw the line between the two. It’s not because of apple refusing to implement something it doesn’t work. It’s because “the competitor is bad”, or because they don’t have the “deep integration” between the two or something. It never occurs to them that if you just make the API public it suddenly “just works” for everyone.
Maybe it’s because us people hate corporate loyalty and anti consumer practices. And corporations are like lemmings, they see one company doing it and they all wanna follow.
Then don’t buy their products. It’s just weird to me that people want to complain so incessantly about a garden they don’t have to live in.
Read the last part of what I said…
Why? It’s meaningless. Don’t buy the copycat products, then. The only reason they exist is because people buy them.
dOn’T bUy thE CopYCaT PrOduCtS…
Remember how Netflix cracked down on password sharing? Well just don’t have a Netflix subscription… Problem solved right?
Oh wait, what’s that, corporate copycats?
You’re an insufferable asshole man, argumentative and aggressive, and aggressively defending one of the worst tech companies around… But whatever, you do you…
Walled gardens are inherantly designed to exclude communities and drive classism. Want to view this picture? Sorry you can’t because you dsint pay the fee. Want to chat with this group? Sorry were going to make inconvienent to everyone involved that you didn’t pay the fee.
The end goal is to split people up into have and have nots in order to drive desire for your product with little thougt given to the poorer communies it disenfranchises. Your attitude is the boomer “fuck you. Got mine” one.
Facebook created the quest in order to detach their product from the whims of a terrible company like Nvidia, and that has somehow helped.
Facebook didn’t create shit. They bought the Quest. They bought hyper-evolved, time-traveling 4th dimensional being, actual fucking rocket scientist, benevolent hyperintelligent architect of the post-singularity simulation we all live in, John Carmack, and then he got sick of the Meta bullshit and left.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
hyper-evolved, time-traveling 4th dimensional being, actual fucking rocket scientist John Carmack
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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I forgot this thing exists.
I love the idea of having one of these to toy around with here and there, maybe watch a movie or browse spatial photos, but not for $3500. Fuck no.
They have a new commercial out. The dude falls back on his couch and makes the movie that’s sitting on his ceiling, bigger.
I was like ok that would be cool. Being able to watch something without having to face it, it faces you. But maybe in 10 years when it’s the size of eye glasses and lasts all day and we can have spatial cinema where you can move in between things. Then. Fuck yeah.
Honestly, this is why I’m hoping the Vsuon Pro doesn’t flop. It really feels like it could open the door to a new era. Of course, that’s still years away, but you’ve got to start somewhere. Better now than never.
My gut feeling is that that is apples entire game plan with the Vision Pro- seed an expensive version of the tech, then refine it with what they learned into something leaner and significantly cheaper.
I could be wrong, but given the current price point that’s my guess.
