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Comment by jitl | Hacker News Reader

I can’t imagine anyone buying a $3000 headset for “videoconferencing” as the killer feature.

Would Apple build a VR headset & new operating system just to position it similarly to the Pro Display XDR? Because that’s what these rumors sound like - a super high end hardware for a very narrow professional market. I think the rumors must be getting at least one or two key elements very wrong because the overall picture doesn’t make much sense.

Perhaps the rumors conflate an Apple VR Headset - Mass Market ($5XX) with an Apple VR Headset - Developer Kit ($3000)?

On the subject of the belt battery pack, The Information reported that earlier prototypes used a power-tool LiIon battery at the waist; maybe this is incorrect holdover and we don’t see a production device that works that way?

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> I can’t imagine anyone buying a $3000 headset for “videoconferencing” as the killer feature.

Believe it. "Social presence"[0], the feeling of actually being in the room with another human being, is a very real phenomenon. Its influences are things like gaze following, head movements, hand gestures-- things flatscreen video chat has not and likely will never be able to capture veridically. Its impacts are things like empathy, affinity, trust-- things you very much care about when money is at stake.

To be excessively glib, social presence is why deals are still being won by the firmer handshake, not the better term sheet.

Can Apple deliver this today? Who knows. No one's done it outside of a lab before. But if they can, this isn't competing with video chat-- it's competing with airplanes. And if they can, $3000 is an unbeatable price.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_presence_theory

Apple can’t even do realistic gesture tracking with their memojis on their highest end iOS devices. It’s appallingly bad and can pretty much only do a dozen or so expressions and with lag. I highly doubt their ability to do this in a more serious setting.

There’s enough issues in video conferencing today with audio codec compression and video buffering and Bluetooth issues - I would not want to add an entirely virtual layer on top of that. “Can you hear me?” will be replaced by “are you angry?” when it mistranslates a facial expression. Miscommunication over digital medium (text) is already a huge issue.

I just tried it on iPhone 14 Pro Max. There is no lag at all. Also I am not sure what exactly is appallingly bad? It's pretty good. If you are expecting Pixar quality gestures then that's on you

...and don't forget the benefit of having your persona represented as a Memoji -- you don't have to waste your morning prettying your self up. Hygiene, of course, keep doing that. But what if you didn't have to even concern yourself if your hair is unkempt or you're just wearing the sweatshirt you slept in.

Time savings given back to people is worth something.

> No one's done it outside of a lab before.

Depends on the person. There are many videos [1] where people report that feeling of social presence e.g. whilst working in a virtual cafe.

Question now is whether Apple/Meta can bring that feeling to everyone.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAA9hBwnQKQ

Indeed, and to clarify, it's not a binary feeling for anyone-- IRC is better than email, FaceTime is better than the telephone. VRChat is state of the art on prosumer hardware, but it's not competitive with the boardroom. Yet.

Today? No. Tomorrow? Maybe.

I think it will be an expensive luxury for another while, but commonplace in a decade or so.

It all seems really odd, and the waist-mounted battery pack makes me question the credibility of this 'leak'. Apple won't let me plug in my headphones, but they will force me to wear a lithium-ion Walkman? It just doesn't make sense. The pricing is all wrong and the anticipation of a "killer app" seems way off-base. It's either a very confused product that probably shouldn't release, or a questionable leaker.

FWIW, having used the Oculus Quest, my primary thought on how to make VR go mainstream is to reduce the size/weight/bulk of the headset. Strapping the battery to my waist/chest/back/leg/arm would be strongly preferable to having it on my head.

It's easy and convenient to snake a power cable down my shirt and into my pocket -- I do this all the time with my corded headphones to keep the wire out of the way.

I agree that it doesn't seem very "Apple" in that it's not a sexy solution, but there may be real physical constraints to battery size here that are not surmountable without a giant breakthrough in battery technology (that would probably be bigger news than anything VR related).

I fly FPV drones, and use a headset for that - a Skyzone 04X. It doesn't have an onboard battery, but I can plug in a Li-Po, put it in my pocket, and let the cable just kinda hang. It doesn't get in the way and is significantly more comfortable than my Quest 2.

The main problem with the Quest 1's (and Quest 2's) weight is that it's all in the front, making you feel top-heavy; you can actually make it feel "lighter" by adding weights to the back (commonly, external battery packs, but I literally strapped a ziplock bag of sand to the back and even that was an improvement)

The Quest Pro is a major improvement in this regard; despite being heavier on paper, it feels much lighter because of the weight distribution.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised if the waist-mounted battery pack is purely for auxiliary power for extended use, which makes sense.

Really? Having used wired VR, my primary thought on making VR go mainstream was to remove the wires. The Quest has problems, sure, but the vision of an "all-in-one" headset is simply so Apple that I'm not sure Apple can resist it. With more efficient hardware and more elaborate battery tech, Apple may well be able to brute-force these issues (especially if they're optimizing for video calls).

It's just really bizarre to read about. Its very possible that Apple is working on a headset, but these rumors just don't sound like something they'd do.

Wires by themselves are not evil, the annoying thing about what we consider "wired VR" is that the wires are attached to some fixed point in space (the computer), so you need to dedicate some spatial awareness to where the wires are and periodically untangle yourself or whatever.

In contrast, a wire between two parts of the body that don't move that much in normal operation is basically effortless, and besides the knee-jerk perception "eww wires" isn't a real issue. (By "don't move that much" I mean that the movement range of the spine, the longest section of body that the wire would span, is much more limited than, say, the arms. Controllers wired to a headset would be supreme chaos, but headset wired to a belt piece is not nearly as bad)

I tried the Magic Leap at work, and the computing and battery is off-headset, attached to your pants or something with a simple wire. It did not impair usage nearly as much as, say, my HTC Vive, which has a long wire to my computer I must take care not to step on or tangle myself.

On the other hand, when going out with VR friends, the Quest users are always the first to head off, due to their batteries running low, even though the humans would be comfortable continuing to use it. So I guess a place to put more battery, or even more computing power, (though that is rather more complicated) would not be a bad idea at all.

Generally, I agree. I played a lot of Beat Saber with wired headphones to lower the latency, and the effect of two connected headpieces wasn't too distracting. I'll even concede that tethering headsets is probably the way to go, for now.

What I don't understand is this best-of-both-worlds approach that people seem to be illustrating. If you're going to be tethered either way, why would anyone use it with the battery pack plugged in? Will the battery pack be an optional accessory altogether? Will the battery pack also have the CPU in it? Where will it plug in?

There's so many questions that just don't make sense here. Even previous shockers like the Macbook notch can be easily waived with aspect ratios and the menubar - this just makes no sense to me. Especially if they're chasing benign use-cases like office aides.

> Quest users are always the first to head off, due to their batteries running low

I'm not sure if they know this, but you can charge the Quest while using it. I use the same 20-foot USB-C cable I used for tethering and it works fine, albeit adding a bit of clunk.

There is a huge difference to being tethered to a fixed device (like a desktop computer) and having a wire running to your own body. Having a wire running to your own body, you can still do all of the spinning/ducking/jumping/whatever that all sorts of games require without worrying about getting tangled.

Running the wire down the inside of my shirt and to my hip is completely negligible. Having a wire plugged in to a stationary device / the wall is absolutely non-negligible.

> you can charge the Quest while using it

Yeah, but you need a really long cable or be restricted to sitting games. Most of my friends don't have that, only a short charging cable. (They use the WiFi linking for playing PC VR games)

And the one that does have a long cable fears using it for anything where you have to turn around, because there isn't much strain relief, and a broken USB port of a Quest in Brazil is an expensive repair.

As I recall from the article, the batteries will be swappable. That means:

1. There will be a small battery in the headset

2. Processor can't be on your waist/pocket

The most successful headset will be one that is powerful and lightweight. Right now we seem to only be able to make one of those things. If it's powerful, then it's a heavy, bulky brick strapped to your head. If it's lightweight, then it's laggy and nauseating.

Moving some of the heft to a separate module is one way to cheat and get both of those things. It's a 3rd tradeoff.

When you used wired VR in the past, was it tethered to a stationary computer? If so, then this is different at least because you're not tied to any specific spot in the room.

All that said, I agree that it's very "un-Apple-like" to have a clunky two-piece solution. But it might be a stepping stone solution to show what's possible with a lithe-but-powerful headset.

> But it might be a stepping stone solution to show what's possible with a lithe-but-powerful headset.

Like the dozens of headsets without batteries that preceded them? I think Apple has a shot at delivering a decent tethered VR experience or a decent standalone experience but not both. If they try chasing this $3,000 'worst of both worlds' solution, they'll never move more units than Oculus/Meta has (over 10 million to-date).

I'm being generous and assuming that this is misinformation, but releasing a product like this might be their biggest head-scratcher since the upside-down Magic Mouse.

I may be showing my ignorance here... Did all those previous headsets actually work with a small belt-mounted module? Or did they connect to a gaming PC?

I'm imagining that the rumored product here has a small thing you clip on your waist, not a full-blown computer with an Nvidia card and fans and stuff.

They could work with anything, really. It wasn't uncommon to see people with backpack-mounted gaming laptops or even mini PC builds connected on the other end. Point being - tethered headsets are been-there, done-that. If this rumor is true (which I seriously doubt), Apple is positioning themselves at a direct disadvantage relative to the rest of the market.

Like, if the headset's "killer app" is videoconferencing, why wouldn't you use anything else? You could use the LIDAR on your iPhone, the 6DOF tracking in a $400 Oculus Quest, the much-nicer full-body tracking of a Valve Index setup... the possibilities are limitless, and this rumor purports that Apple is choosing the worst one. I just refuse to believe something like this will ship.

> They could work with anything, really. It wasn't uncommon to see people with backpack-mounted gaming laptops or even mini PC builds connected on the other end. Point being - tethered headsets are been-there, done-that.

That's what I was thinking, and that's not what's being rumored here. It's a small battery pack, not a 2-lb mini PC or a backpack or anything like that. I'm assuming that they got the headset really light. The Quest is still over 500g, which is heavy for being strapped to your head. So imagine they targeted the headset to < 200g, and the only way they could hit that target was to take the battery and move it somewhere else. (And also charge an obscene amount of money for carbon fiber or whatnot)

I'm not going to disagree on the price points, the lack of gaming focus at first, or any of the other complaints about this strategy. It all does seem a bit weird. But I can totally see the value in taking as much weight as possible off of the head, even if that means moving it to your belt.

I guess I really like the hip battery, because it lowers the rotational weight of the headset and allows for a larger battery without the same tradeoffs. It would make the headset lighter than all the competition that uses headset mounted battery. Apple could say "lightest XR headset on the market" while still packing it with tech. Apple loves superlatives like that. Maybe not ideal for a consumer device, but for a pro device a hip pack seems fine to me. Of course, my brain does not work the way apple does so it making sense to me is not an indicator that it is really true.

This probably depends on all the other variables involved, most of which we don’t know.

I cringed at the idea of the hip-battery idea but here are two things that came to my mind when I entertained it:

- If this is a productivity device, not for dancing around, then the USB-C battery pack could be optional. The device could be plugged in via cable when you’re at your desk.

- That braided mag-safe cable feels more like a nice piece of rope. It wouldn’t have to be that shitty tangly experience.

None of our brains work the Apple way - they have a thorough process. They implement the results.

There are other battery-less headsets that exist, though. Plus, if Apple is just going to offload part of the device elsewhere, why not just put the processor in your hip too? Hell, why not just run it off a Mac Mini and a Thunderbolt cable? Going halfway with the cable-based headset seems like a recipe for redundancy.

> There are other battery-less headsets that exist, though.

Sure but not battery-less standalone headsets as far as I know. I mean obviously they have to have a battery somewhere to be standalone, but I am not aware of other standalones that have a hip battery. I am however not an expert, but anyway we know that their big competitor Meta doesn't have a hip battery so the headset could be lighter than theirs.

> why not just put the processor in your hip too

You have all these cameras that have to be in the headset, plus the screens and other basic electronic components. To put compute on the hip you have to have a high bandwidth low latency connection to the hip pack, then back up to the headset. You already have to have an interface pcb in the headset to collect and compress the data to send over this high bandwidth interface, and the cable has to be expensive, etc. Whereas sending power up a cable is trivial. It may be that when looking at all these tradeoffs, remote compute is a net loss, but remote power is easy.

I'm pretty sure the whole computer is on the hip. It makes sense. There's no way they could get the headset light enough otherwise. Even the best wired headsets are too heavy currently. It should be 200-300 grams to be comfortable.

They would need to take all the tracking camera feeds, compress them and send them over a high bandwidth low latency interface, do the compute, then send the result back up to the displays. That all requires a bunch of interface electronics, which may eliminate the savings from moving the CPU to the hip.

At that point, I have two questions:

1. Why can't I just plug it into a Mac/Macbook instead?

2. Does this mean the battery/compute pack will be an optional add-on?

Maybe you can plug it in. But then you'd be tethered to the computer.

However, Mac might not have low enough latency / high enough bandwidth for best experience. My thinking is that it will be an ultra-optimized highly integrated device designed to do just AR/VR, and that's also why it can beat all competitors which interface with standard PCs. I have a very high-end VR headset and GPU, and it just isn't good enough. Apple has to make some miracles here.

The logic board in a modern iPhone is very light, perhaps 10-20 grams?

a) Apple lets you plug in your headphones. You just leave a 3.5mm adapter attached to them like most of us do.

b) Given the complaints about the weight and poor battery life of the Meta Quest Pro there needs to be a better solution than trying to balance batteries on your head.

Waist level pack makes a lot of sense especially since if you're sitting at a desk there is simply no need for batteries.

> Apple lets you plug in your headphones.

Do you know that for sure? How are we certain that the serial port isn't being used by the waist-mounted battery pack?

> there needs to be a better solution than trying to balance them on your head.

There is one - you plug it in. You can use all the Quest headsets while they're tethered to power if you want, it just defeats the purpose of owning a wireless headset. The battery life of those units will definitely last longer than your meeting, presuming the VR sickness doesn't hit you first.

All-for-all, I have to believe this rumor is fake because Apple doesn't make products like this. If Apple does release a VR headset, I doubt it will look like what's described here.

What's the point of having batteries on your head if they aren't being used.

Lightweight headset connected via Thunderbolt 5 to a combined battery/CPU pack or desktop Mac.

The same reason as having batteries in your phone, even though you can use it while plugged in. Most people use VR while moving around, and mobility is much easier when you're untethered. If you're going to make an all-in-one headset, that hardware should probably be one piece.

Hopefully they just drop the standalone element altogether and go all-in on a nice tethered experience.

> Most people use VR while moving around

That's if you're primarily into gaming which Apple isn't.

I suspect the future of VR is going to be at a desk, sofa, bed etc. with virtual screens, meetings, educational lessons, movies etc.

Well good news then! The future of VR is here, and you can already watch movies, educational lessons and virtual screens at your desk, bed or sofa. You don't need a headset to do that, even. You certainly don't need to spend $3,000 on it.

The problem is, none of that stuff is appealing. It's not only not a killer app, it's not even a profit driver. Games move some units, but even that is arguably clunky when you're not fully leveraging 6DOF.

So, what's the point of making a mobile headset that's not intended to be moved around? Why tether a headset that could be plugged into another machine altogether?

Is there another article that talks about the 3.5mm adapter? This one makes that sound unsupported

Which other option is there? Only waist-mounts or backpacks are able to remove the weight of the battery.

You could run a cable to a nearby Macbook Air, and use its processor/battery instead.

Many Apple rumors come from various parts of the supply chain, which explains that they are often incomplete, but have a grain of truth.

Regarding the battery pack, though, I don’t find that completely implausible. With some existing headsets, people have complained about discomfort from the weight of the headset. If a well-designed cable helps to reduce that significantly, why not?

I can see people using these for work on virtual screens if the DPI is high enough and they're powerful enough. Already when I visit a coworking space I see people with a laptop up on a stand, a keyboard, a mouse, and ipad doing second monitor duty. That's close to 3k depending on the macbook and ipad they're using. This is pretty niche though.

Yeah if they can use the foviated rendering feature and iOS compatibility to make it look like my head's surrounded by various application windows with a sufficiently high resolution to read text in a browser/termina/slack/etc then I'd probably ditch my laptop.

My 2.8lbs laptop is great for carrying around the city but its 13" screen leaves something to be desired when it comes to productivity.

Really feels to me like microsoft is just in such a better position to capitalize on the enterprise use case stuff. They already have relationships with every large org and could conceivably include a headset as part of some office+ subscription. Apple has next to no enterprise business, but they're going to convince businesses to buy headsets for employees? Not buying it.

Anecdotally, every company I've worked for has been 100% macOS exclusive. And practically every SWE I know is given a MacBook for work, so they definitely have some enterprise business.

You seem to have a very old-school way of viewing the enterprise.

With the cloud, SaaS, remote working etc. the days of central IT/Procurement departments dictating the technology mix across the organisation is long gone.

Now employees are often bringing in new technologies and IT/Security are forced to scramble and figure out how to manage them.

It's exactly what happened with the iPhone/iPad and now increasingly Macs as well.

> the days of central IT/Procurement departments dictating the technology mix across the organisation is long gone.

No, they're really not. Maybe at some startups, but large organizations have too much to lose by allowing random software to be installed instead of a single suite like microsoft provides. As new programs appear microsoft will continue to copy or buy them and absorb them into office, and will continue to get more and more dominant in the enterprise productivity game.

I work in the enterprise now and have done for 20+ years.

Most software these days has moved to Cloud or SaaS including Microsoft with Office 365.

And so whether you are running Mac, Windows or iPad simply isn't as important to IT/Security teams.

> Apple has next to no enterprise business

Some orgs I worked at had Mac as a standard machine. Not that Apple is in “enterprise business”, but they can sell hardware to some enterprises.

Say we had a 1 dollar, 1 gram, 1000 DPI VR headset. How would that improve margins of businesses?

This is usually how Apple enters/creates a new market. Many other follow the same strategy. They start with a very high end version that highlights their strengths and the product's potential. It will not have mass adoption and it won't make them money. If successful Apple will certainly roll out newer lower costing versions.

> This is usually how Apple enters/creates a new market. They start with a very high end version that highlights their strengths and the product's potential

iPad, AirPods, Apple Watch - none of those fit your criteria, and they’re the biggest launches apple has done post iPhone (which arguably also wasn’t high-priced, it just lacked carrier subsidies at launch).

I think you might be misreading the word "high end"?

By "high end", the person you're replying to was (probably?) not referring to "luxury", but rather the "high end" of the affordability spectrum. i.e. technology that is cutting edge and hasn't yet reached economies of scale. The first iterations of each of those product lines were expensive to procure, which meant their initial margins were thinner and their initial prices were higher.

The "mass market" version of each of those products was not created until the second, third, or arguably fourth generation. Those generations are the ones where the price of components has come down, to the point where you start to see truly affordable options (iPhone SE, Airpods 2, Watch SE).

Apple's insight is that the R&D work required to produce "pro" versions of their hardware (as well as the work required to produce v1) of each product line improves the performance and cost structure of all the "lesser" versions.

They famously derive R&D budgets for gen X+1 as a function of projected profits from gen X and X-1. This connection to the "market" is a strong explanatory variable for the success of their R&D fly wheel since the iPhone. It's a major contrast against how their competitors have historically operated (cough Meta).

I remember all of those products seeming really expensive at launch, though I see your point. They've all become a bit cheaper but not significantly. What's also changed is my perception of what a reasonable cost should be. Spending $150 on AirPods to replace my cheap earbuds used to seem absurd but now it feels more defensible. If AR is a huge success the price will certainly come down, but perhaps only 30%-50% and spending the equivalent of a new Macbook on a headset starts to feel more reasonable.

While those items are expensive for market, they were still affordable for a large market segment. I purchased iphone, ipad, airpod, airpods pro, ipod all in the first year of them debuting. I doubt I would do that for a $3k VR set and I have spent over 400hrs in VR. I will need to let others prove the value on this system before I can jump in.

I've never been all that interested in early VR, but for a truly seamless VR headset I think 3K would be perfectly reasonable. For example, being able to take a laptop onto any train and have the equivalent of a 360º monitor with me seems already worth that. If apple launched a VR headset, I'd assume they've got it to that kind of point where it's a device you carry with you all the time.

The iPhone was more expensive than most phones even without the subsidy.

They certainly have the cash to subsidize a new market creation...

Plus who knows how much for the custom lenses needed if you wear glasses.

It says they are magnetic? I wonder if it'll be possible for third parties to make compatible lenses.

It's likely you will choose the lenses up front.

Similar to how when you buy an Apple Watch you choose the strap size.

You can't just "choose" prescription lenses. You need a valid prescription.

Sure but Apple can just have a range of lens types and you upload your prescription.

How do you think people buy glasses online ?

That's... complicated.

It depends on the state in the US.

Would that necessarily cost way more than the custom lenses needed for glasses?

Traditionally* VR lens fittings have been relatively affordable (Quest had them for <$100). That being said, this is Apple we're talking about here... are we perhaps getting a 'Lens Pro Max ME (Medical Edition)'?

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