The bill of materials for the Apple headset leaked
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Outside of gaming and industry use AR/VR have felt a little like a solution in search of a problem. I do believe though that the people who work at Apple are capable of solving that problem, finding the use cases that an every day person wants it for.
My benchmark for this is my family, they are all different, with different level of interest in tech. If I can see the majority of them having a use for it, being inspired by the UX and marketing, then it will be successful.
Until now none of them have any sort of VR kit, but they all have iPhones and Macs.
As a slight aside though, new hardware products are very hard for Apple to keep completely under wraps, too many people in the supply chain, too many factories. Software on the other hand they can lock down incredibly well (pun intended). I am somewhat suspicious that they may supprise us at WWDC with their take on generative AI. Now that could be part of the headset, but it's more likely to be part of iOS/macOS and a feature that aims to help them sell more of their existing hardware ranges.
Outside of gaming and industry use AR/VR have felt a little like a solution in search of a problem. I do believe though that the people who work at Apple are capable of solving that problem, finding the use cases that an every day person wants it for.
This is my feeling too - I just don't see an immediate usecase for such a device outside of a select few niches, none of which (even combined) move the sales needle for a company of Apple's size. What are people actually going to use this for? I just don't see it - although there could be something as the tech matures in a few years.
As usual, Apple is playing the long game. We should remember that when the iPhone was announced in 2007, Steve Jobs set the goal to get 1% of the cell phone market.
In 2007, there was no App Store and the only native apps were what came installed on the device.
Apple is laying the groundwork for the future. They’ll sell enough for it to meaningful while the rest of the ecosystem comes together.
I guess that's one way to look at it.
But compared to what was popular when the iPhone was released (Blackberry, Treo, Nokia), it was the iPhone that jumpstarted what became the modern smartphone market we see today.
Apple is uniquely positioned to usher in the modern AR/VR era, especially if it's true that iOS apps will run in on the headset. Nobody is better than Apple at capturing the imagination of developers.
You could imagine locking virtual screens and interactive widgets in real space in exciting ways. You could redesign a living room if your main way to watch something is a virtual screen. Virtual cookbook apps you "leave" in the kitchen that you can interact with hand tracking even when you have raw chicken all over your hands.
The Hololens never got there but the use cases are there IF it actually hits the hardware mark. If its confined to 20 minute bursts before discomfort sets in like current hardware then its far more niche.
But I don't think I'm being a fanboy when I say that if I trust any company to fix physical comfort/usability issues, it's Apple (with a $3,000/device budget).
We can be certain that it will look great. That's one thing Apple nails every time. For usability and comfort they have their ups and downs like anyone else, and an above average share of "it might not be very usable, but look how sleek it looks".
Their mouse has a great battery life that requires charging it sparingly. Your Mac tells you when it needs charging.
They thought about the mouse charging problem. They arrived at different answers than the rest of the industry.
I end up charging my mouse about once every few months
Every mouse on the market has a battery life of months. Every mouse on the market will tell the user when the battery runs down. Apple is not special. The thing is just built wrong. And they haven't fixed it after all these years.
That is the smallest fatal flaw with that mouse. The bigger flaw is ergonomics. Selling something that likely to cause injury should be illegal.
It sure is nice to look at, though.
The difference here is that sometimes I ignore the warning and then it gets too low but I can plug it in as I use it for 20 mins, whereas a Mac user can't.
And, I mean... that's gotta be the bar for $3K, right? Even the most insanely passionate gamers would have a hard time justifying a $3K gaming accessory, IMO. And what else is there? The only usecase that I feel is ready is movies/TV, which... yeah is also a hard sell for $3K, especially since every family member would need one if you want to watch something together.
Although (tangent incoming!) I think omitting the OLED from the Quest 2 was a bit of a mistake. My theory is that the screen actually has more to do with why most games in the library have that same-y bright cartoonish look, rather than just the limitations of the XR2. It’s a relief the Apple headset is going OLED, if this leak is to be believed that is.
As far as the cartoony games: that’s actually the “fault”[1] of Unity/Unreal Engine which powers quite literally 99% of Quest titles (you can count the titles using other engines on one hand). VR studios are hyper-indie and don’t have the budget to build out games that look different, especially when that cartoon style lends itself to higher performance.
1. It’s not actually the fault of Unity/UE: Red Matter 2 is built on Unreal but looks spectacularly better than most other standalone titles.
The original iPad was rumored to cost $1500 to $1800. So when they finally announced it "only" cost $500 people couldn't believe how cheap it was in comparison.
Even the M2 could easily draw and produce 30+ W of heat at full load.
The best use case may be ultra thin devices without enough room for a fan, not as a fan replacement.
If they're operating at 30W sustained they're in trouble anyway; that would imply a battery life of probably about an hour.
I'm still very skeptical of this product.
We could be wrong and people are happy to hand over 3k for this, but it’s just hard to understand how for a whole bunch of reasons.
Are they going to get third parties to build software for this? Where is the volume to support that going to come from? Who’s going to want to go first and risk 3k on something that might flop and be on eBay for a fraction of the price in a year?
There’s just so many hurdles to clear for this.
Today there is a high-volume VR headset in the market, the Quest 2, but the new Apple device is projected to be nearly ten times more expensive and it seems to be more of an incremental advancement of the state of the art.
But we’ll see… I hope Apple pulls a rabbit out of the hat.
That's how it broke the “smartphones are niche because the mobile web sucks, and the mobile web sucks because there are so few users that its not worth improving” barrier.
The iPod touch was an important pillar of this new platform’s introduction. It’s often forgotten today, but a lot of people around the world got introduced to iOS on the iPod rather than the iPhone.
The capacitive touchscreen wasn't unique, the LG Prada was announced prior to the original iPhone, and launched before the original iPhone too. Perhaps "unusual" would be a better term.
I had an iPhone at launch, and perhaps it's down to what websites you used (I'm a Brit), but the browsing experience was pretty terrible until people started developing responsive websites, and it really wasn't until ~2009-2010 that this took off in any appreciable or meaningful capacity in the UK, and even then, it was still common to have a separate mobile version of a website up until 2013. Prior to that, an app for larger websites became much more common, and offered a much better experience than the mobile website or responsive website ever did. Browsing the web over 2G sucked. Websites having buttons too small to press with your fingers also sucked.
Websites that were 100% Flash were super common, as were Flash elements. Even the PlayStation Portable could display Flash in the browser by 2005 after an official firmware update from Sony.
I also had Windows Mobile, BlackBerry et al in the years prior to that.
Sure, pinch-to-zoom, that was serviceable in lieu of a responsive website or mobile site, but it still sucked versus just using the app for the site when the App Store eventually launched. Furthermore, most of the software innovation was happening in Cydia via jailbreaks prior to the App Store launch. Even then, for a considerable number of years following it. Apple would frequently incorporate whatever was hot on Cydia as a concept on the next major version of iOS.
The original iPhone OS used the underpinnings of Mac OS X: the Mach kernel, CoreGraphics, the Cocoa Foundation APIs… At the iPhone launch, Apple even called the phone operating system “OS X” to highlight that it’s the same.
None of these things meant anything to the average consumer.
The App Store is what ultimately made the iPhone a success, despite being fairly ho-hum in features versus the competition.
Of course the App Store was an explosion of functionality, but there was a lot to love about iOS before third-party apps appeared.
iOS was largely lacking for many years. No copy-paste until 2009, no multi-tasking until 2010. It was rough, even as a diehard Apple fan at the time.
There were countless times that I had phone envy—paying more to get considerably less functionality didn't sit well with me at the time. It definitely felt like a toy at times. Everybody wanted to play with the gimmicks like drinking a virtual beer or swooshing a lightsabre, or playing Tap Tap Revenge or Angry Birds, but as a daily-driver phone for productivity and not screwing around, it was pretty lacking.
This was the era when you bought a "smartphone" to do productive things, not screw around. I also liked my PSP, but it wasn't a productivity device, despite having a pretty kick-ass web browser with Flash support and a decent-sized screen.
But I am saying that it had feature parity with the first iPhone.
Similarly the Facebook devices have their cost hidden in the privacy violations that come built in. It is a “better” business model than the cellphone contracts because it is even harder to figure out how much they are making off you, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Apple model wins again.
In terms of competitive pricing, I mean yeah if this is just a Quest 2 with better screens its DOA, but I would hope not, though I am keeping expectations low. My only point was Apple does have the capability to pull rabbits out of their hat, not that they will.
At the time of launch the iPhone was one of the highest priced (including carrier subsidies) phones on the market.[1]
> Today there is a high-volume VR headset in the market, the Quest 2, but the new Apple device is projected to be nearly ten times more expensive and it seems to be more of an incremental advancement of the state of the art.
As Ballmer mentions later there were high-volume Windows Mobile phones available at that time too.[1]
I remember the iPhone announcement as being a product that basically everybody had been asking for and immediately saw the value in. And the rumour cycle leading up to the announcement was insane - people were so hyped for apple to announce a proper smartphone, it was already a product category. Things like the Palm Treo and the Nokia N95 existed and were relatively popular - handheld computers with phone capabilities as well as full web browsers, email clients, maps, video playback, etc. The iPhone was taking a product concept that had already been proven, and hugely improving the form factor and user experience. Nobody saw the iPhone announcement and said "nah, i just don't see the value there".
TechCrunch: "That virtual keyboard will be about as useful for tapping out emails and text messages as a rotary phone. Don’t be surprised if a sizable contingent of iPhone buyers express some remorse at ditching their BlackBerry when they spend an extra hour each day pumping out emails on the road."
A ton of people loved it, but it came under heavy criticism for the lack of physical keyboard and the AT&T dependency.
Lots of people criticized it for not being able to do basic tasks like copy and paste or the lack of 3G after they bought it. The iPhone didn't suffer at all from the criticism because people saw it as a work in progress -- the AT&T attachment was actually brilliant because it allowed them to make AT&T build their network and offer decent data plans. Before iPhone the data rate was something ridiculous as an add-on to a regular phone plan, and everyone using 2G data all at once brought the network to its knees in dense areas and forced upgrades.
an augmented-reality headset is a fundamentally different sell, because that's not a product that currently exists in any meaningful way. Apple doesn't have to convince me that their AR headset is better than any other one that i've tried, because i've never tried one. They will have to convince me that this is a thing i need to own.
They did cut the price relatively early.
There'll be _some_; remember Google Glass? I'm not convinced there'll be enough to make it any more than a niche oddity, though (even the numbers quoted in the post imply that; Apple doesn't launch that many products where they only expect to produce 500k in six months...)
There’s no huge productivity shift like there was for spreadsheets to visicalc that pushes our perception for what’s possible - so something has to make this device compelling in a different way.
This headset should be thought of as a dev unit, except substitute dev with early adopters.
If it’s good then there will definitely be a value add in maybe 5-10 years. If it sucks then they’ll just have failed at creating a compelling headset experience that has broad appeal, just like everyone before them.
It’s important to realize just still how early we are in the computing revolution, and how much of the growth curve there’s left.
I feel like the 'how many times do we have to tell you old man' character - hearing that the iPhone and the Watch sucked coming out and both eventually became successful.
The iPhone did not suck in any way shape or form. It was everything anyone who touched a PDA or Blackberry before that wanted - text messages in a gorgeous swipe-able full view context, visual voicemail, a phone that had contacts as a first class citizen, you could actually read the screen and not feel claustrophobic, and a frickin' full web browser! And it was your iPod too!? Dude... we all need to sit back, stop playing revisionist history, and realize how in awe we were waiting for this stupid phone to activate - it took me over a week to activate my iPhone because we all overloaded Cingular. But the swipe gesture just to unlock it, and it's beautiful screen just had me staring at the thing for the full week - so damn excited. Simple things like the highlight 'Swipe to unlock' was a designers wet dream for a few years - come on man! This was flippin' insane.
The same thing happened to me with mp3 players and the iPod. I won't bore you with a similar story - but come on! We all bought mp3 players, the experience sucked but the end goal was worth it - and when the iPod made the thing we wanted to do easy - it was a natural success. The same thing happened with Desktop Publishers and people who used spreadsheets on a daily basis for the GUI based computers.
To spell this out again, the world already had and used on a daily basis the product class Apple made great. Most people did not care for fitness trackers/watchers when they came out [see Pebble's fall from grace, fitbit's early IPO failure, etc.], nor do most care for VR and AR headsets.
Here's the kicker, I've bought almost every generation VR and AR headset trying to make these devices compelling - but every experiment just shows these 'take over a human field of view' sucks. They do nothing for us like the music player or PDA did - maybe it's an Alto issue (we need the GUI break through for these) - but I've worked on this problem from every angle for 7 years and it sucks. Even the dang architects and mechanical engineers think it sucks - and they are in the spatial computing context! I was there with the DK1 met with HTC in Taiwan and other people I can't say, and did all the BS - this tech strata sucks for what it wants to achieve. It just needs to be a beautiful hands free reader accessory - that's where it's compelling - this whole ambient computing will not be head worn, it just won't.
Obviously it was amazing. I just meant on day 1, which many of us forget about, it wasn't there for most people. It has conceptually stayed more or less the same product but it really has gotten so much better that we take for granted how much it's improved.
In my opinion, for example, the iPhone 4s was the first that was good enough for most people, but even then for many people it wasn't until the screen became giant that it became usable.
Anyways, I was too poor to own the first iPhone, but I had the first Apple Watch. It was weird for me because I simultaneously felt like it was amazing and a huge let down. I kept telling myself, "Well, at least it's a nice watch", but the truth was that it was just too limited.
I think conceptually the watch has stayed the same but is so much better now.
I'm excited to see the non-head-work ambient computing future, and I think Apple will be successful.
I can't see what "problem" the headset will solve. Apple is not good at games and won't do pron, so what is left?
This is the first iteration of a product category which eventually replaces desktop and laptop computers.
Next time you're buying a new computer, you might buy this instead.
I know, it’s Apple; but at the same time, you’re easily going to sell 2-3 times more of them, and; like the iPod, it can easily introduce them to the Apple ecosystem and when it comes time to buy a new phone; they’ll maybe say ‘well, I’ve already got an Apple Watch and really like it…maybe I’ll get an iPhone this time my contract expires.’
But it’s Apple business logic. I’ve used their products pretty much exclusively for nearly 20 years (I’m an iOS/WatchOS dev and have used Logic to make music for 15 years) but I’ll never understand many of their decisions.
Even fairly notable tech industry folks like Linus from LMG use it even though he’s a Samsung phone user.
The only part you need the phone for is initial setup.
Like, yeah, it’s not ideal but you just ask a friend with an iPhone to help out. Unless you’re in an android only circle of course.
Either way, not ideal, but not as dire as the people above make it out to be either
I argue that it would be a horrible introduction to Apple products. For input, you either talk to it or type on a tiny keyboard. There’s no web browser. The screen is so small, it’s measured in millimeters (whereas in the U. S., the phone is measured in inches).
Were I running Apple, there’s no way I’d let the watch be the introduction to Apple products without some improved means of interaction.
This is why they make those decisions, they know they have an extremely loyal customer base that will buy it anyway
I agree you need the phone too, but at least I’ve been able to track a run while listening to music on my headphones and pay for water after my flask broke all without a phone present.
I think we’re close to just the watch but I’d be damned if I want to dictate messages etc. The screen size and lack of input devices definitely holds it back from being genuinely standalone.
I haven’t tried in some time but about a year ago YouTube Music wouldn’t work at all and Spotify was janky. I started my run and after the buffer was exhausted my music stopped playing even though I thought I had downloaded it onto the watch.
Probably the solution is Apple Music but that is annoying.
Even today, you’ll occasionally see terminals in Europe which don’t actually support Apple Pay as such; it’ll work, because it acts like a normal contactless card, but only up to 50 euro, because the terminal doesn’t know it’s authenticated.
You forgot to mention companies that did accept it but stopped after they implemented their own payment system (which again only applies to American branches of their stores).
I think people are underestimating how effective a “cost-almost-no-object” version is going to be at generating interest. There will be lines at Apple Stores as soon as it’s available to try.
The model is iPod / iPod mini|nano. Everyone wanted the former, everyone bought the latter.
Not to mention all the developers who want to build something for the mass-market iteration. This is going to be like the original launch of the App Store, where even small gimmick apps get a lot of attention. If you want in on the gold rush, you’ll have to buy the first version.
It could work if they allowed pr0n on it. They already offer the privacy which makes it a much better proposition than a Quest where Zuck is always watching over your shoulder.
But Apple will probably nanny it to death.
I don’t think this is the killer app for headsets though, unless maybe someone comes up with a volumetric production pipeline for truly immersive participatory experiences…
After all that’s their business model too.
Why do you believe that Zuckerberg wants to see your porn preferences?
Ostensibly it doesn't matter. Apple's headset won't be any different, both companies will encrypt their traffic and insist it's meaningless telemetry. If these companies want to spy on you, they will - they own your hardware more than you do. Without a verifiable, open boot process you're basically just throwing stones from a glass house. If you want paranoia-tier VR computing, get a Valve Index and an airgapped Nvidia/Linux workstation. It would probably still be cheaper than Apple's complete product (somehow).
Whatever the case, I'd bet the farm on Apple's new headset shipping with OCSP telemetry out-of-box.
This promises to be a portable unlimited screen space - if I can use it 8h+, OS integration is there - I could see myself spending that kind of money.
Having a portable workspace anywhere with a chair and desk is big - especially when desk/chair dimensions now don't play a factor.
I suppose this is where Augmented Reality comes into play.
With supported keyboards (basically Apple and Logitech’s offerings atm), they load up a tracked 3D model of the keyboard and then pull in an overlaid video feed of your real hands. With non-supported keyboards, the video feed is more of a small “window” that also captures the keyboard.
And when it works, it’s honestly very impressive (especially with color passthrough).
I fully expect Apple to have a more robust and less buggy version ready to go - and with the much higher specs they’ll probably be able to get a lot of “wows” from the demos.
You can have this right now from multiple VR headsets (Lenovo comes to mind as a company that puts a lot of emphasis on this use-case). The issue is the resolution of most headsets is pretty low for this usecase, so you end up with pretty low-resolution virtual "screens".
Well, if the resolution is up to par and the software is set up to mitigate the problems even middling resolution would cause.
No headset, except maybe the 8K (and possibly the 4K) PiMax designs, are capable of displaying text in a way that isn't a blurry mess; the problem is both the lack of resolution and the fact that anti-aliasing can only do so much (move your head ever so slightly off axis so the text no longer lines up with the pixel boundaries and fine details become completely distorted by insufficient resolution- software could help fix this if anyone bothered to write any but that hasn't happened yet).
$3k seems a bit high. OTOH I wouldn’t pay $3k for a laptop, and Apple seems to sell plenty of $3k laptops.
People seem to forget this every time, but this version of the tech is aimed at developers and early adopters, just like version one of Hololens was. It's also priced like Hololens was.
The consumer focused version in a thick sunglasses form factor comes later.
c.f. Bloomberg recent piece on this; tldr lot of internal strife at Apple because that’s what they were supposed to do and simply couldn’t. Now it’s limping out the door because they might as well ship something. Lead was saying as recently as a year ago that glasses were 3 years out, but they were shelved because there’s no path to it
One big thing Apple has going for it is that they will iterate on a product year after year instead of doing one hardware update and giving up like Microsoft did.
Regardless, developers need hardware in their hands if you want third party apps for the new platform.
Think about its 'most compelling' consumer use case - Lifelike Avatars in FaceTime. Which one do you think is preferred, cooking in the kitchen and wearing a headset, or propping your iPhone up and FaceTiming while cooking? Where on earth does it 'change the experience' to have a real-life like avatar? We have the 'life like' avatar right now with Zooms - and the reason Zooms suck is innately the human part, not the rendering part - most meetings could be emails or 5 min phone calls.
Everyone had spreadsheets and publishing needs (Mac), portable music players (iPods), cellular phones (iPhone), headphones (AirPods), home wireless music speakers (HomePods)... think of fitbit / pebble, 1980s VR and then todays VR ?
That's amusing, since wearing the headset while doing physical tasks on factory floors was the exact use case Microsoft pushed for Hololens 2.
> Microsoft’s HoloLens 2: a $3,500 mixed reality headset for the factory
https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/24/18235460/microsoft-holole...
(we this found out with GM doing a pilot)
[Edit] to keep it going, external cameras are how you verify parts are picked correctly and put in the right place - you don't need FPV for that to be verified either.
[Edit 2] Until a flight simulator uses VR and AR headsets as primary training, this stuff just doesn’t make sense. CAE has definitely explored with this but it’s not what they reach for
And how'd that work out, commercially?
It's the Lisa vs the Apple II all over again. If only they had the courage left to send this project the way of the headphone jack.
Pancake optics just recently became a thing and they really are transformative compared to fresnel lenses of the past. You have edge to edge clarity instead of the massive blurry mess of earlier HMDs. They’re also typically thinner and don’t need compute power to compensate for pincushion distortion.
If this Apple headset takes off, I’ll almost feel sorry for Meta. The Quest Pro was their “business prosumer” device that needed another 6-12 months in the oven before it would be usable for that purpose. Great PCVR headset, but nobody makes money on those.
If anything, Meta has shown that VR CAN be sold to the masses as a video game console (Quest 2 sales numbers are honestly impressive in that context), but the console model doesn’t bring in the billions in revenue promised to investors. And nobody wants Metaverse garbage. It’s make or break on the prosumer market, and if Apple bombs I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Zuck pack it up soon after.
I am hopeful with recent increases in nits from OLED and luck from uleds / smol oled, we'll get "glass but 4x the size and more contrast" by 2025 from someone.
which has me pretty convinced AR is dead-ish
Even in a dedicated HMD like the Pro, they had to redesign the SoC to move the memory so they could fit a chonkier active cooling system (that mysteriously is on full throttle constantly in recent firmware, which makes me wonder if they were seeing thermal failures). Bosworth admitted in one of those Facebook livestreams that the reason the Pro tops out at 90hz isn’t because the panels don’t support 120 - it’s because you’d cook your face from the heat of running those high nit panels at 120hz.
Iirc, Apple dumped the iPhone onto the market even though it was not ready yet and was missing many elementary functions.
So not sure what you mean by "people seem to forget this every time".
People seem to forget that this wasn't ever intended to be the mass market consumer version of the tech.
They've been iterating internally on a consumer version for years now, and they'll keep at it until they have something for the mass market that they think is worth shipping.
For another, the competitors were also all missing at least one vital elementary function: Internet support that didn't suck.
So I don't think there are a lot of comparisons to be drawn between a yet-to-be-released VR platform that, ultimately, nobody is really asking for, and a phone that almost everybody who wasn't named Steve Ballmer, Mike Lazaridis, or Ned Ludd desperately wanted.
(Admittedly I said the same thing about the watch -- who in the world wants a watch? -- and that was way off-base given how much demand there turned out to be.)
And, from memory, only came about because Apple was Apple and could say "We don't care that you're AT&T. Create this plan for us or your customers won't be able to get an iPhone."
Blackberry for email, Windows Mobile for doorstops, and Palm for 'jack-of-all-trades, master of none'. None of them got mobile web right, none of them had iTunes, and none of them had Steve Jobs hyping them.
At 3k+ it will likely be the unchallenged top headset on the market, and that alone will mean that tech nerds will be raving over it.
> where are the apps going to come from?
Gaming whales exist. Enterprise customers exist. Microsoft got a $2b from the DOD for building the holo-lens 2 at tech demo levels of product quality. IMO, VR is 1 UX breakthrough away from finding a money-generating niche. And UX breakthrough/popularization is Apple's bread and butter.
Either they have the immersion and UI model that makes this kind of content viscerally “wow”, or they don’t have a product. I’m guessing they have a product.
This platform, if it works, will supercharge the value of their service offerings.
VR is hard, sorry hard even for companies that had decade headstart and similar budgets and talents available to Apple.
It may actually help them if people have more realistic expectations than presented here, since its not possible it will be a perfect product from gen 1, day 1. Not even Apple ever achieved any of that on any sophisticated product. Since there are so many sub-categories in VR to compete in (home cinema, overall immersion, raw resolution, couch/room experience, controllers, comfort, virtual huge desktop, sound quality and so on and on) people should be realistic. And also expect to wait few years to have 3rd party software fully utilizing HW.
Price point should not drive expectations, Apple often gives upmark on its products compared to competition. We shall see soon.
The Pro is sort of an aberration. Pixels per degree are actually higher than the Quest 2, but the panel resolution itself is slightly less (and the MiniLED tech is far superior to the regular LCD panel). The big upgrade was with the pancake optics, which are actually quite a leap forward.
Meta should have put the product on ice until Qualcomm had XR2 Gen 2 SoCs available. They couldn’t bump the panel resolution because of the SoC. Hell, even the extremely overengineered Touch Pro controllers only exist as an artifact of the XR2 not supporting enough cameras to do face/eye tracking while still having cameras available for SLAM tracking.
I look at it the same we look at paintings. Some pieces are truely mindblowing, speak to your soul and you could look at them everyday for next decades without getting bored...or not. I think for most people even the most impacting piece becomes a wallpaper pattern after the fifth time they stared at it for 5 min. They might revisit it once in a while, at most.
For a headset, that mostly means it's played with for 30 min the first time and stays in a closet for the rest of its life. You forget about it and don't get a chance to get revisited.
So yes, experiences could be wonderful, but it also needs apps that bring you back to the device on a regular basis to help the ecosystem stay alive.
(the other weird part: the more realistic and visceral the experience is, the more you get greedy and ask for more. Except there's nothing beyond. You'll be looking at that moon landing, wishing to move forward to look closer, except it will be clunky if even possible. And you're reminded that yes, it's "just" virtual, and technology and content is not ready yet)
I think you're absolutely right. I think a similar example of this is the RTX 4090. Everyone complains about the price, the power usage, how it's overkill for 99.99% of the population but it's constantly sold out. I doubt anyone who owns one is really disappointed
I’m not sure. With video cards those gamer whales can crush all the lesser card owners after they buy some power via MTX. Then they can convince themselves it’s skill based, not money based. With a $3k headset in a closed ecosystem they’ll be playing amongst themselves and they won’t get the same level of reward (aka crushing “noobs”) that they’re able to buy in a more mainstream market.
I don’t know a single person, including friends of friends, that would buy any VR headset let alone one that costs $3k. The price point needs to come down a ton and typically adoption of tech like that comes from younger generations that have exactly zero money these days, so I predict massive flops from everyone because I don’t think the economics are going to work.
Are there a lot games where a 4090 owner would have a meaningful advantage over an 3060 owner in a competitive environment?
Yes, all of them benefit from being able to push high framerates at resolutions the 3060 (and 2070 and 1080) can't get to. A high framerate is a meaningful advantage for a bunch of reasons, but so's a higher resolution- doesn't matter if an enemy's movement is smooth if your screen is too blurry to positively identify them.
Sure, the 1080/2070/3060 can run 4K at 30Hz, or 1440p at 90-100Hz (this is why that whole G-sync thing exists- it's designed to help hide framerate drops from those cards), but the 4090 is significantly more powerful than those are and can push 4K at 144Hz.
Which game in particular gives a 4090 owners a meaningful advantage over 3060 owners? I understand the importance of high & stable FPS.
who in their right mind would like a huge screen like a phone, without a good way to input information like a keyboard or a mouse. what would be the use case for a product like that? watch youtube?
boom
who in their right mind would like a watch they need to charge every night?
bam
People literally switched banks to get Apple Pay here.
I think the whole "chip-and-pay" thing in the US is so very laughable - everyone else has been with it for at last a decade.
It's a shame it took forcing merchants to wear the cost instead of banks making the terminals more affordable - then again, I am talking about the banks here.
Having this in the hands of developers could be great, Apple can followup with an affordable hardware product a few years later. It’s basically Apple’s hololens, with hopefully a different fate.
https://i.postimg.cc/gm6ZNFYw/File-20230521-171346.jpg
By far the most expensive part are the two 1.3 inch Sony OLED screens at 700 USD (350 each). A "special-shaped flexible OLED" external screen by LG is only listed as 30 USD, which seems quite low. Its purpose may be to see the eyes of the wearer (reverse passthrough).
Here the Chinese original: https://twitter.com/SadlyItsBradley/status/16590911683768074...
I wouldn’t be surprised if this is Apple marketing or Wall Street traders inserting information into the news cycle. For Apple, the benefit is obviously to exceed expectations when they release an $800 headset (still expensive, but so much cheaper to someone who had mentally allocated $1,600). For Wall Street, anything to get the stock price to move one way or the other is valuable.
https://xrdailynews.com/en/apple-vr-ar-headset-bill-of-mater...
AirPods Max: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25344762
AirPods (general): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21985239
AirPods Pro: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21378197
M1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25049079
M1 (Max/Pro): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28908031
Something interesting is that a lot of the most popular links for these from algolia are not the announcement. The M1 in particular surprised me. The announcement discussion is a few pages behind many other posts about various M1 things.
I've long thought that there's a lot of interesting research opportunities for hn discussions (see Dropbox announcement). Maybe ChatGPT can summarize it.
Some years ago I made 3D photos of a wedding with a physical dual camera setup. That was quite a pain to get exposure etc. synchronized and postprocessed. Still the pictures look amazing on a quest. Nowadays this could all be super easy.
There were several 3D Android phones that I remember in the early days with dual-lens cameras and autostereographic screens, but sadly they all bombed.
At some point the technology will return, I'm certain of that.
Marketing positioning information does not have a BOM attached.
This is fake. Or at least altered from the real information.
Apples track record is refinement/perfecting for mass audiences not blue sky innovation. I’m looking forward to seeing their entry in this space should it actually launch.
The rumours were similar for the iPad. So much so they poked fun at those rumours when they shared the actual pricing which was shockingly low.
For example, volume cost of a basic PCB is in the region of 1 cent per square cm, but a $40 PCB in volume can easily come from many layers and a weird stackup (not to mention that this may be up to about 100 sq cm).
They aren't created by traditional litho + etch, but rather by a process called modified semi-additive processing (mSAP). iPhone, apple watch, etc PCBs are basically the same as CPU/IC interposers on a large scale.
Definitely not 1 cent/sq cm cheap, but they have massive volume and high price points. It lets them get the insane part density needed these days.
And for anyone who knew something about CE BOM cost. That list is just complete BS. At this point it is highly likely Apple will release an AR/VR Headset at $1999 and the internet will think it is a bargain. Given how PR had everyone set the expectation of its cost.
People talk about use cases, but there are quite a few. VR/AR is going to be fantastic for home fitness and Apple already have a fitness subscription, pair that with a watch for stats etc and this really will be a great device for that. Also exactly what apple loves at the moment, requires two products and a subscription in the apple eco system, great to getting people locked in.
I think AR/VR as long as they can get it comfortable will replace screens and the TV, why have a TV in the house, when you can put on a headset and be at the cinema? Without it taking up the space of a TV and being something you can take with you anywhere, like a hotel etc. There were rumours for so long that Apple were working on an actual TV, I think what actually happened, is they will release the device that will replace it.
All that needs to be done, is for someone to make all this work together and you have got a killer product, so i wouldn't write Apple off just because Meta have done a bad job with trying to sell the metaverse vision to everyone. I don't think Meta were stupid for pursing this, the current products are just half baked and badly executed, but Apple is in the position to do this right. This was the talk of the tech world not too long ago, before AI came and took over everything, but I believe Apple is going to put it firmly back on the map in a few weeks when they drop this. What Apple does, the world listens.
This will be expensive and have a lot of flaws, but any generation shifting product that Apple has released has been like that, just wait a few years down the line and see where it goes.
On the other hand, Apple’s bread and butter is one user one device. The question is will Apple lead the way for “killer app” or rely on third part developers?
Watching TV in VR also is highly uncomfortable because you can't relax your head due to the weight (and again it is uncomfortably hot). Unless you are on an airplane it doesn't make any sense. The only other advantage is privacy.
The only hope this has is if apple uses insane camera tech to do video pass through VR in such a low latency that this device can beat Hololens for AR applications.
And on and on and on. It's so obvious. All the challenges involved are engineering/polish/politics (in terms of agreeing on some level of industry standards at least for a minimal level of universal interaction). Which doesn't mean it couldn't be mucked up but the promise is clear. I've spent many many thousands of dollars on displays of all sorts. When one wearable one can replace them all I'd cheerfully pay $5k let alone $3k. It'll also open up entire new realms of form factors for computers.
Apple may or may not manage it, and certainly probably not the first go around, but it's pretty clear why they'd want to be getting going on real experience with it even if it's mostly for devs and such to start. It's the definition of a looming disruption, a huge amount of their current visual product design is about "very nice screens, with stuff on them". Something that eventually obsoletes the "screens" bit would be one obvious way someone else could pull the rug out from under most of Apple's current offerings, and conversely is a big new opportunity for them too long term. It might take them 5-10 years, but if they think now is the time to get iterating I don't see why they shouldn't get going even if it's a touch aggressive.
As-is, desktop streaming apps do exist for VR. This emerging paradigm you're describing is yours for the taking, if you want it.
Screens are simply a better paradigm though. I say this as someone with a wireless OLED headset less than 20 feet away from me - I choose to instead respond and browse the internet and program and watch TV on my disappointing, $250 VA panel. There is never a time where I go "I'd rather experience this 2D, traditional content in VR now" even if the headset is charged and ready to go. Casting the content to my TV is much more comfortable, lets me share it with others, lets me eat my popcorn unintruded and works much better for binging sessions where you don't want "headset burns" on your face.
> On a plane or a train and want to watch a movie, or pull up SSH sessions or whatever else?
Yes, because this is just so difficult on my phone and laptop. If I want to watch a movie or pull up SSH sessions while I'm on a train, I would much rather do so on an interface that is not stuck to my face.
-smoldesu, CEO of RIM (previously Sony, previously IBM), on the iPhone in 2007, the iPod in 2001, and the GUI in 1983
Right.
* Unless Apple has figured out true mixed reality (i.e. transparent lenses with full field-of-vision overlaid video), opaque AR goggles are a non-starter for most people. Seeing your surroundings only through a camera and screen is unacceptable. Not to mention the fact that people around you can’t see your face either.
* Unless other people have these glasses, they can’t see your screen either. Even if these glasses have no shortcomings whatsoever, I can’t imagine a future where everyone in the room needs compatible glasses to look at the same screen.
* Few people actually need enormous amounts of screen real estate, beyond what’s practical to pack in a laptop. The use cases you’ve mentioned (watching movies on the go, logging into device consoles) are fairly niche IMO. There would have to be some compelling new UI paradigm (e.g. truly 3D displays) that’s only possible at massive virtual display scale.
> Seeing your surroundings only through a camera and screen is unacceptable.
Without qualification this statement is strange. I don't care if I'm seeing through a camera and screen or through a transparant piece of plastic. What I care about is image quality, distortion, FOV, latency etc.
So the question is surely a more nuanced one about the relative importance of each of these factors?
> Not to mention the fact that people around you can’t see your face either.
When I'm working I'm not sure this is a huge deal.
> Unless other people have these glasses, they can’t see your screen either. Even if these glasses have no shortcomings whatsoever, I can’t imagine a future where everyone in the room needs compatible glasses to look at the same screen.
Ah. I get it - you're assuming there's other people in the same room as you! Why would you make that assumption for this device? I rarely work with anyone in the room, and when I do, they tend to be working on their own stuff. My collaborations are 90% remote (and for the 10% I can take the headset off)
There is currently no camera/display tech that is remotely close to delivering dynamic range, latency, refresh rate, and resolution anywhere close to what our eyes can perceive.
>>Not to mention the fact that people around you can’t see your face either.
>When I'm working I'm not sure this is a huge deal.
It is certainly a big deal for many people to be able to maintain eye contact with people they're speaking with in person.
>Ah. I get it - you're assuming there's other people in the same room as you! Why would you make that assumption for this device?
I think you are the one making several constraining assumptions here:
1. this device is just for work
2. most people work physically alone
3. in the rare instances that people work together, they almost never look at each others' screens
Re: 1, OP's vision is that AR goggles may ultimately supersede displays entirely, which would make it difficult to do things that most people commonly do today, like show their friends things on their phone.
Re: 2, this is also not true; as of February 2023, it's estimated that 30% of all office work occurred remotely [0].
Re: 3, this is also not true, especially outside of the tech industry, where people collaborate in-person on documents/spreadsheets/presentations all the time.
I see a whole host of impractical impediments: knowing Apple, only Apple glasses will be able to have a shared reality experience, so all the people in the room with non-Apple glasses will be left out. There will also be version incompatibilities as the tech evolves, leading to a whole host of awkward scenarios: "sorry friends, I can't show you this funny video, I have the iGlass 5 but you guys only have the iGlass 3, and you guys have Samsung Galaxy Glass." Furthermore, since these glasses will have to be networked, you'd likely need a separate pair for work and personal life, which creates a host of incompatibilities ("sorry coworker, I can't show you my photos from the weekend, since I took them with my personal glasses and you only have your work pair on you.")
[0] https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3862069-nearly-30-perc...
The reason a Quest Pro is a pain is the weight and passthrough quality. You get used to not seeing someone's eyes fairly quickly.
>3. in the rare instances that people work together, they almost never look at each others' screens
This is a huge one but I think its a workable problem. Hopefully Apple lets you 'cast' your screen to others for a shared experience. It makes a huge difference.
This is the context I missed. I wasn't thinking "all day" usage - but then I don't see that being especially feasible even for transparent AR for quite a while (for different reasons).
This sounds like a very early adopter/developer version 1. The tech for what you describe exists, but this particular version isn't going to be it. Which I'm basing on Apple themselves, leaks says they're thinking in terms of hundreds of thousands of units in a year for this, for contrast they sold something like 220 million iPhones just last year. The question is whether they can achieve an MVP and get iterating.
>Unless other people have these glasses, they can’t see your screen either. Even if these glasses have no shortcomings whatsoever, I can’t imagine a future where everyone in the room needs compatible glasses to look at the same screen.
I can, very, very easily. But in the long interim between now and then, I can imagine remaining legacy screens which people already have for that. Because we already have them. It's not a zero-sum game, having wearable displays too doesn't somehow make existing screens shut off.
>Few people actually need enormous amounts of screen real estate
Utterly ludicrous. The only reason people use small screens is portability, size (not everyone physically has room for a large display), and cost. If there were two 12" notebooks, one of which had a conventional matching screen like now and the other at the push of a button could pop out a 30" magic solid hologram display (resizable to whatever one wanted) at zero extra mass or stored size cost for the same price, there are zero people who'd pick the former. Everything everyone does with computers and gaming and movie watching and so on benefits from full resolution arbitrary size windows. It's just that right now there is no way to separate that from the physical size of the display hardware itself.
>watching movies/playing games/reading books/doing work is niche, and wanting to do it privately is niche
:\ Come on.
I am not aware of this technology; can you point me to it?
>>Unless other people have these glasses, they can’t see your screen either. Even if these glasses have no shortcomings whatsoever, I can’t imagine a future where everyone in the room needs compatible glasses to look at the same screen.
>I can, very, very easily.
Currently, if your own device doesn't work, it just means you can't access your own content. With connected AR devices, it would mean that you also can't access anyone else's shared reality. Here are some common ways I foresee AR devices not being easily interoperable:
* Knowing Apple, only Apple glasses will be compatible with each other, so all the people in the room with non-Apple glasses (or glasses that are too old) will be left out: "sorry friends, I can't show you this funny video, I have the iGlass 5 but you guys only have the iGlass 3, and you guys have Samsung Galaxy Glass."
* Battery life on these had better be phenomenal, since you're cut off from a large portion of reality if it dies.
* These glasses will have to be networked, with close to zero latency, which is always tricky business—even mature technologies like wifi are far from perfectly reliable today.
>But in the long interim between now and then, I can imagine remaining legacy screens which people already have for that. Because we already have them. It's not a zero-sum game, having wearable displays too doesn't somehow make existing screens shut off.
I totally agree. This is the future I think is most likely — some sort of clever hybrid between physical screens and AR screen extensions.
>>Few people actually need enormous amounts of screen real estate
>Utterly ludicrous.
You are right. I should have said, “given the tradeoffs of AR glasses, few people need that real estate.”
>The only reason people use small screens is portability, size (not everyone physically has room for a large display), and cost. If there were two 12" notebooks, one of which had a conventional matching screen like now and the other at the push of a button could pop out a 30" magic solid hologram display (resizable to whatever one wanted) at zero extra mass or stored size cost for the same price, there are zero people who'd pick the former.
I totally agree with this. If this technology were a magic hologram (i.e. zero tradeoffs), it would be totally game-changing.
> watching movies/playing games/reading books/doing work is niche, and wanting to do it privately is niche
You don't need a giant screen with tons of tradeoffs to read most books or do most work. Gaming and movies would benefit, but most people do not spend the majority of their time on a computer gaming or watching cinematic movies.
With their performance advantage they could easily work towards something like Samsung Dex with a compute core that you plug into different terminals, or macOS on the iPad.
But they choose not to, most likely trying not to cannibalize different device categories.
I would love to be wrong but I don’t see this happening for many years until some Chinese brand offers cheap alternative glasses and everyone runs around with a battery powered Mac mini.
Besides that we also obviously don’t know how long until the battery and display tech is good enough to compete with screens
Granted the question of timing is of course always one of the huge challenges too, someone can have 100% the right idea, product segment focus, etc, but be too early (or too late) and fail. But again, Apple has to have as much insight into all of this as anyone, they've built deep, deep manufacturer relationships. As with some of their previous products, the right time to get going is probably "a bit early, but not too much". Ie, good enough to satisfy a few hundred thousand people, not just thousands/tens of thousands, but early enough that everyone else thinks it's not ready yet. Then there is enough qualities/volume for real feedback and getting the iteration ball rolling, but not so much that it means making major changes isn't doable yet. If I think back to Mac OS X (I still vividly remember both the Public Beta and 10.0), the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, or even a lot of Mac models (Macbook Air v1 definitely had a host of "this needs more hardware" aspects), that seems to be around the point they always aim for.
Again no special insight on if they've gotten that moment right here but it certainly doesn't feel like it couldn't be given where things are at. And my confusion is people who apparently can't see any value at all, regardless of improvements. It's one thing to say "I think they're 3 years too early for MVP", it's another to say "what's the point of wearable displays ever".
But that hasn't yet been technically achieved.
What the comments are saying is: "I can't see how current state-of-the-art wearable displays can offer any value, given their current limitations"
And I agree. With none of the headsets I've tried (Rift, Rift-S, Valve Index, HoloLens, HoloLens 2), I could imagine working 8 hours per day. They're heavy, scratchy and are annoying to put-on & take off. The Nreal Airs, mentioned by a sibling comment, have a promising form-factor, but only feature a 1080p display.
At our current technological advancement, I doubt that Apple will overcome these limitations next week.
It's actually funny how a confirmation bias works: In other posts people say "this tracks with other rumors..."...yeah, that's what people who make stuff up tend to do.
Lot of formal/informal colloquial terms gets lost in translation. Yes you could be right - wearer of the headset would be aware of environment behind their head and for that this could be the camera system.
[1] https://twitter.com/SadlyItsBradley/status/16590911683768074...
(Hydraulic ram).
Through an unrelated anecdote, in my head this is now bound to the music of "smoke on the water", with a sheep impression for the guitar (bass?) — "Sheep on the water, ba baa baaah, ba ba ba baaah"
Translation: https://i.postimg.cc/gm6ZNFYw/File-20230521-171346.jpg
Chinese: https://twitter.com/SadlyItsBradley/status/16590911683768074...
Would have been better if the screen attached to an iPhone thereby reducing the cost of a separate processor/battery.
Instead, it looks like someone has reverse engineered one of the devices and guessed at all these figures/details.
I wish they could offer a subsidized devkit or something
I guess they are planning on this being for real enthusiasts rather than a mass market thing.
Look at the state of the art for projectors, they still require special reflective screens to reach their full potential. You're asking for what is still very much in the realm of science fiction.
Your eyball is a screen. And, well, screens are screens. Both work by restricting ambient light and focusing an image at a specific focal length.
Air is ... many things, and useful and all that, but it is not a screen. Fill it with particles and you can get traced patterns through it (e.g., laser through smoke or arclamps through fog), but that's not screen-like projection.
And under any circumstances in which ambient light levels are high, the darkest possible ground is ... the ambient light level. Which means either that the entire image is washed out or it's absolutely blasted with light.
Captain Disillusion has a good debunk of one such purported device, the "Cicret Bracelet": <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=KbgvSi35n6o>
Spoiler: it doesn't work. It can't work.
Though I suppose you could carry a water-sheet-spray system and project onto that:
Head mounted displays are just the obvious evolution of display technology.
A headset which is half the weight, double the resolution and still cheap would sell well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35995072
Anyone know a source link?
>Quantity: It is estimated to be 400,000 to 500,000 units in the second half of this year.