Apple's Vision Pro headset deserves to be ridiculed
disconnect.blog
disconnect.blog
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8291898
To me these seem pretty stupid. Major features (to me) of ear-buds with wires and 3.5" jack are: 1) being attached with wires means I don't easily lose them when they slip out of my ear/hand/pocket. 2) the 3.5" jack actually keeps them pretty solidly attached to my phone (again, less risk of losing them). Walking around with two loose tiny objects seems less than ideal - at least to me; I'd lose them within days.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13169937
$350 and not out until "early 2015" Dead in the water. That's insanely expensive and too late in the smartwatch market in my mind.
Like it might be worth it if you really are able to replace your standard monitor setup and use these for long stretches with out neck or eye strain. But how will you know until you try?
I saw someone say elsewhere, these are not for consumers in general. They are for developers to work with, build software for, come up with new things… then, if and when a niche is found, they’ll probably make a much less expensive consumer model that focuses on that use case.
That being said, I would love to try these, but I’m more interested in an upgraded laptop at the moment, and that money would buy a nice one.
I've been on the AR/VR hype train for a long time and have had many different headsets over the years. Apple Vision Pro seems like it puts all of them to shame. And if Apple can execute on this, no doubt, it'll become a household staple. And this is Gen 1. Price will come down. Apple has to get the experience right though. And so far it looks promising.
The original iPhone models were $499–599 only WITH a 2-year AT&T contract, so that price was heavily subsidized.
The current iPhone 14 range is $799–1099+ for the base configs with no contract, but these are unsubsidized prices.
(The base model iPhone SE is only $429 today.)
Apples to oranges comparison.
Carrier and retail subsidies still exist. It's just that they're no longer the only way to buy an iPhone.
Untrue. Sure, you bought a phone that was locked to AT&T, but you didn't need a contract, and jailbreaking was a thing quickly....
Source: ya, I bought the first one before moving to China, paid $499 for it, and unlocked it before I left the shopping mall (University Village in Seattle) I was at.
I bought the first iPhone as well.
Not sure why you mention carrier unlocking for international travel or jailbreaking — two things that are completely orthogonal to the subsidized contract terms.
I would encourage you to check your memory. Maybe you paid a higher price to not have a subsidized contract, or maybe you broke your contract, etc etc; in any case, the contract being 2 years is very well documented:
> The iPhone was released in the United States on June 29, 2007 at the price of $499 for the 4 GB model and $599 for the 8 GB model, both requiring a 2-year contract.[17]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(1st_generation)
https://www.macworld.com/article/183052/liveupdate-15.html
> The original iPhone reached the market on June 29, 2007. In the U.S. it was priced at $499 and $599, for 4GB and 8GB models, respectively, along with a two-year contract with AT&T.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/06/29/the-story-of-the-...
> iPhone requires a new two-year AT&T service plan.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2007/06/26Apple-and-AT-T-Anno...
No no, really, lots of people bought them without contracts, even from AT&T stores, at the subsidized price. I think it was the way Apple and AT&T were selling the iPhone: you paid the money, the phone was locked to AT&T's network, so you could only get a contract afterwards without jailbreaking. They "required a contract" but it wasn't done at the same time you bought the phone, so you could always skip it!
This was in the early days of the iPhone, just a few months after it was released (I bought mine in October 2007). They closed the loophole a few months later. My memory is pretty accurate on this one, since I actually bought the phone at University Village (for $499?) and was using it in China a week after I bought it.
Some did criticize the launch price, $499(8GB)/$599(8GB), even though it was right in line with the other smartphones of the day (e.g., Treo). But Apple discontinued the 4GB, and lowered the 8GB price by $200 to $399 just two months after launch. At that point it was not mocked, and that price really helped drive it into the mainstream. I'd say Vision needs that level of price slash to even be niche successful.
https://venturebeat.com/mobile/iphone-prices-from-the-origin...
Maybe I’m wrong, we’ll see.
I'm no Apple hater or VR hater, but am I the only one who thinks that the design of this thing looks utterly ridiculous? It's a scuba mask.
At best, it's looks marginally less ridiculous than its competitors (which might be all that it needs to be), but I don't see anything about it that looks amazing.
I remember admiring flat screen TVs in the early 2000s when they cost like $10k: https://www.applianceretailer.com.au/eeqycmzusg/
I also used to have this SGI 1600SW monitor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_1600SW. 1600 x 1024 17", $2,500 (equivalent to $4,490 in 2022)...
$3,500 is a top of the line MacBook Pro.
For example, the Samsung S10 had a headphone jack, an SpO2 meter (who knew we wwould need this in the pandemic!), an FM radio, great screen, lightweight. Their newer models have no jack (to sell more wireless earphnes), no spo2 (to sell more watches), no fm radio (unknown reason), and its heavier. The perceptible difference in performance is miniscule despite all these years. So , some changes do need to be ridiculed
That said, i dont see this headset in a similar league, this seems an experimental prototype because none of the use cases mentioned have been proved.
So losing the FM radio is more a consequence of the decision to remove the headphone jack, rather than an active decision to remove it.
Still sucks, though. The FM radio was one of the most useful features of my previous phone. By the time I upgraded to a newer phone, its battery lasted for an hour at most during normal tasks, but I could get 12+ hours from the FM radio.
There are now very few phones that have my personal "wishlist" of removable battery + headphone jack + FM radio. And these are all budget phones so if you value a decent camera, you may be out of luck. Add 5G and I'm not sure there are any options.
Yep. And I literally couldn't care less about the camera.
All of that (plus my #1 issue of security concerns) are why my current smartphone will be my last smartphone.
This. I think Apple has actively made the cellphone space worse in a number of ways, from removing the headphone jack through eliminating user-replaceable batteries. When Apple does a thing, everyone else takes it as permission to do the same thing.
There’s a few comments like these that people are posting in the big apple vision post as well.
Yes. People have been wrong in the past.
In all seriousness, I think it is helpful context that people have ridiculed every Apple product launch since the iPhone.
Probably earlier: I remember people mocking the colorful iMacs. I’m sure you could dig up some pc magazine articles from the 90s dunking on the iMacs and iBooks :).
That being said, I think it is interesting context to remind people of the immediate reactions to the other Apple launches of the recent past. Especially the headphone jack hits home for me, because I'm still a huge fan of the 3,5mn connector, but it fairly quickly became clear that the early widespread stance of 'I'll never buy a phone without a headphone jack!' soon turned into a somewhat lonely fight.
That's actually exactly the reaction I was going for.
I feel like the people at Apple (and similar companies) are pushing their imaginations and very obviously taking a huge risk, whereas all the nay-sayers are just sitting comfortably in the boundaries of the world as they understand it, and passing judgement accordingly.
I have no idea if Vision Pro will succeed, but as a technologist, I'll spend today thinking of ways it might surprise me for the better, rather than the ways in which it may fall short.
How would you expect progress to occur? Company releases a product users criticize it and make fun of it company/competitors either drop the idea or come up with an improved version. What's wrong about that? Why would anyone care about hurting a massive corporation's feelings? Let's not anthropomorphize them...
> just sitting comfortably in the boundaries of the world as they understand it,
Well it's pretty clear that Vision Pro is very expensive and has no clear use cases. And most criticism is almost entirely focused on these two aspects.
> I'll spend today thinking of ways it might surprise me for the better, rather than the ways in which it may fall short.
So instead of thinking of ways how something could be improved you'll just try to figure out how to make the best of what you have? Best approaches are perfectly viable and reasonable depending on the situation.
This is obviously a very challenging value-proposition. No one is confused about how risky this is. It was undoubtedly on the Apple chopping block many many times.
But I find it infinitely more useful when people see a challenging problem and push themselves to think how it might possibly be useful, over what seems to be just quick and obvious dismissals.
The passive aggression is ugly, it's not a healthy environment for discussion and (as the kids say) simping for a massive company is just plain disgusting.
But the commentary that happens every time they launch a new product is not very predictive of success.
Perhaps the headset deserves ridicule and will fail. Given Apple’s track record, perhaps it would make sense to acknowledge their many successes with products people dismissed, and explain why this one is more similar to their failures that people dismissed (Ping, anyone?)
All it says is predicting the future is incredibly hard and all predictions (the ones predicting success as well as failure) are without much weight.
I wrote about some of these input factors in my post on category defining products a few years back: https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/
Personally, I feel Vision is a bit too broadly scoped for a v1. 3d photos really didn't need to be in there. The consumer use cases that Apple loves really aren't where Vision is providing next level value add, whereas the remote workplace ones are. But I understand those alone are not enough to drive adoption so I can see why they wanted to make it more consumer oriented.
My hunch is they pivot slightly toward workplace in subsequent versions, much like they did with Apple Watch pivoting toward health and away from luxury.
This applies to Apple just as to every other company. It's not like Apple hasn't had product failures, after all.
If this succeed, to me it will be more akin to what the iPad did than to what the watch did.
It’s also extremely expensive. I’m curious to see how Apple will market it. We will see.
Obviously, it was intentional to create a scenario that there are viral videos of people gasping at the price reveal.
I do think this is a revolutionary day but in a totally dystopian way. I suspect this is the start of where the tech innovations are more and more not going to be targeted at the mass market. The mass market is financially tapped out. The future is what Bernard Arnault and his 200 billion dollars figured out a long time ago. As AI starts to make society more and more unequal the money will be more and more in the high end luxury products. Everyone else can eat cake.
I assume it's more of a prototype targeted mainly at developers and enthusiasts at this point. They're probably betting that by the time they can decrease the price significantly somebody would've figured out what can you actually do with this thing.
VR has only significant traction for a handful of games. iPad is indeed an exception while watches and fitness trackers were popular and a growing market before Apple entered.
But perhaps I am turning I to an old man?
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartwatch-shipm...
Personally I think Apple missed a bit in the marketing by positioning this so heavily on average consumer use cases (3d pics of kids!) rather than professional use cases, where yes, having immersive shared environments can be helpful while avoiding any of the legitimate 'consume your life' issues with tech in our personal lives. "Boot up an office at home when you need it" is an extremely compelling use case and is compatible with the ideals of making computing (and work!) more humane.
Unfortunately the author doesn't seem to understand product positioning or have the vision to see possibilities enough to discuss the consumer v work nuance. And the isolation critique could have been interesting but it just defaulted to 'big company bad, tech bad.' Critics are essential, we deserve better ones.
Yeah especially with bringing iOS ecosystem, it means that for (general) developers it's not interesting.
If they were demoing a shell, a code editor, etc. But if it's iOS it's just too locked down.
Developers are actually good first generation buyers. They can likely make their boss pay for.
So it's such a waste, they are excluded because iOS
but instead it has a mundane understanding of what most people actually consider important in life
fortunately his critique is not around the specifics of how this product was made (and 'launched') but about whether this product should be made in the first place
technologically it looks about the same as a hololens, which seems like the same 'product idea' as already launched by microsoft whenever ago; but where is that now?
Re:HoloLens, it failed because Microsoft is not an organization that can build category-defining consumer products. Vision is worlds apart technically from the HoloLens' tech demo level quality. Whether or not it succeeds in the market, Apple was not fucking around or half-assing the tech. This was spare no expense, leave no nuance unpolished, culmination of a decade of deep technical investment and the merging of 30 different workstreams stuff. I can hardly imagine the complexity of the product roadmap that led to it.
Re:mundane understanding, I'm not so sure. Taken as-is with the gen1 hardware we saw, I think Vision should have been targeted a bit more at workplace than consumer given the form factor. But more broadly, the whole product is really just a prelude for what experience we can expect within an AR glasses form factor in the coming decade(s), and products like this need to put a stake in the ground on what they're going to be about.
To give you some sense of why HoloLens never made it: it was timed wrong for the tech (way too early), it was incubated in a company that has never defined a consumer product category and lacks the talent / organizational structure / gravitas to do so, Microsoft lacked the courage to invest in it, it failed to define valuable broad market use cases, it couldn't leverage developers, it lacked multi-year investments in like 10 different key technologies, it had entirely the wrong form factor, etc etc. There wasn't a snowballs chance in hell HoloLens was going to be a consumer product without being fundamentally different.
If I recall MSFT had demos of people jumping around shooting aliens in their living room. That's a very different product idea than what Apple showed today – a "product idea" is specifically not about the technology, but what you the company thinks people will do with it.
I’m all for spatial cameras in the phone and having better ways to view them later but this “future” looks lonely.
Google Glass cost half as much and was in a much tighter form factor, but it failed because the general public perceived it as creepy and isolating.
If this product gets associated with people striving to wall themselves off from the world in their own personal dreamscape...well, I don't know. Maybe that sort of personality type will become a virtue in the zeitgeist. Maybe it already is.
Me too. I'm predicting "creeped out".
However, this is probably the best device ever made for remote work and I think can make it far less lonely, with an immersive shared environment, 3d avatars that have real facial expressions and visibility of hands, etc. I'd so so much rather use this than sit at a monitor on Zoom.
Total bullshit. We’re at total tech: a point where tech is so pervasive we think making it the point of things (rather than an enabler) is perfectly fine. Witness the scores of people grasping at likes, awkwardly binging social media in public, putting giant screens in cars, etc etc.
Apple developed and invested significantly in a system to make interaction possible and (relatively) natural between users of the headset and others in their environment. I applaud that first step towards an AR future that doesn't isolate us from others.
With this, the intent is clearly to have you wear it all the time and let it be your entire interface to the world. And that, Apple trying to insert itself into regular human face-to-face interaction where technology is completely unnecessary, is what’s off putting about this.
I suspect that I won't be willing to interact with them.
Full disclosure- based on the typos and unnecessary FUD in the first section of the article, I didn't bother to read the whole thing.
Was a relatively small group of tech-enthusiast and socially-awkward people, trying to hide behind cool digital lives? Sure, guilty as charged.
Was the world population at large asking for the same...? Eh.
I remember owning one of the earliest smartphones and sitting on the bus every day being the only person playing on my phone.
I remember being the only person with a smartwatch (the Pebble).
It's like calling and getting a "virtual background" - to me it says you're ashamed of where you are.
Now that is an insufferable combo if I’ve ever seen one.
it’s not a matter of being ashamed , it’s a matter of , what right do you have to see Into my home without my consent? Not everyone I video chat is someone I want inside my house.
???
I'm not a fan boy, but if there's a market with unmet needs that can be solved by $3,500 helmet, so be it.
The market will decide.
I think Apple will have no problem with 500,000 in pre-order by the time this ships.
$3,500 is a lot of money, but many consumer electronics have cost far more adjusted for inflation. It's not an insurmountable cost.
The question is, is the product compelling enough? I personally think it is.
I'm not actually an Apple fan boy. I have a Pixel 6 and a Manjaro computer at home. I do use a mac book pro for work but without having bought into the I everything ecosystem. But, I can see the attraction of this device. I don't have that kind of cash rolling around in my bank account so I won't be able to get one any time soon. Also, I'm not in the US so I wouldn't be able to anyway at the launch.
But I think the price point isn't that steep and very reasonable actually. People spend much more on sports cars, plasma TVs, and other things they don't need but that are a hell of a lot of fun. And this looks like it should be fun to use. And arguably this could end up delivering a bit of a premium experience over e.g. the best plasma TV money can buy. It certainly looks like the ultimate in personal entertainment. For anyone with the cash on hand, this kind of looks like a very desirable thing to own.
People make the mistake of focusing on just the hardware. Which looks awesome. But what really caught my attention here is the fact that they lined up a lot of compelling content and applications and are effectively leveling up the content ecosystem they already have. That is the smart move because they were already leading here. So, they are technically extending their lead combining scarce and premium content with a superior premium experience that you can't currently get from anyone. It's basically premium squared.
Having the disney CEO on stage is a bit of a stake in the ground. Avatar, Star Wars, etc. all in glorious 3D. And some of the apps aren't that bad either. And they cleverly sneaked in some announcement about making it easier for game publishers to port their games over to mac. Unrelated at face value, but duh, which game publisher would not want a piece of this action?!.
And basically infinite screen real estate to project your applications in your field of view alone is quite a step up from having just a laptop screen with some shitty external screen to extend that. Looks like that should work with just about any 2D application too. You could spend many thousands on expensive monitors and still have less real estate. I could see myself using that professionally just coding.
They will sell as many as they manage to produce, which probably will be around a million or so. This could be a multi billion business in its first year. It will be some time before they have real competition so they can ask whatever they want for this. Apple has got a new money printing machine here. And it's not like their old ones were struggling.
And one nitpick, a device with a 2 hour battery life (or all day if connected to the mains) is clearly not for all-day use. At least not the v1 product they presented today.
Smartphones didn't exist 20 years ago, now you're forced to use one to participate in society.
Also credit cards are almost mandatory now with so many places going cashless.
I do think we need to stop and think as a society but is a corporation to blame? Or a pair of fancy eyewear?
Society evolves and changes, it’s been the way since early civilisation.
The idea that I might now decide to talk to my girlfriend while wearing my VR headset because it has my eyes on the front is absolutely absurd. I really struggle to understand the rational of Apple doing that unless they want people to walk around wearing these things 24/7.
And the way this was branded as being a great device for conversations with other human beings or taking photos of special moments with children is just kinda gross.
While Meta has said similar things about the communication applications of VR headsets, I think I prefer that they've made it more of a virtual experience than an attempt at directly replacing real experiences. In Meta VR you're a cartoon when you interact with people and this makes it feel more video game than something that is trying to replace real world interaction.
And unlike the Quest the fact Apple's headset doesn't have a controller probably means it's going to suck for gaming. So it seems Apple doesn't think VR gaming is the killer app, but instead believes interacting with your kids is.
Not to mention the price point here is just absurd when compared to the Quest 3. I still think Apple's headset could be a good product for productivity if they've actually managed to get text to look sharp and have significantly reduced eye strain, but I think for now I'd rather just see how good the Quest 3 is to be honest. I know I might have to take my headset off when talking to my girlfriend and kids, but I'm not sure that's as much of a problem as Apple thinks it is.
I think though that the dream is for it to get smaller and more human adapted until you get all the benefits, with normalized cues that make it more social, perhaps more social than the now-ubiqitious smartphone and headphones. But that is a long ways away.
The other thing that I think is not emphasized enough is that this headset is really a two way interface for personal AI, where it could be very compelling. Apple prefers to sell it as an entertainment/work device, but with all those sensors and upcoming multi mode AIs, it would be a whole new category. I think Apple realizes others have taken the "AI" flame, but they know it's important, so instead for now emphasize machine learning, but this will eventually become more like the interface for AI assisted imagineering and self guided entertainment.
These are real people paying real money who want to be locked in a virtual world for hours. Give people who WANT a better experience something better.
Instead, they keep trying to shove Netflix and photo reels down our throats along with a bunch of casual fast games that people get bored of fairly quickly.
But yeah, it's surprising they didn't have any demo like that today.
> Stop this future of computing > Tim Cook and his fellow Apple executives clearly asked themselves whether they could create a headset as their latest hardware product, but don’t seem to have spent as much time considering whether they should.
Has the author considered why people are currently buying these headsets? And why a company with a long history in mobile computing would get in on it?
> … The risk with Apple entering this market is that it does have a unique ability to legitimize products.
The article is probably not worth your time, it wasn’t worth mine.
No Second Coming: Apple’s iPad Just a Big iPod Touch
But at the end of the day, the show’s centerpiece – the iPad — is just a big iPod Touch. Lots of folks will want it, in a hypothetical sort of way. But it’s hard to imagine all that many of them will fork over the initial $499 for a crippled version, or as much as $829 (for the 64 GB/3G model you’d want).
So…man who hates tech hates new tech. Shocker.
“Tech Won’t Save Us challenges the notion that tech alone can drive our world forward by showing that tech is inherently political and ignoring that has serious consequences. It encourages listeners to think beyond the confines of the capitalist tech industry, to consider how we can dismantle oppressive technologies, and how technology can be developed for the public good.”
This is one of my favorite podcasts about the tech industry. It’s thought provoking and I can’t recommend it enough.
The closest thing I can see this being is delivering on some of what Magic Leap failed to do. I was also surprised by the lack of 3D content being described. Was there anything besides the photo/videos? I don't even recall mention of 3D movies (though maybe they were being shown but can't tell on a 2D demo video).
What it doesn't do is deliver in aspects I'm interested in. I wanted something in the Bigscreen Beyond form factor without being room-bound. The idea of carrying an entire MacBook Pro and using it is ridiculous, I should be able to use an iPhone but running macOS on it with a Bluetooth keyboard mouse. The lack of precision input makes it a consumer device rather than a creator one.
I could see a fair use case in STEM education helping to visualize atomic structures, do dissection, or otherwise help people engage with the material. Historical videos are often pretty dry and with some machine learning they could punch up Churchill so you are in the crowd listening to his speech surrounded by a period entranced crowd.
Will it get to the point that you can go to a concert and watch from the front row with seats in the boonies it is hard to say, although hopefully this contains all the AirPod pro passthru tech blocking out other people’s chatter or nearby vacuuming may be a huge boon to concentration and enjoyment.
Unless the plan is to sell it for extra $299.
I am assuming this version 1.0 that will come out will be a "testing the waters" sort of a product which could lead the way to some useful applications like Media, AR, and Communication Services
Our perception of the world is already "fake". Our body has sensors that probe our exterior and provide input to our brain which attempts to create it's best picture of our surroundings. But it's a "fake world" because it is incomplete and often inaccurate.
These products are simply rough versions of what will some day [2050?] be coordinated digital "brain streams" - replacing the streams from our current sensors - that create whatever reality is intended for the brain to perceive... including streams coordinated with streams going to others... so we can all be in the same virtual space with coordinated live streams replacing our sense of sight, touch, taste, smell, hearing - together with other inputs our current senses don't include ... and it will be impossible for the brain to distinguish between digital input from "natural input"
But I digress... and I'm not even stoned... but I've been thinking about this exact subject since approx 1980 (although back then I insisted everything I said above would exist by the year 2000... ha!)
Computing does tend to be about looking at screens.
And companies do tend to be about profit.
One use-case that i can imagine having this headset is as a replacement for external displays. But that would need to be conditioned on great pass through and ability to use physical keyboard and mouse.
People will come around sooner or later on some generation of an apple VRset.