First impressions: Yes, Apple Vision Pro works and yes, it’s good
techcrunch.com
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Their sales pitch was "it makes it amazing to read articles in safari"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYkq9Rgoj8E&t=5410s
$3500 to... look at a floating web browser? Surely they can come up with something. Give me UV/IR vision, let me see the pipes under the ground, show me how to assemble the furniture I'm looking at, give me a template to paint by numbers of a real canvas -- why is this basic concept of "a $3500 novelty device should enable me to do something _new_" so hard for a 3 trillion dollar company to grasp?
Are they just hoping someone comes up with all the above in the next 6 months? If they did, would anyone care? $3500 is relatively a lot of money if you're already giving them iPhone and Macbook money. The supermajority of the world doesn't make more then 60k a year, pre-tax. Actually, the supermajority makes vastly less than that.
I guess I'll wait and watch and see if they prove me wrong, but I suspect no matter how good it is, it'll flop.
By that logic, Tesla shouldn’t be the top selling car, why would you buy them instead of a 25k Corolla? Many are willing to pay a premium for a best-in class-experience, which is what this headset is.
There’s a lot, lot of disposable income in the world, but not held by the supermajority.
With iphones you suddenly had a multipurpose device for relative little.
With this, we know the market and it's not strong by any means
Other headsets highlighted gaming, metaverse, industrial/medical applications,....
Early adopters first, of course. Maybe it really is too early? Depends on the response.
Apple in contrast? They deliver a whole different game in terms of quality and capability, and now others will take up developing stuff for the platform, just like it happened with every new class of device Apple pushed out. And financially, Apple doesn't have to take care of anything, they have more cash on hand than the GDP of entire countries (165 billion $ [1], more than Kuwait, Ukraine or Venezuela [2]).
And even if there don't appear any VR apps - movie addicts will love it.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/05/how-markets-biggest-companie...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
What this will allow is for you to watch a movie with your friends remotely in a way that is compelling.
My gf and I were long distance for a few months. It was really hard, but being able to video chat every day really helped. Unfortunately, anything beyond that was difficult, like watching a movie, because the experience was awful. The closest we were able to do was use a browser extension that would sync our streams, and then have a chat box.
With this, remotely, you guys can watch the same movie, chat, see each other, hear each other, still hear the movie, etc...
Will it replace watching am movie IRL? Of course not, and it doesn't have to. I don't think they're trying to replace physical interactions, but they're making a great case for how we can augment and extend our virtual ones.
I don't even think he installed it.
Which is exactly why they will not buy one of these. It would literally be a downgrade. Movie lovers have better than non-IMAX quality setups.
I would love a huge virtual area with multiple screen so I can see far more of whatever I'm working on.
That would be a game changer.
But Safari, 3D movies, Avatar FaceTime, and maybe some games? And that's all?
That's a tough sell, especially at this price.
Perhaps they can find application is e-commerce. Sites could start building virtual stores and you get a feeling that you’re browsing wardrobes. I don’t know if that’s a thing but it kind of makes sense as a use case.
same goes to vx effects in movies.
what about designing App UI / UX where you're completely in the flow and don't want to be disturbed.
how about complex data anylsis ?
If the price was not an issue and apps are mature, I could defenitly imagine lots of use cases around immersive work tasks ...
Looking for a killer app you are looking at this to be a traditional VR or even AR device, that is not what this is.
This is about having a screen anywhere, multiple screens and turning anything into a screen and any environment into one, hence the name Vision Pro, that is how Apple are trying to sell it.
If you watched the keynote I think that was clear, everyone else seems to missing the point and comparing this to traditional headsets.
The fact when they showed gaming, it wasn't a VR or AR game, it was a traditional game on an AR screen says it all.
You overestimate the purchasing power of 3500 these days.
Which is what traditional VR and AR devices offer. Being able to use apps in VR or AR isn't new.
In reality, they are worthless, it's like looking at a CRT from 1995
At a certain point higher resolution changes how you can use it
I just want to display fake screen, in HD, everywhere in my environment.
The quest does not have high enough resolution for this.
I can already do all that traditional stuff on a macbook or ipad, and "have a screen anywhere", and those things are more portable because I can just sit it on the table instead of having to untangle A CABLE from my clothing and then find somewhere to place a headset that doesnt sit flat like an ipad or macbook.
Then there's the fact that ipads and macbooks have keyboards.
With no killer app, this is a boondoggle, I think.
I've noticed different people have the valley in different places, so I'm not at all surprised if it creeps some people out.
Video calls work great (well once we've sorted out the eye contact issue - now there's a real problem that needs really solving[1]), even with all the ML in the world avatars will be just a pale reflection of the real thing.
[1] You need a screen that is also a composite camera array, so that software can track the eyes on the incoming video feed and place the camera for the outgoing feed at that (moving) location. Sort of like a phased array for light. Thus when you look at someone's eyes, they see you looking directly down the camera.
It's Project Looking Glass 2.0
However, Vision Pro is by Apple. The first iteration is probably as useless as the first iPhone and first Apple Watch. Its for early adopters, and it just has to be Good Enough (tm), with prospect to become better. Compared to say AirPower, the hurdles were purely technical, and couldn't be solved for the first iteration to be Good Enough (tm); so it was canned. Also, once its a commodity, Apple seems to shy away. See AirPort.
Apple only works on something after it's a commodity that they can polish better than others and overprice it. Which is why I'm amazed about statements that they are the ones that introduced personal computing, mobile computing and other stuff. The reality distortion field pays off really well.
Merely being able to do that on a nice screen is enough for me. I don’t want to or need to get directions for assembling my furniture. Heck, in real life, I like many people will just fiddle with the furniture and read no directions at all…
No one will care and studios are going to explore this field until they converge on a cheap but good enough standard to enhance their regular content. Maybe it will be a projection of the color palette of the scene outside the viewport. Maybe they will scan the surroundings of the scene and project it. But I'm pretty sure they'll just tout the quality of the 3D experience and that'll be good enough.
I think most people are trying to find better value in the product.
Headsets focused on providing a screen already exists, NReal is a decently selling product. Sure the Vision Pro has way better resolution, but we're also assuming that NReal and co will have better resolution in their next iterations.
To jest, if a VR screen dedicated device comes to market in 2024 with a tad lower resolution than the Vision Pro at half or a third of the price, will the Vision Pro still have a market as a virtual screen ? At that point it will need to justify the price with all the other things, the hand tracking, the surroundings integration etc. All the stuff people are trying to find value in outside of it being a screen.
Why don't they just have an iPad and digital avatars? Then you don't need to strap goggles to your head for an identical experience.
However the only reason these are needed is because you're wearing something that obscures your face. With your iPad scenario, you could use the camera view of your actual face.
Whereas with an iPad I can use it as a second display with my Mac anyway and put the chat on it. It might be better, but it doesn't sound to me to be quite the slam dunk that it sounds like to you.
I am happy to be proved wrong though so I'll be waiting for reviews of how it actually works with groups
It's oddly draining doing zoom or meets where you can't make mutual eye contact. If you look at the camera you cant see their eyes, and vice versa.
If the digital avatar is as good as it looks, it could resolve that and make teleconferencing less exhausting. Not to mention worry less if you're having a bad hair day. ;)
I don't see what the headset brings to the table other than forcing people to fix existing issues.
The experience is worse because the VR now introduces avatars so I can pretend to pay attention whilst doing coding, whereas if it was on my iPad I could do coding, unload the washing machine, etc. It is restrictive.
Also fixing the eye focus is already a thing for streamers and ML video correction.
And this is WWDC. They’re getting this in front of developers to build the first third-party apps. Years ago, we applied to get Apple TVs for $1 and then came up with an app to launch on it. If you’re early, you have limited competition and can rank in the charts relatively easily (obviously at the risk of fighting over a smaller market).
It will have the added advantage of being private, so nobody can shoulder surf what you're doing.
But ergonomically, writing emails, presentations and filtering spreadsheets - I'd need to use it to see how fun that might be.
I guess you can see through the screen, so you know if somebody needs your attention ?
One will have more success with the wall outlets, but most flights don't have these. Even many international flights don't offer them.
They didn't really find a unique selling point, and they didn't really nail the implementation. Few versions later they refined the product and their messaging for it, and carved out a decent market for it. I actually think the original iPhone announcement was pretty close to this VR headset. It's only selling point was that it did everything nicer and better than the competition, and then it relentlessly iterated. iPhone was an easier sell though than expensive ski goggles - barrier is much lower with it.
It's clear(ish) they have some impressive tech in it, and are 'best in market'. I wouldn't be surprised if "Vision Pro" became a lot more of a compelling device in 5 years time. But right now it doesn't really seem to give me $3500 worth of benefit.
When they launched the firs iMac, the paradigm shift was personal computers are for everyone, and belong to every home and should fit into your surroundings. There were a lot of things you could not do with your iMac that you could do with a lot of much cheaper PCs, especially outside the US. You could do a lot more with your BlackBerry than you could with the iPhone, but here we are.
This seems like a similar strategy. They are trying to win the space by changing the paradigm and moving xr from metaverses to visual computing.
That said, they have had a lot of flops with this strategz as well (Pippin, Newton, eWorld, iTunes Ping) so it's not a given that this approach will work.
But I'm definitely happy to see this strategy reemerging, as opposed a gazillion versions of iphone with a slightly better battery, one more camera, and less or less periphery in the box.
When they released the iMac, they sold 800.000 computers by the end of the year, and that was 32% of those buys were people who have never owned a computer previously. So they were going for the Windows users, but also for people who have previously never seen the need for a computer. By creating an easy to use product aimed at the masses, they created a product-market fit in an untapped market segment where there was none.
When you think about it, smart phones did not exactly have a product market fit - there were mostly mobile phone users, and kind of smallish dying market of handheld computers, some Blackberry/other users that were I guess what you'd call a smartphone users. First iPhone did a lot for unifying those users into a smartphone market.
So I see some of that here as well. By introducing Vision Pro in a demo that showcases all the most popular uses of desktop/mobile computing, they are pushing the XR into the space of mobile/desktop users who were not interested in XR previously. It's the opposite of the killer app approach, but I think it can work for them and is a tried tactic. And it pushes bring XR closer to general use than gaming.
But definitely a larger leap of fate, as you point out.
People owned smartphones (blackberries and palm) and PCs, use them a lot and had established (not speculative) use cases. Clear market signal while VR only has significant traction for a handful of games.
I don't necessarily know the answer here, but my gut feeling is that defining this device based on a "killer app" is like trying to define the original iPhone as needing a "killer app". It didn't necessarily have such a thing but it did end up being pretty big.
Those were the critical features that fueled laptops for several years, taking money from people who found a reason to work on the go. It was a considerable jump up from super tiny (but still used!) computers like Epson HX-20 or super heavy (luggables). The people using them for spreadsheets and word processing joined the field engineering and military applications.
Hell, laptops stopped being synonymous with "business executive" in popular vernacular only after 2000s.
The TRS-80 model 100, an earlier laptop, found a killer app as a word processor and communication device for reporters. Some were still using them into the late 90s.
And the ones that didn't really have killer apps are from a litany of defunct companies/model lines like GRiD.
Those form factors were massive improvements in portability and accessibility, without necessarily having a killer app compared to its predecessor (laptop not doing anything a desktop didn't do, iphone didn't do much new at first but now has translator apps and GPS and stuff)
The headset, though, seems clunkier (awkward non-flat shape, has cables, no keyboard) and you trade that off for... a bigger, 3D screen that shows you mostly the same thing.
I could be wrong, but it feels like an expensive regression in portability.
If it has no killer app and isn't a revolutionary form factor in terms of portability and ease of access, can it win? Maybe it's easier to access than I'm imagining. Maybe I'm wrong. We'll have to wait and see, I guess.
The Maps app was so much better than printing MapQuest maps or trying to use the flip phone version of MapQuest.
Being able to access the real internet from anywhere was futuristic.
You could use iMessage without paying $0.10 per text?!?! Can you even imagine paying $0.10 per text (and $0.25 for every text after the first 100 per month?)
Visual voice mail was also a game changer at the time.
And you got an ipod along with all that. (The iphone was my first "big" ipod device)
This new headset also looks like a technology demonstration. That doesn't mean it will become the next iphone, but it certainly has potential.
Very literally Excel, for business users. That's what most laptop users were running in the 90s.
Then Word for personal use, typically students writing their thesis/homework.
The original iPhone's killer app was an affordable data plan. At the time, data was stupid expense, priced almost as a velben good. But by 2007, AT&T launched a $60 unlimited data plan for their iPhones. Feature phones have been using the web since the turn of the millennium, but nobody could afford it. Nobody bought the smart phones that existed because nobody could afford it. The Motorola Sidekiq was an unattainable toy for most families, but that unlimited data plan suddenly made smart phones viable to most of the population.
For reference, that plan with unlimited data still had a limited number of calling minutes and texts per month!
Assembling furniture
- 1d written description : 1 person half a day
- 2d illustration : ~2 people and a 3 days
- 3d animation : ~3 people and 2 weeks
- 3d interactive thing : a small team and a month.. At least ?
Is it really going to yield a ton more sales?
You can see it in other media. Zillions of creative people write books, a lot fewer shoot movies, and fewer still make interactive narrative video games
All the 3D experiences you end up having are quite simplistic bc no one wants to invest in it. Could you make an Avatar level narrative in VR? It'd be super tricky, but maybe with enough money you could. (arguably there aren't enough people at the moment who know how to make compelling 3d interactive experiences). Will it be worth the extra cost ? Unlikely. It's hard to imagine it being more than marginally better at best
Maybe AI will somehow help speed up the process substantially (and lower the costs), but I'm a bit skeptical it'll help enough
The only thing I can think of where VR would make a huge difference is maybe horror. I'm not into horror, but I could see VR being a huge step up in terms of spookyness
It takes more work, but also (hopefully) provides an additional value. At sufficient scale it might make sense to do this (something like IKEA).
There are at least 1,000 books written for every movie shot, even including material shot by amateurs with their phones.
Figures range from 500,000 to one million books published annually.
However, if you include self-published authors you’re looking at close to 4 million new book titles published each year.
Therefore the effort people put into making the complicated products (movies, games) pay off despite the initial expense.
Only for a handful of titles though.
Most movies lose money, they sell very little if not nothing at all.
Most books don't sell as well, but it costed a very tiny fraction of the cost of a movie production to publish them.
It's mostly a single person in their homes in their spare time.
> Therefore the effort people put into making the complicated products pay off despite the initial expense
The initial point was that most can't afford the more complicated products, but can still produce useful low tech manuals. It's doubtful that the high tech version of the manual would drive more sales, because the product in this case is not the manual, but the furniture (or whatever else).
The AR/VR manual could cost more than the actual product to make.
I'm not convinced that's a good bet. YouTube and especially TikTok exploded by going in the opposite direction.
But it's a move that could integrate Apple's movie and audio software, high end hardware (Studio and Pro), content studio ambitions, and now Vision Pro as a consumption device.
There's a lot more money in lowering the cost of entry to a new ecosystem than raising it. That's how the App Store exploded and drove iPhone sales, and how Amazon has a unicorn business just from self-publishing.
Going for the high end can work too, as long as the content and product are good enough. But it's a much tougher challenge.
Don't be fooled by the raw numbers, look at the big picture.
Anyway that's not a fair comparison, you don't need special hardware to read books, you already have it installed by the OEM, they are called eyes.
But in all fairness books help to sell a lot of devices too
By 2018 Amazon reported selling close to 90 million e-readers. By 2022 the number of Kindle devices sold globally was over 150 million. By 2027, Statista projects the number of e-reader users to grow to 1.2 billion
The problem is e-readers are very reliable, so people don't buy them new every 6 months.
Which is also why people buy books, they are very reliable and last for centuries, without consuming a single drop of energy.
Books are sold in the millions per week and e-books in the hundreds of thousands.
It's a completely different market.
> However, if you include self-published authors you’re looking at close to 4 million new book titles published each year.
Combining those, you claim that less than 4,000 movies are shot each year, “even including material shot by amateurs with their phones”.
I can’t see how that can be true. Google tells me there are about 2 million weddings in the USA each year. From that, I think it’s a very, very safe bet that over 10,000 wedding videos are shot in the USA each year, with the real number probably over a million.
Add in corporate videos, wedding anniversaries, videos about sports teams winning championships, high-quality tube channels, etc, and I expect the total number to easily be over 4 million.
And that still puts the bar higher than “material shot by amateurs with their phones”
People often hire professionals to shoot them.
So this would include things like YouTube videos, Twitch, etc, but not a private wedding video that doesn’t get published.
I bet the videos still win.
When I talk about “material shot by amateurs with their phones” I was referring to independent very low budget movies, the modern version of Peter Jackson's Bad Taste, not videos shot by people at parties, they do not classify as movies IMO.
Should we also include in the book category people's personal diaries, internal companies documents, sportsbooks, wedding picture books, school yearbooks, etc.?
I really doubt that considering writing a book requires a lot more effort than shooting a ‘movie’ on your phone.
That is, it's trivial if you carefully followed the best practices, did everything correctly at every step to make sure the internal representation is semantically correct and complete - and not bashed stuff around, copying and pasting and dragging by hand, until it looked okay-ish on the screen, like everyone else does.
Hell, you can even interactively edit things in the Unreal IDE. But it's still a serious task.
Given the design already in CAD, how about 1 person in a day.
of course still a gimmick
I’m more exciting about a new version of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmFk0AKbXlQ
But it's okay, I think. It has the browser, Unity integration, okay visual passthrough, etc. Ticks all boxes.
Melee in VR feels awful. It feels like swatting flies.
Shooting in VR is amazing. There are multiple games that let you play Star Wars battlefront knockoffs so you can cosplay the droid army.
This is the same problem we saw with the metaverse. It's all hype and no substance. Their best ideas to put into the presentation were looking at web sites.
Why would web sites be better to look at in VR?
At this point, floating pages and waypoints are the "Hello World" of AR platforms.
Oops.
Being able to stand side by side with people to work on something rather than broadcast my face into their face. It's just... so much more natural. All of the social cues like concentration, wandering away to think, nodding your head along with a group conversation you stumble upon and are now actively engaged in. If I can bring my data/apps in but keep them private - sold
Interacting digitally with the environment - this is a new one but I think it's going to be huge. Anything involving maps or layouts, you can plan it prior, and then overlay it on the day when you get on site. AR on a phone is meh because you have to hold it up, but when it's just a gesture I think it's going to open up whole new use cases that were just out of reach (pun intended)
It could be great, but productivity will likely need over 4k per eye to be anything beyond a novelty.
Depending on how the hardware develops, it could become something great for sure. most people calling it a novelty are taking about the device as it's been announced, not the theoretical future it could potentially have if it was different.
And when on the move would be better than... nothing, which is what it's competing against. Look at phones, they're absolutely abysmal for both input and output. But they're mobile. Laptops? They're not as good as desktops.... but they're mobile. Virtual displays? They're mobile, allowing more bandwidth in, it's going to be good
I do completely agree that the promise is there, I've been saying for years that VR/AR is completely pointless as a gaming medium and it's only future is in exactly what Apple is aiming for, here. 4k per eye is just not going to be enough realistically
There is no doubt that AR will eventually get good enough that the devices are paper thin, weigh nothing, and have no external battery (of course). Everyone wants _that_ device, but you have to start somewhere. Apple can afford to be patient in this space and their considerable moat of intellectual property will allow them to carve out the high end of the AR market and then work down as they did with iPhone.
It would not surprise me if they are earning 90% of the gross margins in the AR device space within three years.
I had a friend who had just bought a high end Nokia. We arranged to meet for lunch. She got hopelessly lost because Nokia's GPS and mapping were crap.
Apple's just worked. Same with the App Store.
I'd guess this is going to have some kind of VApp Store. But I suspect what it really needs is plain old MacOS running everything as usual, with slightly customised support for virtual displays.
This make astonishing growth in Google Maps.
Google tracks your location so that they can track ad conversions based on store-visits (no I'm not kidding).
I still remember when the only option for GPS directions was buying a dedicated Garmin, or paying your cell carrier for an extremely crappy and very expensive service that was hard to use because phone screens were too small. Everyone I knew used printed map quest for directions.
GPS being standard on smart phones is just so flipping good compared to what we had before and am positive is still the killer app that pushes people to get smart phones.
It sounds so incredibly unrelatable in 2023, but you have to put yourself in that time. Web browsing was just something you did at work, or at home. Period. Visiting that website while on the sidewalk was really one of the major game-changers in my life.
I guess we’ll need to wait to see what happens with this. Apple has a good track with proving tech literate people wrong.
This... judging by extremely careful wording of a web which needs to play very very nice with vendors to get these early access peeks, seems to not have it. More like nicely polished hammer looking for nails everywhere. Yes, many aspects fine tuned above competition, but competition is not asleep and the gap is not that big. In some aspects, it will be objectively worse (constant powerbank cable which lasts barely 2 hours, realistically a bit above 1 hour breaks immersion very effectively compared to ie Quest, plus you want to have 4 powerbanks and furiously swapping over one longer evening? Not even going into sharing ultra expensive device with rest of household).
Phones are absolute must in modern world, they were already 90% there when first iphone arrived. VR/AR goggles are still considered idiotic by majority of population, maybe Apple can change that but it will take few years at least.
It had some must have killer features for the time. Blackberry and feature phones had some pathetic "mobile web" while the original iPhone would load real websites.
Just not the same scenario and game plan. Brilliant design is one thing, but Apple has landed at the intersection of Hardware & Software in a developed field. Right? Steve Jobs pulled back from running OS on clone hardware, because Apple’s winning scenario was to do both to make great designed products.
At 3k+ this is classic early adopter scenario. Maybe there are enough people with stupid money who will work out issues for the later ~1k version…provided another company doesn’t sweep in and eat Apple’s lunch
The Vision is about the 50th VR device, in a market that's already quite busy with the Vives, Indexes and Quests. It brings nothing new, and is just one more high resolution VR device (which existed before for cheaper).
It was my first iOS device and I even paid the 14.99$ for the update to get mail, calendar and contacts. I played way more games back then than I do now since I was often without a Wi-Fi network.
The difference here is of course that VR/AR has been thriving already. Apple is late to the game as they are most of the time, but the reactions I have seen so far in YT/Twit comments are the amazed reactions of the tech illiterate general public, they don't care what it does, but it does have an Apple logo!
Apple is not bringing anything new to the table. No virtual objects, no 3d anything, just 2d planes showing video/photos which non-Apple VR/AR has had for the longest time.
This is just from the briefest search: https://www.vrdesktop.net/. Already exists and looks more fully featured than Apple's stuff.
Apple is a 1T company, the "richest and most technologically advanced company in the world", so why don't they act like it?
They do seem to have an impressive resolution on the thing, but only Apple can ask for 3.5k, no other headset bothers to have as high a resolution atm because they know consumers will balk at such a high price...
Apple's press release shows it as if some rando people are using the thing at home as if it's not going to be art studios, etc that buy the headset and a couple of hardcore Apple fans. No regular person is buying a 3.5k VR/AR set to look at a crappy 2d photo gallery app.
Other VR/AR software for existing headsets like the Vive/Oculus etc already do actual virtual objects/interaction as baseline and Apple couldn't even be bothered to include something like that for their press release. Because they don't need to, I suppose. People will eat it up anyway.
Presumably this will be a thing since they support on the iPhone and tries making a pretty big deal from by showing virtual legos and other stuff in a keynote a year or two ago.
The ARKit seems to have been designed for this thing since it wasn’t ever a very good experience on the iPhone.
For your point about the no virtual objects, what would you want Apple to do? Create an entirely new OS requiring developers to build everything in a purely 3D environment? It'd be DOA if they did that. They have to highlight how EASY it is to port their current apps to VisionOS. Hell, they released Rosetta years before the M1 came out and there's STILL some apps that don't support M1 Macs. They have to make it easy, and allow the developers to decide to flex their muscle on this thing.
iOS apps in the first year or two of the app store looked god awful because no one really knew what to DO with the thing, but now we do. I think VR like this is going to be the same way.
From what they showcased and the initial reviews out right now, this does look to be the most technologically advanced mixed reality headset. But obviously the most technology advanced headset is going to be eyewateringly expensive.
Apple back in the day was always, the customer doesn't know what they want, you have to show it to them. This is going to light a fire under every other headset makers ass that they can't push out headsets with shit camera delays, poor screens, and shody controls anymore and expect to make money.
And you're right, people will eat it up because it's Apple and only they can get away with it. I'm not buying it, I have to afford groceries somehow. But the rich finance bros buying it to show off their wealth bankrolling Apple's R&D for the next few years to make a more consumer-friendly one? Yeah, knock yourself out. I'll buy refurbished one in 2026.
Let's look at the actual improvements here over the quest, roughly in order from what I consider best to worst:
1) higher resolution screens. This requires more powerful onboard processing and more expensive screens and is an obvious win.
2) better pass through. Again requires better onboard processing and cameras on the front of the device. This is nice to have but I don't think it's a game changer.
3) hand tracking by default. No controllers is in some ways nice but also limits the number of inputs you can have (unless you have virtual controllers, but I can see a lot of accidental button presses with that). It also doesn't preclude adding controllers later but they haven't shown any sign of even considering this.
4) displaying your eyes on the front when talking to people. This is by far the most dubious feature, it looks ridiculous and requires them to add a high definition curved screen to the front of the device. How much does this add to the cost? I think it could be easily cut, just take the damn thing off when talking to people.
The actual value this brings over something like the meta quest is probably, to me at least, a 2x improvement. I might be proven wrong (or they might come out with a real killer app) but as it is I can't see the point.
Proper, well integrated passthrough that seamlessly works with my laptop is crucial for this to work and judging by the marketing material it seems to be extremely well implemented. I simply can’t work with even the quest pro, because the clarity (resolution) simply isn’t there and all the implementations are cumbersome (yea I’ve tried all apps including metas own).
All the other features like 3D video recording are gimmicks to me, but it doesn’t matter.
It's definitely not for me, but I feel like I'm getting their vision for the future of this product line and I'm gonna go conspiracy theorist for a minute here.
1) The clips of people wearing them in from of their kids or doing laundry, etc just screams that we want to get people used to having a screen in front of them, and cameras on their face. Make this the "norm" or at least some form of socially acceptable to do what Google Glass tried and failed to do in 2013. 2) The heavy focus on hand-tracking, eye-tracking, voice controls, and built-in speakers makes me think they want this to be used without needing to carry anything additional with you, obviously. No AirPods, no iPhone, no Mac needed.
I find this product to be an introduction to tackle these societal issues so that when they release a pair of regular-looking glasses that have this type of tech, people aren't going to be afraid of cameras looking at them all the time, or feel disconnected from the person wearing them. And be able to control it all with just their hands.
To me, this product was released way before it should have (frankly I believe it needs 5 more years), but as a lot of companies are pushing AR/VR and it's kinda floundering around right now, Apple had to release something that could keep interest in the product group alive long enough that they can release their proper vision.
They did show 3D objects in the key note, someone sent one through messenger that the user pulled out from the message and interacted with it. Then they showed a 3D heart which could be taken apart in to sections. Next they showed a life size 3D formula 1 car with the aerodynamics.
…anyways, arguable. What’s inarguable is that the iPhone 4, which came along only 3 years later, was a damned miracle. Beautiful design, Retina screen, something approaching a “real” camera—just remarkable progress in that time.
I’m unsure if Apple is going to be able to pull off that hyperspeed progression this time. The Vision Pro seems to have truly wild capabilities, but for a lot of money and with very little battery life. Are we going to have a big leap in price/performance soon? I dunno.
I didn’t really get what the fuss was about until the iPhone 6 (aside from software and arguably Android had caught up by then)
Yep it iterated and yep app store really rocket charged it beyond where it was envisaged on day one. But it was also an existing market, albeit one that was at the foothills of its potential.
AR/VR too is at the foothills of its potential. But the fundamental problem is: even when its potential is realised, it'll still just be relatively niche and relatively fringe. This stuff simply is not going to be mainstream in a serious way. And without being mainstream, there is no real revenue stream of utility for a company of Apple's size.
I have no idea why people are doing such backflips to come up with potential use cases but most of them just aren't runners. This will sell to an extent for Apple but it'll be a rounding error on their balance sheet at best - even in future versions - though I imagine a lot of the tech will end up elsewhere, so it won't be a complete lost cause for Apple.
I think previous AR/VR devices didn't quite have the right sweetspot of hardware features (too low resolution, tied to one spot, extra controllers), but this one looks like it might just do it. What it doesn't have is a low enough cost, so it will be a slow start. I'm also still curious if there will be a "killer app" that encourages people to get into it, but the long-term vision of spatial computing is itself enough of a killer feature. I just wonder how long that will take.
I can compile code on my laptop - can I do that on a vision?
I can plug a xbox on my TV, or watch it with 4 people. Can I do that with a vision?
Holy sht. Can people really* stop comparing launch of VR and with Iphone?
I have been reading tons of comments here and only to see the OP, and folks with similar post here to be proven wrong. Again after again, proven wrong!
The fundamentals question is where is the killer app! Like original poster, this shouldn't be hard for a three trillion dollar company!
Only if there was a way to filter out post that go along the lines of
"....The first iPhone was pretty crappy.... "
This particular song has gotten pretty familiar.
No Wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
Even if Apple made a similar price cut here, the device would still cost over $2000.
The true genius was getting AT&T to subsidize the handsets and pay for the marketing, which gave Apple a lifeline worth billions and essentially created the market.
Just think what Vision will be after 10 iterations and a decade of time.
This is a general purpose computing device, so seeing it have a great browser setup is a big deal.
It will have an App Store like the phone (this was in the keynote I think). I don’t think there will be side loading unless it is govt mandated requirement.
It is aimed at general population and not developers.
If you only can do Apple-approved-stuff on it, it will be boring. Let people release half-baked demos and cool tech. Don't force everything to go through their "review" process.
Would you rather: a. wait 5 years for apple to release some functionality in their SDK. or b. wait 3 months for someone to release their own software doing the same?
Yes, the iPhone is boring. It's taken a decade to reach its potential, because everything needs to be provided by Apple. Compare to an actual general computing device like a desktop computer, where you can innovate at your own speed.
If it is your expectation that Apple would make an openly hackable headset, I think you have unrealistic expectations, so I find a strange thing to be frustrated about.
As to what is better, open or closed, I think it is very challenging to deliver a complete product in an open way, I can’t think of one successful consumer device that ships in that way.
When I consider privacy and security, the locked down devices Apple create are a positive, especially with a device as personal as a headset with eye tracking etc.
iPhones are not boring, they are used by billions of people to do amazing things every day. Don’t Under estimate the significance of ‘boring’ things like a high quality camera and the ability to share photos easily, Apple Pay / Wallet, and safari in your pocket. It is literally life changing for people, eg grandparents can get daily photos of their grandkids, that is the kind of thing Apple try to do with their devices and services. TBH I don’t know what that ‘boring’ thing is with the Vision Pro, but I’m sure if there’s a future where headsets / glasses are common place Apple will be part of it, and this is the starting point for it.
It's a platform. It'll get cheaper, it'll get better, and developers and the market will do the rest. There's a lot of time between now and "early next year" for 3rd party devs to come up with a lot of apps and ideas.
As someone else said, this is the first release of something that'll end up the size and weight as a pair of sunglasses; at that point, I think it will be as ubiquitous as iPhones are.
Because if you go outside wearing this you're going to get instantly mugged. If they were to release something like Pokemon Go before the price comes down, that would likely just result in a bunch of kids getting murdered on the subway or whatever. Much better to drive down the costs by first selling it to people who are excited to use it for coding or whatever.
It could have had a killer app: games. Most VR headsets suck in one way or another, Apple could make one that's actually nice to use.
Sadly, for some bizarre reason Apple still don't understand games. They even have pretty good GPUs now and they're still not making an Apple TV Pro to compete with the PS5.
Even just the Vision could've been announced along with a couple exclusives, but instead they have an offhand mention of Arcade.
Could they really not have given some units to some game devs and tell them to come up with some cool ideas?
This thing just feels incredibly rushed. It's like Apple felt left out of the all the AI hype the last couple months, so they were forced to show this thing before it was really ready.
Kojima is sufficiently famous and well liked to bootstrap a gaming ecosystem, though. They could've gone further and announced an Apple TV Pro, a decent controller, Vision non-Pro (cheaper headset that requires an M1 Mac or Apple TV Pro) and one full Kojima VR game as an exclusive. That could've been enough to start competing with Microsoft and Sony for console games.
VR is a peripheral, not a console. Very few people would choose a VR Magic game over Magic the gathering arena.
Given enough time and adoption I believe it will happen
Spending $3500 just to wank at VR videos is crazy.
Tell me you've never had sex. Sex and VR porn no matter how realistic are words apart.
You sound like those people who want AI to mimic human behavior, yet there are so many more interesting applications outside of that constraint.
Don't underestimate the power of shame; it's not about getting off, it's about getting off in private without anyone knowing about it. And it's about being in control, because an escort can say 'no', will not just disappear when you have post-nut clarity, will have their own boundaries.
Go look at the VR porn subreddit. It's really not impressive. Also the story that VHS won because of porn is a lie. Porn doesn't drive innovation like most people claim.
They should be bursting at the seams with out of this world ideas that this amazing hardware could support. And yet, nothing.
I think it may be positioned more for professional use and then, "oh yeah, you can have a great movie and game experience, too."
There was someone on here some time ago who showed and talked about his setup, he had been doing his job as a software developer reclined in VR for years at that point.
Here's the thing though: smartphones didn't have "a" killer app per sè I don't think, but they became part of everyone's daily lives in a really short timeframe. PCs and laptops didn't have "a" killer app, but pretty much everyone here has it as their day job.
I don't think it's about whether it has a killer app or not, I think it's whether it can become normalized and mainstream, and be listed alongside the TV, PC, smartphone, the car, etc; something everyone will have in one way or another.
That said, I'm cynical myself; modern-day VR and AR has been tried for a decade now or thereabouts; Google wasted billions on Google Glass, Facebook bet their whole company on the metaverse / AR / VR and has had to backtrack, Magic Leap was a mystery company that raised billions and failed to deliver, Oculus and Vive have their place now as a somewhat niche and pricey gaming implement - popular as arcade / events (I went to one for a birthday party this weekend) and middle class households that have the money and space for it.
So there's a market, mostly in gaming, but it's not become as mainstream yet as e.g. the smartphone. I don't personally believe it will, but if anyone can take an existing concept, iterate on it and make it mainstream, it's Apple.
I'm talking about actual usage. My personal observation is that usage of voice calls is declining - especially among the young.
"Calling emergency services is the killer app for smartphones" - no. "Killer app " implies that this is the reason people buy them. If this statement was true then people would buy cheap feature phones.
It's worth repeating the original statement here:
> smartphones didn't have "a" killer app per sè I don't think, but they became part of everyone's daily lives in a really short timeframe. [...]
to which alach11 replied:
> The killer app for smartphones is being a phone.
The smartphone's killer apps were messages, phone, email and calendar. By the time the iphone came around it was just to eat Blackberry's lunch because it gave us multitouch as the killer interface.
Vision is a general purpose computing device. There is not really a single “killer app”. The whole concept is flawed
The touch interface elegantly solved the problem of not having a full keyboard and mouse.
The ultimate vision for these headsets is not yet realized: to unintrusively overlay enriched visual information over our surroundings. This doesn't hit the unintrusively piece by a longshot, nor are the apps that realize this vision even announced.
Vision Pro does, however, provide a first step platform to develop those apps when the tech does shrink to an everyday wearer.
And think about the mainstream industry. It's been years and the peak of AR is still Pokemon Go and VR is Beat Saber. Apple Vision looks to be twice as good as the Meta Quest for 10x the price.
Walk into a physical store and stand in an aisle. How many products can you see in a 360 field of vision?
Visit any webstore. How many products can you see on your screen at once?
To me this is the completely obvious application for VR. But in order for it to be actually useful you would need an online shopping experience that worked with it. At the very least you would have to 3D model every product.
Nobody wants that. People shop online to avoid the annoyance of a physical location. I can shop for things while I squeeze out turds, why would I ever exchange that for strapping an overpriced screen to my face? The average person favors convenience and cheapness above all else, to a huge extent.
This has no killer app and is being sold at full price.
I'd love to work comfortably lying in a hammock, couch or bed. The monitor part is solved, it seems, I just need one of those split keyboards where each half attaches to one hand.
I'd also love to feel like I'm in a colossal movie theater without all the viruses, noise and popcorn from other people.
I'll pay good money for either.
They did show a few third party apps interacting with real world objects (the train moving on a table) but I wonder what amount of that was concept and what was real.
Connecting the virtual objects to those in the real world I feel is a killer feature that will open up a huge set of opportunities. If this doesn’t have that yet, it’s still more VR than AR in my book.
When I travel this is a game changer for me. Right now I lug a small second screen so I can work. I will happily drop $5k to fix this problem and just travel with this plus a small laptop.
Yes.
> If they did, would anyone care?
Also yes.
It was mentionned in the keynote as well...should Apple really brag about their patent minefield in a field that is in need of more players and more efforts to push it forward ?
> In many cases it literally hurt to do so. Not with the Apple Vision Pro – text is super crisp and legible at all sizes and at far “distances” within your space.
That's the part I was most intrigued with, and on one size given the 4K resolution per eye, text being readable was expected, but I can't wait to have more details on how "crisp and legible at all sizes" it is. I have no idea of what's M.Panzerino's threshold is for "crisp", hope it's better than just Full HD level.
And the 4K is across your whole FOV, I would like to see a comparison with some standard monitors (4K at 27" and 32") at particular distances from your eyes.
I suppose because they didn't publish anything it is still significantly worse than hi-res monitors (just better than all previous headsets).
There are a lot of other factors like fill factor (screen door effect) and there are definitely some optical designs that can increase PPD as well. Apple bought Limbak recently, btw, it's possible they use a similar design as what is described here: https://simulavr.com/blog/ppd-optics/
Assuming 4k resolution per eye and 120 degree FoV would give 3840*2/120 = 64 ppd.
Using the link that you gave a 4k screen at 60cm is 73 ppd, so it is reasonably close.
Apple haven't said what the FoV is yet, so I'm guessing 120 based on the pi-max and an early impressions video from mkbd. The horizontal range isn't clear either: 23 megapixels would be about three 4k screens so it depends on the overlap region between the eyes.
It's not that far off 4k, and when sitting that close to a 28" 4k screen I find the pixels barely noticeable, i.e. I can see them if they are aliased but would not notice them when the colour gradient is smooth.
If you think about a monitor in front, each pixel is seen by both eyes, but the headset is giving one 4k display to each eye.
The correct number is somewhere between a multiplier of 1 and 2 depending on the setup of the display. But 2x 4k screens is only 16 megapixels, and so it also depends on where the other 7 megapixels are.
As mentioned resolution on the centroid may be higher depending on the lens design, but there's so much dependent on the rendering pipeline and the optics that I don't think it's worth doing more than ballparking. If you're interested in HMD displays, Oliver Kreylos has posted a lot on resolution measurements over the past few years:
* Optical Properties of Current VR HMDs http://doc-ok.org/?p=1414
* Measuring the Effective Resolution of Head-mounted Displays http://doc-ok.org/?p=1631
* The Display Resolution of Head-mounted Displays http://doc-ok.org/?p=1677
* The Display Resolution of Head-mounted Displays, Revisited http://doc-ok.org/?p=1694
A 27" 4k monitor in real life should look better than a virtual 27" window pushing the same resolution within the 4k display of the headset. For stuff like text that's going to have a corresponding loss in sharpness, and because you could be seeing something at an angle there's going to be lots of weird aliasing effects. There's a reason why Apple starting pushing 5k monitors.
I'd guess the tech would need to get to 8k+ for each eye before it starts feeling "really good" for these use cases.
Once those virtual displays show text at any sort of angle the aliasing effects will be much higher too.
I think the tech might need to get to 8k+ before it starts feeling as good as "retina display" did when Apple launched that.
> It was mentionned in the keynote as well...should Apple really brag about their patent minefield in a field that is in need of more players and more efforts to push it forward ?
That I didn't understood. Should that be a message to the competition? What should that tell me as a developer? What should that message tell me as a consumer?
As a consumer may I don't care how many patents are there. Because I don't have a benefit at all.
As a developer may it means, that a develop for a consumer base, but it is hard to predict how big that will be. Competition needs to work around those patents or will not exists at all because of possible licensing fees. So, should I start development or not?
(It makes me sick to the stomach personally)
Steve Jobs himself during the first iPhone presentation bragged “oh boy we’ve patented it” about multitouch technology.
The Quest 2 has about 4 million, which is undoubtedly more than 0.24 million. Has "order of magnitude" joined "exponential" as another math expression stolen as a synonym for "rilly rilly rilly"?
More seriously the repeated quote-the-marketing in this article was annoying. You’re explaining your use of it, and your experience is the only thing that matters. Everyone has read the specs at this point.
It's 2.5 more base 2 orders of magnitude
Even physicists say that one is not plural.
Even the Wikipedia page makes reference to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude
"Similarly, if the reference value is one of some powers of 2, since computers store data in a binary format, the magnitude can be understood in terms of the amount of computer memory needed to store that value. "
int(log2(n)) is a perfectly acceptable order of magnitude, especially when considering computers, at least to me.
Well, Apple was the first 1T company. I don't know which grade they were learning me that companies maximize profits and minimize expenses. Until it works for Apple, they will happily put whatever price tag. It makes no sense to complain. People will either complain with wallet (not able to buy it) or Apple will just continue to be a behemot.
The Macbooks look expensive too until you compare them to similar Windows laptops with equivalent screens, trackpads, and battery life.
For example, I have an iPhone 11. I got it the day it came out, and I really don't need another phone. I will continue to use this one until it breaks, or probably for another 5 years, whichever comes first.
Maybe for some people, it's beneath them to buy an older, even if it's professionally refurbished and warranted, but to me that says something about the quality.
Last example. My brother in law was once complaining to me about how Apple is trash and that they purposely slow down their phones and that it's all a conspiracy. I asked him what phone he had and he told me an iPhone 5s! I was so impressed that he didn't even notice how outrageous this was.
I can also see my M1 MBP last as long as my trusty 2009 MBP which crapped out around 2016 (7 years!). It also means less waste and less consumerism which is a positive byproduct in my mind.
Vision Pro is supposed to be 23Mpx so let's assume it's evenly distributed per eye, making it 11.5Mpx per eye, and with a square resolution per eye, so that's approximately 3391x3391, i.e. 1.65x denser than Reverb.
Apple isn't playing, though. They're targeting all use cases--entertainment, socializing, and working, even collaboratively. They don't want this just in the office, they want it in the home. If they succeed (on the second generation, mind you) then Microsoft and PC makers will be in the same position phone makers were when the iPhone took hold. They'll have to work together if they want to catch up, and they'll have to work fast, which means working openly.
So I'm hoping. But I ain't betting.
Except for the one use case where there has actually been demand for VR: gaming. Apple's plan is to eat Meta's lunch. Meta's lunch consists of two peas and a leaf of wilted lettuce.
I would imagine gaming with this will be great, you get all the benefits of VR without having to use one of those stupid motion controllers.
If we can turn everyday objects into the thing you hold, that’d be great, but I’m not sure it’s feasible yet. We’ll see if anyone tries.
Unless you mean holding mouse and keyboard, while sitting behind desk. For 1/5th of the price you can just buy big gaming curved screen which has many many technologies that help gaming experience, and Apple will have 0 (ie gsync/freesync, antiflickering etc.).
See: the last 30 years of the company.
I want it hackable, not because I myself is gonna do anything with it, but because I want that kind of innovation. Not the boring, polished, exec-vision thingy. Let other people invent new ways of doing stuff!
1. Seems quite cool in the demo but dorky in the real world.
2. Solves a problem no one really has.
3. Costs 10x more than most people are willing to spend.
4. Actual use case: Mall cops and tourists.
5. Some rich fanboy will buy out the entire inventory, use it outdoors, and fall off a cliff.
The concept of augmented reality also appeals to me when it comes to recipes. I've been considering investing in a Thermomix device, which costs around $1500, because I appreciate the convenience of their on-screen guided instructions rather than attempting to figure out the correct temperature, cooking time, slice size. If augmented reality can guide me through cooking two or three dishes simultaneously, that would be a very convenient time saver. For example, while the onions are sautéing for 5 mins, the software knows that I have enough time to prepare a 2nd dish like chopping romaine leaves for a salad. I’d end my subscription to Soylent pretty quick for something like that.
OTOH these also sound like things a remote teacher could help you with if they could talk to you in an earpiece provided they could immerse themselves in your environment. So the remote teacher would be wearing the AR headset. But now maybe you'd need a robot avatar in your kitchen.
Just brainstorming here but these might be business opportunities.
How would this, which has the hardware of two iPhones in it and stands in for a 100" screen and Dolby Atmos surround system, cost less than an iPhone Pro Max?
It was obvious as soon as they listed the cameras involved, the M2 chip, and the micro-OLED screens (plural), this was going to cost 2x a single top of line iPhone plus headset, so $3000+.
That "just" is doing a lot of work there except I think it's WFH and on a Netflix binge.
Also, there's a good chance that devices like this have a strong future. Just like you could argue that a Macbook is a descendant of the Macintosh Portable, the fact that lots of people own macbooks doesn't mean the Macintosh Portable was a success.
https://www.buymobiles.net/blog/content/images/2020/05/Apple...
Image from this article, which is a great reminder of what it means to take risks:
https://www.buymobiles.net/blog/apple-products-you-probably-...
My bigger concern is comfort. Ski mask style HMDs went the way of the dinosaur for a good reason: they’re nightmarishly awful to use for extended periods of time. I did see an image of an attachable side-to-side head strap, which implies Apple is aware of the problem but prioritized aesthetics.
Also for anyone interested in FoV: this guy on Twitter mentioned that it’s similar to the Quest Pro [1]. Lower than I’d like for that price, especially with an enclosed face gasket.
1. https://twitter.com/benz145/status/1665894522658910213?s=20
It doesn't sound like prior efforts work well for that use case at all.
> The resolution means that text is actually readable. Apple’s positioning of this as a full on computing device only makes sense if you can actually read text in it. All of the previous iterations of ‘virtual desktop’ setups have relied on panels and lenses that present too blurry a view to reliably read fine text at length. In many cases it literally hurt to do so. Not with the Apple Vision Pro – text is super crisp and legible at all sizes and at far ‘distances’ within your space.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/05/first-impressions-yes-appl...
Fwiw, this is essentially correct for all consumer grade HMDs prior to the end of 2022. Fresnel lenses meant you could only achieve (relative) text clarity inside a small sweet spot.
Pancake optics made this more of a question of panel resolution due to their nearly edge-to-edge clarity. The problem is that the two currently available pancake lens devices are the Pico 4 and the Quest Pro: neither of which have quite enough underlying pixels to make the “working in headset” dream viable.
I absolutely DON’T recommend the Quest Pro as a replacement monitor for that very reason. It CAN reasonably approximate a 1080p monitor, but not at a visual distance most people would be comfortable with using for extended times. Similar experience to using a large TV as a monitor (though not quite THAT bad). When you’re that up close and personal with your virtual display, adding extra desktops doesn’t really help much.
“Vision Pro” has pancake optics and a very dense display panel so the “sitting in front of a TV” thing shouldn’t be an issue. I’m very excited to try one out.
I never wear wristwatches or smart watches unless I have to (hiking, running etc) because I dislike any trinkets that touch the skin 24/7, regardless of the material. This thing is almost like a diving mask, just not airtight. How about wearing it several hours straight?
But only for an hour or two after taking off my headset.
Not sure what you mean about socially? I can't see how interacting with people in a virtual space would have any strange effects on how I interact with people in a physical space. I don't really see a difference between chatting in a group around a virtual table versus a physical table.
I also have a 16 foot USB-C cable hanging from the ceiling with retractable hooks for infinite plugged-in use.
I have a very comfortable third-party head strap (BOBOVR M2) and cooling facial interface so I don't really notice that I'm even wearing a headset after a few minutes.
And most people can wear glasses, wedding rings and watches all day without issue.
* Quest 2 = 503g
Apple's headset has no battery and they are pretty good with weight management so likely to be on par with a pair of ski goggles.
Which again people typically wear for many days at a time.
I don’t think we’re really going to know what they feel like until someone not from Apple puts them on their head!
And who will develop software for something with such a small user base?
The cheaper mass market consumer version comes later. They've been iterating for years now on something in a thick framed glasses form factor, and haven't gotten anything they think is worth shipping so far.
>Microsoft’s HoloLens 2: a $3,500 mixed reality headset for the factory, not the living room
https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/24/18235460/microsoft-holole...
> Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-has-laid-...
I'm sure Apple's habit of iterating on and improving a new platform year after year without giving up would have served them better.
Everyone. It's a laptop replacement.
Realistically this "Pro" version is for early adopters. There will surely be a regular/SE/Lite version in a couple of years for the price of a MacBook Air.
> And who will develop software for something with such a small user base?
Everyone will, if they're smart. Being first to market on a new platform is huge, even if it will take a few years to have significant market penetration.
Angry Birds became a multi-billion dollar franchise for being one of the first iPhone games. Who knows what the equivalent will be for XR.
Respectfully, even the iPad hasn't fully evolved into a laptop replacement, so why should we think this device will fit all the multitude of use cases that necessitate the computing power represented by a laptop / desktop device?
It is? As in it acts like a normal Mac OS machine that happens to be attached to your head, holds all your files and stuff without communicating to another PC?
Can I just run IntelliJ on it and write code?
Or does it just replace your monitor(s) ?
Nooo it's an emacs device.
But seriously, can the early adopter type FAANG income techie use this for work standalone? Can it even act as virtual monitors for a Mac Studio?
I'm one of those people who wants that day to arrive while I am still working, so I follow this space with interest and buy some of these devices.
So far, no headset has gotten close. The Quest Pro is probably the closest, but still very far from the goal.
This Apple device looks like it will get closer still, but it likely will fall short -- at least for a few product generations.
So I think the big question is will this product achieve enough traction to keep existing until the tech gets better and the price gets lower.
A VR headset that focuses on being really good at web apps (including complex ones like GitHub codespaces) would get a lot of the way there.
It's sobering to think this has now been so long ago but still: this is absolutely not true. Angry Birds came out end of 2009 and games were available for more than a year by then. See top 2008 here https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/12/apple-reveals-most-do... and top 2009 here https://www.ign.com/articles/2009/12/09/the-most-popular-iph...
And the new VisionOS (or whatever Apple will decide to call it) will have to be even more restricted than iPadOS was compared to MacOS just because of the tighter coupling to your body.
Can you build apps on it?
You can develop some toy apps with Swift Playgrounds, but Apple isn't developing realityOS using iPad.
When you take it off, your laptop, phone, whatever will still work great as normal.
It's a caveat because for a lot of people, I don't think laptops will be necessary in the future. My mom doesn't have one but is obsessed with her phone. Probably one day laptops will mostly be for pros.
But yeah, in general I agree with everything you said.
The reason it is priced at $3500 is because Apple does not have the supply chain to build more of these things. There is simply no point pricing this at $300 and being perpetually Out of Stock which would devalue their brand for no benefit. Hence the Pro tag and release at WWDC.
Eventually there will be a non-Pro version that everyone can buy.
this is literally how every single thing has worked in this industry for like 50 years now. are there really people on this site so young that they don't remember how this works beyond a single product hype cycle? is it that hard to remember how compact discs, dial-up internet, laptops, multi-CPU/cores, DVDs, mp3 players, broadband, smartphones, bluetooth, wifi, flash, SSDs, GPUs, plasma, lcd, led, smartwatches, EVs took 5-10 years to hit mass market? "well, that's different, those were obviously going to be hits" -- no. wrong. all of this stuff was atrocious and atrociously expensive when it first came out. anyone remember the first orinoco wifi cards? or bluetooth? the shit didn't even work.
here are some current things that sort of suck but will probably also continue get better: satellite internet, smart home tech, solar tech, LLMs. this stuff will get better. it's the housing, education, healthcare, financial services that are going to get worse and worse because all of the money flows to the people making the tech. talk about missing the forest for the trees.
i mean is it REALLY that hard to remember this stuff? am i REALLY that old? am i taking crazy pills?
I think significant questions remain at this point about their actual go-to-market strategy (unsurprisingly considering they have only been given a short keynote presentation) which make people suspicious if not sceptical when you take into account the other notorious failures in this market.
Developers are not going to be the primary demographic, this isn't going to be the final price and the product will definitely change over the coming year.
I always hear people giving made up use cases like "oh, service engineers will be able to see instructions overlaid on the machines they're working on" but a paper service manual costs a lot less than a 3D augmented reality manual - and anyone who's worked with service engineers knows for any repair that's performed often enough that productivity is important, the service engineer will know the process by heart.
Oh sure, you can sell a few units to architecture companies that want to dazzle rich clients. But you can't sustain a product like this on sales of 1000 units per year.
Google Glass and HoloLens both targeted the "business market" but that's just them saving face when they can't hit a price point that makes any sense.
The military bought enough Hololens (for whatever reason) to make it worth it for Microsoft. They knew that ahead of time too.
Apple has enough people that will buy whatever they make that this will be successful even if it is also useless.
What you are, is snarky.
The only times Apple ever did this in the past, the product flopped because it was too expensive.
Maybe other companies have been leading with expensive tech waiting for the market to catch up, but Apple hasn't - not since the Lisa anyway.
And yes I am on old fogey - ol enough to remember that the industry has been waiting for consumers to "catch up" to VR for many many years. It's not happening - VR is a niche. Ordinary people don't want to put a VR headset on - they just don't - there's no catching up because 99% of the people I know would never put on a headset except for one impressive demo and never again.
This thing will at best do "okay" - it's too expensive - there won't be a critical mass of software for it, and VR is a niche.
They will when it's got an Apple logo on it.
Why not? Because it's heavy, sweaty, smelly, expensive, uncomfortable for the eyes, or some other reason?
I doubt people have real ideological aversion towards headsets. If people don't want them it's probably because of one of the practical reasons above. And honestly most of those are likely to be alleviated in the near future.
I'd bet that if Apple thought in any way that they might have a sunscreen form-factor device in anything close to 5 years from now they would have held off on releasing anything to the public.
All signs 100% point to bulky headsets being the state-of-the-art for the foreseeable future, and this is going to keep dooming this technology.
Not to mention, the fact that no one has really found a good way to allow you to move around in the VR "space" that they're creating with anything other than a controller (to an extremely disorienting effect even then) also puts a serious damper on our ability to suspend disbelief while enjoying such a device.
Those are not my words, I wouldn't mind wearing it in private (for open spaces with other people including my family definitely above is valid), its from my wife who is a doctor. And she generally likes tech, has latest iphone and garmin 6 pro watches. Just because you like some gadget, you can't force it on folks who properly detest the whole idea of it.
Let's not even start the discussion on negative physical and mental health effects of watching this for longer, especially in kids.
A dentist friend of mine is so excited with the ability of using it for his work. He doesn’t want to look up to the X-ray screen, or has his assistant read out loud for him the number associated with the patient’s scanning result.
I don't understand how can people feel so strongly about this.
If someone wants to wear a headset, what's it to you? Especially if it's not in your presence.
> Let's not even start the discussion on negative physical and mental health effects
Like the physical and mental health effects people complain about EVERY TIME a new form of media consumption technology is introduced. It's a complaint as old as the pyramids, literally.
Of course we should be careful and mindful about the well being of children. But let's not loose our heads, this is not fentanyl.
- “Too expensive” - “Who is this for?!” - “my $20 watch has 20x battery life” - ”This will obviously flop because no one I know wants to strap a screen to their wrist and carry it around all day” - ...and on and on.
I don’t have a guess as to whether this will flop or succeed, but I’m always amazed at how people are willing to announce publicly with confidence that a product they’ve never used will undoubtedly fail.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070908223628/http://www.apple....
A standalone Sun-2/120, with cpu, 1M of memory, 42MB hard drive, tape interface, ethernet interface and software, cost $16300 in 1984 dollars, over 45k today.
So yeah, Macintosh was cheap
The difference was that the Mac shipped with WYSIWYG editing software (MacWrite and MacPaint) that was so obviously better than anything on the IBM that it was a no brainer. People wanted them very much, but most of us simply couldn't afford them.
In addition, desktop publishing was a stupidly obvious killer app on the Macintosh (Fat Mac plus LaserWriter plus Aldus Pagemaker) and you could make your money back within a couple of jobs given how much money you would save.
Even a $400 computer was a huge stretch for them. It was possibly the absolute best purchase they ever made for me as it sent me down the tech path, but they thought VERY long and hard about it.
Zoomers don’t remember a time before any of those things. Hell, they don’t even remember some of those things.
But so far, that is the only app category I can think of that would justify me quitting my job and trying to bootstrap a business based solely on an app for Vision OS. I feel like I am probably overlooking a couple, though... :-D
I thought it would be absurd to be wearing these goggles in the street. Then I thought that at home it would also be strange being with the family with those things on the top of your head. I thought "This is perfect for people who live alone". And then it dawned on me: the killer app for this is p0rn.
Brand loyalty, consumerism, platform lock in. It's the reason why Apple is so wealthy.
People will defend the investment of their time and money by investing more.
At least on the phone market, iphones have much longer lifetime and can often be used second-third time as well (I also use a used iphone, which I plan on passing down to my mother when I upgrade). Their M-series laptops are unbiasedly the best and it is not even funny by how far. There is simply no competitor that would be anywhere near on the performance-battery life plot, and for that its price is really not high (especially an M1 air, used or new).
Android’s wearables are toys compared to an apple watch also.
Sure the product exists and people buy them, but it's no earth shaker - in contrast, a success for Apple is iPad, iPhone, Macintosh - products that if you ask some random person in an affluent country, there's a pretty good chance they own one, two three or more of these products.
The Apple VR headset will not be a flop in the sense that Apple probably won't kill the product, but it also won't be any huge success by the measures above. It will at best be a niche, which is a flop for Apple.
There's gonna be Android for Eyeballs eventually and anyone will be able to make their app have virtual space widgets or something.
Of course that doesn't guarantee anyone will actually do anything cool with it, but they'll be able to.
Google glass?
Because fast forward to now and the horse has bolted into the glue factory.
How many Android for eyeballs has Google released already? I count at least 3.
- Whatever Cardboard was using (2013ish)
- Daydream platform (2016ish)
- Whatever Samsung Gear VR used (2018ish)
All of them nice gimmicks, but also commercial failures and abandoned.
https://www.siliconrepublic.com/gear/robert-scoble-wears-goo...
Your comparison of OSS developers as tinkerers who can't reach the Megacorp scale is totally absurd. I've worked at these corporations, and out of 10 only 1 or 2 would reach a scale of a great developer. But, OSS developers innovations, contributions and impact surpasses any company out there.
Also, nobody in their right mind wants to work 80 hours a week competing with a team who's trying to better you, if you pit the developers against each other it doesn't matter how much you get paid, your time is owned by the large corp at the end of the day. Easy to undermine the work of OSS developers who go unappreciated and hail the rat racing corporations.
Marketing works.
Like, of course the car was a world-changing invention. And Ford's original model T remains a significant point of the history of automobiles.
The smartphone was certainly a world-changing invention, and it seems the iPhone was just as historically significant to it as a technology. I don't think the LG Prada is going to be so thoroughly remembered by history.
The car is the invention, a car product is a Tesla. The TV is the invention, a TV product is the LG OLED CX.
I'm not saying the iPhone is the greatest invention ever (though the telephone might be).
I'm saying that it's one of the most groundbreaking and transformative products ever.
Hope that clears it up.
It's just a deeply cynical point of view for cynicism's sake.
One of the things that shocked me most from the keynote, was the Persona avatar demo. Meta has demoed what they call codec avatars[1] which are super impressive, but still very much in development and not anywhere on the horizon yet.
To see Apple demonstrate realistic avatars was honestly super impressive and will be imo one of the features that you just need experience to truly realize the world of a difference it makes to talk to someone on a flat video screen or feel like you're in the same space together thanks to these avatars and spatial audio.
Immersion is so powerful in VR, I can't wait to hang out with friends and family abroad, play tabletop games, watch a show together, or just shoot the sht.
This makes for some ~800x600 resolution for a focus area such a page of text in the middle of the field. How can it be sharp enough?
Does it use some sort of uneven pixel distribution?
Most of Apple’s other successful products are part of the former. Music players were a proven market. Headphones were a proven market. Cell phones were a proven market. Watches, fitness trackers, and jewelry were a proven market.
VR and AR are really not that. That market has sold an impressive amount of units mostly on the back of a cheap $300 device that its owners consider to be a toy, but the volume is nothing compared to all the other devices I mentioned.
This could very easily be the next HomePod (1st generation): an over-engineered niche product with a price that is too high to be palatable.
One thing is certain: people are getting fired over at Meta.
While they're not directly competing (given that the Varjo is entirely wired and lacks the key attraction of Apple's software and ecosystem), they do seem to be somewhat comparable in terms of price and resolution.
The central 70ppd feels like a pretty solid number. Funnily enough it's price not that far from Apple's headset.
Or did I miss here something?
The same problem exists with monitors. The recommendation is take breaks to focus at different distances.
I wear glasses myself. And sometimes I forget to take them off because they become part of my perception. That doesn't happen to me with my monitors :-D
Since these studies, it has become harder to experiment on small kids as it would be unethical, but on the other hand there's no specific report on kids older than 13 if I remember well.
Then a decent number of adults have been using the headsets for prolonged periods without anything critical reported at this point. It should still be used with awareness of potential risks, but I don't think there's any strong evidence of long term effects.
HOWEVER, I still believe it will be very niche. It’s still putting on a sizable headset and placing two screens right up your eye balls. We don’t yet know the health effects from doing that for an extended period. I imagine it is not good at all.
Maybe it’s the inner ear that is going to get hurt after prolonged disorientation, but astronauts should surely have that worse and I haven’t heard of any studies about it. Maybe something will show up about it.
I don’t see an obvious mechanism where this is harmful and VR headsets have been around long enough that this should be a well-understood safety space.
But:
- Why are no of the other people in the meeting using a Vision? :P https://www.youtube.com/live/GYkq9Rgoj8E?feature=share&t=560...
- The see-through of your eyes from the outside looks super creepy.
Check out Marques Brownlee's video on this - they probably _were_, it renders your face using the internal cameras in real time and displays that.
Do you mean the avatar thingy?
> I’ve used essentially every major VR headset and AR device since 2013’s Oculus DK1 right up through the latest generations of Quest and Vive headsets. I’ve tried all of the experiences and stabs at making fetch happen when it comes to XR.
Here’s what Apple got right that other headsets just couldn’t nail down:
The eye tracking and gesture control is near perfect.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/05/first-impressions-yes-appl...
Drawing is a task that is more like aiming - attempting to hold your gaze at a precise location for a period of time. It is possible, but you are fighting against the natural saccade pattern of your eye and it becomes tiring very quickly. You can expect fatigue / eye-strain within a few minutes.
A new platform certainly doesn't have to be better at every task.
Even 20 years ago, a professional digital illustrator wouldn't try to draw everything on screen with a mouse, they would have a tool more suited to the task, like a Wacom tablet.
But it’s going to take time. The uptake on this particular device will be small due to the price (very small by Apple’s standards).
For V2 maybe they can save a chunk of money by dropping the wearer pass-through display, and just indicate the wearer’s status with some LEDs (You’ve got a big headset on. People around you being able to see a representation of your eyes isn’t going to make them feel more comfortable/connected to you.)
Washington Post negative review.[1]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/05/apple-gog...
The author carefully avoids saying they haven’t actually used it.
Personally, I'm still skeptical. They announced 2 hours of battery life, which basically means this needs to always be plugged in. And while this is much more useful and technologically superior to everything that came before, it suffers in other ways. It looks goofier and more dystopian than Google Glass (though maybe Apple's brand status can carry it through this), and is heavier and has a weaker exclusive value prop than Meta's Quest headsets.
For all the hate it gets, Meta at least has a core use case for its Quest headsets - VR gaming. If you want to play VR games, get a Quest. If you want to ??? get a Vision Pro. Still not sure what belongs there. Watch a movie in VR instead of on your TV? See your monitors in VR instead of on your desk? Record precious memories that you want to relive over and over with a huge chunk of tech strapped over your face instead of living and enjoying the moment with those around you?
I guess it's the HomePod strategy on steroids - release an ultra-premium device, then release the mass market version later, once you figure out what people actually want from it.
Either way, there's only so much that speculation can cover. Right now, no one can speak to very basic factors like comfort over extended periods of time, which can make or break this product.
I think any other company would get roasted on that.
Since for my use case it's the most direct competitor (using VR as working tool, not gaming), anybody got a comparison of the early test devices for both?
I don't think SimulaVR counts, since all they have so far is a few prototypes and a single pre-release build sent to an external reviewer (https://simulavr.com/blog/review-unit-in-transit/). And unless the author is that reviewer (or works for SimulaVR), he can't have used it.
Those conspiracy theories about chemicals in American tapwater must be onto something if people are genuinely (aka not obvious shills) excited about this clownery.
Some of the use cases people are espousing and the timelines are.. ambitious.
So far, this product looks like it was made for stockholders to go try to sell to the general public lol.
To me, it looks like a somewhat coordinated effort to give positive vibes to a relatively pointless (in its current state) product that likely nobody in this thread has had a chance to use.
Maybe it's not even coordinated - just a lot of like minded simps.
I don't want to spend time arranging windows around me at ideal viewing angles. I wanted the device or windowing system to align windows (at least vertically), perpendicular to my view. Straight up and down. I wanted to walk around them like phantom objects in this space, with silly stuff like the memory/resource usage and metadata about the window on the back of it.
What I really wanted to see here was a virtual workspace augmented by the physical space around you. I want to snap or 'throw' a window to a wall or a ceiling or tile them across my floor and walk around like I'm touring miniature golf. I'm sure the gestures and virtual anchors or snaps to do this will appear over time. 1st-generation woes I suppose.
As an alternative I wanted to create a series of nesting-doll-like orbs around myself, where windows fix themselves with equal gaps at optimum viewing angles around this orb and I'm only moving them around inside this sphere-layer, and up/down layers to inner/outer spheres. "Move to back" / "Move to front", etc.
Apple's probably further than any OS on preserving application state. Not just window geometry/placement, but application state. I want to put on these goggles and see 10+ windows "surface" from beneath the physical world around my room. I love the idea of my house/office being like the movie "Her" where it looks minimal and devoid of technology and putting on these goggles brings the virtual world out. Even just having dynamic art persist on the walls when virtual.
Further thought: I want to see 2+ of these goggles in action viewing the same content and applications and allowing for simultaneous/group/mesh controlling. Can I get 2 of these and have my boyfriend and I watch the same movie? Play the same game? I really hope it's something like wifi-direct or mesh networking for local AR stuff.
I think this is the start of something really pivotal and done with enough polish to launch the industry - finally. I just want more sooner, and I'm puzzled why they announced it so early if it's marketed next year.
Asahi Linux for Vision Pro soon? In at least 1 of the Apple videos I saw a window fixed to a wall. Linux needs devs that can build this AR/gesture/interface/compositor stuff.
I actually love the oddly buggy/bubbly design of the goggles. I like how they hid the cameras, and try to reproduce the face of the person, and the fade-in effect to show someone outside the goggles interacting with you. I'm really hoping the downward-facing cameras + sensors allow for speedy typing on a table surface with a virtual keyboard. I was so shocked I could type 80wpm on an iPad virtual keyboard when those were new. I love keyboards, but I want the movie Her with minimal/no tech visible.
They've got my purchase if I can play some reasonable percentage of Steam games on this thing. Vampire Survivors <3
Given refresh rate technology on iPhone and iPad, and the microOLED, I'd expect a ProMotion-like framerate handling:
https://www.trustedreviews.com/explainer/what-is-promotion-4...
For what it's worth, some controller lags:
- Xbox One S Wired OC (1k) - 5.2ms
- Xbox Series X Wired OC (1k) - 5.5ms
- Xbox Series X Wireless Adapter - 5.9ms
- Xbox One S Wireless Adapter - 7.1ms
- Xbox One S Bluetooth - 7.6ms
- Dualsense Wired - 11.1ms
- Thrustmaster eSwap Pro Wired - 11.4ms
- Xbox Series X Bluetooth - 12ms
- Dualshock 4 Wired - 13.6ms
Meanwhile, OLED TV input lags via https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/inputs/input-lag
- 5ms game mode at 120Hz
- 10ms game mode at 60Hz
- 50ms - 90ms outside of game mode
To have camera in, layer compositing, and rendering to your eyeballs, in 12ms, would be pretty quick.
Apple Watch 7 and SE 2022 scored on the top for tracking sleep data[0]. So it's very far from useless, we bought it for this functionality alone.
Target market : rich people (again...)
Enterprise market : military / financial services & trading / cyber defence
I think that they will hit the intersection of rich and young; and they will also get traction from their enterprise niches. This will create a beach head for developers and an onramp that doens't rely on someone just pouring money into it all endlessly.
If the market doesn't grow and evolve then it'll be clear that consumers don't want this, there will be no excuses like "wait for better kit, better designs, a functioning market"...