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Comment by PostOnce | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why there is no AR or VR killer app for this thing.

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.

View on HN

The first iPhone was pretty crappy. No apps. 2G only. Poor battery life. Limited global distribution - not even Canada could get it. But it captivated people who didn’t own it yet, and it proved out some essential ideas like multitouch. And when the iPhone 3G came out, improving on some of the original device’s shortcomings, it was wildly popular. The rest is history.

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 recall not long after the iPod was released in the early 00’s that peeps were clamoring for an Apple phone. It took seven years before Apple fans got their wish. IPhone landed in the world of Nokia, Blackberry, Motorola. All juggernauts in the mobile phone industry.

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 first iphone let you have a real web browser anywhere you had cell coverage. This lets you have a web browser floating at home. Its not the same (and I love VR)

I didn’t get one until the 3G came out, but I have a very clear memory of the “wow!” feeling: right after buying the phone, I went down the street to a coffee shop and started browsing the web while waiting in line. I was instantly cured of my prior skepticism that it could actually be a major improvement over my flip phone + iPod.

Also GPS maps with that shiny glass dot. You bought a phone, and you got a GPS navigator for free.

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.

I don't have much to add except for a "back in my day" story:

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’s worth remembering the original iPhone did not have GPS at all. It had google maps for calling up information like you would with map quest, but no turn by turn/live navigation

It had basic geolocation feature though so you could mostly see where you were on a map which was still very useful compared to flip phones

Cellular triangulation worked really well on the classic iPhone - if you were in a very crowded place. In more rural areas, you could be off by many kilometers. I’m not sure if they had Wi-Fi SSID location back then.

I remember Garmin and TomTom share price dropping when Google announced it was adding turn by turn navigation to Google Maps. It was an amazing time.

Original Maps in iPhone was actually Google Maps.

This make astonishing growth in Google Maps.

Of course, with Google, nothing is "free" free.

Google tracks your location so that they can track ad conversions based on store-visits (no I'm not kidding).

Not sure what maps your friend was using, Nokia S60 series has Google Maps, it’s not bad compared to original iPhone. I could use keyboard to zoom in and out, after log in all the layered map stuff works. In comparison, iPhone’s Google Maps didn’t have turn by turn navigation till a while later.

Yep I actually remember standing on the sidewalk on my lunch break outside of a cafe, and I pulled up the Reddit website.

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.

In Spring 2008 I got my first iPhone as a hand me down from my brother. He didn’t like it at all, since iPhone OS 1 was very limited and went back to Windows Mobile. However, I became a very spoiled kid with access to Wikipedia at the age of 14 in a classroom, at least 3 years before smartphones became mainstream. It most certainly didn‘t improve my character to have such an expensive phone at that age.

And Visual Voice Mail—that was a huge step forward.

Believe it or not, my carrier finally got visual voicemail in 2022.

Just in time for regular phone calls to be on their way out.

There were also hundreds of phones doing that already. And phones with touchscreens.

I guess we’ll need to wait to see what happens with this. Apple has a good track with proving tech literate people wrong.

> The first iPhone was pretty crappy.

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.... "

Lmao, but the first iPhone was a major improvement over other phones at the time and offered a form of consistence/stability versus the often very experimental models other companies had.

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.

This device looks to be a monumental improvement over any current consumer AR/VR headset. From the user reviews that've come out so far, they've talked about the very forgiving hand-tracking, the high-fidelity screens, the nearly imperceptible delay from the cameras, how comfortable it is to wear, etc.

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.

For sure this thing is much better than something like the Meta Quest 3, but is it _seven times_ as good?

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.

1) Agree with you on the higher resolution screens. Yeah it's gonna be a resource hog but from what I've heard it looks downright gorgeous. 2) I'm okay with the better passthrough, from what the initial impressions have said, it really does help alleviate the headaches or nausea from the delay in lower-end systems. I get serious motion sickness and nausea in the PSVR2 headset, if this can solve that problem I'm all for it. 3) I know they highlighted PS5 and XBox controller support for games, so I'm holding out hope for third party motion controller support for when you need finer control. 4) I hate the eyes on the front feature, I agree it looks gimmicky, added too much to the cost, and I don't see it lasting long in future releases.

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.

1 & 2 are essential for one of the main functions of this thing for now, which is to replace or extend a laptop. I am buying it simply for this purpose. I hate working at my desktop and my Air doesn’t have enough screen estate for efficient dev work on the couch or bed lol.

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.

> No virtual objects, no 3d anything

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.

> No virtual objects, no 3d anything

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.

https://developer.apple.com/augmented-reality/

Spurious enough comparison given there were phones, a developed phone market which was 150m+ globally even at that stage, and demonstrated clear use cases for an iphone (an ipod, a phone and an internet browser combined).

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.

The potential is to replace computers. In its current version, it is basically an iPad on your face. Look a little forward and it is a laptop on your face. Imagine that the price came down to $1500-2000 in a couple years, now you can buy an Apple Vision instead of a laptop. And you wouldn't need to buy a TV either. So this does have device consolidation potential like the iPhone did and it can tap into an existing market like the iPhone tapped into the phone markets.

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.

> Imagine that the price came down to $1500-2000 in a couple years, now you can buy an Apple Vision instead of a laptop. And you wouldn't need to buy a TV either.

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?

I think this replacing TVs is a really hard sell, except in remarkably niche people. Sitting on the couch together playing Nintendo just can’t be replaced, and apple surely doesn’t want to allow third party inputs, they want an internal app ecosystem, which Nintendo and PlayStation won’t ever do. (Xbox maybe). Laptop replacement, I can buy though. But only some fraction of those, nothing large, and certainly no larger than iPhone market share percentages.

First iphone had this WOW effect, before there were clunky crappy Microsoft-OS powered boxes with pens and crappy slow imprecise displays. I recall, I had one, it was a massive shift and basically a new type of device.

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.

The first iPhone was an iPod that could make phone calls; that was all it needed to be (for the people who were already carrying a phone and an iPod).

A large multitouch display was a pretty big deal. I watched movies on my iPod classic but it wasn’t a very nice experience and the scroll wheel is not exactly the most flexible input method..

The first iphone was the first time most people could actually use the internet on something they could carry around, even if it was just with wifi. It did everything phones did but much better since it was all touch. Interfaces to alarms, the calculator, the camera etc was entirely different. Anyone who used it knew that everyone else would either copy it or go out of business.

Windows Mobile and Symbian devices were a thing for years and had functioning browsers. The iPhone was an improvement (as long as you had wifi) but it took a couple of years before it actually become widespread

They weren't anywhere close to being the same. You had no multi-touch, no pinch zoom and no fluid panning and scrolling.

Exactly, you’d use the to do the same thing more or less but the iPhone had way better UX. The idea of browsing the web on your phone wasn’t something new or revolutionary, it was all about the implementation.

No, it wasn't the same. Before people would only be able to use special mobile pages and scroll through a few options at a time. Looking at a general site like reddit was basically impossible. Reading a news article on a normal site was basically impossible. It was a total game changer and most people went from never using the mobile internet to using it frequently.

You seem to have forgotten Blackberrys were incredibly popular. Most people in the business world browsed and did emails on them. Windows phone, LG Prada, Hiptop - all of these had non WAP browsers well before the iPhone. You've missed the 2-4 year gap between WAP only phones and first iPhone.

Symbian devices had Opera Mobile and their own Webkit-based browser from at least 2005. Both of which rendered normal websites, not WAP.

And how did you navigate them? With a scroll ball? Even some phones that were single touch with pressure were slightly better but most people wanted nothing to do with that until the iphone.

> The first iPhone was pretty crappy

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.

As people below have pointed out, arguable it was crappy. Sure, lacked 3G, lacked apps, but the utter ease of connecting to wifi and flicking through Safari…

…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.

The iPhone 4 came out a year after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_HD2 and kind of felt meh with it’s tiny screen.

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)

The lack of 3G was barely an issue back then, I used my iPhone on the go with text messengers and web browsing without too many issues. Edge/2G+ wasn’t too horrible, since the web was so much lighter back then (especially since flash didn’t load).

The first iPhone was fantastic. The instant people saw it they wanted it and when they laid hands on it they needed it. The Apple Vision on the other hand is.. a screen strapped to your face.

Exactly this. It's taken 14 iterations to get the iPhone to where it is. Apple Watch has taken 8 or so. Apple has taking a long time iterating to get to where we are today on this platforms. Baby steps really. Each version introduced things we totally take for granted today. I remember just getting the Retina screen on the iPhone 4 was a massively big deal.

Just think what Vision will be after 10 iterations and a decade of time.

To add to the appeal of iPhone's original release; do not forget the iPod Touch. Released in late 2007, it was available far more broadly and was a great entry point into the world of those crazy new iPhones.

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.

> No apps. 2G only. Poor battery life.

This particular song has gotten pretty familiar.

No Wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

The first iPhone was the first phone with a proper touch screen.

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).

Apple cut the price of IPhone 2G by 33%, and got AT&T to subsidize handsets for $200. It was dead in the water before then.

Even if Apple made a similar price cut here, the device would still cost over $2000.

Yeah, people forget that the iPhone was actually considered a flop when it first launched; it was too expensive so despite the interest in the product relatively few people were actually willing to pay for it.

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.

Because no one will really do the stuff you suggest. All the things you describe just take too much effort to make

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

https://www.ikea.com/au/en/customer-service/mobile-apps/say-... should be pretty nice though

of course still a gimmick

I’m more exciting about a new version of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmFk0AKbXlQ

>> - 3d animation : ~3 people and 2 weeks

Given the design already in CAD, how about 1 person in a day.

Yes. If it's any longer then it's a tooling problem rather than an innate limit.

You can already very easily animate an assembly in modern CAD programs by setting up connectors and constraints, which you normally do as a matter of course anyway. There's literally nothing to do, you just click on the "assembly" tab and start dragging parts around.

Yes, in the same way as you can trivially restyle a Word document with a few clicks around the Style section of the ribbon - making it easy to adjust for the demands of your publisher, or to the new corporate color scheme.

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.

But if you want to publish something that will be visible to the public, you can't just export the default output from your CAD app. You want something that fits with your brand's aesthetic/guidelines, that looks professional, that clearly communicates without distraction. These things require consideration. Look at an IKEA diagram—they are carefully designed to make assembly as obvious as possible to a layperson; animations are invariably slower to produce than a static print diagram.

Yeah if only 3D scanning went through the same revolution digital photography did.

3D scanning only gets you a mesh, it doesn't get you interactivity or functionality. If you just want to manhandle a bunch of meshes, modding H3 VR is easy, and there's a 3D modelling program for SteamVR that opens and edits meshes just fine.

Hell, you can even interactively edit things in the Unreal IDE. But it's still a serious task.

Sure, but it's a very useful first step. When you want to do something like, say, 3D printing a case for your bluetooth earbuds, there is no approach that isn't tedious.

But people still do shoot movies and make video games.

It takes more work, but also (hopefully) provides an additional value. At sufficient scale it might make sense to do this (something like IKEA).

> But people still do shoot movies

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.

> There are at least 1,000 books written for every movie shot, even including material shot by amateurs with their phones

> 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”

Wedding videos classify as "shooting a movie"?

I think they do in the context of “even including material shot by amateurs with their phones” and comparing them to a market that includes self-published books.

People often hire professionals to shoot them.

IMO self-published books would be better compared to self-published movies (which isn’t what the original commenter said, but they were just too obviously wrong).

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.

a lot of those 500k “books” are about as similar to what we perceive as real books as wedding videos are to blockbuster movies

> And that still puts the bar higher than “material shot by amateurs with their phones”

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.?

Yes but what's your point? The movie market is comparable to the book market, probably larger. The video game market is much larger than both combined.

Therefore the effort people put into making the complicated products (movies, games) pay off despite the initial expense.

> The movie market is comparable to the book market, probably larger

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.

The politics of this are interesting. 3D movie and game content restores some of the exclusivity lost by amateur/phone content.

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.

> There are at least 1,000 books written for every movie shot, even including material shot by amateurs with their phones.

I really doubt that considering writing a book requires a lot more effort than shooting a ‘movie’ on your phone.

And yet, that small relative quantity of movies compared to books is enough to sell millions of new screens every year.

if book publishers spent the same amount of money movie publishers spend on marketing a single blockbuster movie (50% of the budget, i.e. billions of dollars) books would sell a lot more too.

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.

Counterpoint, there's always been a desire to have a virtual environment as first shown in 80's sci-fi films like Hackers, Johnny Mnemonic, etc; immerse yourself in a system, have it become like a natural extension of yourself.

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.

The smartphone had multiple killer apps: web browsing, maps when you needed them most instead of having to print MapQuest directions, and device consolidation (iPod, cell phone, GPS, and web browser all in one!)

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.

> 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

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.

So… multiple killer app.

Vision is a general purpose computing device. There is not really a single “killer app”. The whole concept is flawed

the smartphone killer app was that it fit in your pocket and was useable almost everywhere you were

The killer app for smartphones is being a phone.

If you mean voice calls then I disagree. They seem to becoming less important every year.

What percentage of people worldwide use smartphones with no voice service at all? Including voip.

That's beside the point. You can have voice calls and choose not to use them very often.

I'm talking about actual usage. My personal observation is that usage of voice calls is declining - especially among the young.

You still want a way to make voice calls in case you need to contact emergency services, no?

At no point did I say "nobody ever makes voice calls any more".

The point being the option to call emergency services still makes phone software the killer app for smartphones.

"Calling emergency services is the killer app for phones" - yes.

"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.

True. The Iphone is an Ipod Touch with a sim card.

The iPhone predates the iPod Touch.

I know, but not by much, they were both announced in 2007.

that wasn't the reason to get a smartphone over a phone. First killer app was email

This was a reported rumour prior to the reveal yesterday: no significant use case. This is a significant departure from Apple's usual MO: find a USP and NAIL the implementation. They're using a scattergun approach here and it's risky. They better be sending these headsets free of charge to thousands of studios in the hopes that some of them develop THE killer app, because this is the only way I see this succeeding. Especially because this is a first gen product from Apple with a maximum of two hours of battery life, a wire hanging off the headset, and no controllers. I'd be much more confident about the future of this device if it weren't $3,500 + tax. At this price I don't understand who will be buying it.

Anyone who flies a lot will be able to use it as advertised now for entertainment and work.

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).

>Anyone who flies a lot will be able to use it as advertised now for entertainment and work.

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 ?

It might sound silly, but I would be fine using this with a keyboard and touchpad. The lousy thing about working from a laptop is the screen being tiny and in the wrong place. It's bad in general, but it's intolerable on a plane. This solves that.

It looks like you either dial up/down the immersion, so you could always see people at the fringes, or the passthrough would mean you could see someone like a steward appearing to get your attention.

Actually it looks like someone approaching will automatically fade in, even if your immersion had been dialed up.

With a two hour battery life? I don't see it.

Most flights I've been on have USB charging ports. Is it different where you live?

Those USB charging ports are usually very low power. The circuits also have maximum loads, meaning that if too many people are using USB charging ports, they drop even further. I've measured output on several airlines. Two topped out at 5W. The other at 12W. This is likely WELL below the requirements for this headset.

One will have more success with the wall outlets, but most flights don't have these. Even many international flights don't offer them.

I feel like this is the original Apple MO that has worked for them for all their most innovative products. Looking at iMac, iPods, iPhone, Apple watch - it was never a perfectly polished product they were pushing, it was a paradigm shift.

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.

Difference is that Apple enters categories that have already product-market fit (PCs, MP3 players, laptops, smartphones, fitness trackers). Only exception probably being the iPad. VR doesn’t have product-market fit except for some games genres (driving / flight simulators, rythme / dancing)

I somewhat agree, somewhat disagree. There was also some product-market fit, but they never entered a formed market - their specialty is creating a need for a product through marketing and product strategy.

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.

PCs and smartphones were both proven markets regardless of market size in a way VR is not today.

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 will buy it for my entire team just for the video conferencing - assuming it is actually as good as promised, of course. Anything beyond that is gravy.

I can't imagine how it could possibly be any good for video conferencing.

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.

Video conferencing is probably the #1 time I just don't have nearly enough screen space. I'm always switching back and forth between dev tools, chat, whatever's being presented, other video chat participants. Would be great to be able to fit all that in front of me where I can switch with a glance.

You appear to have watched a different product launch to the one I watched. The lack of obvious digital avatars was one of the key points.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/5/23750096/apple-vision-pro-...

For some reason I assumed you meant traditional non-realistic avatars - but yes - I concur those are avatars.

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.

Indeed, so you have a worse experience, I still think that they could have the avatars for other devices so that folks can use them if they have their camera off it would be nice.

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

With digital avatars you can fix the gaze offset issues.

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 guess my point was that digital avatars are being bundled with AR/VR but they dont have a lot to do with it. What you are describing happens today without VR, so having these avatars from or to my iPad would be a benefit.

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.

Having to wear this for Zoom calls would be some kind of wagie humiliation ritual

If it doesn’t blow me away, I won’t do it. But I think it will blow me away. Apple rarely disappoints on the experience by the time they launch something, in my experience anyhow.

If my company forced me to attend meetings in a glorified metaverse I'd probably resign.

It will need a virtual virtual avatar so you can disable the sensors and have options for how your avatar should be animated. Attentive, bored, marble statue...

What company do you work for? I want to know so I can avoid companies that waste money.

Meh, this is the same thing they did with the Watch - the last "new thing" they released. The initial Apple Watch release was a pretty scatter gun approach. I mean, one of the headline features was "send your heartbeat to someone else".

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.

This is what's concerning. A team that just spent years creating revolutionary hardware that is leaps and bounds ahead of the competition, who by far have the most context to come up with a killer app, could not come up with one. The best they could offer is reading articles in safari an enhancing the viewing experience of movies/shows/live sports.

They should be bursting at the seams with out of this world ideas that this amazing hardware could support. And yet, nothing.

I think that we need new tools --- I'd love to see a 3D sculpting tool which uses this to show the 3D object to me in real space --- it'd be great for furniture design.

I think 'killer app' is missing the point.

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.

But that's silly, it can do all that and also have a killer app.

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.

The 3D FaceTime with eye contact could end up being the killer app.

With creepy rendered avatars? No thanks.

Are they creepy though? The linked article didn't think so.

I suspect that, like self driving, that last 10%, 1%, 0.1% will be both functionally essential and exponentially difficult.

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.

Looking at the WWDC video, for me it looks like it's gone through uncanny valley and reached the final climb towards realism, but it's still not quite right.

I've noticed different people have the valley in different places, so I'm not at all surprised if it creeps some people out.

The linked article is effectively an advertisement

Sounds like a mental illness and behavioural illness generation device

I don’t want to 3D FaceTime someone with $3,500 to blow on a 3D FaceTime machine.

What’s the killer app for Apple Watch?

the wrist vibration alarm that won't wake up your spouse (unlike a phone alarm or alarm clock)

Notifications and health tracking

Reading and responding to a text without using your phone.

That comparison comes with the form factor though -- it's a headset. It's not something you can wear and mostly forget about. It needs a purpose to make me want to wear it, otherwise it's just an iPad without the nice tactile association.

> everyone else seems to missing the point and comparing this to traditional headsets.

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.

I own a pair of NReal. They'd need to do serious improvements in reducing jitter and improving AR tracking. Now I like their glasses form factor better, but I doubt they'll be able to match Apples polish. Even if it's just due to not being able to purchase ARM chips as powerful as Apple's.

I don't see myself wearing that huge thing on your face if not for a brief moment and a killer app. Much less for 3500 (+ TAX!!!!) dollars.

> Much less for 3500 (+ TAX!!!!) dollars.

You overestimate the purchasing power of 3500 these days.

Paradigmatically that's of little to no value to anyone beyond an amusement.

It's Project Looking Glass 2.0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass

I suppose Project Looking Glass was more of a demo of Java. Maybe because Java on the desktop had a bad name? Such DEs and WMs already existed (3DWM, for example), and Compiz was also taking off back then.

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.

> Also, once its a commodity, Apple seems to shy away

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.

It could have a million screens, if there’s nothing good on the screens what’s the point?

Most of what I do with computers is reading browser windows.

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…

What if just not instructions, but instructions from the perspective of your eyes? Imagine an interactive instruction that guides you step by step according to your progress

Imagine putting a floating PDF in the air next to the pile of parts and you get 90% of the experience for 10% of the dev effort. That's what Apple is clearly focused on. Making your regular computer use functional while wearing techno googly eyes. That's Apple's killer app. AR is not going to get a lot of those experience investments because it makes no monetary sense. It's a massive money and time sink for a very fickle audience. Disney announced exactly what you're asking for, but it's crystal clear that we'll get something like four things a year. Maybe next season of Captain America gets a cool interactive border when looking at it. You can put Disney World on your kitchen table.

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.

How do I find the right PDF? What if it’s big? What if it has two pages on each page and it’s kind of hard to read? What if the PDF is high res and causes the interface to choke out?

Welcome to spatial computing: it has the same problems we’ve always had, but now you’re wearing the computer on your face.

I don’t think it’s about having a screen everywhere though: I would be uncomfortable going out in public with it, for fear of being mugged for it.

This happened early in the life of the iPad. Insurance companies wouldn’t include it in personal articles since there was high theft rate. That subsided over time due to ubiquity and software security.

>This is about having a screen anywhere, multiple screens and turning anything into a screen and any environment into one

Which is what traditional VR and AR devices offer. Being able to use apps in VR or AR isn't new.

Exactly. The Quest 2 has offered this for years and cost $300 at launch.

Theoretically yes, you can have large multiple screens on the quest 2

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

No, you’re still just displaying traditional apps on a headset. They just look better. You still have a big dumb headset on.

I dont care about about wearing a big headset.

I just want to display fake screen, in HD, everywhere in my environment.

The quest does not have high enough resolution for this.

Not really. The passthrough and resolution is not quite good enough on the quest 2 or the pro for it.

To me, it wasn't that I could use Safari that was killer app, but the fact I can use it as a monitor that impresses me. I don't think most VR setups allow you to read text as easily as on a monitor and that is what Apple is claiming. (First impressions seem to support). The second part is not requiring a controller. If I can control this with my eyes, hand and voice. That means I can use a keyboard with it. I assume they'll have some virtual version too. With those two things, a whole lot more use cases open up around it. I don't plan on getting one right away or anything, but an actual usable computer is far more interesting than something that plays games, moves some models around in space and does video conferencing with avatars.

It doesn’t run any desktop apps yet though, only Safari and Photos and a few content apps. They also demoed mirroring only a single Mac display. I think people are overlooking this and expecting to get multi monitor displays for heavy workload apps like on the Meta Quest Pro, but Apple are committed as always to making this a standalone system.

It's not going to be successful unless Apple get this right. I expect a lot of people here spend a lot of their time looking at text in various development environments. with a smaller number working on content creation.

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.

I agree, and I’m pretty worried that really is all that’s being offered on day one.

Correct, it is pointless.

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.

What's strange to me is that they roll out Hideo Kojima to talk about some gaming thing for the Mac OS, yet when it came to the headset all they can give is some creepy demos of a fathers wearing this thing while their kinds play at home.

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.

Except, video game developers have had like ten years to figure out a VR "killer app" game. Even Valve failed. VR just isn't a significant enough increase in experience for the vast vast VAST majority of games to justify the annoyance of having a mask on, let alone the price. If you are super into simulators, then you have some incredible options, but otherwise it's just a bunch of beat saber clones and mediocre shooters.

VR is a peripheral, not a console. Very few people would choose a VR Magic game over Magic the gathering arena.

It’s not that they can’t figure it out I think, it’s that it’s too hard and too limited of a market to justify the expense to build anything cool.

Given enough time and adoption I believe it will happen

Exactly! Even just a small Kojima game exclusive to the Vision Pro would've been interesting.

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.

How many headsets did Valve sell with Half Life Alyx?

103,000

> I don't understand why there is no AR or VR killer app for this thing.

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.

Because it requires greater integration. For VR the whole environment has to participate. At least if we’re talking about VR glasses that you can wear outside, every store, road, building block and what not should provide information. Who would create all that info, and for what purpose. Adoption is non-existent. There is no platform to submit your data. All we have is the interface. If you’re to wear them only inside then all you can do is the things you already do with a slightly modified UI. Which defies the purpose. I don’t want a virtual keyboard because I get no feedback from it. Virtual screens might be good if I’m in a hotel room, but then again I’ll have my laptop which has better interface. Text reading is an interesting use case but what happens with eye strain if you look at those screens for prolonged time periods. And by the way, what happens if you're wearing eyeglasses? Will they fit?

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.

I am also not too optimistic about vision pro’s success, but regarding your glasses question: you would order specific lenses for it. They may even do that inside app stores from what I’ve seen in the video? Hopefully it won’t add an extra charge as lenses are expensive.

You can draw users with a killer app but you can also draw developers with a killer user base. I believe they're leaning on iPhone/iPad app compatibility and Mac screen display to launch it as a peripheral first with existing third party apps, then establish it as a place your customers are waiting for you.

Early adopters first, of course. Maybe it really is too early? Depends on the response.

When they seriously started designing this thing 2+ years ago they probably assumed Facebook's metaverse play would be a smashing success and get VR (and apps like its horizon metaverse) into the mainstream.

Oops.

I bet it took them much more time to make it. Don’t think metaverse had anything to do with it.

Yeah it's why I said seriously started--I'm sure this idea was floating around and the tech worked on for a decade or more, but only in the last couple years did they decide it was viable to make a consumer product. I'm sure Facebook ramping up and betting big on metaverse helped Apple decide to keep going on shipping it.

Ironically we had floating web browsers 16 years ago already (and there have been AR versions over the years as well): https://techcrunch.com/2007/06/05/spacetime-3d-browser-eye-c...

At this point, floating pages and waypoints are the "Hello World" of AR platforms.

Two large screens in a hotel room - so sold (plus on a plane, if that's not socially annoying)

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's 4k per eye. That's great compared to current headsets, but please remember that the screen of your normal screen likely already has 4k, and that's just a rectangle a few cm of everything you see. The 4k per eye means that it's likely going to be <fullhd depending on just how gigantic you want to make the screens

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.

Personally I'd make the monitors the same size as real monitors. So... yeah maybe they'd be HD if they took up 2/3rds of peripheral vision, which would match my current monitors. But you could also have more of them, and handwave them away when you want the table back

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

To be clear, it'd be below 720p if you're making them at the same size as an 27" display at the regular distance.

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

Safari was the killer app for the iPhone and iPad & it’s where people spend an awful lot of their time.

This is a general purpose computing device, so seeing it have a great browser setup is a big deal.

Is it "general purpose", though? So far I've seen no mentions on how I or other developers can run our own stuff on it. Will it be a walled garden?

General purpose like a laptop or a phone.

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.

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!

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.

Boring like the iPhone? Sounds awful.

Why not try to understand what I'm saying, instead of being so obnoxiously dismissive?

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.

I do understand what you are saying, I just don’t agree.

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.

SDK coming later this month https://developer.apple.com/visionos/

Apple is IMO attempting to brute-force create a market here. Facebook/Meta couldn't do the job - for one, Zuck has no idea what he's doing other than chasing buzzwords, for other, they have destroyed a lot of user trust over the past years. And I'm not sure if the stock could take more billions sunk.

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...

Yeah I can't wait to spend €11000 so my family can strap a screen to each of our faces and watch movies like that rather than staring at a dumb old TV like some kinda poor people

Probably, in person, for the foreseeable future you'll just watch a movie IRL when people are in the same room, and that's fine and I like that.

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.

Have you tried Bigscreen VR? State of the art to watch a movie together in VR

That would require a bunch of my friends to have VR as well, while only one of them has it, because I gifted him my old Vive setup.

I don't even think he installed it.

I mean I feel like this non-ironically. My wife is badgering me to order us both one as soon as possible

Movie addicts have $10k 8k 100 inch TVs and thousand dollar Dolby Atmos surround systems.

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 have a great home theater that I love to use. But there are lots of times when it'd be nice to have a similar experience while in bed or traveling.

There's no killer app specific to this headset because this is just a supercomplicated me-too product, and also because there is no point in half baking a potential killer.

But it's okay, I think. It has the browser, Unity integration, okay visual passthrough, etc. Ticks all boxes.

Does it need one at launch? The Apple Watch wasn't specifically a health-tracker at launch, but that's what they've really leaned into now. When they launched the iPhone, one of the most vaunted features was "Visual Voicemail", which I'm not even sure still exists?

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.

The killer app is replacing my giant monitor with this device.

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.

None of the Apple apps they showed for the VisionPro had any substantial photogrammetry mapping. They didn’t paste virtual TVs to the walls, or place furniture into an empty room. All the Apple apps were contained to virtual floating screens, even the keyboard (instead of placing in on a surface).

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.

I worked for a digital creative agency that partnered with a few AR/VR companies including the big ones creating demos and POCs for conferences or events. We spent so much time brainstorming and testing with some really bright people and never really came up with more than diverting bits of motion art. We made one pretty decent mini game. Nothing substantive.

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.

What killer app did laptops have that made them the success they are today? Does new technology necessarily need a killer app if the ergonomics end up being more desirable to a broad range of users?

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.

The iphone was full of killer apps at release.

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)

(For what it's worth, iMessage didn't come until 4 years later in iOS 4)

The built in apps of the iphone were more of a technology demonstration than anything else. They few that existed were also kind of useless because the iphone didn't have mobile data other than glacial slow GSM until the iphone 3G.

This new headset also looks like a technology demonstration. That doesn't mean it will become the next iphone, but it certainly has potential.

iPhone severely depended on how shitty US networks were in general, and honestly if MS didn't bumble things with WP7 I'm not sure it would get that popular that fast.

> What killer app did laptops have that made them the success they are today?

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.

Arguably word processing combined with some method to transfer files (especially modems) was first, with spreadsheets coming second. But yes, 1990s the laptop was business executive tool and status symbol.

The killer app of laptops is portability. That killer app was so damn powerful it worked even when laptops were called "luggables" because they were fifty pounds and you couldn't use them without a power outlet.

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!

Spreadsheets and word processors.

Not when the first laptop came out. Imagine lugging around a heavy piece of computer, with crammed keyboard and not so nice monitor. Why should one be subjected to such a subpar experience?

By the time laptop form factor became somewhat common, yes, it was spreadsheets, word processing, and a communication suite (mail, file transfer, etc).

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.

I had a Toshiba T1x00 in my house (probably a T1000) and I can confirm it was able to do Lotus 1-2-3 and WordStar. Games were strange on the wide screen, and its other killer app was as a serial terminal.

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.

That's a good point.

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.

Laptops had killer apps in word processing and spreadsheets and various early email systems, bringing them clients other than field engineering and military.

These applications already existed for desktops, this was not something unique to the laptop form factor.

But laptop made it possible for the executive, reporter, etc. to work on the go much better than with previous (luggables) or not at all, and the ensuing combination was the killer app.

Laptops' killer apps are arguably Word, web browsers, and Photoshop.

An MR 3d sculpting app like Maya or ZBrush would be pretty sweet. Not sure it's as killer as Photoshop but id be excited none the less.

I think this will be one of those “iPod, less storage than a Nomad, lame” comments in a few years, but I guess we'll see.

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.

Shopping.

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.

This is laughable. Walmart literally has a demo of an "AR experience" shopping experience and it is absurdism, on the same level as that pepsi logo design document.

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.

Just give me lightsaber battles and I'm sold.

It doesn't work, because you can't constrain the user's hand to match what's happening in the game, meaning it completely removes any immersion benefit you get from VR in the first place.

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.

Even if they somehow nail the hand input, without controllers for haptics, I'm a bit disappointed.

literally the only thing I use my Quest 2 for is Beat Saber

What lessons have we learned from the killer apps for smart phones? The killer app has to be addictive to children.

Isn't the actual killer app for Advertisers? "Glue this thing to peoples faces and you now have the most effective most intrusive way to slam ads in front of people ever created!" Don't see why any consumer would buy this for 3500 though.

The killer app will be porn and/or virtually undressing the people around you.

You should try VR porn. Like actually try it. I have heard it loses it's gimmick really fast. It's extremely limited because the camera rig required for video content is restrictive, and the only ones who can afford it are really boring studios, and it's not actually "VR", but merely "3D with a large field of view", which turns out to not be that great, and the "games" that let you interact are often cash grabs, and plenty more often just store bought 3D assets with extremely mediocre animation.

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.

With $3500 you can go on an epic drug fueled sex party with high quality real live escorts that will make your mates jealous and will be an experience you remember for life.

Spending $3500 just to wank at VR videos is crazy.

Yeah but that involves going out, talking to people, and actually having a witness to your own desires.

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.

At some point the signals going to your brain won't be too different. VR + AI experiences have way more potential, and will greatly accelerate the trend of people mapping out their limbic systems.

>At some point the signals going to your brain won't be too different

Tell me you've never had sex. Sex and VR porn no matter how realistic are words apart.

At some point your brain will be able to be tricked enough for you not to care about the difference.

That won't be vr tech. That's more neuralink/mind-machine interface sort of thing.

How? Maybe when we plug our brains directly into the matrix through a neural interface for direct electrical simulation but that's SciFi for now. We're still at the step of VR headsets.

Of course there will be variation in what people will accept. For many, near enough is good enough (I was surprised to hear that people had AI partners.)

You sound like those people who want AI to mimic human behavior, yet there are so many more interesting applications outside of that constraint.

Okay

The hidden cost of a lifetime of STDs may be what this math is missing.

Condoms are cheap

Statistics

The game console industry shows that even having a killer app isn't enough to avoid selling hardware at a loss and making it up with ecosystem rent.

This has no killer app and is being sold at full price.

I am also waiting to see what the killer app is.

I think it may be positioned more for professional use and then, "oh yeah, you can have a great movie and game experience, too."

If I had to live in a VR context for any reason, this really feels like the product I’d want to have to do it in. But I can’t think of a reason why I’d have to.

If you look more closely at the keynote such AR apps are demoed; a factory process visualisation, and a human heart, if I recall correctly.

Certainly without the device, there’s never going to be a killer app for the device. It’s the first step, it’s not even in stores yet.

Well, yes. This is the early adoption device they expect to bootstrap their app store with all the niche things you described.

> Are they just hoping someone comes up with all the above in the next 6 months?

Yes.

> If they did, would anyone care?

Also yes.

You can't see the killer app for the nurturing ecosystem.

What nurturing ecosystem? We've had ten years or so to find an actual use case that every average person is willing to spend hundreds of dollars on, and we have come up empty handed. There's nothing magical or so new in this headset. The people who have an actual use for VR, simulation game turbo nerds, have been mostly satisfied, nobody else cares about VR. Most people who try the "floating web browser and custom theater and infinite monitors" experience quickly realize how unergonomic it is. VR is still an experience that one in ten cannot adjust to.

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?

actually what about immersive 3d experince design ? imagine being a game developer and having this in debth experince with your game visuals.

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 ...

You don’t make money targeting those without money to spend.

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.

That kinda misses the question. It might very well be the best in class headset (at that price it kinda needs to be). The question was: okay, the hardware is great, but what is need-to-have app?

Other headsets highlighted gaming, metaverse, industrial/medical applications,....

Car prices like Tesla are a no brainer because the market was already here.

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

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