Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gareth321 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com