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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

The power in the headset makes it sound like it replaces your laptop.

So for $3,500 I get a new laptop plus a 100 inch screen. To buy those separately would be far more than $3,500.

In my case I plan to buy it on day one because I want it for working. I'm tired of having to choose enjoying the nice weather outside while using a tiny 15 inch laptop screen or being inside at my desk with my 3 32" screens.

With Apple Vision, I can have my 3 32" screen outside. Or on the road. Or in the office when I drop in for a day. Or anywhere else I may go. It will be a huge boost in productivity and definitely worth the price.

That is the killer feature for me -- portability of my most productive setup.

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I kinda doubt it would be comfortable to wear it for 8+ hours...

I can't use Quest 2 for more than 30 minutes at a time: sweating, eye strain, etc.

This is v1, I think it’d be a safe bet that those things won’t be an issue in v10. Have to start somewhere, and this is one heck of a start.

We've been working on fixing those issues since 1985. In the past decade we've gone from 20% of people getting nauseous wearing hmds to 17% of people getting nauseous.

Is it just because it's an iProduct that it will magically not have the same problems?

There would be private units within Apple testing this headset for hours and days. And now that it's announced, this testing will be broadened to the more public areas of their facilities.

They're gunning directly for work/productivity use, because of or despite what they've learned about how people feel using it. Either thinking people will use it for a couple of hours with occasional breaks (lunch, etc) or the nausea and so on are less of an issue.

This is a massive investment/bet, so presumably they know what they're doing.

Does it replace the laptop, or supplement it? From what I've seen it can project one monitor from your existing MacBook into the space.

Which means you'll also have to lug your MacBook around in order to use it on the go, and you won't be able to have your 3 monitors, just the one.

It better do more than project monitors. I’ll use it if the whole space around me is one big monitor for overlapping app windows. I want to throw my open apps in a pile to my right, shuffle through them to find what I need, push them all to the side to work on something else, and probably do the virtual equivalent of those meme conspiracy pins-and-string research boards.

From the keynote it looks like you can do that with iOS-style apps, but the Mac screen is treated as just one "app" for the spatial window manager.

Can confirm. I watched some of their developer videos for how to design apps, and it showed multiple safari windows side by side (though never more than two, equidistant from each other - no actual indication yet that we can overlap them). And it looks like we can push them farther away - though that will resize the apps, not just make them smaller.

Could actually be exactly what I've been hoping for since the first real VR stuff came out 10 years ago.

The devil is in the details. If you can only mirror your laptop screen, it's not that useful, unless you can run Vision native apps next to it. Then I only have to mirror my laptop for laptop only stuff and can run things like Safari and Notes and Mail all the other stuff separately.

If I can set up vision as a 100 inch 8K external monitor, then that becomes much more interesting, because with that much screen real estate I don't need multiple monitors.

I guess we'll have to see.

They showed in the demos mixing your desktop screen with native visionOS apps so I'm pretty sure this will be possible. It will be really cool if Apple allows a "Coherence"-type mode (a la Parallels) to pull macOS windows themselves into your space and not just a 2D pane that mirrors your desktop. Even if I can only create some virtual monitors in 3D I'm sold. I'm writing this on a MacBook running 3 external monitors right now and I bought a duplicate setup for my parents house when I had to stay there for about a month for some medical treatments for my dog (closest place that did the procedure) because I didn't want to lose my productivity (also wanted to make it easier to visit them regularly without worrying about work productivity). Being able to just grab my laptop and my Vision Pro would be amazing and would open up travel to way more places.

It has the M2. Apple says it works with select iPad apps in addition to its own App Store down the line. Apple just recently made FCP & Logic available on the iPad. I think the direction is clear.

iPad apps are intentionally useless for dev work, so a Vision platform that is similarly locked down can never replace a MacBook for my use case.

So... the killer app is "it has the M2?"

I'm not sure that's the consumer magnet you might think it is.

Even if multiple virtual monitors isn't supported today, it's the sort of thing which could be entirely solvable in software.

From the way it's described, realityOS seems more equivalent to an iPad Pro than a MacBook. Many people don't need anything more than a powerful iPad in order to be productive. So the built-in computer would be sufficient on its own. (Or at the very least, sufficient for many secondary screen tasks such as email, calls, notifications, monitoring, etc.)

I think you get two 1.5" screens with half the resolution of my 34" monitor.

If your 3 32 inch screens are running collectively at 2.1k bits, they must be pretty old. Why not just keep them? They're fully depreciated.

And it runs an entirely new OS, so I have to buy apps for it again. Or cope with VisionSafari being slightly different than desktop safari and wait for Adobe to support it.

When I want to go outside, I just take my laptop outside. It's much easier to see in the full light. Plus, I can change the distance of things I focus on, which is supposedly good for vision.

But I was asking about the "killer app." What can you do with this thing that you can't do with a laptop, phone or desktop computer?

> What can you do with this thing that you can't do with a laptop, phone or desktop computer?

Be fully productive no matter where I go. Have the same screen setup no matter where I go, so my muscle memory applies no matter where I am.

Have a multi-screen workspace at the office, in the study, on the couch, outside, in a hotel, on the plane. Without having to cart a laptop and two extra displays everywhere.

I'd like to see a tag on every Vision Pro commenter noting whether they typically use multiple displays or not. Might help understand from where they're approaching the discussion.

If Apple can bend the OS to cover more and more of the average work needs, they'll make in-roads fast.

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