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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

> There’s a strong echo here of mobile 20 years ago. From the late 1990s to 2007, we had mobile internet devices that were OK but not great, and slowly improving, we knew they would eventually be much better, and we thought ‘mobile internet’ would be big - but we didn’t know that smartphones would replace PCs as the centre of tech, and connect five billion people. Then the iPhone came, and the timeline broke.

While I think the statement here is generally accurate, the analogy feels so off the mark here to be downright misleading.

The pre-iPhone cellphone and "mobile internet device" era was totally different than the current VR/AR era. Most importantly, people actually used their devices all the time, they just wanted them to be better. There was a reason they called them "Crackberries" - Blackberry fans were on them 24/7, and they got tons of utility from them. There was none of this "If we build it, I hope they'll come" feeling of the current VR/AR era.

Honestly, it saddens me to think that technology used to be about solving problems for humanity and has morphed into more of this "What substances can we sell to the masses that are sufficiently addictive to make our stock price go up?"

I fully understand how much Meta, Apple and others "want to make fetch happen". Many of us are simply just not interested.

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> I fully understand how much Meta, Apple and others "want to make fetch happen". Many of us are simply just not interested.

That thing that gets me is just how weak the scenarios were in their promotional videos.

After building this device, the best that they could offer as benefits were viewing 3D photographs of your children, looking at multiple screens around you, or watching a single large screen for a movie or photo-browsing. (I mean, they showed somebody browsing the web. Why even dedicate time your video to show that?)

It feels like they're either out of ideas or really playing it safe. I'm guessing they do want to make "fetch" happen but don't really know how and are just going to bet on third party devs creating some killer app they haven't thought of. They've certainly got the time and money to work it out over the next few years.

Exactly. I was watching carefully for some new capability, something that couldn't be done before. But I didn't see anything, except maybe "watch movies on a plane without looking down at your tablet/phone". Maybe I'm weird, but if I were so sensitive to bad experiences that I couldn't just watch a movie on a tablet, I wouldn't be on a plane in the first place.

The only "new capability" for VR headsets seem to be ... VR games. But Apple very much doesn't want to advertise the headset as a game console, even though VR games are obviously a type of app it can run, just with hand gesture controls instead of dedicated VR controllers.

I'm guessing Apple is hoping that the apps will be the killer thing. They claim to have not expected the app store to be so successful, so maybe they're hoping they don't need to create the killer app that someone else will. That's why they are introducing the dev tools for it so much sooner than it being available. They are banking on killer apps being announced before launch

I remember a news article about the Apple headset a few weeks before it was officially revealed. It cited anonymous Apple employees being pessimistic about the prospects of the new headset, and one of them was actually quoted as saying that perhaps the apps will save it.

This sounds indeed like Apple doesn't know what it might be good for, while hoping app developers will find some novel use case.

Otherwise it will not be much more than an AR window manger.

In any given group of people something like this will appeal to some and not to others. From the limited about of information that leaked out, it is pretty clear that most people in Apple didn’t really know much about the device and only had rumors. It’s likely that only a few had ever tried to use one.

this is a new general purpose computing device, so most of the regular things you might do with a laptop would be doable here. Of course the difference here is that you have an immersive view and a nearly unlimited screen to work with and one where you can seamlessly blend the virtual and physical world. I think that is going to be transformative for the existing applications and will open up a space for other activities that we haven’t seen yet.

Apparently the eye-tracking is 'like telepathy', according to MKBHD. I feel like if Apple fleshes out GameKit and integrates Vision Pro as a more general input device then that alone could be a killer feature. Imagine having telepathy in League or Minecraft.

I want to live in a future where focus-follows-gaze is the default.

Revolutionary speed-chess technology...

If it's as good as sold I actually do wonder how chess websites will deal with it. Faster input technology has been a problem before: https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/35358/why-is-liche...

I think it's simply a matter of the media not being there yet. You could envision movies made specifically for experiencing through these devices that would be utterly enthralling to take in, but it won't be for another half decade at least.

Otherwise, I think Apple's focus on "spatiality" is what is key.

I think Apple has played it incredibly safe with their announcement, and I did not get excited by the way they presented potential use cases for the device, as they didn’t venture much further than “what if you could have a screen, but then bigger and anywhere in your surroundings?”

But what they did get right was the hardware and operating system itself and the fact that it needs to be boring and “just work”.

As a young 3d artist and software engineer I just desperately want it, and want to develop for it. I want to walk around in my 3d creations and want to let other people experience what I can envision in my head.

While I don’t see it being as big of a leap as the desktop computer, internet or smartphone in terms of _productivity_, I do think enabling creativity is the “killer” app.

Imagine building and playing with an unlimited world like Minecraft or with LEGO bricks, right in your living room :)

Personally I’m building an app that allows me to put my 3D art from Blender into AR on the Meta Quest Pro [0], and it’s so much fun to do. It gives me a childlike joy to walk through my own creations and share them with others.

Anyway, I got a bit carried away, but I feel like HN is quite pessimistic about AR and VR, and want to give some positive counter views.

[0] https://youtu.be/cbIDRB1u04s

What's frustrating is that Meta was so close to "getting it" - games where you get to be in the creative driver's seat are underrepresented right now. The Metaverse should be the place you can experience that childlike wonder you mentioned - decorate your place, visit your friends, set up your own escape room, show off the 3d art you made with tiltbrush. 3d myspace. During the pandemic I bought a quest, learned blender & unity, and built a little retro arcade with skeeball and a few other games. It was so much fun.

I'm disappointed that Apple is focused so much on office productivity AR, I'd rather be transported somewhere else in space and time with VR - not marginally more productive at work. But still crossing fingers that this is the start of something.

The metaverse problem is that there are a million different metaverse. Creating a stable spatial OS that other experiences can exist inside of creates a broader-spanning ur-system that might possibly grow. Where-as most metaverses aspire to be a beginning & end. Creating open ended technical ecosystems is a challenge.

I think Apple’s release of their headset was conservative by design. They saw what an ambitious vision for spatial computing did to Meta, and I don’t think they were keen on repeating such a launch. Both in price point and functionality, the Vision Pro seems to be very clearly targeted for developer use. Apple knows that very few consumers will pay $3,500 for this thing, and that’s the point. I don’t think that they actually plan on selling very many of these headsets until they have a few more years to shave off battery weight and innovate on the OS. They’re offloading a lot of the software R&D risk to developers, and I think they’ll be watching with lots of anticipation what people like you build and how they should position their Vision 2 accordingly. Remember, one of Apple’s primary market cap drivers has been their growing focus on services. App Store and other distribution gatekeeping is a money printer that they’ll want to capitalize on from the get-go for this next platform. And I think that’s why this boring headset is Apple saying to developers, “Here are the keys and do with it whatever you en-Vision (haha) so we can give you a subsequent version that lets you take your apps to mass market.”

Another look at it: Apple has a successful mobile and a full computing platform already on the market and has only limited ROI in VR wildly succeeding. At best it replaces their existing platform. In comparison, Meta or HTC have a lot more to gain.

While paying lip service to "Spacial computing" their product name is "Vision", so the core of it arguably the display part and they'll be pushing it as viewing device more than anything (I like TheVerge's "Apple made a TV" headline). And VR staying a minor platform only used as a display will be totally fine by them, they'll just keep selling computers on the side.

PS: For comparison, this was the pitch for Hololens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqFqtAJMtYE

A more grounded pitch for Hololens 2: https://youtu.be/d3YT8j0yYl0

> people actually used their devices all the time,

No, not really. Like Steve Jobs said, smartphones weren't very "smart". Most people did not have blackberries (those that did have Blackberries, were mostly business users). The rest of us that were technically savvy were playing some crappy java games(the ones allowed by mobile carrier stores), and browsing the web with WAP browsers in our flip phones. Most people were not even doing any of that. And why would they? The experience was terrible.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone...

Using the same metric, people already use VR headsets, and just "want them to be better". Sure, the marketshare is a fraction of phone marketshare(https://www.statista.com/statistics/677096/vr-headsets-world...). But we can argue that most headsets are tethered to high end PCs, Meta's version is one of the few decent standalone versions.

Apple's device has lots of potential. It's all about the execution now, and subsequent devices.

How many people do you know that had pre-iPhone smart phones, bought them and used them for a couple months, and then "abandoned" them on the shelf, a common phenomenon with current VR/AR gear as mentioned in the article.

In my experience, practically nobody. I agree that the Vision Pro is a technological marvel, but it's still a solution looking for a problem, and it's striking to me how even Apple had a difficult time presenting actually compelling use cases in their videos.

To be clear, I think there are some viable uses: gaming obviously, and potentially media consumption, but even there this solution is so much worse than a home theater system (as another commenter mentioned, I can get a group of people together in my house to all watch a movie on a big screen TV that costs much less than the headset that each of my friends would also have to own).

> How many people do you know that had pre-iPhone smart phones, bought them and used them for a couple months, and then "abandoned" them on the shelf, a common phenomenon with current VR/AR gear as mentioned in the article.

The difference, IMHO, is that those with pre-iPhone smart phones were largely business users who didn't have a choice. Not that there weren't exceptions - I'm sure many had personal smart phones - but I vividly remember (in both Europe and the US) conversations with friends where the idea of paying for a data plan was considered the height of absurdity and would never happen for personal use.

Those phones weren't abandoned. They just didn't get much use for anything beyond calls, text and sometimes the camera.

I don't know what was going on in the USA, but in the Europe people were using pre-ios/droid smartphones massively (and we basically didn't have any Blackberries due to region limitations). There were a ton of the WinMob PDAs, there were years of advanced HTC communicators which started expensive but dropped to a very cheap levels fast. At some point almost every taxi driver had been using one (it was easy to observe because drivers were using phones for nav in the cradles). The demand was super high. People were comparing generations of those early smartphones for example about GPS lock speed, because it was an age when receivers were rapidly improving and every gen shaved of minutes of lock time. And before WinMob era there were advanced Simbian 60 (iirc) devices, middle and high-end Nokia, Siemens, Motorola phones, with apps. Half of my class in school and uni were using phones with all support for texting, reading books, music and games.

Retconning phone history as if there was nothing between flip phones and first iPhone, or that transition time was short is dishonest.

If you look at the chart in the essay, you'll see that though there were lots of what I called 'proto-smartphones' before the iPhone, and enthusiasts (like me!) loved them, the actual user base was tiny. SMS was huge, MMS was a rounding error and very few people were doing anything else. I was a mobile analyst - I even went to the actual S60 launch event where the Nokia 7650 was announced - and then worked at a telco, and I wrote some more about this a few years ago. https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/2/19/mobile-sma...

(Also, Blackberry was big for UK teenaged girls due to free BBM)

> Most importantly, people actually used their devices all the time, they just wanted them to be better. There was a reason they called them "Crackberries" - Blackberry fans were on them 24/7, and they got tons of utility from them.

There are some enthusiastic people who use HMD (like Quest Pro) over 10 hours everyday for virtual display. Though currently the number of people is far less than Blackberry era.

There is also a difference in kind. "Crackberry" types were businesspeople, executives, politicians. People high in social hierarchies with a lot of sway. The people who use VR to that degree are, and I mean this as affectionately as possible, very unusual.

That's probably a big reason Apple has ignored the current VR market segment.

Difficulty of demonstrate is also a pain. It's easy to demonstrate to friends or mom that BB is useful, but demonstrate any HMD usage/functionality is one of the most hardest thing ever. What most people can do best is just send WWDC video.

There's truth to this.my best friend was bugging me to try his Quest 2 for probably a year before I relented and tried it on and understood.

Crackberries were for people who always needed to be connected. There was no TikTok for BlackBerry, people barely used them for talking to their friends. The modern iPhone barely has anything in common with them

> people barely used them for talking to their friends

In the UK Blackberry and BBM remained very popular for a long time.

That Blackberry was additively used for email (even in a business setting) implies a lot of use for friends. The crackberry addicts were emailing their friends, who were likely also work colleagues, fellow execs, etc.

There's a viral quality to emails from BlackBerry devices as well. Didn't they add "Sent from my BlackBerry" to the end of emails by default? And then Apple famously added "Sent from my iPhone" by default to emails from iPhones.

Yes, that "Sent from my Blackberry" was the default, AFAIK. A very obvious signal that you're a smart important person with a Blackberry.

That's when the "Please excuse the typos, sent from my mobile device" became popular too.

I Canada at least and I think in usa too there was a period where blackberries were way cooler among teenagers than iPhone are today. In age where each sms used to cost money, blackberry messenger was uber cool.

Yeah but today's view of businessmen and executives is less charitable.

While I tend to agree with you, I think one of the reasons why VR devices today are not selling like hot cakes is because they're mostly (wholly?) targeting gaming, for all practical reasons.

Ignoring price for a moment (remember that early Apple computers cost $11,000 in today's money), Vision Pro is positioned for general computing, including games, and has a vibrant App Store so there's actually something to do.

Current VR headsets simply haven't been good enough for anything other than games and porn. Text is too difficult and painful to read for any extended period, which is an absolute minimum barrier to entry for almost any other computing task. I honestly believe Apple have solved this problem. Yes it's expensive, but I don't get any real indication they are lying about text being legible and comfortable for extended periods of time, which is a game changer IMO.

Even if they have solved the resolution and image quality and physical comfort, having a bright OLED inches from your eyes induces more eye fatigue than looking at a monitor.

All you can do to alleviate it is close your eyes. You can't rest them by gazing out the window, across the room. Things you do naturally without realizing, that give your eyes a break.

In my experience this is as much an issue as headset physical comfort. In fact it's the one aspect that prevents me wearing a headset beyond a couple of hours.

(Plus it is a real pain to drink coffee, have a snack, open the mail; all the little side tasks we tend to do at desks)

> You can't rest them by gazing out the window

Please tell me we'll have a virtual window app for the VP that will simulate looking out a window. Anywhere. And it'll be touted as a way to rest your eyes without removing the VP.

The headset is not varifocal so an app like that can't be made.

Is there any headset with a long focal distance? Even dumb glasses that simulate looking outside would be really useful in some work environments.

Yes there are headsets that place it at infinity

"""having a bright OLED inches from your eyes induces more eye fatigue than looking at a monitor"""

That's quite a claim that I've seen no evidence for in the years I've been using and following this industry.

Actually the light hitting your eyes is much dimmer that you are regularly exposed to all the time so...

This is only my personal experience, but I agree with you, even with an optimal setup I still require ~5-10 minutes of breaks every couple hours when staring at my monitor.

With VR I could easily do (when I had the time) a full day (~12 hours), with only a single 15 minute food/washroom break in the middle and no signs of discomfort at all.

> a full day (~12 hours), with only a single 15 minute food/washroom break in the middle and no signs of discomfort at all.

Wait until folks catch on that by being aware of your environment, using the washroom doesn’t require leaving AR.

I'm more interested in how it affects your eye focus. With regular VR it's hard to focus your eyes right when bringing objects closer to you. It takes some getting used to.

Since you are working within a 3D space, there should be areas where you can shift your gaze that would be the equivalent of that window and are not full brightness.

As to having a drink or snack or other activities, the crown control lets you dial in more or less of the real world around you and let you choose the degree of blending.

> there's actually something to do

What do you imagine people doing that isn't done about as well on some other Apple device? I can sort of get the gaming use case; I think it's wildly oversold, but it's legitimately different. But even Apple's launch video doesn't suggest that general computing will be notably improved here.

In a word: immersion.

Just to be clear, that's not doing something different.

Also, I'm skeptical that immersion matters all that much. People manage to get quite immersed in their phones, after all.

There’s not much to argue here, but thanks for making your guesses heard! I like mine, lol. Only time will tell how much people value “feeling like you’re there” while chatting with the grandparents, watching a movie, or, yes, browsing the internet. Although as this great article points out, the vision pro is mostly AR so it’s more about “feeling like that is herel”

As attested by people who have had the Vision Pro demo at WWDC, afterwards, looking at the screen on a laptop feels very limiting and artificial. Your engagement is quite different when you are fully surrounded by an environment and can interact with it fluidly vs the separation of a small, rigidly bound rectangle.

3D is known for its strong novelty effect. At least 5 times people have declared that it will change everything: the Brewster Stereoscope, the DOD purchasing 100k Viewmasters in the 40s, the 1950s wave of 3D movies, the 90s wave of VR, and the Avatar-era wave of 3D movies and TV. As you may have noticed, none of those things are more than a rounding error in the market. And that's before we get to exciting failures like Magic Leap, which people were similarly excited about.

And I'll again point you to phones. Despite tablets, laptops, and ever-larger TVs, people spend an awful lot of time on those small, rigidly bound rectangles.

I don't need immersion when looking at a website.

The actual potential "killer app" is something like a holodeck: a movie that it puts you inside of so there isn't any screen at all.

The problem is that the only part of their $3500 device that is better for this than an oculus quest is the screen resolution. All of that other stuff makes operating menus and AR aspects better, things that are useful for tasks you can already do on a device 1/4 the price.

I agree with you on websites. But I'm skeptical of this:

> The actual potential "killer app" is something like a holodeck: a movie that it puts you inside of so there isn't any screen at all.

We'll see how this turns out, as Hollywood is doing a lot of VR experimentation. But most modern movies will not translate at all to VR, because they control attention and aesthetic experience very precisely, all based on the constraint of the viewing frame.

I think the experiences compatible with a user looking around as a facehugger display allows will have to be much more like dioramas. They may be very interesting, but they won't be movies.

We've seen this with 3D films where many subtle aspects of cinematography (e.g. depth of field) don't directly translate over. But I think it'll be infinitely worse for "VR" films. Even setting aside basic stuff like what should the viewer be looking at, some of the most basic tool of film-making — cutting from one scene to the next scene — could be jarring in a way that it isn't for a rectangular porthole.

For sure. One of the big questions for me is "what does the viewer understand?" So much of modern film is very quick. There's low redundancy. So if you miss a look or a motion, you're lost. If you can't be sure where the viewer was looking, you create a lot of uncertainty about what they know. So look-anywhere entertainment will have to have a much lower information rate, much higher redundancy, or allow the viewer to control the pacing. That sounds a lot more like Myst than John Wick.

> All of that other stuff makes operating menus and AR aspects better, things that are useful for tasks you can already do on a device 1/4 the price.

As a Quest Pro owner, that is exactly what a headset needs. Passthrough on the quest is a blurry, noisy mess that feels like looking through two original iPhone cameras attached to your eyes. The VR part is great currently, and you get that “for free” if your screens/cameras can do an impressive AR mode. I can work in VR mode on the quest, but the AR mode gets way too distracting when you can’t read a phone notification that popped up on the device in your peripherals.

The screens aren’t the only upgrade though, hand tracking on the quest is mediocre currently, doing simple hand gestures requires me to do them repeatedly often as they don’t get recognized. Eye gaze + small gestures on the Vision Pro are the “pinch to zoom” moment of the VR space.

I'm a quest 2 owner so I'm used to even worse passthrough. The thing is though that I don't mind, because I don't really have any _use_ for passthrough beyond moving a bit of furniture or finding the controllers. Being able to read off my phone screen while wearing the headset isn't a concern, if I'm taking a break from the headset for a minute or two I'll just take it off.

Hand tracking and eye gestures are really nice to have for sure and they make navigating menus feel like actual magic, but again the vast vast majority of what I'm doing when I'm wearing a headset is not navigating menus. This is the point I was making: I don't highly value navigation because if there IS an application in that style I'm probably just going to do it on a phone or PC, menus are not immerse and gain nothing from existing in 3d space.

If I want to move around in a virtual space that's larger than the physical space I'm in I essentially need a controller for smooth movement unless I'm going to be making constant hand gestures.

> But even Apple's launch video doesn't suggest that general computing will be notably improved here.

We'll find out! And as a UI geek and someone who enjoys exploring new tech, I'm totally gonna buy it, though I reservations about its commercial success.

Zooming the screen 25% without having to scroll.

current VR headsets, and I mean just the Quest, is selling fine. For casual gaming and fitness more so than hardcore gaming.

Oh really? There is already a "vibrant App Store" (whatever that means) full of VR ready apps? Before anybody has received the hardware?

Or do you mean you can install iPhone apps? That's a completely different thing and makes your statement highly misleading

Also, are you implying that the Quest App Store is somehow not "vibrant"?

There are many reasons why I am super excited about the Vision Pro, but the App Store do not number among them

I agree. All AR/VR devices are replacing... AR/VR devices.

But if you want to displace the iPhone/smartphone it has to be 1000x better, which today's tech simply can't do yet.

If the glasses that I'm wearing right now could become an AR device at Vision Pro's abilities then take-my-money would be in full swing and easily displace the iPhone as the "center of our lives" computing device.

> the glasses that I'm wearing right now could become an AR device at Vision Pro's abilities

Nevah gonna happin without breakthrough in lithography. Sub nanometer needed prolly. Ur right tho

I don't see that lithography is the barrier to practicality here. IMO trying to make AR or VR happen without some kind of direct link to the visual cortex is like trying to build an iPhone before multitouch capacitive touchscreens were practical.

Smartphones went from "Pointless waste of time" to "Inevitable and incomprehensibly-important technology" overnight when that happened. Jobs had the sense to wait by the river, probably as a result of prior misfires with things like the Newton. Cook, well, not so much.

Did you read the Vision Pro thread in HackerNews? I think you might be mistaken - many of us are interested! Here's some choice quotes:

> I will happily go on the record as saying that this will be as revolutionary as the iPhone, perhaps even more so.

> But it's going to be a hit. HN is going to be swamped with "How I used Vision Pro to..." posts when it comes out.

> Well fuck me. This thing looks absolutely insane. It’s come in at $3499 and if it performs as good as those videos make out then, if anything, it’s a bargain.

> I think Apple designed an incredible piece of hardware here

I think the aim of the Vision Pro is to make people use them all the time as well.

The product is not designed for gamers for instance but provides a VR interface for pretty much your everyday iPhone/Mac/Watching movies use.

Personally the thought of people putting that on as soon as they get home/in office or even in the street is somehwat nightmarish but I think they're hoping for something like that...

I feel the analogy comparisons are not about the device type or use cases for them, rather its about the potential for it to be a paradigm shift in device categories. To me it feels more like the shift that the original Mac introduced to the public at large, from command line based computing to GUI computing, and the potential for new categories of app interactivity.

There's this weird bitterness in the comments about the Vision Pro.

Like...

> the analogy feels so off the mark here to be downright misleading.

I mean, come on, you're obviously nitpicking here.

It's not 100% the same, but the parallel between having devices that were basically dumb phones -> internet computers is there, and there was no real indication at the time that a smart phone like blackberry would become a mass market device. None. Zero.

It was a niche device for rich people; most people were, and let's be absolutely honest here, absolutely, perfectly OK with simple feature phones, sending text messages and making calls.

So, the analogy here is pretty clear; once the device existed, it created a market that didn't exist or maybe extended a tiny market that already existed, but come onnnnnnnn, is it really that epic a stretch to imagine that it might happen again? ...can you not imagine this as a gen1 device that improves over time?

It is really so completely different?

I don't think it is.

I'm not convinced it will, but the parallel is not nearly as misleading as you're making it out to be.

Here's what I think is interesting: People want this is fail.

Lots of people. Not because they don't like apple. Not because they don't like VR. They just seem to hate it because its expensive and people are being positive about it and they feel like it's somehow wrong for apple to be:

- Selling something this expensive

- That is a risky bet that might not play out

- That people are willing to talk about favorably on the basis of the Apple brand.

...but, here's the thing right?

1) Who cares? They're rich. Let them fail.

2) Apple has the brand it has because it can deliver, and it has delivered in the past.

What kind of numpy stands here and thinks... "Oh gee, these guys at Apple are stupid. They're never going to sell these. They'll regret this. Look at all their failed products and their unsuccessful business. Haha!"

> I fully understand how much Meta, Apple and others "want to make fetch happen". Many of us are simply just not interested.

...if some people are excited and enthusiastic about it...

...let them be enthusiastic about it?

The way I remember it, the first iPhone was criticized for not having 3G, which was a standard feature ordinary people were already using. But maybe that depends on the country. At least at some point, the Japanese were supposed to have really fancy phones, while the US was behind the rest of the developed world in mobile technology.

In Finland, mobile internet was already a big thing during the dot-com boom. The early attempts failed, because the hardware wasn't ready. Regardless, "mobile portal" remained one of the big buzzwords, and even taxi drivers knew that the mobile was the future. In a few years, new phones got color displays, cameras, 3G connections, and GPS receivers. Ordinary people bought them, because flagship phones were cheaper than they are today. And then mobile internet started finally making sense. I remember using the local public transit journey planner on my phone in 2005 or 2006 to determine the right stop after taking an unfamiliar bus.

I think culturally we are in an exceptionally cranky and cynical time. It reminds me a lot of the 70's in that way, actually. Here's hoping we find our collective way through it with aplomb.

The next paragraph makes exactly that point:

"where the iPhone was a more-or-less drop-in replacement for the phone you already had, nine years after Meta bought Oculus, VR is still a new device and a new category for almost everyone. Indeed, the Vision Pro actually looks a bit more like the original Macintosh, which was over $7,000 (adjusted for inflation) when it launched in 1984, and most people didn’t know why they needed one."

> There’s a strong echo here of mobile 20 years ago.

I don't know. Holding a phone in your hand is very different than putting something directly onto your face.

Not so much the implementation of mobile but the impact of a new way to interact with information.

This is what happens when ever optimizing robots like Tim Cook are put in charge of anything. They should never be in charge of setting the heading of the ship. Keeping the ship running and afloat sure that's what optimizing robots are good for. Don't mistake them for leaders or visionaries. Apple has been a mindless ship on autopilot since the iPhone 4.

Not tru. Ppl already use laptops and desktops a lot already. Vision will be evolution to spatial type of computing which is why Apple says it

We already have laptops and desktops. It's not a given that this goggle thing will be a general improvement. Personally, I'd rather use a real screen, even if this was free. Which it very much is not.

Wanna bet? In 50 years 1 billion or more will be using something like the vision pro.

The visual exp will b better.

I have no idea what will be happening in 50 years. I'm not taking that bet.

But if your prediction is correct, then I think we'll have some better use cases than looking at fake screens. That's my bet.

Lol ppl are using paper after centuries. Screens r da digital equivalent to paper workstation.

Better visual exp is worth it alone. It doesn’t need 2 b better than that.

All useful perceived vision will b 2D plane. Stone tablet, paper workstation, crt monitor, lcd, vr. All showing 2d planes

You keep saying "better visual experience". What's alleged to be better about it? I watched the short promo video, and didn't catch anything about that.

The reason why I would prefer to use a real screen is that I (imagine) the visual experience to be better. At least we agree about the reason.

The idea that this can even be something you'd reasonably have a bet on demonstrates his point. It's not a surefire thing that this will be a better experience than just using a laptop or desktop for most people.

Going back to the original analogy, while you could argue about the iphone in terms of price maybe, it was undeniable that it was flat out better than a feature phone in every possible way.

You okay there buddy? Your cynicism's showing. That's either been the case forever, or never. Grandma can't take a plane flight to be with the kids, and the kids are too young to fly to her. But in Mixed Reality (MR), it's just like she'e there. Same with life-saving surgery where the surgeon and the patient can't be colocated.

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