Its definitely possible that the Vision Pro will be a dud, but it seems odd to assume that Apple hasn't verified basic things about the product like "is watching a movie a good experience".
So we can argue hypothetical rebuttals to these hypotheticals, but we can also note that this pattern has repeated over and over. Apple has failed before, but “it doesn’t have a physical keyboard” and “what improvement can they bring to the commodity mp3 player” and “what’s wrong with command lines” and “who wants a small iPhone on their wrist” and “wires make earbuds socially acceptable” are valid things to remind this year’s doomsayers of.
It doesn’t make sense in hindsight, like the “iPhone will fail because it doesn’t have a physical keyboard” doesn’t make sense. But that’s the pattern here. Vision may fail, but if so, it will not be just because it’s different than current paradigms.
It’s easy to criticize. My complaint about the criticism of the Apple Vision is that it largely boils down to: It’s different and doesn’t solve existing problems and I can’t imagine people using it.
Great products sometimes don’t solve existing problems. They sometimes create a need. I’m very excited about the possibility of the Apple Vision. If it’s as good as Apple touts, and this remains to be seen, then I think it will usher in a new era.
Oh god, you're giving me flashbacks to the "courage" keynote...
It’s interesting that now very few phones have a headphone jack. The vast majority of the headphones sold are wireless.
So, I agree. It's very courageous, not for Apple but for the user who so absent-mindedly gives up on platforms they control.
Who can blame them, though? Most people's idea of "open computing" these days boils down to their web browser and Xbox. Maybe people are ready to jump from frying pan to fire.
So far, the author, and nearly everyone else, has yet to wear this new device, let alone on an airplane. All the analysis on previous headsets is great but moot, since the reality of Apple's version isn't tested yet. And, based on how wrong all those iPhone analyses were, it's a fair benefit of the doubt to think maybe Apple will do right by this headset as well.
why? It’s not like companies which previously released successful products don’t fail all the time. Also the iPhone even back then had some clear use cases (web/media/maps and later camera) it’s just that all other people mostly sucked at these things. Nobody has quite figured out what can you do with a VR headset besides gaming.
But even taking your point about no one has figured it out yet, why go to a place of "it's gonna suck" before actually trying the thing? The specifics aren't known yet by anyone not under NDA, so why speculate something will be bad, as the author did?
I didn’t say that. IMHO it’s as silly as those saying that it can’t fail and it will revolutionize the world because it’s Apple.
> The specifics aren't known
apps and real world use cases will probably matter much more than the specs. I highly doubt gen 1 will be that successful or that Apple expects it to be though. It seems much more like a developer preview than the end product.
> Because their hit ratio is still positive?
Corporations are made up from people and many of those who developed their most successful products initially are no longer there
True, but it's not as if this is a completely new company with new employees. Much of the leadership remains, many of the rank and file as well, and probably many internal processes/guidelines. I'm comfortable claiming that Apple's past successes are relevant when considering whether the AVP will be successful as well.
Which isn't to say it will be successful. The price alone will ensure it remains niche. But apart from cost I fully expect it to be a better headset in many ways than others that came before it.
The iPad is the more interesting one to me because tablets had been a Next Big Thing for a long time, to the point that the common wisdom was that they weren't going to happen. Phones become slabs-of-glass because of the constraint of fitting into a pocket. Tablets couldn't compete with laptops in the absence of that constraint. The iPhone was the birth of a new industry; the iPad breathed life into an already dead industry.
(Granted, that industry seems to be trending back towards dead, or if you prefer, "a stable niche that isn't going anywhere due to the ease of just making a Phone, but Bigger, but isn't going to take over the world", but if anything that makes Apple's accomplishment even more impressive.)
This seems a much closer comparison to VR. Even before the current push represented by the Oculus and similar gen products, VR headsets had been a Next Big Thing for decades now. I'd still characterize the field as basically dead, at least at an Apple scale. If it hasn't outright plateaued, its first derivative is certainly only marginally positive. If the Apple Vision product succeeds it'll be another breathing life into a dead industry play.
I'm not saying the iPhone was obvious. I'm saying it wasn't coming after years of failure in the product space. They did a good job and leaped very quickly to a good solution. Absent Apple, the rest of the market would have gotten there, though. They weren't swimming upstream, they just got where the stream was going faster than anyone else by quite a lot.
iPad was swimming upstream. So is a VR headset.
One day reading the latest computer magazines was Steve Jobs talking about a computer so easy to use a 2 year old could use it. I could not begin to comprehend what he was talking about. He was talking about the Lisa. I don't know how long it took me to find out what in the world was going on.
It maybe like 2 mouses in that it has eye tracking and hand tracking. Which might make 2x as good as a mouse.
VR glasses have not yet gained mainstream acceptance among the general population in the way that phones had achieved before the iPhone. Practically nobody is saying that the Vision is a bad product, all of the skepticism is whether it’s a good product category.
The same could be said about the iPad and Apple Watch, no? Tablets and smart watches weren't popular before their introduction. With that said, I don't think the skepticism is unwarranted. Just because Apple has been successful in introducing new product categories in the past doesn't inherently mean that they will be this time.
As for the watch, watches are a very popular accessory generally, and there have been plenty of entrants before the apple watch, all the way from the casio calculator, to fitbits and pebbles to android wear.
If you were already into watches, and were already in the apple ecosystem, which I have to imagine was a large set of people, the apple watch was basically an insta-buy, not only because of its integration but also it’s customizability.
I don’t see those same variables present for VR as were for the watch, but I do see similarities between AVP and iPad in how it’s billed as a pro device, and I imagine it will suffer a similar fate of falling short of expectations.
Certainly how it worked at my company.
Or you can consider an even longer past; has any company in history ever been able to consistently "hit-it-out-of-the-park" with products? Or is there an element of luck here that distributes these things.
In other words, does one game-changing innovation make it more likely or less likely to produce a second?
Apple has had financial success with many products, yes. Is that what we're talking about? No.
Do you really think MacBooks and AirPods are revolutionary products like the iPhone?
I guess if we declare everything Apple’s ever done to be just pretty versions of ENIAC, they really haven’t had any successful products at all?
What other product categories have Apple "re-invented" or invented. The mobile phone. The tablet. What else?
They didn’t invent any of those, and they didn’t invent the innovations that made their products successful. But the user experience of all of them was so much better than existing products that they went from nothing to dominating the category in just a few years.
Maybe the iPad, but large phones became popular and the whole tablet hype sort of disappeared.
The Apple Watch? The only people I know who own one are people so deep in the Apple ecosystem they need it all. Seemingly good product (everything Apples makes is), but not a game changer.
The fact that Apple fans want every Apple device does't make the devices amazing. My opinion, of course.
Smartphones are great examples of how user behavior can change. No keyboard turned out to be fine, and people wound up plenty happy to watch videos on tiny screens.
I think two things could have made the article more useful:
1. A better structured article. This was a mix of random details and jargon with speculation about the new device that didn’t feel well tied together.
2. I would expect the view of a sceptical expert to be more cautious and considered; to say what things might be difficulties, why they were difficulties for things in the past, how Apple seems to be planning to deal with them, where that approach might fail or succeed, and then some estimate of whether it seems easy for them to solve the problem. That is, it should be more clear what the assumptions are that are being relied on for the estimation.
To take a stereotypical iPhone criticism for example, it would be bad to merely say that the lack of keyboard or badness of touchscreens makes it impossible and better to say that good touchscreens and some kind of solution to keyboard problems would be needed, and you don’t think improved sensor resolution would work and the problem seemed hard because X or Y. Like, I’m not saying that the author needs to be right but I think they could do a better job of having convincing reasons that they have tried to thought of the ways they might be wrong.
[1] There was some discussion of a device the author worked on in the ‘90s(!) but I didn’t see discussion of more recent work. Capabilities of much of the tech going into this Apple thing will be quite different.
If Apple Vision was the form factor of a pair of sunglasses (more like what xreal is doing) then I wouldn't be so critical.
I have no idea when/if the technology will get there but a HUD in a fairly ordinary-looking pair of glasses you could wear on the street seems potentially interesting. I'll keep an open mind about the Vision Pro but the use cases I've seen don't seem super-compelling to me--at least at this point.
TL;DR: I agree; don't use Glass as a reason to write off AR glasses altogether.
Seriously, the headline here is why something "may" be lousy for watching movies.
Being 500 grams with most of that in the front (for that stupid glass and "face" thing), it's not going to be a good time. Without a back to front strap, it's not going to be comfortable, and the "solution" for the weight of just clinching it tighter against your face is the WORST solution (believe me I've tried) and only results in more discomfort.
I don't know how lightweight you have to get before something is comfortable to wear on your face for extended periods, but it is probably closer to 250 grams than 500
At this point though, all of this is speculation. I expect v1 to suck, v2 to be a little bit better, and v3 to be the one that gets it right. I'm guessing that's about 5 years out.
The launch unit probably should be a heavy mess and if it isn't, maybe they weren't ambitious enough.
For example, the one I link to below is a two piece setup where goggles clamp to your face and then a wide shield hangs from the goggles:
https://www.lincolnelectric.com/en-us/equipment/welding-gear...
There are all kinds of attachments you can get that can bring the mass into that 500g neighborhood. The ones from the previous generation were easily 500g.
All of Apple’s product launches get criticism leveled at them, and if they are successful, people forgot about the criticism. If the product is unsuccessful (Mac cube), people forget about the product.
Predictive text being utilized to change the virtual size of touch targets on the keyboard, yet keeping the design static to improve accuracy, was something even those with years working with and on touch only smartphone interfaces did not figure out in its entirety until after the phone was in their hands.
The iPhone is a good parallel because just like with it, this is trying to further an existing class of devices and history has shown that, for as many things as I can criticize about them, Apple is very good at adding these unnoticeable optimizations and hidden tricks that make experiences work much more flawlessly.
Adding to that, though, I will admit that the first iPhone was severely flawed in other ways, like lack of MMS and 3G. These however were not issues with the UX (compared to Windows Mobile which supported these but had UX issues out of every orifice), but rather conscious feature restrictions, on which Apple ended up back paddling.
In fact, that is my main concern with the AVP, Apple intentionally restricting it in ways that will make the hardware less appealing and impactful. The AVP, in my eyes, should in the long term replace both Macs and iOS devices (at least iPads), but to do that, should enable the creation of software on device. I hope that, just like with 3G and MMS, Apple will see the light between V1 and V2 regarding local macOS app support (or at least Xcode).
If that happens, I will buy one at their asking price. As it stands, I will wait for reviews and only buy one if it means a distinct improvement to my workflow, even though I'll need to take my MacBook with me. Apple should, just like with Xcode on the iPad, stop being afraid of letting new classes of compute device replace the old. To bring this back to the original iPhone, imagine if Jobs had announced that it is not an iPod on top of being a browsing device and phone, because they feared cannibalizing iPod sales. Would have been shortsighted, to say the least.
Lastly, I will freely admit that past performance should not be used to predict future successes. It is possible that Apples methods may have changed since then, and they have not put as much consideration into solving the UX issues plaguing current pass-through AR devices, in which case justifying the price will be (even more of) a challenge. I doubt it though and, even if, more recent history (Apple Watch) has taught them a thing or two about pivoting a seeming failure into an impressive success.
> Third, users will detest the touch screen interface due to its lack of tactile feedback. Using a thumb keyboard, as on the very popular Treo phone, allows the user to feel the keys and know subconsciously that he’s about to press this one and not the one next to it. A touch screen doesn’t allow that, so the user will have to be looking at the keyboard at all times while using it.
http://suckbusters2.blogspot.com/2007/06/apple-iphone-debut-...
https://512pixels.net/2009/01/early-macintosh-reviews-show-d...
> Apple makes the arrogant assumption of thinking that it knows what you want and need. It, unfortunately, leaves the “why” out of the equation — as in “why would I want this?” The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I dont want one of these new fangled devices.
John C. Dvorak
I've been idly imagining how my work experience would be different if I had eye tracking and hand gesture recognition these last few days, and I keep noticing times when I wish I had it.
His mistake wasn't in assessing the issues, just that he could not see that there's software solutions to fix those.
The complaints were valid, but they weren't nearly enough to make the device bad.
Now, how many people can spend $3500 on a headset where the main use cases are "watch a movie", when those same people probably also have a really nice TV? Everyone keeps talking about how it's "very interesting" but how many of you have actually tried to watch a movie in a VR headset? It's not comfortable, not just from screen specs, since those don't really matter. The weight and face gasket suck to have on. You can't engineer that away.
The other extreme is expecting history to repeat by demonstrating that people have consistently over estimated the probability of success in the VR space.
I don't know which is right, but my gut says that VR is not something that will go mainstream in its current form (HMD). It's too 'bluetooth earpiece', and doesn't match the prestige image that is particularly strong in people that favor Apple products. Notice that I am not criticizing anything technical with AVR, which I think is a peripheral issue.
While I agree that blindly expecting history to repeat is problematic, it’s worth considering that this seems to be Apple’s strong suit, and while there are plenty of questions about how the market will react to this product, the early demos seem to confirm that Apple has indeed accomplished something that the other headsets have not. I think this is why some people are so bullish about this tech - and not for no reason.
> It's too 'bluetooth earpiece', and doesn't match the prestige image that is particularly strong in people that favor Apple products
Apple took something that was decidedly uncool (Bluetooth earpieces) and turned it into a status symbol (AirPods) despite these earpieces looking pretty goofy when they first landed.
And again, I think the optimism comes from their demonstrated ability to achieve this kind of shift in perception/public consciousness.
The reality distortion field in the form of top tier marketing from Apple has the best hope of making progress in this area compared to those that have come before.
Could this all still be an enormous flop? Maybe. It could also be a Newton, and a decade later we’ll get the product Apple really wanted to ship: the iPhone (compact glasses).
The trend I see is software companies like Facebook, Valve, and Microsoft over-estimating their odds of success at making hardware devices.
We think the iPhone is great today almost entirely because of Apple’s iteration since launch. The initial model had promise but also major shortcomings that were obvious at the time.
So “remember the iPhone” is probably not as strong a reassurance as it might seem on the surface. In general, Apple “version 1” products are often flawed.
But Apple generally does not launch a product unless it intends to iterate on it for a long time (one of their not-so-secret keys to success).
which country?
Phones that didn't have any of that usually were from the older generation like the 3310. That lack of messaging options combined with the very high price at launch made it a non-starter.
All of that got fixed on the 3G.
Even now the iPhone isn't as popular in mainland Europe as it is in the UK, Ireland, and the US.
https://www.thestreet.com/technology/iphone-to-debut-in-fran...
Usually Apple’s 2nd version of anything is the best.
V1 is always missing something important that they couldn’t quite get ready in time.
That is my only hesitation with the Vision Pro! It’s a lot to shell out if next years will have some new and amazing thing
That's the same for every company I think, you always miss stuff when designing the V1
https://qz.com/work/1167463/apple-is-forcing-ceo-tim-cook-to...