Apple forced to make major cuts to Vision Pro headset production plans
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1) Apple taking a stab at it, because it’s the kind of thing where UX really matters and Apple does UX well.
2) Apple not being trapped in the “if we can’t sell a billion of them then why even bother?” mindset that so many other companies get trapped in, often because they’re not bursting at the seams with cash, talent, and runway.
I feel like the iPhone mini being only two years long is a strong counterpoint to this. There's a small hope for an iPhone 15 mini, but with no 14 mini, it's a long shot. It accounted for 6% of all iPhone sales in it's first quarter, after a delayed and rocky launch.[1] There is a small but somewhat vocal minority that want smaller screens, which Linus Tech Tips' sub-channel Mac Address covered recently. [2]
[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/news/iphone-12-mini-sales-a-disast... [2] https://youtu.be/BjhiYa0KsSM
I use an iPhone 12 mini that I ordered on launch day and love it. Finally a worthy successor to the 5S/SE1.
Apple also doesn’t update the SE every year.
Also, the 12 mini was released 6 months after the 2020 SE, and the 2020 SE was released ~4 years after the previous SE. it stands to reason that many people who wanted a smaller phone jumped on the 2020 SE, and then had no reason to buy a 12 mini.
Also, the 12 mini battery life sucked. The 13 mini is perfectly usable though.
If they are 100% certain this is the final form factor they would take one path. If they think we need to get this out in the world and see how it is useful they would take the other.
It seems to be the opposite with folding phones. A lot of Android manufacturers releasing them, despite low sales numbers, while Apple apparently thinks: if we can’t sell a billion of them then why even bother?
That being said I feel like this is almost the obverse, they have a product that sells well so they don't need to follow each trend that comes out. So they can pick and choose which way they run with things.
I don't agree that this is a myth.
If you look at the first generation iPhone in a vacuum, it was limited, perhaps (but I think there are plenty of arguments that the first gen iPhone was pushing envelopes - name one other phone that had a fully functioning web browser at the time, and pinch/zoom felt magical), but nitpicks about functionality aside, I don't think this framing makes sense for other reasons.
A product line is not just its initial release. It is a process, an organizational discipline, a manufacturing and logistics pipeline, an ongoing upgrade cycle, an ongoing engagement with customers, an understanding of the market, etc.
When the first generation phone was released, plans for the 3GS were already well under way. The 1st gen phone was a necessary step to get you that 3GS. When operating at Apple's scale, at least a decade of roadmap if not more was already planned in depth. The 3GS was not a reaction to the success of the 1, it is the real product Apple envisioned and planned to ship before we even knew the iPhone would exist.
If the 3GS got it right, so did the gen 1, in a certain sense.
And as an aside, I have to say I really liked my 1st gen iPhone compared to everything else I'd had up to that point, and I was a gadget junkie who had owned quite a few of the other "hot" phones at the time.
I highly doubt that considering that web app / native app store debacle.
Also was there any real reason to not support 3g from the beginning? A lot of “dumber” phones had it so it seems more likely that they just made a mistake.
I don't think early politics about how apps get shipped plays too much into the core planning for the device, e.g. form factor, manufacturing, user interactions, structure of built-in apps, etc. are all pretty much orthogonal to the app distribution model.
But even then, there were clearly two camps, which means there was a disagreement about a specific path, but not a lack of forward thinking. And then they course corrected. Something that many companies simply do not do.
> are all pretty much orthogonal to the app distribution model.
I’m not sure it’s only the distribution but the entire existence of native third party apps that they weren’t sure about.
You mean the same Apple where Jobs said that no one would want to watch video on a tiny screen less than two years before the video iPod?
Apple didn’t go from idea of a fully featured SDK and an App Store in nine months without already planning to do so.
- support for mouse input
- a native file manager app (2017!)
- pressure-sensitive pens and screens (~ 4 years after Samsung)
- Multiple apps on same screen (2019!)
None of these are things that take years to get right. Apple commentators simply get lazy and recycle this iPod-era talking point.
What would you do with one on a device where every app is heavily sandboxed and there's no common file system?
> pressure-sensitive pens and screens (~ 4 years after Samsung)
When they did release this, no competition was even close to the precision and fidelity.
When Apple releases something later than competition it's usually (but not always) justified and results in a better execution
Access each app's sandbox to move/copy/exfiltrate the data contained there, for whatever reason the user desires. Not much different from the way file managers are used on traditional desktop systems.
That breaks the security promise that apps don't have direct access to other apps' data.
There's a reason you can't even access photos without an explicit user prompt.
> Not much different from the way file managers are used on traditional desktop systems
Traditional desktop systems never had heavily sandboxed apps with no outside access
No it doesn't. Giving the user the ability to get their hands on their own data is not the same as giving other apps direct access to it.
> Traditional desktop systems never had heavily sandboxed apps with no outside access
That's completely orthogonal.
Does the user have the need for that on an iPhone?
I don't think a single app on my phone has any files I'd ever need access to
> That's completely orthogonal.
Of course it's not orthogonal
You questioned whether there was a use case for file managers when apps do not share a "common file system" and are "heavily sandboxed", and stipulated that providing one would break the security promise of not giving apps "direct access to other apps' data".
Whether desktop systems have traditionally sandboxed their apps to the same degree is, in fact, orthogonal. It's a separate question entirely.
> Does the user have the need for that on an iPhone?
Sorry, but when I spot somebody moving the goalposts (and failing to acknowledge when one they staked out earlier was satisfied), my approach is not to indulge them by continuing to respond as if they're just like anyone else having a discussion in good faith. Instead, I say, "you are moving the goalposts; you are not asking in good faith". This is monumentally helpful in making economical use of my time.
Regarding other features, I don't understand the connection you're trying to draw here, or how they serve as counterpoints. All these anecdotes point to is where Apple has chosen to focus resources and in what order. Having worked on a product team, there are dozens of "obvious" things that get cut from every release. I don't see this as some enormous indictment of the product.
Mouse input on what? iPhone? Is this a thing?
A native file manager is a feature that applies to a small subset of users. Do some people want it? Sure! Does a lack of it somehow imply Apple is failing? I think that's hard to argue. Anecdotally, as a highly technical user, I rarely if ever touch that app. I don't think most of my friends/family know it exists.
Multiple apps on the same screen ... on the only tablet in the market worth considering. Again, this is a gripe about roadmap order and not an effective argument against the core claim.
And core to the claim is the fact that Apple is often late to the party.
> None of these are things that take years to get right. Apple commentators simply get lazy and recycle this iPod-era talking point.
I don't think anyone is making the claim that these things take years to get right. More interesting than this would be to examine what they chose to ship instead.
If you don't believe the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, MacBook Air and AirPods are market-defining products, we'll have to just agree to disagree. It's not as if the iPod was the last product to resemble the "Apple does it better" pattern.
The recent pixel foldable shows the way to totally screw up a foldable screen. I’m sure you’re totally happy with yours, but all the foldables I’ve seen have distortion at the fold and it’s definitely a week point that will eventually degrade. Not for me.
I was actually around when the first iPhone came about. As a tech enthusiast it was incredibly disruptive. Everyone was still shipping devices with stylus and this device with a capacitive screen came and blew everyone’s socks off. I don’t think anyone can rewrite that history.
https://store.apple.com/xc/product/IPHONE13_MAIN
Any source that they stopped making it?
I'm a really avid mountain biker, road cyclist and snowboarder, and I'd love some basic telemetry displayed in the goggles or glasses I'm already wearing. Nothing kills a ride faster than having to stop to pull out your phone to see if you missed a turn or to figure out which unmarked trail you're supposed to take. (Not to mention all of the information we current have to look down at our cycling computers to see: HR, watts, cadence, etc.)
I know that's not the problem Apple's solving here, but I'm hopeful that anything they can do to push AR will filter down quickly.
I hear people say this often enough to question my own sanity, because I don't find Apple's UX to be very good at all. I find it confusing and it makes things difficult to figure out.
It's probably invisible to most Apple users but it's a bit puzzling to anybody coming from anywhere else.
This is even worse on Apple smartphones, because a lot of stuff is done using mystery gestures that you have to already have memorized.
Skeuomorphism used to provide a small amount of relief, but since that's gone out of fashion, it eliminated even those clues.
In short, I find Apple's user interfaces to be very opaque. In fairness to Apple, this is also true of Android, Windows, and Gnome. But in the case of Android, it feels intuitive to me simply because I've internalized how to do the stuff that it gives no hint as to how to do.
What system(s) do you find more discoverable, and how? I’m honestly curious because I love checking our new systems or window managers and it’s bugged me not to have some of this elsewhere for a while.
The search bar in the menu is fine if there is a menu to search. IIRC or at least last time I used it the screenshot tool had no menus and was extremely unclear as to how to save a screenshot as a file in the location you actually want.
To your point about trackpads though, I agree. I can’t stand a mouse on macOS, it loses too much convenience, especially with BTT available.
That said, is there any system today that you find more discoverable? I mean serenityOS actually fits that bill, and classics like older macOS or windows 98, but anything modern?
The Dock also works, although you have to move the pointer downwars to show it. In a lot of ways Clicking on Icons is MacOS foundation mode and everything else is superfluous. I, as a Poweruser, forget that sometimes.
> IIRC or at least last time I used it the screenshot tool had no menus and was extremely unclear as to how to save a screenshot as a file in the location you actually want.
The Screenshot tool btw. is also an App under Applications → Utilities. If you use that, you’ll get a floating palette with different options including for different locations. Those options then get also used by the Poweruser ⇧⌘n shortcuts.
(I don’t necessary disagree with you, there is too much invisible navigation.)
As for where to save that screenshot, that is available in the Options section of the floating menu.
You don't. They are hidden. If you are supposed to see them they shouldn't be hidden.
I understand that other operating systems make a different choice about this, but that doesn't make their choice is the correct one.
Did you know that you can hold the spacebar to move your cursor around on iOS? Without my friend telling me about that feature, I also found text selection in iOS to be deeply frustrating as compared to Android
I just tested this on my phone (albeit it is an iPhone 8, so a bit older model perhaps without as many features). A short tap is sufficient to turn it on and off. A longer tap brings up the intensity slider. I was unable to tap the icon quickly enough so as not to register the tap and toggle the flashlight.
Upon retesting a couple times, I did notice that on the first tap the icon is illuminated but it did take a split second more for the actual flashlight to turn on. But waiting the split second was sufficient instead of further tapping.
I’m using the menu that is pulled up while the phone is unlocked (by dragging from the bottom of the screen, on my model), for reference.
For the flashlight in particular, the button inside the control center can do a few different things—including closing the control center entirely—if you fumble the tap even slightly with an upward push of the thumb. With the Lock Screen, a sliding motion of any kind will just not turn the light on if your slide doesn't begin and end inside of the UI element that you're entirely obscuring the view of with your enormous fingers. You can accidentally open the Lock Screen customizer. It's even possible to get haptic feedback from the lockscreen flashlight button without actually turning it on.
While I don't have any of these problems, I am familiar with them and have observed others struggle. There are accessibility settings that are designed to help (repeated input filters and such) but they all slow the UI down and somehow make it more confusing because the phone is just more likely to do nothing rather than the wrong thing.
On a multi monitor setup, why is it impossible to drag a window over to a monitor where another window is fullscreened?
How do you select a specific resolution or refresh rate when you're plugged into an older meeting room projector?
I had to use an iPhone for a few weeks when mine broke. That was enough to convince me to never touch any of their products again. I'd love to tell you more about it but it's been 4 years and I just don't remember all of of details. The main thing I remember is that it was anything but intuitive to use and it was an entirely frustrating experience. Easily the worst phone experience I've ever had
My 70-80+ year old parents can use iOS abd ipados mostly fine but get lots of things wrong on their Mac, so it seems to be a net improvement.
For the life of him he can't he can't look at a text message while in a phone call and then get back to the call menu.
He unknowingly mutes notifications for contacts and has no chance of figuring out how to unmute them.
He accidentally calls his contacts all the time.
Those 9 sections are all unlabeled for some insane reason (I suppose maybe this type of plain table view thing has never had a UI element to make headings?), so even the intent of the designer is unknown. If you want a certain setting, you just have to keep scrolling. There is Search in here, though the search is mediocre and it’s still hard to find things.
Oh, and Settings has a junk drawer too called General, which seems to mostly mean “someone was forced to pull 15 or so items into a subfolder, and it also uses the “random groups without headings” method of organization.
All of this seems low-effort and like the designers didn’t learn even basic lessons from 40 years of GUI design (or like the ones calling the shots are fine art majors more concerned with words like “uncluttered” and “elegant” than “usability” and “discoverable.”
I have many examples, but I'll just pick one. When having multiple instances of an app, the doc adds a "dot" by the app icon. This dot is present no matter whether I have 2 instances or 10 instances. Oftentimes I forget instances there (which can open due to many reasons, including for instance private browsing) because it's not easy to tell that I have 3, instead of my usual 2 instances.
Additionally, switching instances is unnecessary slow and requires more clicks than the older Windows taskbar (which is hopefully coming back as MSFT imitated Apple's terrible UX). Maybe you love this but I objectively lose productivity with this UX decision.
This is why open windows are represented on the second level, e.g. listed in the context menu that appears when you right click a dock icon. Programs and windows are not synonymous, and in fact windows belong to programs.
Macs have used this model since they first gained multitasking decades ago.
That's simply not the case.
The dock adds a dot to the application icon if the application is running.
If you have multiple instance of the application running, there will be multiple icons (each with a dot) in the dock. This is fairly difficult to do, the only way I know how is by starting the application again from the command line. Well, or when you're running an application you are developing from Xcode.
So not 100% sure what you mean with "multiple instances", but almost certainly not actual multiple instances. I am guessing you mean an application with multiple documents open.
So basically, what you regard as "bad UX" is simply you trying to map assumptions from one environment onto a different environment, and finding that your assumptions don't reflect reality.
And yes, the application will be running (showing a dot) whenever you have 1 or more documents open in the app.
To switch between documents of an application, you can either go to the application's "Window" menu and chose one from there, or to the dock icon and choose one from there.
Anyway, I'm using Chrome and that's what happens.
Alt-Tab (erm... Cmd-Tab) switching through applications instead of windows (and then having a separate hotkey to tab through windows, but only within one application), and that mess combined with the fact that there can be UI applications that just have a menu bar but no open windows is just incredibly bizarre (and even though I'm now a primary Mac user for more than a decade it still feels incredibly clunky - at least there's this gesture-controlled 'exploded-desktop-view' as a workaround).
...and when it comes to the new stuff:
- hiding the scroll bar, what a completely non-sensical decision from a UX point of view, I now need to wiggle the touchpad to see where I am in a document, and how much of the document I'm currently viewing (yes I know that this can be disabled, and that's the first thing I do on a new Mac, along with inverting the scrolling direction)
- arranging buttons vertically in popup dialogs on macOS devices with landscape display orientation (arguably it makes sense on an iPhone with portrait display orientation, but in either case the vertical arrangement makes it a lot more likely to accidentally hit the wrong button)
- the new settings panel is just a massive step back from the old one (which wasn't all that great either)
- don't even get me started on iOS, if you don't know the 'magic gestures' nothing makes sense (same shit on Android though)
I’m assuming you came to macOS from some years using Windows?
...but I was also exposed to 90's Macs somewhat. I remember that my switch from the Amiga UI to Windows was fairly smooth, but I never got quite used to the Mac UI (not that it matters all that much though because I mostly switched back to the command line anyway, that's the only way to keep sane when switching regularly between Mac, Windows and Linux).
Visual Studio on Windows does drive me crazy for exactly this reason, especially as each instance can only have one top-level document (solution) open at a time.
I think the app vs window centric model really comes down to user preference - I think I could get used to window again but I had Chrome, Audacity, and the windows explorer open last night with maybe five windows and was alt-tabbing to all the wrong places. My brain just makes sense of “get to application, then find the window” better than a list of windows I have to sift through across disparate apps.
I agree with the scroll bars and settings getting worse. Buttons are either way, but - like app vs window switching - could be remedied with a setting to change the behavior.
Or why don't we have Copy and Paste keys on our keyboards. Or Undo and Redo keys?
Or why is the USB drive in the back of an Apple monitor?
Or why is everything so opinionated?
Or that mouse that could only be charged with the cable plugged into the bottom so you couldn't use it?
Or in earlier versions of OSX, you had to upgrade the OS by starting iTunes (wtf?) ...
> Or why don't we have Copy and Paste keys on our keyboards. Or Undo and Redo keys?
Copy: Cmd+c
Paste: Cmd+v
Undo: Cmd+z
Redo: Cmd+Shift+z or maybe Cmd+y if the devs do windows stuff too
Also Apple just killed some of my app notifs with the update and despite all of my settings being proper some apps like Instagram just don’t work.
20 years later, given an Android and an iPhone, they were equally difficult (or easy) to use. Furthermore, after having used Android for years finding stuff on an iPhone was definitely difficult. Probably the other way around is true.
I too thought Apple UIs were confoundingly bad, but one day I decided to take a step back and approach it as any ordinary man would. I pretended I knew nothing and cared nothing about computers.
You know what happened? It was intuitive. It was consistent. It was harmonious. My mind was blown.
Apple UIs are made for the ordinary man, not for tech nerds and professionals like us. Forget alt-tabbing and window managing, the vast majority of people on the planet don't know and don't care about computers; and it's those people Apple caters to.
Apple at least designs their UIs to accomodate how normal people use computers, which is why their stuff doesn't mesh well with tech nerds and professionals without a mindset change. We are not normal people.
For context, Oculus sold only 56,334 of their DK1 devkits.
I feel like the major cuts are because of lack of hype. I don't think anybody understands if there is a market for this, so nobody is sure how much money to put into developing for it.
To me this feels like the first apple product in a long time without a compelling use case and no solid idea of who the potential customer is.
Sure apple could sell 100,000 anything. The question is are you going to be able to make any money developing for apple's $3500 VR headset or not. I don't think that these can be used for desktop replacements makes them worth it as desktop replacements. $3500 is an "out there" price with no ecosystem level market, in my opinion.
That’s IMO why VR has largely failed, out of the box there hasn’t been a compelling reason to get one and there isn’t enough software to keep people interested.
I’ll be ordering a Vision Pro primarily to use as a display for my Mac, but also for development purposes. It is definitely a niche product at launch, but I think it’ll grow into the consumer space over time - it is really only niche because of the price tag.
Games will come, but gaming is the “easy” part of VR because you control the entire environment. AR interactions are what will make this into a viable computing platform that actually moves beyond the current 2D paradigm.
To me VR seems closer to where PCs were in the 80s at this point.
I doubt anyone is going to be using one of this in a spin class any time soon, but there’s plenty of situations where a laptop/phone/tablet don’t really work well.
Ideally yes apps should update themselves, tailor the experience. But the main focus so far has been pretty conventional app like experiences, which happen to be hovering in space. Where-as most headsets have tried to create entirely new ecosystems from nothing, and that would have been a huge mountain to climb.
They can sell 100k of them and crow about being sold out, but I don't think even apple has figured out who this is for - thats what I got from their presentation on it. The only answer they have so far is "people who will spend $3500 on a vr headset" which isn't a use case.
For the most part we got marketing level "watch people emote joy as they do things with this device" and all the use cases sucked.
It means that now you are competing against desktops which have been iterated upon for decades and have a lot of value already. Instead of standing out by having apps that are only possible in VR people will way if they would rather use the app outside of VR.
But the problem is:
1. The people who aren’t already engrossed in the field, don’t have a good view on how to bridge between their current world view and the new one.
2. The people who are already in the space don’t need to be sold on unique cases.
Very few post-jobs-return Apple products show dramatic new use cases even if the product then goes on to enable it, and even if Apple themselves have clearly thought of it.
Their marketing is: this is how you take what you’re already doing into this space. Unique VR experiences only matter to a fringe set of users. The every day mundane stuff is what matters to the rest.
Take the ability to run iPad apps on it natively. VR enthusiasts will scoff at it. The real trick though is that it means you aren’t having to switch devices to do a mundane task, which means more time on each device. That’s what appeals to the bigger market, and has been proven time and time again , because it’s not making them do contortions to use it.
Another issue is thinking that the demographic for sales has to be the demographic for ads. People will reply and say: well the price isn’t for the lay person. To which I’d say, who cares? They’re not the early adopter but they’re still the demographic for who the people buying this will be developing apps and content for.
I disagree with this. Why would someone buy a headset instead of use an ipad or desktop? If there is nothing unique to VR why should people put a heavy thing on their head for about the same experience?
>Take the ability to run iPad apps on it natively. VR enthusiasts will scoff at it
No, where have you seen this? Everyone likes the ability to run these apps, but my point is that these apps are not a draw. Most people find it more convenient to use these apps on their phones or tablets.
>To which I’d say, who cares?
Developers care. Most big developers don't care about devices unless they have a large amount of users. Their time is better spent on devices / platforms which have hundreds of millions of users.
Because the experience can still be enhanced by the form factor and be compelling. Watching a movie isn't unique, but watching it on a 100ft display while trapped in a plane is compelling. The entire pitch is progressive experiences, and has been for every product they've shown since the iPhone. Take what you're used to doing and make an experience that progressively scale to the form factors.
> No, where have you seen this?
Countless posts here on HN and in the virtual reality community (like /r/virtualreality) that bemoan the device as a glorified iPad, and hate the amount of 2D windows shown.
> Most big developers don't care about devices unless they have a large amount of users
Big developers will take the risk, and are already doing so. Apple showed off multiple developers like Unity, Disney and more making apps. ( more here https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/06/developer-tools-to-cr... )
Part of that is that the visionOS allows for progressive experiences, which is not something other HMDs allow for. Developers aren't building an app for visionOS. They're adding to their existing codebases for iOS. Their investment therefore isn't a niche new platform, but the entire ecosystem.
There's a huge first mover advantage in software on these platforms as has been shown by the iPhone where people were going ga-ga over fart apps, and beer drinking apps. Those people made bank because they delivered fun knick-knacks before the market got saturated.
Even looking at other HMDs, it's often the big players and the indie players that move first. The middle of the spectrum are the ones who move last when the ecosystem is there. The Oculus Quest launched with a Star Wars game available.
Apple has customers who will buy multiple $15,000 configuration Mac Pros without batting an eye. That’s the price of the tool and for what they’re working on (perhaps a $250,000,000 movie) it’s justified.
The Vision Pro, as announced, clearly isn’t much of a consumer product. The price is too high. But that’s not surprising, it does have ‘Pro’ in the name.
When the Vision or Vision Air. come out in a few years for $1000-$1500, that will be the (higher end) consumer move. And by then software will exist.
For now it seems more for executives. Maybe travelers. On The Talk Show Gruber and Panzarino were talking about how useful it would be for working on secret designs or private financial information or HIPAA information in public. You could be in an airline seat or at Starbucks or whatever and work on the information without anyone else being able to see it, unlike a laptop screen.
And it’s not hard to imagine how it might be very useful to architects or certain other businesses that might be willing to spend the money for an expensive tool to buy expensive software if it really helped them out.
I don’t think Apple will have problems selling them, even at $3500. Is it the next iPod? No.
But right now, they have got to be 109% constrained on those insane displays. Nothing else in the headset seems anywhere near as hard to manufacture.
I would absolutely buy this argument were it not for Apple's own portrayal of it during unveiling that shown a person watching movies, which is not commonly a professional role ( as in, it is intended as a consumer product ).
That is not to say that I think it is a bad idea. I am not an apple fanboy and I want to get my hands on it if I can convince wife it is not a waste.
It may have looked like that person in the demo was watching a movie, but maybe they were making a movie…
To be clear, I don’t think any of this will be driven by need, especially at first. It’s going to be something people want to use. If the virtual screens are just barely usable, they are going to sell a bunch of these things to people who want to work on virtual screens. I can’t seem myself ever doing it, but I know there’s some demand for it.
People who have the money WILL buy these as early adopters, but it's not a mass-market product.
Like the comment above said, the real game changer will be the Vision and Vision Air or whatever they're called. Either the tech gets cheaper or Apple will pare down the sensors and features to a point that satisfies the applications devs have built for the Pro and shown that they are viable.
The pass-through eye display for example is just 100% Apple flexing, not something a "normal" user will ever need. That's a few hundred off the price.
I have a gaming PC that I bought for 2000 EUR pc that I built for entertainment and some work. 4000 EUR is so much out there that I cannot imagine who is buying it with his own money
Top designers for Ferrari? Famous architects working on buildings costs tens of millions? Other expensive people like that I can see it.
People buy skiing equipment for 2000€ Euros just to go skiing a few times a year. They buy mountain bikes or road bikes for 5000€. They buy brake upgrades on their sports car for 7000€.
I think Apple will easily find a few people willing to spend 4000€ on a toy.
Whether the market will be big enough for 3rd party developers to be sustainable is another question.
My Apple //e setup cost around $3500 in 1986.
My Mac LCII setup was $4K in 1992.
There are enough people in the world who will drop $3500 on the Vision Pro without blinking for Apple to sell all it can make.
Someone ought to tell Apple then; I see eight videos on https://www.apple.com/apple-vision-pro/ and seven of them show home use.
Of course, it's possible the product targeting will change. I certainly agree that "it's for business" is how the execs responsible for HoloLens and Google Glass have kept them on life support to delay pulling the plug.
Or has that changed? I'd be lying if I said I keep up to date on this stuff.
You’re right, Apple stuff is certainly used in tons of other industries by people who either need them for a specific reason or just prefer them.
Do you have quotes showing otherwise? I wouldn't be shocked to be wrong here, mind you.
Movies are not just rendered on rendering farms. There's a ton of other stuff that gets done. Rendering the final movies is the smallest, most boring and trivial part of the whole process.
For me it seems more like a devkit targeted at developers who are supposed to figure out what can you even do with it.
Exactly. And Apple showed exactly zero use cases for "vision pro" that would be useful to these people.
Also, iPad has had lidar for a while, which you can use to 3d scan stuff when building out AR apps.
I hope someone will find more compelling use cases for the hardware, but it will definitely have an ecosystem on day one.
For some, maybe, but not for everybody. I certainly would never use them for this, no matter how good they were at it.
By the way, how do you show something inside the VR headset to somebody sitting near to you? Do you buy two headsets one for you and one for guests? One for each family member?
The problem is the pricetag. It's 10x too expensive for mass adoption and 5x too expensive for developers to bother working for it.
Movies - same thing, also not worth the headset price.
Remote Meetings - why do I want to wear a headset that stops a video of me being recorded? The presentation they had exactly showed that people who didn't wear the headset had video of them and people wearing the headset just had an avatar card. It was the opposite of helpful. This headset makes remote meetings worse.
Porn - its an apple device - any porn will just be web based because otherwise apple won't allow it.
None of these use cases are $3500 compelling. There's no target market, and no compelling use case. It's a brand new helicopter skidoo hybrid and as impressive as it sounds its not clear why it exists yet.
> The problem is the pricetag. It's 10x too expensive for mass adoption and 5x too expensive for developers to bother working for it.
Apple's name behind it, and advertising it as a work device as well as a gaming device, would let them steal a lot of the market.
And I say that as someone who doesn't currently own any Apple products.
Except when you want to show the display to multiple people at the same time.
If it were a smartphone killer maybe you could eat that market, but smartphones are commodity products at this point. You can’t compete in that space at 3.5k usd. Even if it was good, it still will be a niche product for enthusiasts. It needs a low price and a mass market killer app.
Perhaps, but only because most gaming in general is done on smartphones.
I reckon about 80-90% of the games I own on PlayStation are either single-player or online multiplayer, which is the same as single-player in what relates to the matter at hand.
PC gaming is even less social.
Apple has the luxury of being patient, and the benefit of a developer ecosystem and bottomless funds. This release may or may not be huge (I don’t think it will), but the one after, or the one after that, probably will be.
I agree Apple doesn’t know the use cases or customers that will be big for gen 3 in a few years. So what? They didn’t know that for the Watch or iPhone either. The markets evolves, as markets do, and the developers experimented, and later-generation hardware evolved to support how people used earlier generations.
I can understand skepticism, but I really don’t understand adamance at this point.
Apple hates 3rd party developers, the ecosystem exists because there's money to be made off Apple users. If there's no users of an Apple device there will be no developers - and frankly, there's no incentive to even hack around on their devices.
Apple likes to build platforms and let 3rd party developers figure out the application layer. After a third party finds a big enough market Apple will crush them and take it. It's essentially just outsourced R&D where Apple doesn't pay for the bad ideas.
You're outrageous. It seems to me you're the one outraged that someone would do anything less than praise it breathlessly.
Anyone who is willing to pay $3500 for this device is also likely to pay a lot for apps and games. Way better than extracting pennies out of Android users.
This is exactly how the Apple Watch started! Today it's the most popular wearable on the market by a huge margin.
Their Vision Pro just needs to get into enough company's hands for people to start exploring what markets might exist. The direction Apple will take things if it turns out that most of the demand is in the medical field will be a lot different than if the demand turns out to be in education. By growing where the demand is initially, they can lower the cost of entry which will make it possible to go into other fields where their is value but lower margins.
The iPod is an even better example, the first three or so versions didn't hit the mark, but with 4G they finally had the right feature set to sell them like hotcakes.
Those also required a high-end PC costing costing thousands of dollars and lacked key technologies like eye-tracking. There simply won’t be bargains here for many years: VR is less demanding than AR but even there the low-end approach hasn’t seen popular adoption because your brain’s threshold for something seeming real is quite high and has failure modes like nausea and vomiting.
The Vision Pro is Apple’s take on that problem trying to see if they can sacrifice on pricing but actually hit a threshold where the quality is high enough to work for most people. It’s going to be interesting to see if the productivity applications they demoed are going to be as good as they looked – if that experiment doesn’t work at this price, it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the field.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-parent-bytedance-battles...
I suspect that gets back to the space / isolation problem: if you don’t live alone there’s probably just not enough time where you’re using VR to be worth the purchase price to most people. That doesn’t get better until they’re cheap enough that the entire household can have their own or people find professional reasons to own one.
The site is working for me at the moment.
I switched back to Firefox Developer Edition in 2017-ish.
So I figured I must've left a bad user-agent string or something in my about:config. But after lots of trial and error with FF settings, curl/dig, with VPN, without VPN... turns out it was because I was using Cloudflare DNS. I forgotten I'd switched a while back when I was getting dropped packets to quad9.
My best assessment is for whatever reason Cloudflare's DNS gives a different A record pointing to a non-TLS (or broken TLS) redirect, so Chrome worked because that's allowed by default. A fresh FF profile also worked because it defaults to DoH thus bypassing the problem completely. My VPN worked because it has its own DNS. But because my daily driver FF profile is set to use system DNS with forced TLS, it'd hit the broken redirect it got from Cloudflare and die.
So as usual, it was DNS.
> If we were just beginning to design this mechanism, and not documenting existing protocol, it is unlikely that we would have done things exactly this way.
--/--
> We recommend that the feature be turned off by default in all nameserver software, and that operators only enable it explicitly in those circumstances where it provides a clear benefit for their clients. We also encourage the deployment of means to allow users to make use of the opt-out provided. Finally, we recommend that others avoid techniques that may introduce additional metadata in future work, as it may damage user trust.
Seems archive.is is in the wrong here, which is a little surprising. Don't meet your heroes I guess. But then I also can't see their rebuttal because Twitter is currently a dumpster fire.
Similar to the iPhone 'winning' capacitive touch (or the iPod winning with Toshiba's mini HDD's), Apple plans to 'win' on SOTA hand tracking, camera-based full-color passthrough, face tracking, etc.
These are all things that Meta (and the rest) have talked about, but have not yet executed on.
It's not surprising (given this strategy) that the first runs are at low yield, the $3tn question will be can Tim Cook fix the problem fast enough (he was largely chosen as CEO because of this exact skill).
My guess is that this follows a 1/2 scale iPad trajectory - People like it, the early days are choppy but no one denigrates the product's quality, the product defines the category (and potentially becomes the category like iPad did), then over time the category becomes a utility product (e.g., iPad cash registers driving a lot of sales) rather than a 'new' iPhone.
If that were true, they’d long have an iPhone with a foldable screen, and would have shipped AR/VR glasses years ago.
I don’t think that ever was their strategy. IMO, they figure out what a good product needs and build it as soon as technology allows.
That always requires integrating technology well, and often also requires using new tech, but that’s just a consequence of wanting to build the best possible.
Beating everyone else to market certainly isn’t (high) on their list (“less space then a nomad”, “my Nokia could do that years before iPhone”, etc)
But the use-cases displayed in the demo video are just weird, not what I expected apple to come up with.. you don't buy a ski-mask to make 3D photos of your kids, or buy a ski-mask to watch 2D facetime windows of conference call participants even if they are floating in mid-air instead of on your phone..
My guess/hope about the 3D videos is that they'll bring 3D capture to the iPhone. For conference calls, I can sort of see the value—I might actually prefer being an avatar so I can sit on the couch and have plenty of room to open multiple documents and Slack threads.
I think you’re really confusing my point here.
There were plenty of touch screen devices before the iPhone, but only a few niche devices had capacitive touch screens.
Apple doesn’t throw too-early technologies against the wall (folding phones still have visible creases when opened, for example).
Unlike the iPhone, this is clearly an indoor device, not an AR system to navigate around town.
It seems a much more immersive desktop experience, but are you really going to be more productive using AR than a 4k monitor or two? Maybe so, but I wouldn't take that for granted until people start actually using these for work.
It does seem like it has a lot to offer for gaming. That isn't Apple's traditional market, but it could be the direction they're going in.
Think for example of their work on virtual avatars [0]. That research is FOUR years old but looks about 1000 times better than Apple's "Personas" from visionOS. But Apple will actually ship.
[0]: https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-oculus-codec-avatars-vr...
And you'd probably be surprised to know just how capable other offerings are, too. I'm a broken record, but the PS5 VR is quite impressive. Yes, you have to have a cable to hook up to the PS5, but not having a battery is an odd benefit. Not to mention the general cost difference. And my understanding is that it isn't that far ahead of the Meta offerings.
This was also the first time I read about your FaceTime usage being an odd 3d rendered version of you.
The tracking of my hands, though, is one that just feels misguided. The controllers provide haptic feedback that is needed for many games. To the point that I would view hand gestures as completely irrelevant?
Is the eye tracking much better than the PS5? Again a thing that feels neat and is nice to see. But then I quickly turned off all controls based on it, as I would rather the indirect options with my hands. In almost all cases.
Everything about it gave off the vibe of marketing teams overhyping a product and engineering left to pick up the pieces afterwards, which is very unlike how Apple usually works.
Yes, the headset exists and it works. People wore it after the keynote and wrote about the experience.
Once the goals were met they had to ship the product despite uncertainty on how exactly it would be used.
They could tell it could be used but have no insight if it will be used.
> They had AT&T, the iPhone’s wireless carrier, bring in a portable cell tower, so they knew reception would be strong. > > Then, with Jobs’s approval, they preprogrammed the phone’s display to always show five bars of signal strength regardless of its true strength. > The chances of the radio’s crashing during the few minutes that Jobs would use it to make a call were small, but the chances of its crashing at some point during the 90-minute presentation were high. [1]
This mobile data hackn was among many other problems with the product at the announcement of iPhone.
iPhone sold ~1.4 million units in the first year. But arguably, the Vision Pro is easily 10x more complex of a product than iPhone was. It is also a much bigger leap in human computer interaction than a touchscreen.
I think these sales projection numbers seem reasonable for what the tech is, and if anything the system’s stability at demo was way further along than iPhone.
most threads are of extremely low value. it is sad, it's significantly worse than even just five years ago.
This seems like exactly what Apple would do.
If the passthrough eyes were available, clickbait journalism would also probably do things like intentionally cross their eyes and get a goofy look on it, then write and article about how the headset will make you look extra goofy.
Video of a journalist using it.
We're in a post-vid slump growth phase.
Nvidia is, as you said, a spike. One driven by AI but will probably be irrelevant in a few years. They're still great at engineering and CUDA will almost certainly continue to dominate, but the AI boom won't last forever. Once ASICs hit the scene it will be game over for GPGPU vendors, like it was with crypto in 2021. They'll still have gaming and industry markets to cater to, but their spiking days are numbered.
So with these recent influx of capital to me that's the market saying that it believes Nvidia and Apple are going to bring in profits in the future so here's money now to grow in order to capture those profits that come in later.
I'm probably misunderstanding aspects here though.
Yes, it's not as simple as "the company will make profits, therefore it's worth a lot".
Apple's expected forward p/e is ~28 over the next five years, which means if you believe that and buy now, you can expect an average return of 3.5%. How much you expect future earnings to grow determines if buying now is a good deal or not.
More seriously, if anybody launches a platform that can't weather a recession, it wasn't going to make it long-term anyway. Windows 3 launched around the 1990 recession, IBM PC launched into the 1982 recession, iPhone launched during the 2007/2008 recession. Platforms take time to take shape. A recession occurring early in a platform's life might even be beneficial, as it will make management more forgiving of "missed" sales targets in the early years.
1 - The USA
2 - Seriously, we're not in a recession and haven't been for 3 years. The economy grew at this rate most of the last decade and there were no complaints about us being in a recession. Money costs more now is the major difference.
For people who think they'll be designing and coding on Vision Pro virtual screens all day might be disappointed.
EDIT: Although since the screen pixels are aligned to your eyes (head, more specifically), and not to the environment, this means the rasterization of the text will shift around as you move (even slightly). Which means it'll be slightly blurrier than a screen of similar resolution, as you can't employ "pixel snapping" and other tricks (as seen on Windows) to make low res text look better.
I’m perfectly comfortable spending 8+ hours in a day writing code on a non-4K screen (widescreen with the pixel density of a 27in 1440p) and based on what I’ve used in the past could probably handle anything as good as a 27in 1080p monitor with the right fonts.
That said, I do find the screen door effect on my Valve Index rather distracting and can’t use it for longer than an hour or two without risking a headache, especially if I am reading any text (tried watching a movie with subtitles and oh boy).
So I don’t think retina resolution is necessary for work (at least for me personally) but it does seem like having the screens so close and completely covering vision does increase sensitivity to picture quality so I may be wrong about that.
What's the killer app for this device which other devices on the market don't support today?
I don’t know that a killer app for it exists, but with its built-in developer base it’s inheriting from iOS thanks to using the same APIs (a dev base that’s notoriously fast to pick up new features, at that), I believe the chances of a third party dev finding a killer app are significantly higher than with prior AR platforms.
Also worth noting this is not a “headset” but a computer (“headtop”?) in a different format. Think of it not as buying a headset for your gaming rig but as a laptop replacement.
If you’re talking about additive displays like xreal , magic lens or HoloLens, then the Vision Pro has a much higher field of view of the content and the ability to display things that are darker than the real world , in exchange for looking at a screen of the world instead of directly at it. Those trade offs are subjective so I won’t focus on them because the tech is so different.
If you compare to other VR headsets with cameras feeding video to the screen, there’s a lot:
1. Clarity is higher. If you look at the footage from their product video which they said is shot from device, it’s a lot more stable and clear than anything up until you get to the $6k Varjo XR-3.
2. Latency is lower apparently. Most other headsets have more of a delay between photon in to photon out based on people who’ve tried it.
3. Better reprojection of the image. If you look at videos of pass through from the Quest Pro, as you move, things warp in the view. From videos from the vision pro, it doesn’t seem to have any of that. (Obviously I’m just taking each company at its word that videos are honest)
Supposedly the Quest 3 is significantly better passthrough than the Quest Pro but very few people have tried it and said anything in depth about it, so it’s too early to judge.
What about mRNA vaccines? Centimetre-accuracy differential GPS navigation systems that fit the palm of your hand, like the uBlox f9p? 3D printers like the Ultimaker S5 that can feed carbon fiber thread into the print? High-end cameras like the Sony A1?
What is the defining feature(s) that makes a new VR headset so much more advanced?
I’m not saying that they didn’t make something great - it does seem great. And given it’s Apple, they’ll likely have great polish and attention to detail, that make a HUGE difference.
But it’s not a best thing since sliced bread. It’s not a technological breakthrough. It’s “just” a new generation of customer electronic device, that’s better than previous one.
And of course Apple is buying the displays for their headset from Sony, so who is doing the envelope pushing there?
While calling it “the most advanced” might be a bit of a stretch, the sophistication of the hardware was something that I wouldn’t have previously thought possible. Some of your counter examples fall short of that complexity. The actual mRNA vaccines are pretty technologically simple, the complexity in differential gps is in its algorithms rather than hardware, and is that camera really groundbreaking (genuine question).
Apple vision is even more technologically simple. You get the screen, attach some sensors to it, sprinkle cameras, add CPU, battery, lenses and you’re done.
> the complexity in differential gps is in its algorithms rather than hardware,
I could somehow understand your ignorance when it comes to mRNA - it’s outside of typical software engineer field of expertise. But GPS?
Yeah, complexity is just in algorithms. Building a satellite that can survive decades in space, building and attaching extremely precise clock to, some solar panels and antennas, thrusters and few other minor details, then getting that onto the rocket and injecting into very precise orbit - that’s an easy part! And especially doing that in 1970s!
All those things are easy compared to leet code! /s
You mentioned some cool tech stuff, but it's all too categorically random and distantly unrelated for a fair and meaningful comparison.
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/71648f5ad34f4d8f972718e5f36...
This particular headset? It is too expensive, too bulky, etc. But, I can tell you that in time any serious developer will have this. The only thing that will make me give up my ultra-wide monitor is this: an ultra-wide screen monitor that I can take anywhere.
Is this the next iphone or not? That is the question.
As for AVP, it is a brand new category where the use cases are yet to be identified. It costs 2 months' rent, it has no killer apps that people are going to line up for, and you'll look weird wearing it. It's a completely different proposition.
AirPods got so much hate in 2016, it can be hard to remember. They were far from a sure thing.
As for unsubsidized phones, the US is the only country that sold them on contract, and the iPhone didn't take off until Apple had AT&Tcut the price to $199 to match other flagships. The Nokia N95 for example retailed at $730 and sold millions in 2007.
Regarding the iPhone, I'm not sure what your point is, but my point is: people mocked the iPhone for having a ridiculously high price at launch despite having fewer features than other high-end phones. It's a direct analog to the Vision Pro reception, because this happens literally every time Apple launches in a new category.
But the Watch is a moderate success compared to what? What other consumer electronic product by any other company is either selling in the estimated volume and with the margins of the Watch?
How is something a “status symbol” if it has a 60% market share in the case of phones?
Any teenager working at McDonalds can buy an iPhone on 2 year contract or get one “free” with a contract from one of the low end MVNOs
Perhaps the majority of humans alive today don't live in a market where that's true?
For this kind of money and discomfort you require mind blowing 3D experiences for it to be worth it. The problem with that is that those are impossibly hard/expensive to build by 3rd party developers.
The risk is that you'll end up with endless 2D apps projected into 3D, or poorly made 3D apps similar to today's AR apps with shitty graphics.
I’m not saying it isn’t true, but rather there is no evidence to support it. Ars Technica is also reporting on this topic this morning, and they are also missing evidence-backed sources. It’s all Wall Street analyst speculation.
Read with several large, coarse, grains of salt.
2. My existing monitor is already really light on my neck.
I don't see any benefits.
2. Taking it with you easily. You have the same large screen (s) with you in the hotel room or at your in-law’s or at the cafe (people might look at you weird but this is a massive flex regardless)
The Index pretty much has it -- it's doable. I can read comfortably in there, or watch a youtube video and not feel like I'm getting some grainy, crappy version, but it's just barely there. It's very heavy and hot, though, so I almost never choose to use it.
The claimed resolution of the Vision Pro is unbelievably larger than the Index. I forget what the numbers were exactly, but they claimed to be able to virtualize "multiple 4k monitors" or something, and the per-eye resolutions _actually supported that_.
The next thing is: it's gotta be reasonably light, balanced, and cool, so I can wear it for an hour and not get intense neck pain or nausea. I'm skeptical but, hey, we gotta keep trying.
If it hits those points: it'll be a great virtual monitor and a lot more.
But they don’t have as compelling latency, hand tracking, or app development toolkits
MacOS seems to have pretty spotty monitor settings stability, I'm regularly having to fix a setting that was forgotten for no reason.
Activating PIP mode on my 4k monitor causes OSX to shit itself as it rearranges everything, which is odd because there is no perceptible change to OSX's understanding of my monitors. This means my 4k monitor is somehow reporting PIP as a change in monitors (basically snitching on me) when I'm PIPing in an unrelated device.
Ubuntu, Debian, Garuda don't have this behavior. They remember settings better and don't shit themselves when PIP gets activated.
For reasons like this, I'm skeptical that Apple Vision Pro will do a great job at the monitor replacement angle.
However, I'll follow that closely and probably wait for a gen 2.
I'll be curious how they navigate the difficulties of getting this category to self-sustainability.
I haven’t looked into the SDK and what it offers, but I read it’s not full room immersive as some gaming sets are.
When they switched from PowerPC to x86 in 2005, the dev kit was a Pentium 4 motherboard in a Power Mac G5 case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_Transition_Kit
Apple never used any Pentium CPUs in Macs except for this loaner model. The first Intel Mac desktop was an iMac, so completely different form factor.
why does every thread about an Apple product end up just as a competition to see who can have the least informed but most negative take on whatever it is?
Obviously this is just one of many cases.
paywall and I'm not really interested beyond the headline anyway.
To each their own.
Same with a Rolex embedded phone case, having all the money in the world won't buy you a fancier iPhone than anybody else, so if you're intent on turning everything you own into an excessive status symbol you have to take your device that already has a built-in clock, and add an less accurate but handmade and more expensive watch to it.
I have a hard time imagining who exactly would be impressed by that, but what do I know?
I was worried my Unity Game dev contracts were dead for good, but I'm back now baby.
Apple saved my consulting biz with their Unity partnership!
The only thing that sucks is no controllers
anything happening in this space?
[1] https://www.uploadvr.com/apple-vision-pro-supports-unity/
vision pro apps need to return 1000x-10000x
Leaving only longer term options for devs
We'll see in Q1/2024 when the Vision Pro comes out for real.
No need for an “Avatar 3” — it is fast and relatively cheap compared to the hardware that movie / video game productions already use.
If the market likes the headset, there’s no reason it has to be limited to 100k units. Figure out how to make an average office employee 10% more effective and it pays for itself quickly.