Apple Vision Pro available in the U.S. on February 2

https://www.businessinsider.com/less-expensive-apple-vision-...

For 99% of the price point people will pay for VR, it is still there.

...and will be for Apple Vision (non-pro) and Apple VisionSE.

I travel often and I’m looking forward to always having the ability to have a large high resolution display to work on. Also seems cool for entertainment. It’s returnable like anything else.

So one could for example have the benefits of multiple screens while lounging or in the middle of a flight. Even at a desk, window/screen placement would be more flexible than otherwise possible.

It's kind of like comparing a monitor that's locked to a single app with a monitor that has multiple spaces you can switch between. They both have the same resolution, but one of them can display much more stuff.

In VR, that 4K needs to cover over 100 degrees FOV. And any 'virtual monitor' content is being resampled and filtered, inevitably blurring/softening things.

I suspect that we're going to need a lot more than 4K resolution before you can comfortably work with small text (e.g. coding, web browsing) in VR.

It would be nice to work in various locations with the equivalent of a big 4K screen.

I am unfortunately one of those people who really cannot work on a laptop screen, I need lots of real estate. (And laptops are ergonomically bad even if you don't mind the small screen)

I actually currently have 3 4K monitor + keyboard workstations in various rooms in my house. (Office, living room, garage) because I like to work in various places depending on the weather, who else is home, etc.

In France, it was launched at 600€ (8GB version) with a contract; but just the year prior I had bought a Windows mobile smartphone that completely sucked for 250€ (LG, under contract as well), plus a 210€ iPhone Nano. All in all, you are not that far from the price for a device that was truly something else and had all the functionality of the previous combo and much more.

The iPhone worked because it was priced pretty cheap considering everything it brought to the table. In fact, I am absolutely certain that people started buying iPhones because they intuitively understood that they would save money by staying ahead of the curve while bringing a lot of usefulness into their lives. It is extremely doubtful that something like that will happen with the Vision Pro, firstly because it doesn't really replace any existing device and its pricing is completely disconnected from ordinary people's reality.

The iPhone was 5 years ahead of anything on the market, yet it did not cost 3 to 7 times the equivalent technology. Actually, as I said I'm pretty sure it worked because people figured out that while it lacked some features or had "not as good" specs on paper for certain things, it was a far more usable and useful device. If you looked at its competitors at that time a Nokia N95 8GB would go for 300€ under contract (700€ naked) and the most popular Samsung/LG big feature phones/smartphone were around that price.

The iPhone was not expensive. This is a mythology created by Apple fanboys under Tim Cook that gaslighted everyone with "clever" diversification and an insane pricing ladder where he keeps selling old technology for twice the price of its competitors just because he benefits from the Apple brand halo. When you look at it the first iPhone was what is now called a "Pro" iPhone; it was the best Apple could sell, but it was also the best in the market overall, there wasn't any alternative with a better integrated package. Even if we make a charitable comparison and take for example the most expensive iPhone 3G at 700€ (16Go version) and ignore the Pro Max iPhone (which is an extreme outlier) and go for the "base" Pro iPhone at 1230€ ; you go from 68% of monthly minimum salary to 90%; a rather substantial 22% increase. For what is essentially the same thing relative to the overall market. If you were to just consider inflation, 700€ in 2009 would be around 890€ today. This is already 80€ more money than the "base" iPhone 15. This base iPhone is technologically underwhelming, its only redeeming quality is the fast silicon but it is largely unnecessary and as to make up for the lower amount of RAM (that nowadays is way more relevant to what you can do with your phones that pure benchmark speed). It is basically the same thing as a Samsung S23, expect sold at a 300€ premium.

This is the reality that the Vision Pro is launching with, and as a "new" technology it was already bound to be expensive, but under the Tim Cook "leadership" it is bound to be a meme device considering the pricing placement. It is better technology than the competition, but not 3 times better and its potential use cases are not 3 times better than what exists. In fact, we already know from very similar existing devices that such things are uncomfortable enough that they could not be considered as a primary device. So even if someone finds a use for them, it's going to be very niche and time bound. Nothing that could warrant its asking price.

But I find it very fitting to the Tim Cook era, it represents exactly what Apple has become with him: overpriced, overengineered, luxury show-off technology. Lots of posturing, enormous potential to display wealth; very little substance.

It's not like users will be allowed to play real games or install a real OS.

I'd like to know how it handles itself when you throw 8K120fps HEVC or AV1 at it. If it can't do that, then how could it ever compete with a $2500 PC and a Valve Index?

The entertainment aspect is a massive draw too—I don't want to downplay it by any means, but people were asking for some of the reasons that I want one, so I was genuinely answering with some of the features I envision using and how.

Personally, I still think VR is mostly something like 3D TV/movies where you end up paying a lot more for nothing of real value, just a novelty factor.

They sell premium hardware with a walled garden of software that meets the full expectations of 80% of people in general and 90-95% of people who can afford these devices.

For their target audience, $3000-3500 is probably the perfect the price point for the “first” generation of a new (to them) tech platform. Insofar as it allows them to turn a profit, ship best in class mass-manufacturable hardware, and not price out their core demographic of new adopters.

I have been an Apple customer since the first iPod but nowadays their pricing makes absolutely no sense considering their products' positioning compared to the rest of the market.

But somehow you cannot say that and you will be gaslighted about Apple pricing that always have been this way (even though it is demonstrably and factually not true).

At least for the iPhone there was a good excuse: network operators were not very keen on letting a completely open device run on their network, and still today there are limitations on what you can do with a fully rooted Android device. It somewhat makes sense; the nefarious potential is pretty big.

But for a headset? No reason at all to have it locked down from the get go.

All indications is that Apple will only be able to manufacturer 2 million of them. Is there any doubt those will sell out.

As far as how many people did it. Back in 1992, Apple was the number one seller of computers when they started selling “low cost” Macs. Apple didn’t start struggling until Windows 95.

Apple was more valuable than Microsoft until the mid 90s if I recall correctly

While Apple sold a lot less Apple //e’s than low cost Commodores and Atari computers, they were much more profitable.

I do not own Apple stock, I don't work for them, and I'm not buying one (although I'll be watching with great interest)

However.... whether or not you think any of these products are worth it, the Apple Vision Pro is objectively pretty far ahead of the Quest 2/3 in terms of capability.

But I've had opticians do a poor job of getting me the prescription I need, and so the Zeiss lenses were way off.

I bet Apple will have this dialed in from the get-go.

> Apple says that "not all prescriptions are supported."

And yes, I’m aware of the radio waves around me constantly and that’s a problem as well. So I was adding any more of it going to do anything to help us?

http://pe.org.pl/articles/2020/9/35.pdf

But there are still electronics in the headset and I can’t wait to get a hold of one to measure the EMFs that are coming out of it.

And the jokes about the tinfoil hat I don’t get it. There is so much research around this, and so many questions. Still, you think the evidence is all in. And we have an industry who is trying to downplay the non-thermal effects of electro biotic radiation because it would damage the industry if anything harmful came out.

As mentioned elsewhere, the people who went to the Vision Labs are buying them on release day, so there must be something there.

Apple historically has been able to improve on current existing technology to deliver an experience that the rest of the industry had to catch up to, they aren't in the business of releasing completely new unseen product types since the 80s...

The tech journalists who got an early look seem to think so. Obviously time will tell if this holds up under real world conditions.

I was a VR early adopter and have used the best consumer units available. The thing that always held it back for me was the obvious screen door effect and the isolation of these headsets.

Apple seems to have focused on both of these issues, which makes the device intriguing. Being able to immediately interact with the room in high fidelity will make a huge difference. The AR mode on the Valve Index is awful, but also really cool. If Apple delivers on half of the room AR, it’s a huge step forward.

And a lack of screen door effect makes it viable for real productivity use cases.

Also the software is much more restrictive. Barely any “flat” apps and doesn’t support the hybrid 2d apps with depth. Also can’t pin apps around a physical space. Some of that is coming but it’s clearly way behind in terms of software features. Which I’ll add lower latency streaming from other devices to as well

The Vision Pro is nothing like this, in hardware it is a noticeable improvement to what already exists (but not that big compared to the latest gear in the premium segment) and the software is largely a copy of what already exists with no clear use case. You could say the eye/hand tracking is the killer feature but it has to been seen how reliable it actually is in practice and it doesn't enable any particular application. In fact, it seems obvious that for many things done in VR people will quickly need to associate some controller. All that at 3 times (at least) the price of the closest competitors.

The iPhone worked not because it was a magical innovation, but because it was the recipe that had all the right ingredients in the good proportions following the right cooking process; at a palatable price. Pretending otherwise is history bending.

But you can always wish and dream, I'll give you that much.

Granted, none of that is available to consumers yet.

Epic as well, recommend an iPhone for their meta human capture.

Feuds don’t often stop pragmatism.

Totally fine to say their version of it is bad because you can only change perspective very little. But saying it's "only" 3D would I think confuse people more, since it'd be wrong.

I ended up having to pay $100/yr for a developer account to be able to sign and notarize the binaries. They can now open them like usual, with just a warning that it was downloaded from the internet. But without the signature they get an uncircumventable gatekeeper error.

ETA: See https://wiki.freepascal.org/Code_Signing_for_macOS#Big_Sur_a...

1. Your link gives directions for enabling a setting on M1/2/3 Macs that does allow running unsigned apps from the internet without prompting. (see the heading labeled "Big Sur and later on Apple M1 ARM64 processors").

2. Even without following those steps, I can run unsigned apps (I just have to click through a gatekeeper warning the first time I run it)

3. Requiring technical users to run two terminal commands and adjusting one setting in system preferences one time to globally allow unsigned apps seems like a reasonable trade-off to prevent non-technical users from running malicious programs... like, if I were setting up a Mac for my grandmother, I would never enable this gatekeeper bypass.

Gatekeeper is one of those things that is loud when it gets in your way, but silent if it isn't working... so having it off by default doesn't really make sense. The only way I can see having it off by default is by adding a screen to the onboarding flow that asks a question like "do you plan to submit an app to the App Store in the 12 months?", and then disabling gatekeeper if the user clicks yes.

Because while Apple pretend to be operating in good faith, they have been hard at work to make sure nothing they do not approve of can be run on their hardware. No matter what some fools like to think. There is a greedy money related part but it also has a lot to do with dystopian authoritarian views "I know better" that are very common among the boomers currently running Apple.

In french my mother would say that those peoples are "nigauds" (dense/thick) which I find pretty fitting.

Personally I’m more put off by the bulkiness of the device, something very light is necessary!

Apple already knows how to sell “overpriced” consumer hardware since they have a $5,000 Pro XDR monitor and $1,000 stand to go with that “overpriced” monitor in their line up.

The monitor is not a hit so there’s no reason to assume that $3,500 Vision Pro will be an (instant) hit, since it was intentionally priced to be out of reach of many people.

I guess people assume because it’s Apple, or perhaps because of the amount of buzz they generated with the reveal for the Vision Pro, every product they make has to be a hit

Your reply doesn’t disagree with what I wrote. At all.

At the end of the day, the $3,500 price tag is also a signal as to Apple’s thesis about how well the product might do on the marketplace. Their thesis can mean a bunch of things:

1. they think the device will appeal to a niche set of professional customers that have bought or have the ability to buy products in this price range e.g. customers of the high-priced $5,000 Pro XDR Display I mentioned. Their plan might be to grow the applications that Vision Pros can be used for, which will lead to increased demand among pro users which will in turn grow the revenue from this niche segment.

2. they don’t think there’s mass market appeal to justify selling Vision Pro units at a lower price (or at a loss like other companies have done by deploying penetration pricing e.g. Meta) as you observed. Again, their plan might be to grow the applications that Vision Pro can be used for leading to increased demand. The shiny new spatial computing tech that makes the Vision Pro exciting could slowly make it’s way into other products in their line up (or they could introduce a less capable edition at a lower price tag).

E.g. Spatial computing could eventually make it’s way into the next-generation Pro XDR Display monitors used in the office. Apple could also expand their presence in the home with a fresh take on home projectors in-fused with spatial computing, to complement their Apple TV product.

Busting out a portable wireless keyboard and putting on an HMD would be pretty neat IMO, if the HMD was good enough.

VR lets you swivel your head to get more real estate, but it doesn’t let you look at more pixels at once. Not unless you zoom out, which is what exposé already does.

But sure, you can strap a couple kilos of hardware to your face and take on that neck strain, disconnect yourself from the environment around you, and introduce motion sickness just to avoid pressing F3.

- VR meetings in my opinion feel better than 2D Zoom calls - but I don't see companies buying VR headsets for this purpose for their employees

- Education: There's definitely some cool stuff here, but hard to monetize I think (did something in this space a few years ago)

- Non-gaming entertainment, such as watching movies on big screens. This could be the next big area for VR after gaming.

- Fitness. You could count this as gaming, but specific fitness apps are really popular and I would define fitness as a separate category.

I feel like people who believe other people are buying Apple products merely as a status symbol, are projecting their own insecurities and thought processes onto others.

If you weren’t working in the field at the time, it’s hard to appreciate how much that put the mobile web on the map. The places I dealt with went from not caring about it really at all to crash projects optimizing their websites because all of the executives had iPhones and wanted their apps to support them well. I know at least two large organizations where the remote access policy was changed, too. Having been involved with phone/PDA apps since the late 90s, this was very different from anything I’d seen with things like WAP just fizzling with almost no interest from clients. At WWDC in 2008, it was frenzied even before the announcement of the App Store – so many web developers had been able to get permission to attend because of all of that interest.