Damn. Gonna really boost Apple Music and Apple TV+ then over time if Apple Vision Pro works out. Already both great products. Especially with the more recent improvements made to Apple Music.
It is more of a proof-of-concept thing, so that Apple can show off their "vision" of VR. If successful, it may lead to a mass market product in the future, but by that time, YouTube, Nexflix, Spotify, etc... may actually provide first party support.
And I wouldn't even consider this unless it drops below 2000€. It's just insanely priced. Here in Europe with tax it'll be way beyond 4000€. And I own multiple Quests. And a gaming pc with 4090. All those added up didn't cost that much.
Of course it won't be as good at a €1500-2000 price point but I don't care. If it's three times as good as the quest 3 for 3 times the price, it would be amazing.
But my point is, if even an enthusiast like me won't even consider it.. And I travelled to a different country to wait for hours before opening to buy the first iPad :) A product I wasn't even as passionate about as AR/VR.
They're clearly aiming at the richest 1% even in the western world. But those are not necessarily the kind that would have affinity for this stuff. And the people that have enough money to buy it as a toy will have a lot of money to buy a lot more toys all competing for their attention.
I think a lot of these are going to get bought and end up as an expensive showpiece without seeing much use. The amount of people who have both the affinity to make the most of it and the purchasing power to actually buy it will be so few.
There is no competition for it yet, and the competition that will come out (Samsung/Google's collaboration, Meta's next attempt at Quest Pro, etc) will alike Android 1.0: planting a flag, but the actual experience will be measurably worse.
It's a fully-integrated standalone MR headset with access to the wider Apple ecosystem, the highest-quality components of 2022 (yeah, it's shipping late, but it's still better than the competition), and it's backed by Apple, which will end up redefining the conversation around XR as a whole.
Even as a portable home cinema I'd consider it, especially in my small European apartment :-) The price is high because it's expensive to make (~1700 USD [0]), they need to make the money back on R&D, they're supply-constrained [1], and likely because - yes - they want to limit the mass market's exposure to 1.0. Still, as an enthusiast, I've been waiting for this for many years; I'm ready to try it out for myself.
[0]: https://www.uploadvr.com/meta-quest-3-apple-vision-pro-produ...
[1]: https://www.uploadvr.com/apple-vision-pro-production-severel...
But as for Apple vision pro, I don't really see the value at this point. And with the limited amount of headsets that will be out there due to the price, it won't be interesting for content creators.
I have to say though I'm mainly in it for the immersion. I don't really care about mixed reality scenarios as much. I've been trying them with the quest 3 but even when keeping the much lower quality in mind I just don't really find them exciting as I do real immersive VR.
I'm much more enthused about the future of computing; I've wanted to get away from monitors for a long time now, and this finally feels like the first step towards that in the consumer market.
Unless this flops completely and developers/Apple can't figure out actual use cases, there _will_ be a Vision Regular with all the stuff removed that's not 100% necessary for the main use cases (like the stupid "see your eyes from the outside screen :D) and it will be a lot more affordable.
Not Quest 3 prices, but still cheaper.
A huge problem I've had with demonstrating - and being demonstrated to with - MR headsets is that I can't actually see what the user's looking at. This is much more troublesome with MR and passthrough, where it's very important for external users to be able to see that the user is looking at them.
Yeah, there's still a few quirks that need to be worked out, but I think it's a fundamentally important part of future MR headsets, and Meta agrees [0] (much more rudimentary 2021 prototype at [1]).
[0]: https://twitter.com/douglaslanman/status/1732441912043589993
[1]: https://research.facebook.com/blog/2021/8/display-systems-re...
Not to mention weird bugs in the iPadOS app - if you try to download more than X episodes too quickly, like because you're at the airpot before boarding a plane and want an offline cache to last the long flight, the downloads fail with a useless (classic Apple) error message, and nothing outside of a restart of the device fixes it. I hit this a few times, and there are forum reports going back years.
So yeah, had one free month, paid for 2, and cancelled because it isn't even close to being worth it.