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Comment by ToucanLoucan | Hacker News Reader

Well the largest seller is Meta, naturally, since theirs are the cheapest and they've supposedly moved 20 million headsets. The second most popular (on Steam anyway which skews in it's favor) is the Valve Index, which has moved 149 thousand units.

I mention that because I have a feeling a venn diagram of the purchasers of both the Vision Pro and Index have a lot of overlap. I don't have data for that beyond the numbers being kind of similar, but:

- VR is a niche technology

- Index and Vision Pro are both quite pricey and unlikely to be someone's first go into the tech, so you're talking true VR enthusiasts. Casual wanna-tryers are going to go for a used Vive or a Meta Quest

That being said I wouldn't die on the hill of this analysis, because while the Index is expensive (full kit is about $1k) there's still a steep increase for Vision Pro, which runs $3,600 if memory serves.

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The 20M figure includes Quest 1, 2, and Pro, and spans several years [0].

[0: https://skarredghost.com/2023/03/03/quest-20-million-mainstr...]

I enjoyed my Index and I also pre-ordered the Apple Vision Pro

You can't really run AAA games on the Vision, can you?

You can run AAA games on any apple silicon, and the perf is usually superior to anything else on the market except specialized gaming PCs. The real issue is that there is a small selection compared to xbox/ps/pc.

> You can run AAA games on any apple silicon

This is a pretty big oversimplification. Anyone familiar with VR tech and VR gaming knows that experiences that aren't made and instead are modified after the fact to be VR compatible =/= VR experiences. In that sense, I would say the only truly AAA VR game I know of is Half Life Alyx. And it is incredible mind you, but this is a very, very, very exclusive club for games to be in. MAYBE you could count Skyrim VR as it's by far the most polished VR port I've played, with only some jank here and there. But then you have stuff like Fallout 4 VR which, and I say this as someone who put an unethical amount of time into Fallout 4, Fallout 4 VR is just... trash. Just pure garbage. Utterly unplayable. And then there's Doom 2016 VR, which like... you took a run and gun and had to remove the run part to make it so people wouldn't vomit violently after 5 minutes. Is it even the same game?

But "specialized gaming PC" IS what gamers play on. I have a M2 Max and even for native Apple Silicon games like Stray or BG3 the performance is pretty poor, even compared to discrete GPUs of several years ago.

Don't get me wrong, I love that laptop, but a gaming PC it is not. Apple Silicon has the efficiency but not the raw horsepower, even if you get something like the Ultra. That doesn't even include things like DLSS and Reflex. I do my gaming on GeForce Now because it's a dramatically better experience.

That said, it should still be oodles more powerful than the Quest, at least. I wonder if Apple will actually try to push gaming on it.

I don't really disagree with what you say, but I mostly play on laptops and I find that a MacbookPro M3 max feels about the same as my Razer gaming laptop with a 4090 in it.

It's the same silicon on laptop and desktop with apple gear though, and that isn't true with x86. The desktop chips with an edgy heat profile are nearly twice as fast as the laptops if not more. But compared to xbox or PS the apple machines still win. So it's really specialized gaming desktops that win, even though it is by a solid margin.

Yeah, that's a good point. I think I'd feel the same way about Wintel laptop GPUs. I tried a few in the past but they were so much worse than the desktop GPUs I returned them.

But in any case, I'd still consider gaming laptops specialized gaming hardware. It takes a 40-core M3 Max to approach ~4080 levels, and the Vision only has 10 GPU cores for a roughly 6k display at 90 Hz. That's not going to be a great AAA experience...

Personally I wish they went the opposite way, just a dumb display-only headset without the compute, and streamed everything from a Mac/desktop PC/the cloud.

But, still, it's pretty exciting to see this come out. I won't be able to afford something like this for a few years, but I'm still hoping Apple really makes a dent in this space.

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