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Comment by pwthornton | Hacker News Reader

If you live with other people, the appeal is limited. I can see the appeal for my friends who live alone in small apartments. They can get this and a nice pair of headphones and have a great home theater experience. This is something that would be difficult to do in their current situations.

I also see the appeal for people who travel a lot for work. This is probably an amazing way to watch movies on a plane or in your hotel room at night.

I have a wife and two small kids, so I will not be buying this to watch movies at home.

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Are there a lot of people who live alone in a small apartment that are willing and able to buy a $3500 headset?

I feel like this entire thread has a blind spot to the fact that this device is very much a luxury item. A 55-inch TV is ~$300. A high-end laptop is ~$1000. High-end noise-cancelling headphones are ~$250. You could buy all of those and still not reach half of the cost of this device.

The only people I can see buying the device are rich people looking for another toy, not as a serious competitor to other entertainment tech.

>The only people I can see buying the device are rich people looking for another toy, not as a serious competitor to other entertainment tech.

I'm surprised at how consistently people think that a technology that is so expensive and serving such a niche will end up having adoption asides from a few wealthy enthusiasts. iPhone 2 suggested retail price was $300 (~$425 in todays dollars) and provided "smart" replacement for your cell phone matching its features 1-to-1 while also providing more than what was available.

If someone imagines themselves buying this to watch movies "on the go" or at hotels or something, they're part of an extremely exclusive club.

> iPhone 2 suggested retail price was $300 (~$425 in todays dollars)

This was back when most phones were still carrier subsidized and required long term service contracts. Per Apple's press release, the $299 pricing required "a new two year contract with AT&T". Unsubsidized price was about double.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2008/06/09Apple-Introduces-th...

It's 10x the cost of an entry Oculus device. And no one wants that either.

Meta Quest's are basically video game devices. It's a much different market than AVP.

Meta is selling hundreds of thousands of units a month, so I don't know if I'd say no one wants it either. It seems to be selling pretty well overall, but Meta way overinvested in some of the stuff and is having a hard time making enough money.

They're both primarily for media consumption.

Just because one device is from Apple doesn't make media consumption any more virtuous or productive.

The Quest 2 has sold 5-10x as many units as the first iphone did. Apples to oranges, but that's not no one.

> $3500 headset?

Nobody is buying the Pro version of the headset just for watching movies other than the early adopters, YouTubers etc we have today.

The idea is that when a normal version launches for $999 it will be a far more compelling proposition.

Sure, there are in any of the global cities. I'm in the DC area, so I know plenty of people who have money and live in apartments/condos. NYC is the same way. There are plenty of people in the Bay Area that this describes as well. And then you talk about Western Europe and Asia, and home theater setups are a lot less common.

Even if you have a lot of space in your apartment, it's hard to justify much of a home theater setup, as you will be really limited by sound issues.

The price will come down. This version is for wealthy early adopters.

At $3500 though you can easily put together a decent-to-great 75-80" home theater system with the latest gaming console(s) and have plenty of money left over for multiple rounds of pizza & beer with friends over. 77" OLED TVs from Samsung & LG are only around the $2000 mark these days, after all. Compromise even just a smidge to a full array local dimming mini-LED QLED TV and you're now down to under $1k for the TV. Surround-sound soundbars that sound fantastic are plentiful below the $1k mark as well and require next to zero setup.

It seems like you need to live alone and be rich enough to afford it such that you likely already have a great home theater anyway and still be interested in the Vision Pro. Or you actually don't want a TV at all for some reason but still want a home theater experience.

That seems like a quite small market?

I can afford a 75-80” home theater system, but I cannot afford an apartment in NYC large enough to justify buying such a system.

Most people who rent also move at least every few years, so having that large of a thing to move is a bit annoying. Not even mentioning people who travel for work and obviously cannot bring such a system with them.

It isn’t just all about the money when it comes to device purchases.

Presumably in a smaller apartment setting, you don't have any need for such a large TV (or sound system). It should scale appropriately and provide the similar experience at an even cheaper price. A 48" OLED TV, for instance, is much much easier to move.

I don't think those are really comparable. Spending a ton of money on a home theater is a large and static purchase. You put it in your home, and that's it, you can't move it easily or adapt it much. The Vision Pro, on top of having other functionalities, lets you have that home theater experience anywhere. Want o watch in bed? on the couch? outside on porch? waiting at the airport? People spend a lot more on phones because of the portability aspect.

Another HN commenter[0] speculated that the R1 chip could be part of the path towards an Apple self-driving car. Since they're no longer trying to do level 5 FSD, I think one of the absolute coolest things could be using the Vision Pro to see straight through the car into what would otherwise be blind spots. Obviously there are implications to wearing Vision Pro while driving, especially since if the device loses power you will entirely lose the ability to see. The idea still fascinates me though.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39108792

Something I've noticed in the past few years is the number of homes I've been in without a TV and the use of smart speakers placed throughout instead of a fixed stereo/surround system.

Seems quite a few folks are opting to randomly binge-stream on their laptop as vegging out on the TV is a thing of the past for them, so no need to have their living space dominated by these types of electronics.

Are those folks going to suddenly find it appealing to strap on a headset with a battery pack for $3,500 but don't want to try that out today for $500?

The appeal of the laptop/tablet/phone veg is the speed at which you can plop and start watching. Futzing with VR headset is kinda not that.

The "personal home theater!" angle has been tried, and failed, so many times now. It doesn't seem like the Vision Pro changes anything to suddenly make it a motivating feature on its own. Which I think is the more telling thing about Netflix's response here. They've been pushing VR movie watching since day 1. And yet now they aren't doing so for the AVP. That seems less likely to be a snub of Apple and more likely to be an admission of "this just isn't something people do or want currently"

It's too early right now and I feel the device needs to make strides for it to be viable for most. The various youtubers pointing out neck strain issues underscore this. We can't gauge much from early gripes on a low production device that hasn't launched yet.

Netflix's engineering staff is expensive and I imagine they learned some interesting lessons from experiments like Bandersnatch. No need to make bets for the sake of innovation, let things play out first. I'm sure there is some signaling involved for the sake of investors showing they're prudent here.

All I'm saying is - to your point - the market may be shifting to where personal consumption devices like this make sense. It's not replacing a TV so much as a laptop.

For some early adopters the experience may be far superior, and if so, a next generation device that cuts the cost and size in half may be the thing that launches things forward. Like the iPhone 3G.

Or it could be sort of a wash and go the way of the 3d TV craze from 15 years ago.

The $500 headset can't really do this well. They may have demoed one in a store and realized this isn't a great experience. You will also not find a lot of people online recommending it either.

I have a Quest 3, and I would much rather watch movies on a laptop or iPad than it. The screen quality is not great. You can see the pixels due to the low-ish resolution. The contrast ratio is not great.

The screen quality is generally good enough for VR games and other VR-specific experiences, however.

You’re forgetting just how much space that all takes up

It takes a wall. Most people that can afford a $3,500 VR toy usually have at least one wall - often at least 4 of them, even!

A lot of homes are not built with an obvious spot for a TV, especially a big one. Hence all of the people sticking TVs over their fireplaces (which is way too high for proper viewing).

A wall. And power. And furniture to hold the 50 cables and 5 auxiliary devices that go with the TV. And a place to comfortably sit that works with all of the above.

I'm hoping there is a better selling point than a really good home theater for single people. When I was single, having a TV and couch was valuable so that even though they were 95% used alone, they could be shared with guests.

If I was into media enough to spend $3,500 to have a great experience, it would be a bummer if I couldn't watch a movie with someone else occasionally.

You can just share the headset and each look into one eye.

I mean, you can still have the TV to watch things with guests.

Or if you're both into the big screen VR experience, you can both wear headsets. Watching movies in a shared virtual movie theater is already a thing and works great. Even better is that you can be in your home and your romantic partner can be in their home (or traveling) and you can still watch together.

If I'm watching a movie with my romantic partner, I'd like to be in the same room as them lol. Not really interested in a VR Chat relationship.

Yes, that's preferable when it's an option - unfortunately, that's not always possible, especially when life intervenes. Wouldn't you still want a way to share a space with your partner and watch a movie with them?

> Or if you're both into the big screen VR experience, you can both wear headsets.

For the low low price of 7000$, vs 1000$ for a TV.

I mean, right now it's for the low low price of $500 for a pair of Oculus Quest 2's. Just as big screen, but you'll effectively get 1080p quality on the virtual screen rather than 4K.

Obviously for the Vision we'll wait for prices to come down.

I'm somewhat of a VR enthusiast. But my headset is mostly gathering dust.

There's one use case that I do think I would actually use once it's good enough though. It's using glasses as replacement for computer monitors when doing work. But I'd prefer the Nreal/Xreal Air form factor and price point.

My inner VR enthusiast thinks the Apple Vision is cool but my inner realist wonders if anyone is really going to use anything beyond smart glasses.

> My inner VR enthusiast thinks the Apple Vision is cool but my inner realist wonders if anyone is really going to use anything beyond smart glasses.

My personal prediction - smart glasses as a smartphone replacement, AR/VR headsets as a poweruser workstation machine replacement.

The market segments map out nicely with your prediction as well - almost everyone has a smartphone of some kind (just like i expect almost everyone to have some sort of smart glasses in the future), while a relative minority (even though it is a large one) has poweruser workstation machines (just like with AR/VR headsets in my prediction).

That is, until at least the tech gets insane enough to allow packing full functionality of an AR/VR headset into the form factor of glasses, with an insane battery life to boot. I don’t see that happening in any foreseeable future though, sadly, barring some transformational and unexpected battery chemistry breakthroughs.

> My personal prediction - smart glasses as a smartphone replacement

I still struggle with seeing smart glasses as a viable smartphone replacement unless paired with some sort of peripheral to perform input privately. Doing everything by voice or expressive gestures around others isn't going to work for people.

Wrist wearables that can track micro-muscle movements in your fingers (pinching, scrolling, etc) are in development as a pair to these devices

That’s a really good point I totally forgot about. I would expect it to be controlled by a combo of gestures using eye tracking + some auxiliary input device, like a ring or a smartwatch or something like that.

I agree, for now we have no good or even barely established UX/HCI paradigms for hypothetical standalone AR glasses.

Not that we even have those types of paradigms established for currently existing AR/VR devices, but we are getting there slowly. With each year since I first tried the original HTC Vive, every new device and update slowly but surely made the interactions better, simpler, and feel more “worked out”.

What gives me hope is seeing how the touch-only UIs have changed since the original iPhone release. At first, everyone was scoffing big time at touch-only interfaces ever becoming functional, viable, and widely used. The first third party apps on the App Store were also extremely disjointed and had almost nothing in common between each other in terms of UI/UX. Felt like everything was just spliced together and stamped with “we think this should work.” Not casting shade at devs of those apps, everyone was in that position back then, as there were no established UI/UX for touch-only interface smartphones.

In 2024? While there are still continuing changes, things slowed down overall as the general cohesive UI/UX principles for touch-only smartphones have been established. And they indeed became functional, viable, and widely used devices.

Pupil tracking is in consumer VR devices, I can see it being further miniaturized, especially with advances in waveguiding.

In fact, this might be a great use for Zeiss's holocam tech [0]: high resolution, low definition, grayscale "window" that waveguides some of the light passing through, down to one of the edges, where an image sensor picks it up and decides it.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38881981

Agree, but it’s trivial to add support for bluetooth controllers or keyboards.

This isn’t for in-home use, I believe they were talking about use cases similar to using smartphones outside of home. I am not pulling out a bluetooth keyboard out of my pocket on the street when I need to navigate using GPS or look something up.

Btw, pretty much every AR/VR headset I am aware of these days already supports bluetooth controllers and keyboards. For some keyboard models, you can even have them visible and physically tracked in your VR space (I tried it with Quest 2 and apple’s wireless keyboard, worked like a charm).

I actually was thinking of what people by far use their phones the most for (in terms of what matters to them, and perhaps also in terms of time for many): Text messaging. Having a social life others aren't privy to because it's silent and easy to hide from their eyes.

Keyboards in VR are really bad, and the AVP also doesn't have any ideas there (looking at keys one by one and pinching is extremely "peck and hunt").

The closest to a magic AR solution I can think of is tracking so obscenely great that you can project a touch keyboard on a screenless slab without annoyance. Maybe.

Unless you approximate smartphone typing speeds, silently, it's not going to be a smartphone replacement for any masses.

> That is, until at least the tech gets insane enough to allow packing full functionality of an AR/VR headset into the form factor of glasses, with an insane battery life to boot. I don’t see that happening in any foreseeable future though, sadly, barring some transformational and unexpected battery chemistry breakthroughs.

It's not that far fetched if you move most of the hardware to a fanny pack or similar. You can probably get pretty close with current smart glasses (or Bigscreen Beyond) and a (next gen) Steam Deck.

VR glasses aren't very practical if much of your work consists of Zoom meetings with webcams.

If you live with other people, it could still be appealing. Not everyone wants to watch the same thing at the same time. Also, living together does not mean everyone is family.

> They can get this and a nice pair of headphones and have a great home theater experience. This is something that would be difficult to do in their current situations.

For that price you can get 3 of your friends a nice 1080p short throw projector and studio monitors which will outlive the vision pro and won't cause neck/head pain after an hour.

This is indeed a great use case for people living alone. But then they they'll also get way cheaper options if it's just to watch streaming services. I'd assume devices like the xreal are lighter and cheaper, and the Vision Pro's extra resolution is less an appeal if it's just to watch Netflix.

Putting on my doomer glasses: with the so-called loneliness epidemic and the rising prices of property (forcing people to co-habit with non-family/friends), I can definitely see something like this becoming as popular and perhaps as necessary as mobile phones.

The other problem here is that the is very little moat here - all you need is a good screen and decent headphones, both of which are commodity.

The AVP is vastly overpriced and overspecced for basic media consumption.

Moat like water around a castle?

We have a projector at home.

Still my wife watches her stuff on a phone.

People actually don't care about quality more often than not.

But the quest 3 should be cheap enough already for this and good enough and still is not the mass market

We too have a nice 4k projector. Wife prefers to watch in the living room on an old LCD. She doesn't even mind watching DVDs (no upscaling on this TV). That makes my eyes bleed, but she doesn't care one bit.

Quest 3 doesn't get you a 4k image and you can get a 4k Tv for less than the Quest. It's almost just sharp enough for text but not quite. I don't think you can really make the claim that the Quest 3 is good enough. Probably the Quest 4 though.

It provides immersion. Your brain eventually filters out what little bit of screen door effect there is when watching a movie. Sometimes when I go to the movie theater I forget to bring my glasses, but I still have a good time.

I'd be surprised if anyone thought the Quest 3 didn't render sharp text. I find everything very readable.

> have a great home theater experience

We'll have to see how people handle 1.5lbs of headgear for long periods. Maybe it'll be fine, but the Quest is already heavy enough.

I am curious to see the image quality of the VP, because the Quest 3 already does a pretty good job as a home theater replacement for $500.

With the AVP we can actually have the game on while the wife and kids control the living room TV.

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