Apple Vision Pro review
wsj.com
wsj.com
For me the biggest issue though is that it can't fulfil it's primary use cases:
Want it for productivity? it can't run MacOS applications and if you want to use your actual Mac it can't do multiple monitors.
Want it for entertainment? people want to enjoy photos, videos, movies with other people and it can't include them. Even if they have a Vision Pro, I haven't yet seen any sign of ability for multiple people to do these things together.
All up, it all seems far more immature and dev-kit stage than I was expecting.
The reviews haven't mentioned it, but SharePlay [1] is OS-level functionality and the press releases mention using it with movies, music, and games.
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10087/
Most of Apple offerings are good:
Watch
iPad
Mac
iPhone
services
Are they really expecting this to just be a hard problem initially that they get better at over time? When is the last time they launched a "so so" product?
Btw, don’t forget visionOS 2.0 is just 18 weeks away. (Source: WWDC is every June and every platform gets a version bump, as we saw with watchOS launching in April then getting a 2.0 immediately after at WWDC.)
> Ive began dreaming about an Apple watch just after CEO Steve Jobs’ death in October 2011. He soon brought the idea to Dye and a small group of others in the design studio.
I've been wondering how much this is part of the context here. He may feel some pressure that he hasn't really launched a new major product category from scratch in all his time as CEO and if this has been running 10 years as a project now, that it would be a blemish on his legacy to not get it out the door before he leaves. Perhaps without him there it would even be binned which would be even more pressure to deliver it.
Contrary to all that he really seems a bit ambivalent about the device himself, having never allowed himself to be seen publicly using it.
And I would argue the M-series CPU are pretty major as well.
Wikipedia's citation that the Watch began in 2011 after Steve's death is incorrect. It began in 2010 under Steve's direction after the acquisition of Bob Messerschmidt's Rare Light, which brought hearth rate monitoring tech to Apple. Messerschmidt was assigned a team by Steve. Don't blindly trust Wikipedia, folks...
As for the others I just meant platform products, none of those have their own OS until homeOS later this year. None of them defined new product categories for Apple - for instance the AirPods were an iteration on EarPods, not a new product category. Apple was already shipping a home speaker product before HomePod, which was an iterative product without its own software platform for developers. M-series is iterative tech, not a new product category. The Motorola ROKR wasn't an Apple product. But sure HomePod is perhaps Tim Apple's one original new product category before Vision if the 2006 Apple Hi-Fi counts as a distinct product category.
No one would call the iPhone an existing product just because Apple shipped the iTunes collaboration phone with Motorola.
As far as I can tell Tim Cook has never pretended to be a product guy. He seems perfectly comfortable being what he is: a ruthless operations guru bent on efficiency. In every profile I’ve ever read he’s not really the one making hard product decisions, and seems content to leave that to others better suited for it.
Source?
Edit: But since it is still so new, it could not be until WWDC 2025 that visionOS 2.0 gets announced.
it'll be a beta
The first two iPhones weren't as innovative as they make them,just more polished than other symbians with cameras and internet, it took off with apps really in third iteration.
I think visionpro has lots of opportunities in the next iterations, early users will provide feedback this gen.
Apart from that, yesterday I just played Pickleball with a guy who used his apple watch to keep score. It was a little odd at times but seemed like a cool use.
Yes they were. Multi-touch in particular was a revelation. Making a big screen with one physical button is a simple idea, but making it work well was the hard part that nobody else had figured out.
Those first iPhones were dog slow, sure, but they absolutely defined how smartphones work ever since.
Yet we're supposed to give to consider the iphone a revelation because of multi touch. I had the iphone 3g. It was a more polished experience than other phones but that revelation part was just not there. Apps made it big, later.
I swear people treat iPhones like a cult.
It was a full unix OS, not some mobile-specific trash like the others (Symbian, Windows Mobile, Blackberry). Capacitive touch wasn't an invention, but a premium form of touchscreens (most were resistive).
Having nearly 60fps high quality 3d accelerated animations on a phone also contributed to a heavily premium feeling for the software. It enabled things like Inertial Scrolling, which among other things (like first class typography afforded by using OS X, and a fully standards compliant web browser), none of which were "innovations" in the sense of "we came up with this first", but more exceptionally good engineering in service of a great experience.
In almost every way (apart from the "traditional phone metrics" like 2G ironically), the iPhone was a huuuuuge leap forward from the status quo.
It might be true that anyone else could've done it. But nobody else did. It wasn't just luck that Apple did.
The iPhone was the first one that I actually used to take pictures and play music. It wasn’t the first to have those features (and the edge network was super slow), but that polished experience is what made it work. And made it clear to everyone how we would interact with phones for decades to come.
It was a technological inflection point. That’s why it is looked back on the was it is.
There was a "cult," all right. It consisted of people like Steve Ballmer plugging their ears, shutting their eyes, and denying the obvious.
I don’t think this was my experience at all. The first iPhone was always snappy until they started adding random crap everywhere (e.g. by the release of the iPhone 4 the original was near worthless without really old firmware)
Clunky and sorta useless, but “a new class of device”… eventually
[edit]
Looks like I pissed in someone’s cereal. Didn’t mean to, but different strokes, and all that…
I was just recounting actual personal experience, which, I suppose, isn’t popular, hereabouts.
Just for context, I have been writing Apple programs, since 1986. I am totally committed to their products, and their vision (although I have no opinion, –yet– on their Vision), and have every right to be critical. Those of us that have been on the ride for that long, have seen a very bumpy road.
But it gave me a route where I need to turn left right after taking a right-turn ramp, except that the left turning line are separated by road dividers before the exit of the ramp. So I would need to either go wrong direction and do a 180, or bulldoze the dividers. As a comparison, Google Map never gave me that route in the past.
This happened in a moderately sized town so I guess I will still stick to Google Map for now.
Not a great first impression. Also while I can view Apple Maps via a third party like DuckDuckGo, you can only report a map issue through an Apple device, so I guess it's staying wrong.
Still weird either way.
In smaller countries though, it's total rubbish. Samoa, travel guidance is nearly non-existent. Tahiti, very patchy. In those countries, Google Maps was perfect.
However, one bug that is a showstopper in AM is the dreaded “can’t reach the server now”, which I get probably more than half the time I try to use it, and with apparently no solution other than wait.
As a result, I just removed it from my phone.
Gmaps also helped by enshittifying itself.
Ridiculous.
I don’t see the VisionOS play here and wonder if it’ll be Tim Apple’s first major fail at the helm. There’s no clear set of competitors or established industry for Apple to just polish like they have with most products. There’s not an obvious large tam for VR headsets and I’m skeptical optical ar is close. I don’t get it but I’m sure the internal Apple and board view it as a strong thesis.
Still glad it’s this and not a car.
Looking forward to how it plays out.
* A pub that doesn't exist - there is one about 15 miles with that name, but there's never been one called that here.
* The local church is in the wrong place
* The opening hours of the local cafe are wrong (11:30-3:30 instead of 10:00-3:00)
* Business names aren't correct
Generally, if you are in a city it is fine, but don't use it if you are rural.
The first Watch was awful. I love my Series 8.
Don't get me started on the first Mac...
I definitely do not think that opinion was widespread. If anything I think that the biggest discussed shortcoming of the first iPhone was that it was only available on AT&T.
Compared to all the smartphones of the time, it was a slow toy with no apps and a 2G connection that was completely worthless
It looked nice though, and eventually it got an app store (unnoficially first), and the overall UX was a clear winner (nobody believed touch screens would ever replace blackberry style devices!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_iPhone
> When Apple announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007,[38] it was sold only with AT&T (formerly Cingular) contracts in the United States.[32] After 18 months of negotiations, Steve Jobs reached an agreement with the wireless division of AT&T[39] to be the iPhone's exclusive carrier. Consumers were unable to use any other carrier without unlocking their device.
I don't know how they did it, but "life finds a way" ?
> I didn’t even use my iPhone in the US
So you can't really describe the experience for the several different US carriers which it didn't work on, and thus can't really say it worked on any other network. Verizon was a network it didn't work on, and thus fails the "any other network" standard you set earlier.
It worked on any GSM network. Tmobile for instance. Verizon and Sprint were the exceptions in the US, since they weren’t GSM.
It is not being pedantic to point out someone is saying something massively untrue.
Your comment makes it sound like anyone could just easily take an OG iPhone and run it on any network, but in reality, to US consumers it was only a few smaller networks and only after breaking an expensive contract. See how that's more than just a pedantic difference?
Also, it took over a year to be able to write apps for it.
JS Web apps were not “apps.”
It didn't multitask, even though other pocket computers for a Long Time had at least the appearance of multitasking. It didn't have the ability to install any additional software, even though other pocket computers for a Long Time handled third-party software just fine. It didn't even have a copy/paste function, even though [WTF? Srsly, Apple?].
All of these things were eventually corrected by Apple, but it was pretty awful until they were corrected: For quite some time, the iPhone was just a rather fancy touchscreen music player with telephone and SMS programs tacked on.
(More damning: All of these things were corrected very quickly by third parties via jailbreaks. Some of us were having a ball with first-gen IOS devices very early on in the game, but Apple wasn't any help in getting that accomplished.)
It seems like the Vision Pro 1 has the M2 so that when the Vision, or Vision Air comes out, it will be at least as powerful as the first Pro. And the Pro 2 can have the M3.
But from various PalmOS devices to whatever Android device is in my pocket right now, carrying wired headphones has never been a thing for me for whatever reason.
So as a Google Voice user since it was still called GrandCentral, having Google Voice available on a Wifi-connected touchscreen pocket music player called an iPod Touch was simply never very useful to me: The OG iPod Touch was lousy as a telephone, since it lacked all of the basic parts (like a microphone or an earpiece) that made telephones useful, and SMS was not yet in its heyday back then either.
I got much better use of the service with my dumb phone with T9 text input and transcription of voicemails to SMS, and my dumb phone worked anywhere instead of just where I could find a Wifi network.
Jailbroken, the iPod was an amazing pocket computer with a brilliant display, thin profile, and exceptional responsiveness to touch input, especially with third-party apps and improvements installed. It was fun having a real *nix userland installed on it, and it sure seemed novel to SSH from it.
By default, though? Almost useless except as a music player -- a task that previous iPods did better.
(I mostly used my OG iPod Touch to take offline notes. It did OK at this, but previously-used PalmOS devices did better in terms of input speed and portability of those notes.
Even relatively high-end aftermarket car stereos at the time were afraid of it: "Oh, why sure I can play music with your iPod!
Except.. is that an iPod Touch?"
"shun shun shun")
And to take two of your examples, multitasking and 3rd party software, yeah, other pocket computers had them, and they generally sucked hard (see, Windows Mobile). Even the lack of copy/paste - other phones had them, but there was (and honestly still is) considerable debate over how it should be implemented given multitouch was new.
It had the only truly usable mobile web browser. Windows Mobile's IE was trash, and the browsers on Palm OS, Blackberry and Symbian were laughable. This was the killer app (especially on Wifi, EDGE was not great).
Albeit not from the computer nerds who knew what they were getting, but the general public who thought they were buying a phone on par with the Motorola, Nokia or Panasonic phones in term of reliability.
It was incredible and obviously a game changer.
When trying to use the iPhone seriously, at some point it wouldn't receive calls anymore (just silently crash the deamon receiving it, you'd never know if not told by the caller afterwards), drop active calls when battery was too low (single digit), call quality could be horrible, stuff would crash from time to time.
Memory would leak like a sueve from everywhere so rebooting the phone every now and then was good hygiene. It's only after the 3GS that it stabilized, otherwise antennagate would have been just another tuesday IMO.
It was still a stellar device, but not a fully reliable device in any way shape or form.
Before Steve stood on that stage in 2007 and demoed the first iPhone, most people had never even seen 'swipe to scroll'. The first iPhone absolutely kicked the arse of everything else. So what if it was 2G that was how most phones were back then. The only objection anyone could think off (e.g. Ballmer) was that it was expensive.
You have to put it in context with what passed for a smart phone back then. No web browser (they sort of existed but were extremely cut down and not really usable), small screens with limited software, very limited connectivity that was very expensive.
A valid criticism was the lack of physical keyboard, which phone-jockies found a deal breaker, but in all other ways a phone with decent apps, a large screen, a real web browser designed around and provided with unlimited internet connectivity was always going to be a hit.
It wasn't even that expensive compared to other phones.
At the time my feature phone had much better MMS, video calling, and J2ME apps. The first iPhone was a joke by comparison looked at through that lens, and detractors generally were looking at the fact it was this hobbled 2G device missing features that were common in other, cheaper phones. Oh, and the camera was absolute garbage, too.
MMS worked well enough but was/is pretty limited. Video calling existed but postage stamp video at 8 frames per second was not something that anyone wanted to actually use. And don't get me started on J2ME, an ecosystem so vast that Google didn't even bother to include it in Android even though they are both based on Java. Although other phones had better cameras, none took what we would call an acceptable photos today.
What people did use all the time was the browser and only the iPhone had a decent one. That was the only thing that mattered. Heck, the iPhone wasn't even a very good _phone_ and even that didn't matter.
I am sure someone with quibble that some other product technically had something similar first, and they are probably right. But the iPhone demo was the first time I had seen anything quite like it.
Turning on a light bulb, ordinary light in the house, meh, ok, then swipe your hands out over the counter and the recipe pulls up. That's the 'oh wow' moment. Then grab and throw a song to a Homepod connection. You know what I mean...
There's a gap someone can shoot, maybe 3 years tops. Honestly though, the developer ecosystem is just so tight, continuity so powerful, doing this solo requires more than what the whole MFi program offers.
I based my purchase of phones in the early to mid 00s on whether they came with the full Opera Mobile browser.
I could use just about everything online the same as desktop, that didn't rely on flash of course. The screen size was small but surprisingly wasn't a big issue as everything else was a massive improvement.
Oh Nokia 3660, how I loved thee. I actually chose the 3650 and then 3660 because they seemed to be the best smartphones at a standard sized. I just couldn't justify qwerty.
All of them! The first version of the iPhone, iPad, iPod, watch, AirPods...
They all had similar reviews. "Seems like a tech preview, not really ready for general use, too expensive", etc.
The first iPad was similarly expensive, thick and underpowered. It wasn't until a couple generations in that it was good.
The first iPad was ok only because it truly was "just a bigger iPhone". But they didn't really make features that were unique to the iPad and took advantage of its bigger screen for a few versions afterwards.
I would say the main function of an iPod OS is finding what you want to play, not actually playing it.
It was extremely easy if you tagged your mp3s properly.
The idea of 'spatial computing' or a heads up display that augments your vision and gives you eye tracking input to manipulate UIs in your visual field seems clearer superior to looking at little glass displays (meta agrees). If you can project out a future where that hardware becomes better and better it's a pretty powerful interface paradigm.
Eye tracking as an interface for this can get pretty close to telepathy if done well.
I ordered one - it's the sort of thing you really have to play with yourself imo.
This has always been the case and this technology has been around for a while. I'm surprised Apple would have chosen to use it for user input.
one reviewer said they kept hitting "No" and "cancel" when they meant "Yes" because their natural progression was to look at the buttons in order, pick out the one they want to press but actually click it after they finish scanning all of them with their "mouse" paused on the one they want to hit. It's kind of fascinating that the VisionPro's input method works so well when it does work that it tricks people into doing this, because they really do just expect it to work like magic.
The problem is the Vision OS has no cursor. Cursor position is critical. Your eyes move around a lot more than your cursor moves, but in Vision OS, cursor position and eye position are the same. Very annoying. Maybe they could put a little cursor in the center of the screen that you could move around with another gesture.
I have tried eye tracking as primary input method some years ago in another setting, and I very much did not like the experience.
That's how it works on the Vision Pro. I didn't really feel annoyed by it, but make sure the device is calibrated to your eyes, or the results might not be that great.
At a deeper level it depends a lot on the question of does Apple want this? If they do then all these will be solved over time. But if they actually see MacOS as a legacy integration then they simply aren't going to invest in encouraging people to use it. I'm waiting to see indications on which way they are going to play it.
I think about all the apps I'm running and switching between on my computer now, using shortcuts and toolbars and docks to arrange, hide, and switch between them. Everyone using multiple apps on visionOS just looks chaotic.
I once had a second portrait monitor next to my ultrawide. I had to get rid of it because it was just too tiring to be constantly turning my head so far to look at it. It didn't work out.
I cannot imagine how uncomfortable it would be if each app needed to be in a different physical space that required turning my head to use. Painful.
Or maybe it’ll be another homepod
But nope, nothing more interesting came, and OS updates ruined performance so badly that I happily returned it to my employer 2 years later and opted not to buy my own until 2021 (for exercise and notifications only).
iPod was the size of a beefy wallet, but was good enough.
iPhone was glorified plastic and websites looked like crap, no app store. But hey, it worked well enough.
That said... this isn't accessibly priced and what's the hook? Like if this launched the same time as Pokemon Go or WoW were taking off alongside it it'd get the social momentum all the other options had.
Also it's better than the competition in key was, but differentiable ways...? AR/VR could very well take off but it's not this year.
This is not accurate, FaceTime has Share Play. Any app that leverages it can build a synced entertainment. Example out of the box, Apple TV, Freeform, Apple Music.
I wish the SDK for Share Play was not tied with FaceTime, since it limits you to only people you have their iCloud email or phone number to. Big Screen on Quest was a great app that leveraged the idea of multiple users in the same VR session, based on interest, Quest just lacked the quality.
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/shareplay-watch-liste...
2. 52% of media viewing in the US is done alone.
I know zero people who have eliminated their TVs for a headset. Apple isn't going to change that.
2. And so the vision pro isn't even viable for 48% of watching. That's a huge percentage, and shows that nobody is getting rid of their TVs for this.
2. Setting it up is as trivial as setting up Zoom
3. You’re still ignoring the fact that the majority of media consumption is done alone. It’s not all or nothing either. People both watch media alone AND in groups depending on the context.
Besides, how would you know the problem isn’t solved if you don’t use a headset yourself?
That might not be their primary goal, but the device could appeal to that demographic either way if the other features are appealing enough.
[0] https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4085828-a-record-share...
Everything you've said is reminiscent of the reviews of the first iPhone.
Completely untrue. The original iPhone required a 2-year contract with AT&T/Cingular. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(1st_generation)#Releas...
The contract issue had more to do with how the phone interacted with the network. IIRC, AT&T was an exclusive provider because of the backend requirements (visual voicemail notification maybe?). I assume the contract was in part because they wanted to recoup those expenses.
Here’s a news article from the time that says that AT&T didn’t actually start subsidizing the phone until the 3G arrived.
https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/wireless/phones/2008-07...
Also, the subsidy might have been from Apple, if anyone… Apple got a kickback of $10/month per iPhone user. They might have used that to keep the price lower, but that wasn’t from ATT’s side of the account until the 3G followup.
The original parent post claimed that it did and implied that this was the reason why it was so successful. They also implied that the new Vision Pro would need similar subsidies to be successful.
I’m not quite sure the killer feature is there yet for VR headsets. But if the usability is better for the Vision Pro than the Quest, et al., it could still be successful, regardless of the cost.
That's completely untrue. The original iPhone DID NOT require a 2 year contract, you could absolutely buy it on a prepaid plan. Yeah, you had to "fail" the credit check to get offered the prepaid plans, but all you had to do was put "999-99-9999" as your SSN in the activation screens to get them.
Also it was a totally stand out appealing device accessible to everyone with immediate value to everyday people.
I wonder what new site, and what new euphemism, will replace the "hug of death" and "the orange site" in 2044?
(Hopefully not robots that go around actually hugging people to death…)
I let the next guy explain what a mailing list was.
Apple didn’t fix any of them.
I never heard this complain before. Can you explain more?
VR avoids this since they just make up their own designed world instead, while most AR glasses avoid this by having actual transparent glasses and reflecting images off them instead. The Vision Pro is more ambitious and tries to pull off both AR and VR, resulting in these compromises.
I do think future generations of AVP will do well. Iterating and applying learnings and customer feedback will make this a good product.
So, I don't know if I agree with this considering Apple has such a large cash cushion. They can easily make missteps the first few generations until they figure it out.
Early Apple Watches focused on luxury and personal communication with loved ones. But later iterations de-emphasized all that and pivoted to being a health and fitness band and some subset of iPhone features like cellular phone calls and texts (instead of the weird heartbeat sharing stuff we saw at launch of the 1st gen device)
The trick was to just buy the smartphone outside of the plan. Then you get unlimited data at half the price. I'd pull gigs of data a month on my "dumbphone".
In general, UX design is the argument people used to (and still do sometimes) run to "prove" that the device was better when it was clearly not. Fancy icons dont make a good UX, functionality does. You dont say copy and paste is good UX, you say its a feature.
Not sure how people don't remember what a revelation the capacitive screen was. It was miles better than most Nokia phones that mostly used resistive screens (not saying that Apple invented capacitive screens but they most certainly made it popular) and the navigation with the simple home button and everything else being instant feedback with the buttons on the screen was better than anything else on the market from what I remember. The keyboard especially was incredible with that light tapping sound and instant keystrokes appearing. While it wasn't functionally better than most phones (famously less functional than a Blackberry), it was very much the leader of the pack in details that ACTUALLY contribute to good UX. Just as the iPod and the clicker wheel was ahead with the instant feedback and usability of rotating the wheel to scroll at high speeds through hundreds of songs
When iPhone came out, the mobile internet was so shit and screen was very low res, so the benefit of having a full touchscreen was minimal (mostly being able to select things directly, but that was a very small advantage). Mobile web wasn't a thing. You had to have wifi for any real speed. And if you had wifi, you were likely in a building where you could sit down, and there were things like netbooks and mobile pcs that were just better than the iPhone for doing web stuff. Even people with iPhones still mainly used them as iPods and phones before 3g cellular.
The keyboard on Blackberries was in fact better UX because it was easier to use and faster to type on, without any delay in appearance. The on screen keyboards were all shit until swipe typing became defacto standard.
And then you look at the drawbacks, like no removable battery, no microsd expansion, no shit proprietary cables that would break, no copy/paste, e.t.c, all of them absolutely make the UX horrible.
Eventually the Moto X came along. I thought it was the perfect phone. Its voice assist features worked better than most voice assist features even today. You could easily do everything you wanted to do with the phone in your pocket and your earbuds in.
It had the perfect size screen. It had a great ambient-on watch-face screen that looked nice sitting on your desk among clutter. The dimple in the back was a really nice touch, it made it like a worry-stone[0] in your pocket. It had a lower resolution, but I kinda liked that about it. I think Motorola was bought or something, but whatever the reason, the next phone in the series ditched every single thing that made the Moto X special.
Those two devices were both my favorite mobile computing devices, and probably the closest I've come to getting fan-angry about a company screwing up their own magic.
More to the point: you might have been able to see it at Motorola, but even looking back, I don't understand why Razr couldn't have won against the iPhone. The Razr was a surprisingly capable little machine!
I wouldn't call Motorola a failed acquisition - Google bought Motorola as a shield in an increasingly litigious environment: this was the age of Apple going "thermonuclear", Microsoft and patent trolls were wantonly shaking down Android vendors, and beginning to circle Google itself.
Motorola (under Google) had the best value-for-money smartphones - their midrange was solid, and reasonably priced while everyone else was continuously shifting to flagships, with each release priced higher than the last.
From the outside looking in, Google appeared to dispose Motorola to make Samsung happy - Samsung had been complaining loudly and widely about the Motorola acquisition, and openly flirted with other mobile platforms as a hedge.
Motorola shareholders got paid, Google got the patents it wanted, Samsung remained the 600 lb gorilla in Androidland, Lenovo got a good brand and keeps making ok phones to this day. So, not a failed acquisition by any reasonable measure
Google was searching desperately for revenue diversity and was acquiring pretty hard at the time. I think the intent with Moto was to acquire a hardware shop and establish a market leading brand to compete directly with Apple. They eventually arrived at Pixel by building it entirely in-house. That Moto got raided for IP and spun out to Lenovo did not meet those (high) expectations. There was no need for anyone to take a loss but I think Google wanted to make a whole lot of money and did not.
1. It was a crazy time. The winning consortium - which included Apple and Microsoft - invited Google to join their $4.5B bid; which would have made the patents entirely useless as a defense of Google against Apple or Microsoft. Google wisely declined, but bought Motorola less than a year later for $12B. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jul/02/google-pi...
Source: I was supposed to run the dogfood program in the NYC office. I never got the watches, but somewhere I still have the USB extension cords and the (then quite fancy) chargers with dual USB ports, one for your phone and one for the watch.
And they still do under Lenovo. Multiple-day battery, almost stock Android with very useful enhancements.
I was hopeful for the post-acquisition Motorola but it didn't quite pan out. The IP salvaged from the purchase was always a big part of the deal so it wasn't really a loss, just not really much of a win either.
I have an iPhone mini now, but it's still not small enough to 100% operate one-handed, at least not without grip adjustments. The Moto X wasn't quite a flagship phone, but it came close enough. I can't even find a properly one-handed phone anymore
Apple certainly wasn't the first smartwatch, but anyone who owned one before that was obviously a geek (said lovingly). Apple made the first mainstream acceptable smartwatch by smoothing over a lot of the complaints about their competitors, while adding some of their own in the process, just like the Vision Pro. It took a few iterations, but today people from all walks of life wear smartwatches. Certainly not as ubiquitous as smartphones, but Apple made smartwatches a standard piece of tech that millions of people own and they made plenty of money along the way.
The Vision Pro will probably be similar. For example, anyone wearing a VR/AR headset on a plane today would likely get stares. I bet a few years from now there will be several people on every plane wearing one of these. That doesn't mean Apple will make the best VR/AR headset or that VR/AR headsets will be a piece of tech that everyone owns, but Apple is capable of mainstreaming a piece of technology in ways that the Facebooks and Googles of the world aren't even if that is due to their marketing prowess and the strength of their brand just as much as their technical expertise. And in that sense, the thing that is more important than any of these reviews dropping today is the Super Bowl commercial Apple has almost assuredly bought to show this thing off in two weeks.
I remember a friend talking about load balancers when they were first came on the market 20 years ago. Cisco had this thing called "localdirector" which I believe couldn't handle load in the first place, while competitors did load balancing in hardware.
I was puzzled why people bought them.
My friend said, "Look, people buy $1M of cisco equipment, and they can just add a line item for one or 10 of these with no friction"
So, I think Apple made their watch a "line item". People buy a phone, and they need cables and the watch is sitting there, and they say "ok!" and try one.
(aside, I love my garmin watch. I just put it on my wrist. I haven't hooked it to my phone or connected it to the internet. It is great with battery life. I track my sleep, which seems to be when most people put their apple watch on a charger. I put my watch on the charger during my shower, which is all it needs)
Same as the Apple Watch.
...to top it up to 7 days of charge
Really? Why do Apple fanboys make these kinda claims.. same as wireless Bluetooth pods, or fingerprint readers, or faceID. There are ample examples of these done well on the hardware side prior. The main advantage Apple has is its seamless integration with software, which of course it pairs well with iOS because nothing else is allowed to.
They weren't the first smartwatch, but Apple is the company most responsibly for changing arbitrary societal metrics of "mainstream acceptance" like the percentage of people who would wear a smartwatch on a first date. That seems like an obvious observation and a "win" even if smartwatches aren't as ubiquitous as smartphones. I think the Vision Pro will follow a similar trajectory of success in that it will take years before anyone uses that word "success", but a few years from now you'll get on a plane and notice more than a few people wearing headsets and that will be because of Apple.
We'll adjust.
Their problem was that none of the features was _usable_. It was like they released the first MVP the engineering team got done and forgot that people needed to use it too. But it gave them a bonus and another line on spec sheet, so all was good.
For example Nokia had Copy & Paste years before Apple. But it was shit. They _had_ it, but you could copy very specific text bits to other very specific locations. Even Android had the same issue, you could copy some bits not others.
Apple isn't innovating, they haven't for a long time. They rarely come up with something "new" that _nobody_ has done yet.
What they are pretty much the best at is getting the tech everyone else has tried and packaging it to a usable form factor for the normal non-Hackernews consumer.
Wireless BT headphones existed before the Airpods, but they made it so seamless even my mom could do it and hasn't needed any help with them. Open box, insert in ear, done.
To be fair iOS copy and paste is still shit today, selecting and copying/pasting is really one of the worst experiences on iOS.
My point was more about the fact that you can copy an image in most apps and paste it to pretty much any field anywhere. It'll just work. Same with other rich data.
You couldn't do that with any previous C&P implementations, there were hard limits on what you could copy and where it could be pasted.
IF they manage to produce some AR device that 1) you almost won't notice you are wearing 2) it has pass-through light capabilities so being real AR and not VR mimicking AR, THEN it can get mass-adoption, at least for office workers or to replace big TV screens.
first apple watch was afailure and immediately fixed by the watch 2
>Apple made the first mainstream acceptable smartwatch by smoothing over a lot of the complaints about their competitors,
if anything apple set back smart watch development, the real groundbreaker was Pebble, but thanks to apple the smart wtach market is a stagnant perpetual compromise to justify low battery life with overpowered chips and bright screens, when all we really want is week-long batteries, e-ink always on displays, and physical buttons to work well.
i say this as an owner of at least 2 apple watches over the years. pebble never had a chance, but android's watch software has always suffered on trying to play apple's game instead of finding a true advantage
It's entering a crowded market that isn't even that big. As the premium option.
Climbing that hill is going to be a very tall order.
Apple's brand will not be a moat, either.
Zuck's initial response to Vision Pro [1] was the correct one:
> From what I’ve seen initially, I’d say the good news is that there’s no kind of magical solutions that they have to any of the constraints on laws of physics that our teams haven’t already explored and thought of. They went with a higher resolution display, and between that and all the technology they put in there to power it, it costs seven times more and now requires so much energy that now you need a battery and a wire attached to it to use it. They made that design trade-off and it might make sense for the cases that they’re going for.
> But look, I think that their announcement really showcases the difference in the values and the vision that our companies bring to this in a way that I think is really important. We innovate to make sure that our products are as accessible and affordable to everyone as possible, and that is a core part of what we do. And we have sold tens of millions of Quests.
[1] https://www.roadtovr.com/apple-vision-pro-zuckerberg-reactio...
I don't think this will be an easy market for anyone. It's low attachment, low critical app space.
I want to believe, though.
Iphone 1 was a collosal PoC. Slow, most of web didnt work. Its only appeal was the full touchscreen, which of course sucked to type on, but looked cool (which is the reason people bought it mostly). Everyone that needed mobile compute functionality was still on Blackberry and some other devices.
There was a time during early 2010s where the iphone was better than everything else due to native hardware and in house software and updated functionality. However by 2016 Android caught up, and since the first Pixel came out it pretty much has been ahead ever since.
and motion controls. Between the Nintendo Wii and the first iPhone people were obsessed with motion controls for some reason.
Iphone 1 set the stage for tech jewelry.
I remember the first time I saw an iPhone. It was 2am at a house party with a bunch of 19-25 year olds. Pretty much everyone stopped drinking or dancing and played with this dudes phone for three hours.
Given what was available at that time (I was using a Windows Mobile O2 XDA AND a Blackberry at that time), the iPhone was simply magical. The ability to browse the full web on the go and a proper mail client, was amazing.
Worth the money to travel to San Francisco from Singapore just to get one (and the cost of the AT&T SIM masker to spoof it on the local Singapore telco network)
As for email. Proper email client? It was pop3 only, and you had to manually tap to fetch new messages.
The internet on anything mobile was pretty painful when it launched in general. Websites weren't optimized for mobile, mobile data was unusably slow. Most people who wanted portability were using things like netbooks, which you could actually multitask on.
Blackberry was the goto for actual phone because it was much easier to type on due to the best keyboard at the time, well developed software for things like email, basic browser, e.t.c.
Ill leave you with this staplepiece of internet history: https://maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=iphone/
I could've sworn that "it's easy to type on" was the one weird trick it did right? Though perhaps I'm just misremembering the media; my first iOS device of any kind was the iPod touch with retina display.
Something about Apple having a temporary monopoly (or possibly monopsony) on capacitive touch screens, where everyone else was stuck with resistive ones?
Typing on the original iphone wasn't perfect, but it was generally better than tiny physical keyboards in many cases
There was a whole era of autocorrect and the memes that came with it due to how much it was being used with touchscreen keyboards.
Of course the advantage of a full screen for things like web and media was more important, and making fullscreen phones was cheaper, so physical keyboards died out. The size of the screen increased as well.
It’s not a trope if it’s true. Most hard core nerds didn’t get it until they had tried it hands on (including myself, I panned the device hard until I tried it). Then it was the exorbitant price point ($650 at a time when nobody really paid for phones). Then it was the lack of hardware keyboard. No “real” apps. No copy and paste (even my older at the time Symbian S60 devices had that). The list goes on and on.
I get it, if you were at another phone manufacturer, you might’ve been scared, but the reality is the iPhone didn’t really pick up steam in the market until 3G or 3GS.
AR though, that's something the public hasn't shown much interest in yet. These products are looking more like the Segway (which was once supposedly going to revolutionize transportation) - cool, popular in a few niche markets, but not the revolution that people imagine them to be.
People also forget that using a stylus with a touchscreen made it a pretty crappy phone, and they weren't ergonomic to hold up to your face with a lot of the larger PDA-like ones. The Windows devices with sliding keyboards were pretty decent as a compromise in terms of size and features though. But boy were they expensive in the UK at the time as they were generally imports from the USA.
Back in 2010 there were rumours of Apple building TVs and cars. Those would be weird because they're in areas where Apple had no experience and no software content to provide.
I used to go back and forth to Shenzhen all the time trading refurbs and by 2010 I straight up would not buy anything other than Android devices because 1) iPhone was actually more expensive in mainland China due to it being a grey market item back then and 2) demand for everything else fell off a cliff.
As someone who bought the original iPhone, it was extremely impressive, but had many many flaws. The browser was practically unusable over 2g and the whole pinch to zoom the New York Times desktop site was never actually practical.
I think the parallels are clear.
I also bought the original MacBook Air. Now that truly was terrible and stupidly overpriced. More expensive than the Vision Pro when adjusted for inflation, and with major functional problems. Today it’s the world’s most popular laptop.
These googles are as bespoke as it gets, are priced at 7x the competition and more than a flagship laptop, steer clear of the most popular existing use case, which is games, and offers... what exactly again?
That's quite some difference.
Neither of these statements is remotely true.
Not even remotely.
“marvelous display, great hand and eye tracking, and works seamlessly in the ecosystem, … The Apple Vision Pro is the best consumer headset anyone's ever made”
Yes, they also list a bunch of flaws. But the people trying to make out that the reviews are saying it’s a shittier oculus quest are not being honest.
Anyway, I bring that up because when the iphone came out, it really did do something different than the locked-in feature phones of the time; I did have to look it up to refresh my memory (https://www.cnet.com/pictures/original-apple-iphone-competit...), but its competition in that year was a lot of Blackberry-style physical keyboard and resistive touch screens running Windows Mobile. I do want to highlight the LG Prada, the first capacitive touch screen smartphone - came out in the same year the iPhone was announced, and it along with the HTC Touch on that page had a similar screen focused form factor.
Nothing on Vision Pro is comparable to things like Beatsaber, VR Chat, Pavlov.
Hard to tell if the hand tracking could handle those sort of experiences currently.
I had an HTC touch when iPhone came out and I was most envious that you could do two finger zooming in Google maps instead of tapping zoom buttons.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistive_touchscreen
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#Capacitive_touchsc...
But I agree, Apple is absolutely good at taking all this tech at the right time and making a compelling product. Steve insisted on glass/capacitive and that is just the best choice. Also, the UI didn’t feel like a layer (that you could easily get out off) as with touchflow. I’m also an iPhone user atm. Switched from Android about 3 years ago. The whole experience feels like higher quality to me still now. Although I have friends that would argue against that.
If we weren't busy with Symbian vs Linux internal feuds, and the Microsoft deal, things would have turned out much differently.
This however is coming after a decade of existing AR/VR consumer electronics and still misses the mark
... no?
Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Palm, Nokia, Symbian, Maemo?
The first iPhone, yeah, it had some detractors, but I don't think the kinds of criticisms the parent poster gave ever really applied to the iPhone. To succeed, the iPhone didn't have to be this utopian product; it just had to be more useful than its main competitor, which was dumbphones. People who complained that it was missing features the Blackberry had were working from an unstated major premise that the iPhone was initially targeted at enterprise users, and I think that everyone who wasn't too busy being a pundit to see how the world works could see that that quite transparently wasn't the case. There was even a time period where I had both an iPhone for personal use and a Blackberry for work.
And I think the criticism about entertainment is spot-on. By contrast, despite being extraordinarily limited compared to even the very next modal, the first iPhone was fantastic for entertainment, precisely because it was good for fostering shared experiences. It didn't take long after the device came out before you'd see groups of people clustered around an iPhone, looking at photos together on that big, vibrant, gorgeous screen. That was something that none of its competitors could do. And you better bet that people saw that happening and started wanting to have one of their own so they could have fun, too.
I do think we're still in the "wait and see" phase for this product, but, unlike some of the original iPhone criticisms or cmdrtaco's original dismissal of the iPod, the criticisms this article points out feel really personally relevant to me.
They're just a consumer goods company. Sometimes they make good things people don't appreciate at first. Sometimes they make bad things that people don't appreciate ever.
Their track record is better than the mean, but comparing every criticism of a first-gen Apple product to the iPod/iPhone launches is unserious. Of course some people panned any given new thing on Earth.
And this isn't even in response to someone predicting that AVP would fail, but just that the 1st-gen AVP is an immature product. The 1st-gen iPhone was an immature product! It's delusional (and discrediting to Apple!) to think the iPod, iPhone, OS X, Intel Macs, M1 Macs, etc. were as mature at launch as the later iterations we associate those technologies with now.
- incredible amounts of hype
- loving the design
- loving the touchscreen and input (directly contrasting folks worrying about the eye tracking now)
- a sense (at least from cnet and pcmag) that it's really just an overgrown iPod so they keep comparing it to an iPod (compared to the vision where folks get that it's a new category for apple and have good comps outside anyway )
There are definitely similarities in terms of complaining about missing features that apple's probably going to add soon anyway (keyboard showing up in portrait and stuff). Lots of complaints about not supporting flash but we know how that went. Also apparently the headphone jack position was annoying.
What I'm not seeing in the current vision reviews - and maybe it's impossible to see this in real time - is some feature that has the chance to change literally everything that people arent able to comprehend just yet. These reviews being relatively dismissive of this web browsing on your phone thing is absolutely hilarious in hindsight. The only similar thing in the vision is - the passthrough eye thing maybe? Nothing else seems particularly baffling.
I'm glad I read some of those reviews. The vibe I'm getting is - the iPhone was doing something fundamentally weird with this whole smartphone thing that reviewers just didnt get, so they kept reviewing it as an iPod with really bad voice calling and a browser and being confused by all the hype. The vision though? It's a vr/mixed reality headset, we know what those are like, and apple didn't throw any real curveballs.
Like seriously idk what people want from those reviewers. If they were 'accurately' predicting an outlier product like the iphone I doubt their wild fantasies would be accurately predicting much else
"Ensemble (formerly MacCast, before the lawyers had something to say about it) bridges windows from your Mac directly into visionOS, letting you move, resize, and interact with them just like you would with any other native app. It's wireless, like Mac Virtual Display, but without the limitations of resolution or working in a flat plane."
And this is a quite hard limitation, since the Mac has to actually render those windows and then stream them to the goggles over radio. So, without quite a bit of magic, you have a limited amount of pixels the Mac can draw and send.
I wrote a long comment [1] months ago when the Vision was first announced expressing my skepticism about the use of eye tracking based on my person experience with the tech. At the end I said, "maybe I'm wrong." Turns out I wasn't.
or, how often do we believe other people are clicking something with out looking at it?
im examining this for myself...hard to feel organic while im actively focusing on it, but i at least glance at my mouse pointer target while traversing the pointer towards the target across my screens
I also started thinking about it reading the reviews, and the main cases to me are:
- checking something before commiting an action: for instance reread the product name before pushing the purchase button. The pointer is already on the button, I keep it there while checking the order, so I just need to click.
- focus switch: pushing another window to the forefront doesn't need a super accurate click. I assume most people eye ball it like me and will click on a emptyish part of the window from the corner of their eye. Same for moving the focus away.
- scroll and type like situation: mostly when using a document on the side while taking notes. My eyes and focus will be primarily on one side (with quick glances on the other), while the mouse/trackpad movement will be on another.
I think we'll discover a lot more instances of this.
assuming that, in the AVP UX, the user could not linger hand-gesture focus on the button then immediately click after verifying whatever info they are reading as they will have to move the eyes up (to read lol) then back down to focus the hand-gesture control back onto the button
timestamp where reviewer discusses this idea
I don’t know why, but while I feel multiple monitors helps my productivity a lot in Windows and Linux I find myself not caring as much in MacOS as long as the screen is big enough. I think it has to do with my habits around how I use the windowing in each. I tend to teasselate and arrange them in MacOS while I tend to maximize or lock to screed edges in Windows.
Iirc though, there are diminishing returns fairly quickly beyond dual monitors.
Me personally, the sweet spot is three total screens.
This is a disingenuous argument. Your other points are much more valid than this one. You don’t have a VR headset to interact with other people in the same room. If you want to watch a movie with other people around you, there are many other (cheaper) ways to do that (and Apple can sell you a nice AppleTV to do it).
Whatever, it at least gives a startup an opportunity to build something unique - it's just sad to see your old friend start going senile.
As far as viewing with other people, this doesn’t seem like an insurmountable challenge. They have the theaters, they have Personas, they have spacial audio, and other Apple devices have features for watching content together with friends. Put them all together and it seems like if several friends had Vision Pro they could feel like they were sitting in a theater room together while watching a movie. I’m not saying this will be easy, but it seems like all the building blocks are there. The Personas are probably the big weak point, especially looking at someone next to you, but with the focus on the movie, I that’s probably the least important part.
It really isn't though, at least not for long, as of mid 2023 there are publicly showcased compact lightweight prototypes with 240° FoV.
Exactly. You know what is the best "goggle" type display I ever saw (and I tried quite a few)? Recent FPV goggles (hdzero) that have 1930*1080 OLED displays at approximately 46 degrees fov. I'm very glad the manufacturer decided to use the his low fov instead of increasing it to 55deg and more like others. The picture is insanely crisp, and looks better than looking at a 4k display. Another huge benefit is that entire picture fits within your "focus cone" so there is no need to gaze around. It is not a VR display, it's purpose is different, but it shows us what visual quality is possible.
I'd love if manufacturers, if they can't make 16k displays that fill the entire fov, create variable pixel density displays. Best quality in the center. Deteriorating towards the edges. That would be much cheaper, but then for good illusion one would need eye tracking and motorised optics which would probably be more expensive in the end...
Oh, well, I'm pretty happy with my fpv goggles (for fpv) I just wish there was a way for them to display different picture for each eye. They already have head tracking, I wonder what VR would be like with this huge ppi narrow fov goggles. Would it be more or less immersive?
It's perfectly doable, but there's still a hint of fuzziness and we're still a couple generations away from crisp LCD text.
I care about my eyes, so I use a 4k screen at 2x scaling for coding, and will not use the Quest 3 for work, unless that involves playing games and watching videos.
We can't see what's in our peripheral vision clearly, so they should be able to get away with most of the FoV being blocky af, shouldn't they?
This can also be achieved with 3rd party apps. On Quest, this is already a reality with Big Screen.
The main difference between discord, zoom or any other flat viewing experience vs VR is immersion. Words don’t do it justice, you have to experience it yourself.
Apple can do amazing things, but they do also fairly regularly make terrible things.
It really lends itself to the phone being a tool, rather than a device for endless entertainment. It also suggests it is an accessory, with the desktop/laptop being the home base, rather than the phone being a primary device.
It really bothers me that the phone is now at the center of the ecosystem. It seems like the hub should be something that isn't as vulnerable (to theft, loss, or drops) as a phone.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
It's a gimmick priced as 2.5 monitor stands.
Other combinations of distances and virtual sizes can be calculated in the same manner.
My work setup as a 43” monitor set about 1 arm’s length away. I can just touch it when my fingertip if I stretch slightly. In a virtual space, I’d probably go slightly larger, maybe 45-48”, pushed a little further back.
0.85*0.85 => 0.73
But then, you usually don't buy a 4k screen because you can perceive the individual pixels either, unless you are creating content that requires that.
I suspect it aligns easier with the quality concerns of reality and not with virtual components - if I can use a monitor through the screen with no noticeable loss of quality or additional eye strain, there's no reason to think a virtualized monitor won't be at least as good.
A screenshot would be blurry because of the foveated rendering
The device doesn't even have a power button
Not having buttons obviously doesn't prevent there being a screenshot function, just as lack of screenshot button on iPhone hasn't prevented it from taking screenshots, and just as the VP's lack of buttons doesn't prevent users from interacting with it at all...
- gigantic (virtual) screens showing your photos/videos in a spectacular way
AND
- a incredibly small, light, comfortable, and almost unnoticeable (e.g. glasses) headset
then, yes people will absolutely use that instead of actual photos printed on paper.
Obviously we're not there yet.
While I wouldn’t move back just to go into the office, I absolutely miss the ability to look at a specific person while talking in meetings, and for other to have the context about who you’re looking at with head turning or gestures etc…
In a Teams group chat, I’m always talking to the whole wall of faces essentially. Only by context of the conversation can you figure out who someone is talking to, and even then their webcam might be off center or on a separate monitor from where they’re looking and you don’t even pretend to make eye contact. There is no way to break out into an isolated side conversation or select your gaze and there’s a lot of value there.
There’s also the concept of sharing a virtual room with a person I’m collaborating with. Drawing on a whiteboard, walking around pointing at things on the monitor and such. The feeling of a shared physical space is powerful for collaboration.
Anyways, what I’m trying to say is this: The thought of replacing all human interaction with tech is of course depressing, but I don’t view this like that. This is technology that can meet people where they are and improve an existing experience. I’m not moving away from my family, esp. as my parents get older, and I will remain working remotely for the company because I very much enjoy what I work on, my team, and the way the company treats me.
This tech is a step towards making the shortcomings of remote work less impactful. It’s stupid expensive and the first iteration so it’ll have problems, but I’m much more excited by Apple’s approach to this than Facebook’s nonsense. Excited to see where it develops and how it’s adopted as it becomes cheaper.
Is an AR productivity tool really so hard? Apple owns the whole stack here. Nintendo can do Mario Kart AR in your living room with an RC car, but I can't get unlimited AR desktops for software development etc?
What you don't get is Mac windows intermingled with AVP windows, it's just your Mac screen as one window that you can move about. It sounds good though, and there has been a fair amount of movement in screen sharing over the last few macOS releases which suggests more could be coming here (like multi-screen support).
I guess for the Apple ecosystem we've gotta wait for some software updates to make it more useful. Not that I can justify paying my own money for the Vision Pro or Simula One.
[1] https://youtu.be/a3uN7d51Cco?t=16 [2] https://www.vrdesktop.net/
You can't because it's computationally impossible. There is simply no computing device that can render unlimited high-res desktops at 60Hz per eye.
Not to mention the need to stream all that data to the headset - since you're not going to put a high-end graphics card needed to even attempt this in anything approaching a wearable form factor. Good luck getting multiple 4k or even just HD streams between your laptop and your AR headset over Wi-Fi.
Not a stretch the same thing could be applied to a virtual desktop environment especially when you have eye tracking.
That bar shows a small lower-res preview of each of the desktops, it is not rendering all the desktops at full 4K res. Essentially the smaller a window appears on the screen, the lower effort is needed to draw it.
Vision has both of those. People will conveniently ignore all the downsides of it, like they do with current Apple products.
Why would you want presence in an action movie? Cool, in an exciting sort of way.
But presence in recording of your family? That's powerful stuff, for everyone!
That feels like the long-term hook. iCloud to handle obscene storage amounts as a service. iPhone to generate new recordings. Vision to play back recordings.
And the dastardly brilliant part is... the more 3D video you record... the more valuable a Vision is to you.
>> Capturing -- One of the more remarkable things to watch? Your own home 3-D movies. Apple introduced “spatial video” for the iPhone 15 Pro a few months ago, and I started recording my sons with it. Watching the videos in 3-D in the headset now is almost like reliving the moment. The Vision Pro also captures these videos and photos—you just hold down a button on the top left.
lol, literally the only use case I could convince myself to spend this money on (hey its cheaper than an XDR ).
Even then I was having trouble convincing myself since.. all indications were you wouldn't want to wear this more than a few hours at a time, so ultimately you still need the real physical monitors for the other 80% of your workday.
It's basically what the SimulaVR guys are aiming at, and I'm surprised Apple didn't go this way with their Mac integration. Especially because the native visionOS apps do seem to behave just that way.
I had not seen the Glove80 before, it does look pretty nice. Though I would prefer a bit smaller. I don't really use F keys, and use layers for things like arrow keys.
Glove80 has hot-swappable tripod mounts, so I attach it to my chair, or I use clamps to attach it to a table, or to short tripods standing on the floor, or to very tiny tripods that can give the keyboards an extreme near-vertical angle on a desktop. Very easy to get an ergo setup going when traveling this way.
For sure there will be some hardcore indies that just love developing for vr.
There will probably be some game studios ready to go.
TikTok will probably be there.
But, why would Netflix, Spotify, every productivity tool…go out of their way to work on this thing at a time where most are diving deeper into PWA’s?
For spatial computing, they’re going to need to improve the dev situation or accept that safari is the star of the show.
But there are 3rd party solutions that will let you do just that though: https://github.com/saagarjha/Ensemble
Do the math of how much bandwidth like three windows/screens (because with this model each window is basically its own screen) at 4K/100hz/10bit color each would take.
You're at limits of TB4 _very quickly_.
You can compress the image, try to do something smart with foveated rendering (only stream the windows that users are looking at; but that breaks if you want to keep a window with logs in your peripheral vision), use chroma subsampling, etc; but those all are varying trade-offs with relation to image quality.
I can also imagine it having some weird privacy implications; like Mac apps somehow monitoring this and tracking whether you're actually looking at them, etc.
If you would just trivially stream all windows to the vision of course it will at some point be at the limit of current technology. But I would assume a company like apple has the means to push the state of transmission media (rather than just using a now 4 year old standard) and be able to think of something smarter than „just stream all windows in maximum quality even if the user doesn’t look at them“
You don't need to send every pixel for every frame uncompressed.
It would be more like VLC, not sending pixels that aren't changing. And you don't really need 100Hz either. You can't read that fast anyway, the content could refresh lower than that as long as the actual window is moved at 100Hz to avoid nausea.
I really doubt the Mac display functionality as-is is refreshed at 100Hz with full pixel fidelity without compression. WiFi can't handle those kinds of speeds reliably.
Another option would be handling rendering on the Vision Pro rather than the MacBook so pixels don't need to be streamed at all.
The primary problem I would guess here would be latency though so maybe not feasible. The other possibility is if the actual rendering happens on device instead of streaming pixels. It would dramatically decrease bandwidth required.
I think there's a solution somewhere for this.
Here's a screenshot of 4 windows plus the deskop.
https://pasteboard.co/hPKLrKgp5vjy.jpg
This features has been there for nearly 9 years?
(note: In my view there was passthrough and I could see my room but the screenshot function didn't include that).
It seems limited to desktop + 4 popout windows but I know it used to support more because when I first got the Rift I tried to see if I could get 6 videos running + desktop all at once. It worked.
There are issues though
(1) it's just showing the desktop's image, that means it can't adjust the resolution of the window. Ideally you'd pick a devicePixelRatio and a resolution and it would re-render but no desktop OS is designed to do that.
(2) It's Microsoft Windows, not an OS that Facebook controls which means they're at Microsoft's mercy and whatever features Windows supports. No easy way to add better VR controls. For example, IIRC, you can't size a window directly. Instead you need go to the window showing the full desktop, size it there, that will then be reflected in the popout window. If that's not clear, there are 2 size. The size in VR. The resolution of the window. If the window is a tiny 320x240 pixel window on your desktop and you make it 5x3 meters in your virtual space, all Oculus can do is draw those 320x240 pixels. You can go back to your desktop, size the window to 1237x841, now Oculus can draw those 1237x841 to your 5x3 meter VR pane. But, since Oculus doesn't control windows (or maybe they're lazy), there is no way change from 320x240 to 1237x841 by directly manipulating the pane in VR. Instead you need to do that in the desktop pane in VR.
(3) IIRC it's got some weird issues with the active window. Since it's really just grabbing the textures of the Windows OS compositor and showing then in different spaces, that's separate from Windows' itself's concept of which window is the foreground window. So, as you select windows, you can see on the floating window of the "desktop" the front window keeps changing.
These are all really just a function of (2), that Facebook doesn't own the desktop OS.
The same problem would exist with the Mac. Apple, since they control Mac, could maybe make it work but it would be a huge change to MacOS. They'd effectively need each app to run on its own screen and each screen to be a different resolution and device pixel ratio. Plus they'd need to map in all of the other features to mac MacOS to be usable in AR
But I'll give it a try, thanks!
And yeah Apple would need to do some changes to macOS to make this work well, but as you say they control it. If they really view this as the future of computing they should really make it work.
The idea of SimulaVR is that it replaces your window manager so they avoid some of these issues by taking direct control. But that's something that only works on Linux.
the way RDP works is the code to actually render a window or desktop gets sent over the network and is ONLY rendered on the remote client.
this is not only more efficient but also allows for fun things like rendering remote apps directly on your local desktop mixed in with your normal local windows
I think all the wear comes if you’re sitting up wearing it, though. For passive consumption (or thinking between moments of work), you can just lean back or even lay down, which will take the pressure off your head/face.
No idea if it does this, but the obvious use case is for people who aren't physically present - but letting them somehow share a physical space. It could potentially be awesome for friends/partners who live far apart.
may be apple expect every person to buy one. Didn't facebook recently try something similar?
Eh... I prefer empty cinemas
No loud babies, no popcorn sounds, no people explaining the plot to people not paying attention, just me and the world of the film. Bliss.
There’s a video circulating of someone cooking while wearing it and gingerly pinching a virtual timer and placing it on a pot of boiling pasta.
It looks so stupid that I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.
Maybe younger people might think differently but for me, this stuff is dead on arrival because of simply how uncool and stupid it makes you look when you use it.
We all look stupid staring at our black rectangles, with notches at the top, with little headphone stems sticking out of our ears. It looks stupid at first and then you get over it
1. They are more "worn" than "used"
2. They conceal your face while wearing
So maybe cultural acceptance might take a while...
EDIT: typos
Do we really though? Reading a newspaper or book would be stupid as well
I'm so old I remember the N-Gage 1st gen being ridiculed for the "sidetalking" feature.
Now we have millionaires on TV talking to their phones like it's piece of bread they are about to take a bite of and nobody bats an eye.
Sort of virtual assistant.
That could be useful to people to avoid burning or forgetting stuff.
Do you mean a Mac's external monitor visible through the vision pro AR view?
This has been know for at least 30 years in the eye tracking business and it even has a name - The Midas Touch problem.
I wanted to see how it is possible but sure enough, I found a paper from 1995 that cited even older research about this.
> They expect to be able to look at an item without having the look cause an action to occur.
So this doesn't seem to be a problem that Vision Pro has?
Yeah, Apple Vision doesn't have this problem, because eye tracking is used just for pointing; not for clicking on items.
> some form of ‘‘clutch’’ to engage and disengage the monitoring
The paper does talk about other challenges with look-to-select, even if it is biased by the thinking of back in the day:
> Unlike a mouse, it is relatively difficult to control eye position consciously and precisely at all times.
You have to remember that the historical setting for much of this research was to help paralyzed people to communicate, and pushing a button or the modern pinch-touch was not really always an option.
Let's say I want to click on the "reply" button below this text box. If I'm perfectly honest, I DO look at the button for a moment, then I move the mouse pointer over to it. But then right before clicking, my eyes switch back to the content I've created to observe that my click is having the desired effect on it.
I'm not actually looking at the button at the moment I click on it, but I DID look at it just a few milliseconds prior to the click. Why can't the UI just keep track of what I looked at a few milliseconds ago, to figure out that I actually wanted to click on the button, and not in the center of some text box?
One issue could be maybe I thought for a moment about replying but then changed my mind and decided to edit the content some more. But the UI has decided that I meant to click the "reply" button and so now it's been submitted prematurely. Yeah, I can see the problem now. The position of the mouse cursor is meaningful when clicking, and the Vision OS doesn't have a cursor. Cursors are important.
Not on a plane they don’t. Not in a hotel room on a business trip.
IMHo, the Vision Pro is for being somewhere when you’re nowhere; not for being somewhere when you’re already somewhere.
The hypothetical use-case that the GP is talking about here, is AR -facilitated collaboration — people in your "see-through" view of the world being able to interact with the AR objects in your field of view, or vice-versa. Being able to AirDrop something to someone's iPhone by dragging a file from a window over to their body that you can see through the lens. You and your SO on the same flight, next to each-other and both wearing headsets, able to see the same set of shared/synced AR objects, and therefore watch the same movie. That kind of thing.
While this is an intended use-case for the Vision "platform" as a whole — it's an implicit promise of the whole "spatial computing paradigm" phrasing — I don't think this kind of AR-facilitated collaboration was ever intended to ship with the Vision Pro.
Why? Because, nobody in the Vision Pro's target market — at least as Apple would have it — wants or cares about AR-facilitated collaboration. I'll get to why in a moment, but in short — it's because it's the Vision Pro. And like Apple's other Pro products, it's mostly intended to be something possessed by an individual but owned and managed by their employer.
Now, Apple clearly intends to build VR -facilitated collaboration — but hasn't yet. That's what all the reviews mean when they say "the collaboration" is half-baked in the Vision Pro. The people in Apple's target market for this thing, expected VR collaboration, and it's not there. But that's an entirely different thing from AR-facilitated collaboration.
The Vision Pro as a specific product offering, almost certainly came out of Apple employees doing pandemic WFH, and realizing that all current "remoting" solutions sucked. Especially if you're a hardware engineer and trying to get a good look at a 3D real-world prototype of a thing. The people who are actually there in the office could just come in and stare at a real 3D-printed prototype. But the WFH people had to settle for looking at a 3D model on a screen... or maybe setting up a Windows machine, connected to an Oculus Quest, and using special compatible CAD software, in order to be able to do a walkaround. And that CAD software definitely didn't let them just paw at the 3D object with their hands.
The Vision Pro is clearly aimed at the "high-fidelity sensory feedback" half of the remoting problem. It's thus the complement to the companies who build telepresence robots — those robots solve the high-fidelity presence and interaction half of the remoting problem. (And you could really do some clever things by combining them!)
But note what else Apple released during the pandemic: Freeform, a piece of collaboration software. In fact, Apple added collaboration features to many of their first-party software offerings during the pandemic.
Apple never thought they'd extract their best work from their WFH (or now, travelling) employees by having them "show up to the office" with a telepresence robot. They rather expect that the best platform for all their engineers — in-office or otherwise — will be a digital office: one made of collaborative apps. And specifically, "level-of-immersion responsive" collaborative apps — apps that can switch between (or be compiled for) both lower-fidelity 2D screen-based UX, and higher-fidelity 3D spatial UX, on the same codebase.
It's this sort of 3D spatial collaboration-app UI experiences that the Vision Pro lacks in 1.0 but will clearly add later. (Which is why Apple cancelled WFH as soon as they could: their "solution to the remoting problem" isn't baked enough for them to usefully dogfood yet!)
But this is effectively VR-facilitated collaboration — working with other people who could be in arbitrary places, in VR or just interacting through a screen, where you see their VR avatars (personas) instead of seeing them. It's "Metaverse stuff" — but don't let Tim Cook catch you calling it that.
But AR-facilitated collaboration — i.e. having other people who are part of your work, present in the room with you, with some or all people in the room wearing Vision headsets with the see-through turned up, and where people wearing the headsets are interacting both with shared AR objects and with others present in physical space (rather than their VR simulacras in VR space)... this all has zero relevance to the remoting use-case. If you're in the office, then you're not going to be wearing a Vision Pro... because you can collaborate by just getting people in a room, and using various screens (AirPlay on an AppleTV display for shared viewing; your Macbooks for running collaboration tools; etc.)
Now, AR-facilitated collaboration is likely a use-case for the "Vision platform" as a whole. (Otherwise, why bother with the AR OS features?) AR-facilitated collaboration, is what a self-employed / freelance creative professional — someone who isn't remoting into some [idea of an] office, but who does have people [e.g. clients] physically present around them who they need to interact with them and with their work — would want. AR-facilitated collaboration would therefore be the defining use-case for a later "Vision Studio": a "prosumer" model targeted at such creative professionals — the same sort of people who buy themselves a Mac Studio. It would match the Vision Pro's targeting (which, if you haven't considered it, will almost certainly end up squarely on "businesses buying these for their remoting employees" — even if the early adopters are individual tech nerds.)
> cameras are still cameras, and displays are still displays.
Anyone remotely familiar with the state of development in those areas would be aware that “even Apple” can’t cheat Reality (punintentionally).
Those left still raving about and/or hoping for a game changer will be greatly dissapointed - or only in it for the line go up.
The whole concept will be a niche product for many years to come and will stay an isolating experience.
First Gen is usually awful
This is not awful and maybe even closer to 2nd gen
Everything starts somewhere
Most things are ready for the masses by the 3rd or 4th gen.
At the end of the day, this is Apple testing the waters and trying to get a positive cash flow to help offset significant R&D...what they're showing is pretty impressive in a number of ways, even as it's lacking in others.
This is one of those things that Apple never claimed was supported, and yet there's something about that behavior that feels like such a natural intuitive implication to the technology that a lot of people feel alarmed or even cheated when they realize it's not possible (yet). It's been funny to watch the various discussion threads as people pop up talking about their shocked realization and disappointed feelings.
Update: I did realize when watching the WSJ video that the "mirrored" display actually appeared to have greater "resolution" (more pixels in height and width) than what she had on her laptop. So that's something.
If Apple approves it, of course. This is one of my major concerns; there's a lot of potentially useful functionality that could be implemented, but you have to jump through the app store hoops and hope that Apple doesn't decide that it conflicts with their idea of what you should be allowed to do.
So even though you have a sequestered Mac output alongside Vision apps, you can use the same controls for all them simultaneously. This should help in the interim.
With Stage Manager on macOS now, it feels like they have all the primitives in place to "transpose" macOS stage manager windows textures to Vision OS/ the iPad OS foundation.
Though this will be tricky to get right for all apps. Will be interesting to see if it's a macOS App store only feature/ API, opt-in, or some other option
EDIT: -5* doesn't make sense, this is the most polite way you can point out that getting macOS apps windowed on visionOS has ~0 to do with double-buffered windows on iPad OS. n.b. I didn't use half-baked, OP did.
I use iPad Pro as a kind of sidecar daily driver, in the magnetic dock magic keyboard w/ trackpad.
As I type this, the screen shows a traditional MacOS style dock across bottom, four Stage Manager window clusters I can tap with a thumb on the left, and Safari plus Messages taking 2/3 and 1/2 of screen respectively.
There's more app and pixel real estate than most Windows laptops, and bringing screen sets to the foreground or swapping them back to the side is so natural I almost feel like giving up that space on my Mac as well.
The big thing I saw happen from apps over the past two version of iOS is app devs realizing their windows will not always be full screen or 1/2 screen size, but arbitrary size.
By now, most iPad apps of any serious nature are effectively window size independent, making them play well with others in stage manager. It's easy to see how that would make them play well with the headset one day.
They just haven’t done it.
- [Profit on basic innovation] Did they want to wait and see how their customers would adopt VisionOS's native free-floating windows, so as to avoid cognitive overload by commingling with MacOS windows?
- [Benevolence to fellow competitors] Did they not want to takeover the existing market of virtualized VR desktops?
The Vision Pro is effectively using AirPlay to mirror the whole screen. If you used AirPlay to mirror each window as a whole screen, you'd run out of bandwidth pretty quickly.
The windowing system in MacOS, Quartz Compositor, also isn't built to stream window information. Right now it has a big built in assumption that any windows its displaying are on a screen it also controls. It was probably too big a lift across teams to also re-write the graphics stack for MacOS for the launch of the Vision Pro. Hopefully they get it working in the future, but neither of these problems are easy to solve.
In fact, there's already a project for it on GitHub. https://github.com/saagarjha/Ensemble
480 lines total, including comments, headers, whole shebang.
It's all of the edge cases and UX refinements that takes time.
Try it with a full suite of Mac Apps and you’ll find it falls apart because they aren’t all well behaved.
You are making this sound much more complicated than it really is.
The trivial case is simple. You are imagining it's all the trivial case.
What fools Apple engineering management must be, then!
Compositor work isn't tremendously hard when the graphics primitives are already done.
UI state handling and input is a majority of the work from there. I've implemented this work before. A large portion of my background is in compositors and UI primitives.
What's really cool about having window backing layer handles, is you can do all sorts of crazy fun stuff in the office and show off to your coworkers or tech demo that basically will never make it to production because it's totally impractical.
The best example of that which actually did end up in a final product in my opinion was Windows Flip 3D. Totally fun implementation, I'm sure.
Remember the original comment was the claim that Xorg could easily do remote windows years ago. This is only true using the low performance path that modern operating systems have universally rejected.
The first iphone didn’t have copy/paste.
Apple will always prioritize critical scenarios over nice to have. None of these things are technically difficult, it’s just time. I’m willing to believe they released too early, but at some point you have to start learning from real users.
Literally nobody has done it. It's beyond ridiculous that you can't already show or duplicate an application window on any display you want and allow it to be controlled from anywhere it is visible.
Searching for ways to do this lead one into extremely niche software ecosystems. Please is there any collaboration app out there that makes it seamless to toss windows around like everyone actually wants?
Even classic Mac OS, which wasn’t designed to be “rootless” could be run that way could have its windows mixed with OS X windows in the classic days.
As others have pointed out, there is already a PoC app that is doing it, so it seems if Apple wants to, it’s completely in their power. However, does this match their vision? (pun intended) Time will tell.
This would mean the goggles would be basically just a dumb display for the Mac. It would also be weird to try to move an AR app onto your Mac.
But this is sufficient for many use cases (or at least, mine). I pre-ordered one with the idea that my main work will be on the 4K monitor, with most of my superfluous apps floating around as native visionOS apps. That's mail, a web browser, and zoom, which all have apps now, and Slack, which I could just use Safari for but may have a native app in the future.
It's more like 1080p monitor. The virtual monitor only covers a small part of the VisionPro's display. You can compensate a bit for a lack of resolution by making the virtual screen bigger or by leaning in, but none of that gives you a 4k display.
To really take proper advantage of the VR environment you really need the ability to pull out apps into their own windows, as than you can move lesser used apps into your peripheral vision and leave only the important stuff right in front of you. You also miss out on the verticality that VR offers when you are stuck with a virtual 16:9 screen.
Which is the resolution that the majority of PC users are likely using.
“There is a lot of very complicated display scaling going on behind the scenes here, but the easiest way to think about it is that you’re basically getting a 27-inch Retina display, like you’d find on an iMac or Studio Display. Your Mac thinks it’s connected to a 5K display with a resolution of 5120 x 2880, and it runs macOS at a 2:1 logical resolution of 2560 x 1440, just like a 5K display. (You can pick other resolutions, but the device warns you that they’ll be lower quality.) That virtual display is then streamed as a 4K 3560 x 2880 video to the Vision Pro, where you can just make it as big as you want. The upshot of all of this is that 4K content runs at a native 4K resolution — it has all the pixels to do it, just like an iMac — but you have a grand total of 2560 x 1440 to place windows in, regardless of how big you make the Mac display in space, and you’re not seeing a pixel-perfect 5K image.”
We're pretty close to "Write once, (rewrite a bit,) Run everywhere"
even the big UI update recently as completely overwritten how the old app used to look in my memory
the only feature i have tried and not really cared for is the "Canvas" feature
edit: Yes I know you can build apps before they're in the store
Yes I know you can technically do this without a paid dev account, but it's practically useless because it has to be re-done every 7 days.
I think mostly people don't (for high end IDEs) because they expect a keyboard and pointing device that isn't a touchscreen and those are faily rare per ipads sold.
The ipad pro certainly is seeing some more beefy productivity apps it seems.
Windows, BeOS and Commodore 64 apps also don't run natively on the iPad or Vision Pro.
This allows you to restrict full bitrate to a single window with a maximum resolution and keep the user experience high and astonishment low.
It feels like the Vision Pro would definitely be a great replacement for people who (want to) buy multiple expensive monitors, but it doesn't fully reach that potential today, and mostly because of software? Although rendering 3 or 4 virtual workspaces through ad-hoc Wifi at 4K 60fps+ low-latency would certainly be a huge challenge.
OSX had the opportunity to follow that path before settling on the “render windows, capture the screen, compress the image, send it over the network to be decompressed” VNC-style remote access that’s bog-standard today, and if they had Vision Pro would be set up to be an absolute mind-blowing macOS experience.
I guess one downfall is that that your pipe has to be lossless, and there's no way to recover from a broken pipe (unless you keep a shadow copy of the window state, and have a protocol for resynchronizing from that, and a way to ensure you don't get out of sync.)
This has been done many times before (see e.g. X Windows) and has known downsides. Off the top of my head:
- You need the same fonts installed on both sides for native font rendering to work
- Applications that don't use native drawing functions will tend to be very chatty, making the total amount of data larger than VNC/rdesktop/&c. style "send compressed pictures"
- Detaching and re-attaching to an application is hard to get right, so it's either disallowed or buggy.
It falls apart as UIs got richer, browsers in particular: they're entirely composited in-app and not via GDI, because GDI isn't an expressive enough interface. So you end up shipping a lot of bitmaps, and to optimize you need to compress them. You might as well compress the whole screen then.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/3972/nvidia-gtc-2010-wrapup/3
1: e.g. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/windows_protocol...
Applications which bypass the native APIs to render their window contents, in particular video players or games, get a compressed streamed video which has very decent performance. The video quality seems to be dynamic as well, so if there's a scene with very few changes you can see the quality progressively improve.
All of this is done per window, so a small VLC window playing a video in a corner gets the video treatment, while everything else still works like native UI.
How did you know it sends windows hooks? Was it some sort of binary serialization?
1. The receiving side has to have at least as much rendering power as the original side, since it will be the one actually having to render things on screen. This is always going to be the opposite case with any kind of glasses, where you'll always want to put as little compute as possible for weight and warmth reasons.
2. Each application actually has to send draw instructions instead of displaying photos or directly taking on control of the graphics hardware themselves. No or very few modern applications work like this for any significant part of their UI.
However, the best review I’ve found that actually transmits what is possible and what it is like to use is Brian Tong’s 55 minute review video: https://youtu.be/GkPw6ScHyb4
I’m not familiar with him, but unlike other reviews I’ve seen, he spends less time evaluating or summarizing, and more time trying to actually use the device. I didn’t even realize that you can seamlessly use your Mac to control your visionOS apps, for example.
He said he could wear it 45 mins before needing to take it off, that it was overstimulating so you need to slow down how quickly you use apps and move things on screen, and that gestures also were fatiguing. You could tell he was trying to be fair but positive.
Headsets just haven’t cracked this nut yet, and tho tech may advance somewhat, they may be limitations inherent to the form factor. Even if it gets really light weight, the issues of overstimulation, headaches, and the amount of neck movement implied may keep these products in a niche. (I say this as someone super excited about AVP)
For everyone used to using their computers all day long wanting to do it in a headset, don’t throw your macbooks away just yet.
[1]: https://www.bobovr.com/products/bobovr-m3-pro
A lot of the physical downsides here are basically self-inflicted by companies trying really hard to hide the "nerd factor" necessary for comfort, to the detriment of the actual user experience.
The big product marketing question is what niche do headsets fit in, and thus whats the ideal single session and daily usage goal for a headset?
If it's about replacing laptops or another high usage scenario, that's a pretty high bar, definitely too high for the next 1-2yrs. I imagine some people at Apple wore dummy see-through goggle ergo tester units of varying weights around all day to get at these numbers :) Wonder what they came back with. Even still, that only gets at weight vs the perceptual ergonomics, skin-feel, etc.
The issue I see with headsets is that there may not be a lot of improvement possible without compromising durability or other factors necessary when going to market. E.g. what if they can't get it below ~400g (making AVP ~40% lighter), but to make the headset comfortable for most people for the usage scenario that makes them mass market (e.g. 2h+ sessions daily) requires ~250-300g?
And those who work in VR report their coworkers and just about everyone they talk to customer wise feels the same way.
I know there are people who really want to, or think they do, but most would rather just use screens until maybe such a time the form factor becomes a pair of eye glasses.
I think it's completely reasonable to say that this stuff is only going to continue to get lighter and more comfortable every generation. What's that balance of interest going to look like when a headset's eventually got the same weight and form factor as, for example, big ski goggles?
IMHO both. As for form factor lots of people already opt for contacts over glasses for comfort. I think ski googles are right out for anything that's not recreation or industry/application specific.
As for being in VR people really do like the real word lol. Going in and out of VR is a bit of an ordeal. Anecdotally I like taking small breaks from looking on my screen during the work day. Frequently. I look outside at the trees, at my cats, stuff on my desk, and etc when I'm thinking. If I have to "go in and out of VR" to do that or just not be in VR I'm going to just not be in VR.
For it to catch on mainstream for productivity and day-to-day it's gonna have to be like eye or sunglasses with seamless AR. Via something like retinal projection perhaps. I feel like Google was onto all this hence the Google Glass.
At first people think "wow it's so awesome I can be sitting on the moon while I browse the web". But after a bit of time you just get tired, and I think it's precisely because your whole brain is working in overdrive to understand the unnatural environment you are in. None of this manifests explicitly but at the end of it, when people are faced with the choice of putting the headset on or not, they just "feel" like it's a lot of effort.
I say all this as someone who does regularly spend 1-2 hours working in Immersed with multiple giant screens up. And I love it as a break, a way to focus or just relieve the boredom of working in the same space day in day out. But even I feel this effect of it being tiring and not keen to do it for 8 hours a day. And the minute you say that, you lost the use case of this being your "only" computer / replacing your laptop, so it's actually kind of crucial to its central justification as a replacement for a computer or a 'new kind' of computer.
Having demoed VR at my old office I can tell you that the range of reactions varies from an immediate "nope" and having to take the headset off to being able to stay in it for a significant amount of time with no discomfort.
But what is the account situation like?
For years I’ve been complaining that I can’t easily use my private iPad with my company Mac because they have separate Apple IDs. Things like sidecar for a quick virtual whiteboard are basically impossible.
AirPods have gotten better over the years where today I can freely switch between devices belonging to different Apple IDs with the same AirPods.
But is the Vision Pro like that as well? It would seem weird to exclude the not-so-small group of people working from home but with company MacBooks
Assuming the Vision Pro screen sharing works using the same stuff, I have high hopes.
Ended up creating a new account that was part of my family.
(My partner is corpo; I'm startup, but have worked at corpos. No thanks.)
Better to keep it all owned by the company, in my opinion, and have them issue you an iPad for this express purpose.
The main one being a complete separation of calls, messages, calendar, notes and reminders. For my own sake more than for my employers sake.
And many employees with company phones already have that separation. iPhone and Mac is not that uncommon to provide for employees. But an iPad on top? I think that’s gonna be much harder to find
And edit: a Vision Pro on top…
If your work is on the traditional model of perimeter protection and trusted intranet, a non-work device can't join the network as you have correctly pointed out. If your work is on the newer BeyondCorp style model, switching to a second account on your computer is going to invalidate the device trust needed to access work resources.
Locking you customers into your ecosystem? Fine, whatever. But even within the ecosystem restricting usage in such a way!?
It's been said for years but the iPad could be so much more than a mere media consumption device if it weren't for short-term-profit driven design decisions.
Maybe they do better with the Vision Pro.
Literally the only cloud drive product I know of which doesn't work on my corporate laptop is iCloud Drive, because the EMM gave a checkbox to set a flag. As a result, a huge portion of built-in collaborative features and apps just don't work. I have paid seats in other products only to regain functionality lost by that checkbox.
I have a similar complaint with my Apple Watch and my corporate issued laptop. When I am using my own computer (mac mini) I love how easy it is to use my watch to login, use it to approve actions, etc. However when it comes to my company laptop I have to type my password in repeatedly. It would be awesome if the watch could be linked to both IDs to make this much more seamless.
It's actually far worse. There's a single user and a "guest mode", but for AR/VR to work with, there's a calibration step, which means that the guest has to go through that step every single time they want to use the device. It might be fine for a real guest using it once, but it would be basically impossible to share the device with someone else. Having to setup the device every single time you use it sounds absolutely terrible.
This is kinda what Managed Apple IDs are for - the work 'owns' the Apple ID it puts into its management profile and can set policy. Apps write into a separate storage container which the company could remote wipe, without affecting the rest of your personal data. If they want to disable things like sidecar, they can do it.. for the corporate apps/accounts/web domains.
I'd' generally assume the multi-user aspect is worse (because face shields and prescriptive inserts) so generalized multi-account is pretty low on the priority list.
Zoom has a good Airplay sharing feature that works well in this situation.
But I get what GP means -- I do have a corporate profile, and I made my own @corporation.com Apple ID, but what do I do to use sidecar? Either log out of my personal iCloud on the iPad (gross) or log in to my personal iCloud on my work computer (grosser)
I use my iPad so sporadically that it could easily be the house iPad, but I’m signed in with my email and so on it can’t be.
What the fuck. The fact that an apple ID is even involved is absurd. Should be able to just Bluetooth to any device.
However, pairing an audio device is an exchange of settings and encryption keys, and Apple will sync that pairing that to your entire account. Hold your AirPods near your Phone and tap the button to create the initial pairing, and they start working with your Mac and Apple TV.
I use my airpods with my Nintendo Switch and Samsung TV all the time. No Apple IDs on there.
Bluetooth is one of the worst protocols to work with. That goes for both implementers and users. It’s one of the key selling points of Apple devices - they just work together.
Troubleshooting which device is hijacking the Bluetooth speaker is not how I want to spend my relax time. And don’t get me started on anything IoT. Solving the pairing issue is a massive selling point.
As for Apple ID specifically, I know that it’s used for tracking lost devices, and connecting with other devices that you may not have paired individually in a n^2 fashion. It could be, for instance, that Bluetooth pairing would conflict with apples own discovery/ownership protocol - say you only use BT (no account) and then an iPhone with temp access to your AirPods could “take over” your AirPods since they didn’t have a logical owner before.
The "freely switch" here is referring to the W-chip multi-device support that will on the fly switch between any number of Apple devices based on what's actively being used at the time, without needing to do any manual connection stuff.
Other non-proprietary Bluetooth devices will generally do 2 devices at most, and getting that to work right with microphone input settings can be kind of a nightmare.
These devices are going to have your sweat, makeup, odours etc on them.
So you're really not going to want to share a device with anyone else.
Unfortunately Apple is charging $200 per extra facial interface though.
The moment you use different Apple IDs you lose a lot of nice features of Apple‘s products
Either you can't sign in with your personal Apple account, or you shouldn't (because MDM). So the only way to access anything associated with iCloud is what is available on the iCloud web portal; which is a horrible experience. You can't do sidecar. You can't do airdrop, copy-paste, continuity camera, nothing.
I've only ever used Macs in a professional environment. I've, also, always had a Mac and iPhone as personal devices. But I've never made the jump toward saying "Ok I'm actually using iCloud Seriously now" for this single reason. The best Google Cloud experience is available in a web browser, which I can be signed-in to on everything. Google Drive is everywhere. The list goes on.
Its such a crystalline example of why Apple's walled garden actually hurts themselves.
I am hoping we will see a lot of experimentation in the coming years, and I am excited for what the Apple ecosystem will bring to the table. That said, from what I have seen so far this does not seem to be a revolution compared to the current offerings, but an evolution on various fronts, without addressing the killer app question.
In 1988-94, the CPUs available in desktop computers were substantially more advanced than the widely used operating systems. Windows 3 and Mac System 6/7 didn't support pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection, or many other features that define a modern OS.
Maybe we'll look back at today's Quest and Vision Pro as similar transitional devices with one foot stuck in the old paradigm, running old-style software.
That was partly because RAM was over $100/MB (Nominal; ~$230 inflation adjusted) in 1990. Additionally, in the IBM compatible world, many people didn't have a 386 at that point.
Also, minor nitpick on the dates; 1993 saw OS/2 2.1 and NT 3.1, both of which had preemptive multitasking and memory protection.
But other notable ones include Synth Riders, FitXR, OhShape, Pistol Whip, Thrill of the Fight, and (maybe) Gorilla Tag. And this list is far from exhaustive.
VR is pretty good for fitness just because it can make exercising more interesting, comparable to sports without the need to coordinate with other people (and it's easy to do inside your house, if you have at least a 2m x 2m open space). Major downsides would be having that space available and sweat inside the headset.
https://www.meta.com/us/quest/accessories/quest-3-silicone-f...
https://www.meta.com/en-us/help/quest/articles/in-vr-experie...
It turned out the killer Apple Watch feature was fitness, and I don’t see why it couldn’t have been here.
It was fun for a few minutes but not really usable for serious exercise:
- It's heavy and annoying (and this apple product seems even bulkier and heavier). The cable situation is also not great, you need a lightweight cable and ceiling suspension to keep it out of the way, but this is solvable.
- Exercise means you get sweaty. Can't wipe your brow and you have a wet headset on your face.
- You can't see your body and maintain proper form. The VR environment itself is also distracting if you turn your head around to look at stuff moving there.
I much prefer just to have my phone or tablet in fixed place in front of me to watch youtube or some movie.
I really don't think that's the best use-case for VR - if you're doing some kind of virtual rowing, a flat screen is going to offer most of the experience with none of the downsides. VR fitness is really about games that are fun in their own right and happen to be physically active. There's a big cohort of people who hate exercise and would never set foot in a gym, but who will happily spend an hour at their aerobic threshold because they're playing a fun game.
The reason running outside is nicer than on the treadmill is not that you get to look at nicer images. You get to smell fresh air and feel the wind on your body, you get to sometimes interact with people, you get to feel various textures under your feet, you get to move your bodies in more ways as you turn left and right etc.
Rowing outside is even more different, as you get the feel of the water currents and water splashes as well.
VR can mimic none of these things, and it comes with the massive downside of a sweaty face that you can't wipe away.
Totally agree. I'm waiting for a usable Virtual Desktop app to come out. All the ones I have tried which work on my cheap WMR headset fall short of having floating app windows in view.
I guess there is one of those which works on Meta Quest, but not PC headsets. That's really what you need to be effective working in VR. Just like is mentioned the Apple headset supports.
I’ve also heard about players spending a lot of time in counter strike games like pavlov.
At this point it seems like there’s a TON of things to do in VR (and I’m gonna be honest, there were a ton of experiences too on the Quest 1 when I had it).
I’m just waiting for more live shows and concerts that I can attend from the Quest personally.
It is like VR is currently stuck being Kinect in terms of sales and stickiness, while Meta and Apple would both like it to be at least like the Wii, or ideally the iPad.
Personally I have found social experiences to have the best long-term appeal (i.e. Racket NX or Drop Dead with friends), but even there I am not these apps have sufficient mainstream appeal.
This matches everyone I’ve heard talk about it, too. It was fun, they enjoyed a few things and then at some point they realized that their headset had multiple months of dust on it.
I think the big question is when costs come down to the point where it’d be reasonable for a non-rich family to have enough headsets to use together. Most people mention technical limits (resolution, latency) but the thing which everyone mentioned as a dealbreaker was that putting the headset on was shutting out everyone around them.
I bet these people also have consoles that are collecting dust as well
The discontinued WMR Portal, essentially the Window's desktop in VR, was so far the only software that tried to be a full workspace in VR. But even that was missing a lot of important features and Microsoft gave up on it years ago and never made it accessible to non-Microsoft headsets. It's currently scheduled for removal from Windows.
VisionPro seems very similar to WMRPortal so far, with a few key improvements like allowing apps do add 3D objects into a shared space.
For example, "killer apps/content" never arrived for 3D TVs and they have largely disappeared from the market. Same with various "waggling" input technologies like the Wiimote and Kinect. There were some compelling uses, like Wii Sports, but these were pretty limited and many other uses of these in games was a case of Nintendo shoehorning the technology into the game.
I think the best pessimist argument is the one offered by Folding Ideas in his metaverse video[1]: Text is really, really useful, and a virtual 3D space is not a good environment for either creating or consuming textual content.
I don't miss multiple monitors so much, but I do often wish for a larger screen. Not enough to put one in my space, though. That's where my interest in the Vision Pro lies - simply a way to project large, high-fidelity, 2d screens.
For less than this headset, I can buy an Ergotron arm and some monitors and have multiple large monitors that have zero footprint on my desk.
No, I can’t take my setup with me when I go somewhere, but I don’t want to.
I have a hard time seeing this become a mass market device. It’ll have its adherents and enthusiasts, but personally find it difficult to imagine even wanting one, let alone using it.
But what do I know, I thought the iPad was goofy. Though I never did end up replacing my gen 2 iPad. Realized I didn’t need it.
I'm on the same boat as you, but ended up just getting a long table so I can move to the empty side when I need it.
I certainly could make adjustments to accommodate a monitor - I just don't want to, and would love for there to be a way to not have to and still get to use a large display.
I don't have a TV at my small apartment but do have two 27 in monitors. Sometimes I wish I had enough space for a sofa and 55+ in TV for movies and shows. And maybe headsets will solve the problem, maybe I don't even need those monitors any more.
Now? I realize I don't need multiple monitors, 2 is enough. (4k is definitely better than 1080p and 2 is better than 1, but I don't think I can properly utilize a third monitor.) And these are good monitors -- not Pro Display XDR good but still premium 4k monitors -- that have been around for years and I'll keep using them until they die. And about movies -- I have tried using the Quest 2/3 to watch movies. It is usable, and apps even provide "scenes" that make you feel you are in a theater. Do I want to wear them and watch movies on a fake 100" screen? No, for obvious reasons (comfort).
If the day comes when they are light, comfortable to wear, allow very good passthrough and actually do a better job than my 4k screens, I'll take another look.
Hasn't VR taken over waggle? I don't think you can say its disappeared when the VR install base is in the 10s of millions.
And yet, from a gaming perspective, we still have to crack force feedback and natural locomotion before we have a holodeck. Maybe in 20 more years.
People aren't really that happy wearing even vision eyeglasses, and I don't see any realistic chance we will ever be able to have something with the capabilities of the Vision Pro in a form factor as small and light as eyeglasses.
I see on scifi all the time where someone flicks/flings a video playing on a device to move it to a larger display surface and it kills me that we actually have the technology to do stuff like this right now...but because every company works in their own interests/don't work together to create standards we don't get to have fun use of tech like that.
I'm still full of myself for postponing getting a 3D TV enough times that the technology died.
> Same with various "waggling" input technologies like the Wiimote and Kinect.
... but I have a PS Move gathering dust somewhere. Which I even preordered.
So the hardware is not good enough yet. It will be good enough when I basically don‘t care, just like I don‘t care with glasses.
I agree that progress has been slow in the consumer space and meaningful long-term adoption of VR has been confined to a few niches; that isn't necessarily an indictment of the long-term prospects for VR, because desktop computers spent much longer in that stage than most people remember.
In enterprise, I think things are more advanced and some user groups have decisively gone through the one-way door for some applications. I think the best example is architecture. If you've done a couple of client presentations in VR, you just aren't going back to showing renders on a flat screen, because immersing the client in a physical space is that powerful. It's not just a sales tool, but a communications tool - clients can understand and respond to the environment intuitively and give much better feedback as a result.
Industrial and clinical training is less clearly one-way, but I think we're very close in a lot of areas. AR is still less developed than VR, but I do think we're on the cusp of something significant - a sufficiently comfortable standalone AR headset with sufficiently high-quality passthrough can deliver training experiences that can't practically be replicated through other means.
I think one of the most interesting areas of development is in psychiatry. It's still early days, but we're starting to see real, meaningful benefits in RCTs for VR-based therapy of disorders like phobia and PTSD. Some of the most compelling results have been in the very sickest patients - people with psychosis, who often find it impossible to engage with conventional psychotherapy.
https://www.psy.ox.ac.uk/research/oxford-cognitive-approache...
I don't think it's remotely likely that VR will ever replace flat screens, but I do think that VR is slowly growing into a niche but durable HCI platform. Tablets are a reasonable analogy - a lot of people see them as a failure, but they still sell in serious volume and they're often a much better form-factor for specific applications than either a phone or a laptop, especially in industry. Tablets didn't change the world, but nor are they likely to go away.
WebGPU and WebXR are the two big enablers going forward. With WebGPU, developers have a common way to access hardware and that's a big deal across all your devices. A common way to access the hardware that gets you real-time 3D graphics, machine learning, crypto, etc. that works on your phone, tablet, laptop, headset, whatever is a big deal. And it's not just for anyone with Apple gear, but anyone with a compatible browser. Think generative AI/ML streaming Gaussian splats to your retinas via a browser. That's where we're headed.
Need an OR to explore a phobia of surgery? Sketchfab has you covered: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/charite-university-hospital-...
The reason the software doesn't exist is because compelling hardware doesn't exist for it to run on, so nobody bothers to write it.
Apple is imagining this device will be used for productivity but it's still painful to actually wear for long periods. We're a long way from being limited by software instead of hardware.
How about enabling AIs to create layouts of information on behalf of the user? Like, what if an AI could arrange all of your information for you in a scheme derived from Archy?
It's a 600+ grams headset with a battery on a leash for $3500. I wouldn't say the hardware is mainstream ready or fulfilling it's side of the contract yet.
Oh sorry, that's from CNET's review of the first iPhone in 2007: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/original-iphone-review/
It's way too early to tell if this product line will succeed in the long term. Will the first gen Vision Pro be a runaway success? Of course not! Will later generations look as obvious as the iPhone does now? I sure hope so!
For comparison, Apple sold 1.4 million iPhones in 2007. Supposedly Apple is expecting to sell around 500k Vision Pro units this year. Given the 3x price difference (in 2024 dollars), that effectively means the first gen Vision Pro is expected to bring the same revenue as the first gen iPhone.
We all have rosy retrospection about how great and obvious the first iPhone or first iPod was, but honestly nobody had any idea if Apple's crazy bet would pay off. We all agreed it was magical tech, but it was expensive, had tons of limitations, and nobody really needed it. Sound familiar?
All I know is betting against Apple has rarely paid off. They do have failures too though and this is clearly technologically more ambitious than any other launch, so who knows! And honestly that's what makes this launch most exciting.
It's been so long since I've had child-like wonder about some new technology that I'm just glad Apple took a chance on launching such a crazy device, even if I don't know what to do with it... yet.
Probably a dozen other companies launched similar devices already. Apple is hardly going out on a crazy limb here. This is their classic iterative refinement of what other people already did.
But I do agree with the first point - the flaws in this gen 1 has very little bearing on the long term success of it as a product category. But I would argue it works both ways, in that to the extent it is successful in the niche that buys it, you can't tell yet if it will break out to mass appeal. We just don't know.
> Fortunately, we can report that on the whole, the touchscreen and software interface are easier to use than expected. What's more, we didn't miss a stylus in the least. Despite a lack of tactile feedback on the keypad, we had no trouble tapping our fingers to activate functions and interact with the main menu.
What I’m seeing in the reviews of AVP say the opposite about many aspects:
> There is a built-in virtual keyboard so you can type in thin air. But it will drive you mad for anything longer than a short message. And selecting smaller buttons with a pinch should be a carnival game. I started getting real work done once I paired the Vision Pro with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
I agree it’s still too early to tell, but the best thing that I see being mentioned is movie watching which is something all the other headsets already do as well. The AR aspect seems to be a unique aspect, but I wonder if there will be safety issues that prevent things like cooking and doing other tasks assisted with AR from truly taking off.
1. How does it compare to an high-end monitor for text editing/programming, web browsing, watching non-VR video, playing non-VR games? Is it better or not?
2. Is the resolution, latency, FoV and lack of color fringing good enough for it to be indistinguishable from reality in both passthrough and VR modes? If not, how exactly far is it?
3. Can you run VR games on a PC with multiple desktop GPUs and stream to it? How does it compare to current high-end and ultra-high-end VR headsets?
Windows even has support for IndirectDisplayDevices - I'm not sure how openXR or SteamVR handles those, however.
I recommend the video review as well. Seeing the video call between Nilay, Joanna, and MKB shows how much the tech has advanced but also how much it still needs to evolve to be at the level of FaceTime Video.
They’re like talking paintings in the Haunted Mansion ride with bunch of blur and depth of field. It’s way too weird. Joanna’s looks a bit like she’s been stuck as the replacement person in the Mona Lisa.
A static picture of you or maybe your Memoji (remember those?) would be far preferable.
I’m surprised Apple is shipping Personas.
Facebook has also shipped meta.
All the money in the world can't buy you an understanding of your market.
This seems alpha. I’m sure it’s a hard problem but I feel like waiting a bit longer would have done them a better service.
They do make it clear that it's in Beta so they know there is work to do.
But if you're having a Zoom meeting with a divorce lawyer or negotiating an M&A a Memoji is the last thing you want.
lol what kind of review says that. It would be like someone who doesn't even use any kind of vision correction saying "I just used it without glasses and it was fine."
(edit: the review is actually quite good. but that line was bizarre)
Also, I don't think people with only near/far vision issues or prism correction know how this interacts with VR. IIRC in general you always use your far prescription and there is no support for prism.
Streaming games from a PC to a standalone headset over WiFi has been proven to work with the Quest, but that has proper controllers.
It's a very niche setup, but a few people already use it in order to combine Lighthouse-based body trackers with a non-Lighthouse headset.
The point would be that you don't use them for positioning at all, just buttons/thumbsticks. If you've using a Virtual Desktop-like app on the headset then it's already got positioning from the hand tracking.
I suppose an ambitious implementation could try to fuse the hand tracking data with the IMU data from the Joycons for better resolution.
I feel like being able to see everything open at once would be incredibly distracting. I like how I can swipe between app screens on my desktop so that I'm only focusing on one app at a time.
Of course I imagine there are some applications where it's useful, but to me it just feels like the Apple Vision Pro is just a very large screen and they haven't quite figured out what to do with it.
You can shove the app into a corner of your room, out of your view, and it will be there when you walk over to that corner later. That's part of the idea of "spatial computing" - if we can associate computer objects with real locations in space, maybe we can better harness spatial memory and stuff like that when we interact with them.
Even with just 1 4k floating screen I think it would be a winner for me but I'm also really excited to see what people come up with in VisionOS itself. I think for a while the sweet spot (for me) with be using a virtual monitor and a handful of VisionOS apps as well. Eventually I hope to be able to pull macOS windows out of a fixed box and arrange them wherever I want but I'm fully aware that might not be this year or even next year.
I don't think you'll be able to pull windows out of the mac screen, but apps you might need are in vision OS anyway like safari or messages.
I think my dream would be dual 4k monitors, or maybe a double wide?
I'm not sure where the limitation is right now (if it's purely a software limitation) but my MBP runs 4 monitors right now and I'd put up with a cord (or two) plugged from my MBP to my AVP if I could have all my monitors in VR. I believe they are using AirPlay to give you the virtual desktop but 3-4 AP streams doesn't seem too crazy, but I don't know much about that.
Reaching out with my whole arm to click, or pinch to zoom, is a HORRIBLE user experience. (For most things - clearly VR games and such will be fine).
It seems I can connect an ordinary keyboard and mouse to it though, so I could see using it as essentially a really large monitor. As long as I can point and click with my mouse independent of my eyes or head position, and my text-entry focus doesn't move without permission.
just look with their eyes and then gesture with the hand
lots of reviewers discuss how the hands can be in low, resting positions
theoretically, as i dont have primary experience to draw from, this UX could potentially be even a smaller amount of wrist motion
That's also the main reason nobody uses Quest 3's hand tracking despite it being really good. Why would I wave my hands around when I can achieve this with micro movements of my thumb.
- The Vision Pro is the best VR set that can be done today, with massive investment (rumoured 5e9 USD) and competent staff, and hefty price. It is miles ahead of the competition.
- It’s still not enough for most if any practical use, apart from films maybe. The technical requirements for a really useful VR are still largely out-of-reach, and will be for at least the next 5-10 years.
Thank you.
Milion, Miliard, Bilion, Biliard = Million, Billion, Trillion, Quadrillion
(neither are justified because neither start at the beginning, that is at a thousand :) )
Less weight would be better, but there's ways to embrace that and aleviate the issues ("have the product be true to its nature" to channel my inner Jony Ive).
This time Apple chose not to, while Varjo tends to care a lot more about these ergonomic aspects. Looking at the XR-4 strap, it looks like a solid design to me.
A motorbike helmet is heavier (3kg), but the weight is wrapped around your head, not hanging in front of it.
Yes, that's what makes the weight bearable.
Same way the Quest Pro for instance splits the weight around the head to achieve a good balance. Better bands will also help.
At this point we have none of that for the Vision Pro, which is a choice Apple made.
I really don't think this is correct. It's a bit better at some things than any of its competition, and it's a little worse in some ways too. Other than the displays I don't think you can say it's substantially ahead at all.
> the Vision Pro has the best video passthrough I’ve ever seen on the sharpest VR displays any normal person will ever come across
> the eye and hand tracking control system… is light years beyond any other consumer hand or eye tracking systems
It calls out other aspects similarly.
2: The detail oriented software. Look how polished everything looks in Vision OS. It’s just nice to be ‘in’ there.
3: The integration of the software and hardware. Extremely nice handtracking, amazing see-through functionalities, working with a good ecosystem (keyboard, MacBook, trackpads,…)
Those experiences are what makes Apple unique. Not ‘better’ per se. That depends on what you need.
I don't think it is ahead of the competition personally and especially when considering the 7x price I fail to see how it could land with consumers. Having said that I do anticipate Apple will finish the tech in the next few years and it will be a much better buy (both in value proposition and with a lower price) a few years from now.
This whole product is 90% of the way there. But the next 9% is just as hard as that original 90%. Apple is releasing it now to push it to 99%. It'll get better.
Movies on airplanes. I’m guessing these will become virtually ubiquitous in the front cabin within a few years.
I couldn't see carrying one of these instead of just an iPad for movies. (But then I'm a very light packer.)
And I was casually watching one in my seat, the movie was “Blackhawk Down”. And it occurred to me how a neighbor might not enjoy watching blood, guns, and violence out of the corner of their eye.
So, I can absolutely see value in a headset style movie experience in public places.
They always have a screen in front of me. And I always have my laptop or iPad. There are still advantages to this, from immersiveness to privacy.
You aren’t unpredictably accelerating most of the time in a plane. It makes sense Facebook would have fucked this up. I’d be surprised if Apple has.
- Learning instruments in a guitar-hero way (Piano, guitar, drums)
- Cooking with timers and recipes right in front of you (will be even more doable with better internal displays in the future)
- Coding with virtual displays on-demand. This is another thing where we still need more resolution to make it really doable.
- Watching movies. Obviously a solo way of doing this but I could see it being big.
- (once these are much lighter and less intrusive) I could see these being huge for virtual workouts like Yoga, weight lifting, etc.
Also regarding your question, I'm trying to think of the "killer app" is for a currently successful device - iPhone. I mean, camera? Texting? Most people use tiktok a ton but I wouldn't consider that a killer app. I think it's more of the device providing a home for a bunch of different apps.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MM6F3AM/A/polishing-cloth
What would VR add here? For guitar-hero style instrument learning, there are already Yousician, Simply Piano / Guitar, Gibson and Fender apps, and quite a few others.
This is by the way a great explanation of all the attempts to make music easier to read and how they fail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3bUFgEcb4
(coming from someone who has been taking piano lessons for the past 8 years and have a Quest 3)
I'm imagining an AI VR tutor - heck, with some legal deepfake+AI style evolution, perhaps that tutor could actually be a famous player, talking to you.
The 3D view gives, well, a 3D view, and all the advantages it entails. For example, when you are with a physical real world teacher, you don't have a fixed view. You can observe from any angle, the teacher can observe and correct micro errors. And the senses of scale and proportion are intact, unlike viewing on a 2D screen of arbitrary size at arbitrary distance.
Even the simple POV of VR means that you get to see the techniques in-situ - e.g. seeing the expert's hands on your guitar, and how the technique is supposed to look from POV - rather than the standard teacher-student limitation of e.g. guitar, where the student sits opposite the teacher and sees a reversed image.
But to be clear, my vision of how this would be game changing relies upon a level of interplay between hardware and software that is not yet developed. But I expect it will be, in time, because virtualising real world experiences is arguably the core goal of VR, and (correct me if I'm wrong) but nothing in the music tuition world has yet proven superior to having an extremely skilled one-on-one mentor who can personally guide your every step, "in person" - and this is what VR would seek to achieve here.
My guess is not, because to me it is obvious you don't understand how this works and are just imagining things.
Speaking as someone who takes private piano lessons and have been practicing daily for the past 8 years:
If this were possible, music teachers would have already been replaced to some extent. But that has not happened yet. AI is not new. VR is not that new. Even without this, just talking about non-personalized, non-VR instructions. Have you seen those websites that "teaches" you piano just by connecting your keyboard to a computer and following instructions? Where are they now? It does not work like that. Maybe for an absolute beginner who has trouble finding a key or fret, but as soon as you get a little bit better it won't work.
Music learning is an extremely personalized experience. People pay 1-1 private lessons because it needs to be done that way. A teacher, especially a good teacher, can tell you exactly what you did wrong and what you should do to get better at it. Plus different teachers often have different opinions of music -- how a piece of music should be interpreted or played. As you get more advanced, you spend even less time on technique itself. Theoretically you could train an AI tutor that does the same thing. But no, it hasn't happen yet and will not happen. Did I mention hallucination? Do you want a teacher that hallucinates?
Plus you need lots of practice -- routines, repetitions, all those scales. AI or VR is just useless. Effective practice strategy is important, but you don't need AI for that.
That's great! I'm glad to hear that your 8 years of music practice has given you some firm opinions, and I'm sure you'll continue learning over time. Speaking as a player and composer of 25 years, former music teacher, and maker of the instruments I play - for whatever such things are worth - I believe my ideas have some merit. But only time and technology will show whether-or-not such AR (and AI) musician overlaps eventuate.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Or real workouts. I want to be able to have floating text to read on my runs, and real time biometric data directly in my field of view rather than on my watch would be cool too.
Definitely not going to run with the current product lmao.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Visual_Augmentati...
Apparently they are still making them for military purposes
> According to an exclusive report from The New York Post, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver “said the league is working with Apple to bring a tech-enhanced viewing experience” to its upcoming headset.
When asked about it, he told the outlet: “We’re working very closely with Apple.”
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/nba-games-could-be-apple-visi...
If there is one group that has a track record for laying down piles of money for hardware like giant televisions and expensive streaming services, it's sports aficionados.
I do agree, just watching a sporting event on a projector where the athletes are life-sized is excellent, on-field cameras already provide a better view of the game then any seat.
Now make it more immersive, and the trick of immersion is very cool. Like The Sphere, that immersion is next level.
Add sports-betting to the Vision experience, that is a great side-car app for this. (I am not pro-bet but see the usage).
I'm wondering how that translates to VR.. do they just teleport you around the arena? That seems like it would be a bit jarring if not altogether sickening.
And for other sports even better I think. With say soccer/football and football (USA) you can have a big overview (like you are sitting at midfield) but then camera angles for closer view of the action...
I think sports viewing could really be incredible. Figuring out exactly how to do it well will take awhile. But it seems to me the kind of thing Apple could do very well.
Can’t imagine doing work is the killer app, not while wearing a headset is more cumbersome than opening a laptop.
Apple is already making it's own 3D content.
For instance watching a concert shot in 3D with spatial audio may be something that people find compelling. Certain artists, for example Taylor Swift, have fans who are well known to be willing to spend a fortune to attend her shows in person with high end tickets running $750.
Almost NOBODY uses the Netflix app because it’s terrible, terrible software.
For a lot of people, Beat Saber and similar games are a killer app for the Quest. It can be good for making exercise fun and accessible at the same time.
The other one that could be huge IMO is attending real-life events like sport, concerts, shows, etc.
I disagree. Games will have limitations. Limitations constrain but foster creativity. Console games were already limited in so many ways yet people found amazing ways to make them fun as hell. When mobile games come I truly believed that nobody would be able to have fun there, yesterday I played the entire game of League of Legends retrofited for mobile and it works! So now VR gaming is great, people will find ways to make it even greater without free movement that makes you sick
What is required is a device as thin as sunglasses, which basically does AR things. That will be the gamechanger and I think that will be done by another company because it feels Apple forced this one and that's sad.
It could not even copy-paste. It had horrible internet.
Vision Pro may be the first OS that does things "the right way" in AR/VR too. Big difference is that iPhone was a real consumer device, this seems more like a development device. Which may be a smart move, because after all: (Phone) Apps made Apple win, and not enough apps made Windows lose.
If they'd made something like "Vision Air" that was essentially Meta's Ray-Ban Smart Glasses plus AR for $999 they'd sell millions, they'd have a market for app developers, they'd convince people there was a point to having them. That's an actual interesting product and it's closer to where they want to be anyway.
This feels broadly like a staff retention project, or some kind of market positioning strategy or supply chain capture strategy or something. I just can't believe this product was the point of all the time, effort, and money Apple spent on it.
Eh I think there are a couple of important differences.
The first difference is that the iPhone wasn't 300% the price of the contemporary Nokia N95. It was actually around 30% cheaper ($500 vs. $730). The Vision Pro is $3,500 and its closest competition is the Quest Pro at $1,200. I don't think anyone would argue that the experience justifies the price difference.
The second difference is that the iPhone foretold how people were going to use phones in the future. The technology was good and convincing enough that it--to my sorrow--killed other ideas instantly. The Vision Pro obviously hasn't done this. People are buying the state of the art when they buy the Vision Pro, but people were buying the future when they bought the iPhone, and everyone knows it.
And I mean, inventing the future is a bonkers high bar. I admit we shouldn't be holding any company--including Apple--to that standard. It was a confluence of a talented, experienced team, world events, and technological progress. I'm saying I find it hard to square the fact that buying the future (the iPhone) cost less than the then state of the art, whereas Apple's clearly not created the future here, and priced it way out of bounds. It would be like if the iPhone ran the best version of Symbian and had the best resisitive touch screen or physical keyboard that could possibly be made, and then they sold it for $2k. We wouldn't even be talking about this product as a real product if it weren't Apple selling it. We'd assume only rich people would buy it and it would impact the culture not at all.
Also, that's what's happening! Well, that's the best case. The probable actual outcome is people not only get used to the idea that AR/VR has hit a ceiling and is really expensive, but a few really obnoxious people wear the Vision Pro to cafes and everyone gets the idea that it's extremely uncool. This thing is at best a dev kit and at worst a bauble.
[0]: https://indianapolis.craigslist.org/search/cta?hasPic=1&max_...
I don't know if I buy that. Watch the original iPhone announcement. Steve spent most of the time talking about what a great phone it was and how much better voicemail is. Connecting to the internet was tacked on to the end of the presentation.
"Now, what’s the killer app? The killer app is making calls!"
I don't think that's foretelling how people were going to use phones in the future.
But aside from all that, the point was the UX. There's the whole "smartphones are hard to use" angle which was really the raison d'etre for the whole thing. And now? Phones work like the iPhone worked.
"What's a computer©®™"
Its sad that the fastest thing we have now is log.Printf("asdasdf") and grep the logs on the pod :)
Debugging multithreaded application is as difficult as it was 50 years ago, maybe VR debuggers will allow us to debug complex interconnected systems or models in a more intuitive environment.
Also I think having hundreds of chats with some llms to investigate specific part of the code/docs fits very nicely with infinite screen space, and using your eyes to focus instead of alt+tabbing
I have my fingers crossed for some insane tooling advancements in the next years.
Does anyone know of any re-inventing the IDE in VR projects that are worth following?
I already imagine how people from 5 years in the future will be sharing photos of the current Vision Pro asking "Remember when this was the best VR headset hhh??"
Sure, VR headsets existed before Apple's foray into that segment, but also did laptops, smartphones, tables computers, smart watches and bluetooth headsets.
And if one to learn from history, all these products categories were significantly improved after Apple entered their respective markets.
That said, I think the "you're looking at a digital reconstruction of the world" aspect pretty interesting since it means, in principle, everything can be changed as you'd like. Why not turn day to night, night to day, redecorate, block out ads on billboards, re-paint your house, hang paintings, add an extra window to your wall, etc?
Without that, you'll be looking at an artificially "crisp" version of the world.
Why not just get a few projectors or more screens if you want digital environments?
Sure, Apple built the headset so that it mimics AR devices, but it definitely is not one itself.
The technology to build an AR device with the capabilities that Apple boasted is simply not here yet. I'm sure that Apple top-talent is hard at work trying to break the barrier (if it didn't yet), but that'll be for a future version, just not this one.
> I'm sure that Apple top-talent is hard at work trying to break the barrier (if it didn't yet), but that'll be for a future version, just not this one.
To me, it feels like AVP is the final nail in the coffin of the optical compositing evolutionary branch of HMDs. Even if it's someday possible to do well, devices would still need the same realtime subsystem necessary for digital compositing in order to do 3D mapping, object detection, environmental lighting integration, etc.
I understand that in the short-term, camera sensors and displays don't exceed what the human eye can perceive, but those seem straightforward (if not easy) to address.
"AR can be defined as a system that incorporates three basic features: a combination of real and virtual worlds, real-time interaction, and accurate 3D registration of virtual and real objects"
There is nowhere in there that says the output has to have pure optical through. Digital composition seems to fit into the definition.
"AR can be defined as a system that incorporates three basic features: a combination of real and virtual worlds, real-time interaction, and accurate 3D registration of virtual and real objects"
What is it missing?
That sounds like a way that may actually work (and don't cost too many penny). Just put dozens of programmable LEDS at the edge of your view. And shining correspond colored light when someone actually use a flashlight to point at you. That might even be used as a safety measure without block your view.
"The displays have other limitations: the field of view isn’t huge, and the essential nature of looking at tiny displays through lenses makes that field of view feel even smaller. Apple won’t tell me the exact number, but the Vision Pro’s field of view is certainly smaller than the Quest 3’s 110 horizontal degrees. That means there are fairly large black borders around what you’re seeing, a bit like you’re looking through binoculars."
https://www.theverge.com/24054862/apple-vision-pro-review-vr...
The widest FOV headset you can currently buy is the XTAL 3 at 180 degrees, and it's huge, despite being a PC-tethered design that doesn't need to make space for a SoC or battery.
https://www.xtal.pro/product/xtal-3-mr
We're a few breakthroughs away from having full immersion and a reasonable form factor at the same time.
[0]https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=nikkor+6mm+f2.8+fisheye&iax=i...
From their own page, the very minimum requirements for the PC are 32GB RAM and an RTX2060 GPU. And that’s a minimum, so I am not sure how well it functions with those specs.
Just the lightest GPU listed in the minimum requirements (RTX2060) is around 950g[0], while Vision Pro battery pack is ~350g. Add to that a motherboard (being able to support that GPU and a i7/i9 CPU and 32GB of RAM), a CPU fan, and a 500W (probably could get away with less, but i decided to be safe) power supply being around 3.9lb(~1.7kg)[1].
Even without accounting for the motherboard, desktop case, and CPU fan weight at all (which can vary significantly and are pretty heavy compared to the rest of the components) and counting them as a zero, you have already crossed into the 3.6kg territory. With those accounted for, you are crossing into the 5kg territory easily. And if you decide to go beyond minimum specs for GPU, I would expect it to be even worse. And the size of that monstrosity would be rather significant too.
I think comparing that to the weight and size of the Vision Pro battery pack is not that good of a comparison at all.
P.S. I am aware that there is a noticeable variation in weight of GPUs depending on the manufacturer and the specific variant for any given model, as well as for motherboard/cpu fan/power supply. However, that would not change the overall conclusion at all, as there is exactly zero way you would be able to get the build below 3kg. And I am being extremely generous here, as my estimate is very likely below even the lowest real-life lower-bound estimate.
0. https://www.msi.com/Graphics-Card/GeForce-RTX-2060-GAMING-Z-...
1. https://www.evga.com/products/product.aspx?pn=100-W1-0500-KR
Could also be very handy when working on planes, and for working from outdoor locations like parks (which I love to do). I find I'm most productive working from planes, but if there's a seat in front (non exit row), looking down at a laptop for several hours at a sharp angle can cause some neck pain. This would allow me to look straight ahead.
> A: The Vision Pro wasn’t designed to be worn with glasses. Instead you have to order prescription Zeiss optical inserts for $99. The two monocle-looking pieces snap right into place.
It's $99 for readers (non-prescription) and $149 for a prescription. Very odd that she would have gotten that detail wrong since it's so easy to check and it's been repeated so often in coverage of the AVP.
Basically it wouldn't be them to pass up a accessory sell opportunity.
Yeah, uh, they definitely always do that. It "wouldn't be them" to ever not.
(Hell, the monitor even supports True Tone—and it didn't at first, that arrived in an OS update, from Apple)
The device is a simulation of the dream device that can overlay UI on top of your vision without you looking any different to those around you, I wonder how far away that is.
Plus a $3500 dev kit that lets me set a kitchen timer, while simultaneously recommending I not wear the device while cooking, seems crazy to me.
Does it? What about gopros or similar action cams, being used for over a decade, and for less than a tenth of the price?
Also, it's hard not to enjoy any review that includes the word "bejeezus."
The thing I most want to know about this device that went totally unmentioned is:
how sharp is the text? Or, how many windows of code can I comfortably see at once and is it more or less than my 30-something-inch monitor?
TBH, that's what will sway me one way or the other on this... my current monitor might have been $3500 nearly 20 years ago. It was $1000+ when I bought it in 2012. If this (or one of its near term successors) could replace it in a way that is better, I'm kind of interested.
And the battery life is brutal. Extremely first generation.
But in this case, I would probably try this device during half a day if someone gave it to me, but I feel zero desire to own or use one.
It does not enable anything that I can't do better with a real computer, a TV or a smartphone.
This is an utterly bizarre stance.
I can't possibly imagine buying a product, any product, let alone a $1,000+ product, purely based on their marketing, when you admit that you don't even like the product.
Most people, when marketing convinces them to buy something, aren't really consciously aware of it. Not only are you consciously aware of it, but you acknowledge that you don't like it, and buy it anyways.
I'm sure it supports Airplay, but being able to plug it in to a real monitor with a wire, wouldn't that make the purchase a bit more appealing?
Very much like the XReal glasses but with resolution of Quest line.
I loved my XReals. The biggest issue with them was it had no head/position tracking to keep the screens in one place.
The technology I’d throw my money is glasses that:
- look like fashionable glasses. Not that glasshole crap from Google. Or VisionPro goggles weighing a kilo. XReal are fashionable enough that most people didn’t notice it when I was using it in public.
- Add an unobtrusive display only visible to you, not to bystanders. Text display ought to be crisp and readable.
- Built in speakers audible only to you, not to bystanders.
- track head position so windows can stay floated in space instead of moving with head. The immersion of virtual object.
- some form of finger tracking to select and tap on things. Again private, shouldn’t need to put them infront of my face.
- pretty darn good contextual AI that has understanding of world around me. Show me gps directions. When I meet someone, recall their notes so I can have a meaningful conversations. Fact check my conversations on the fly. Be the bicyle of my mind.
Basically, the thing gives you some screens fixed in world space. You have to be mostly stationary for the effect to work. So it won't replace walking around staring at your cell phone. A lot of thought has gone into the interface for this sort of thing. That's the real achievement here, and that matters.
Workplace of the near future - a room full of people, crammed together as on an airplane or in a theater, each wearing a headset. No more desks!
It's still too heavy, though. If it's tethered to a belt-mounted unit, why isn't the electronics down there, instead of in a brick on the back of your head? The headgear part needs to drop to no worse than swim goggles.
In reality, it will collect dust.
It needs to "do work" faster, or at least more conveniently, than a computer can.
Just needing to put the thing on is a massive hurdle for regular adoption.
I tend to agree, but Apple has a big fan base. If anybody else shipped this thing, it would be a very niche product. We know, because others have shipped such things and gone nowhere.
This thing could have been useful on day one for lots of people, from drone operators to cinematographers to programmers. But Apple's sad fear of I/O has crippled yet another product.
People should expect that a $3500 video-display device has a way to get video into it.
I bet Luckey had something like this working in the early days but abandoned it because it wouldn't work for games. What a shame
Is it to watch movies on a 100" screen on an airplane? The xReal weighs 75 grams and does that for four hundred dollars. It has a HDMI port too, so I can play my steam deck or switch.
Where are the cool AR apps? Where is the contextual data popping up as I drive my car? None of that exists!
Also, AR glasses being used by someone operating a motor vehicle sounds like a recipe for an entirely different kind of “killer” app.
?!? The audio quality wasn't somehow different, but the feature set surrounding the phone sucked: it didn't have ring tone profiles / called groups and so was pretty infuriating versus a basic Nokia phone in addition to having a fraction of the battery life, a worse form factor to hold up to your ear, and a fundamentally more fragile construction. It also was pretty pathetic at text messages, as it didn't have any support for MMS (which was already shipping on competing devices). Notably and critically, even a cheap Nokia candy bar phone could do the most basic texting feature of sending a single message to multiple people at once... somehow the iPhone shipped without that? Even the most basic things like "at least you will be able to store a ton of text messages finally as the device had a LOT of storage" somehow were thwarted: Apple implemented some stupid arbitrary limit of I think it was only 1000 messages before it started deleting old ones!! I just can't believe you think the original iPhone was a better phone than it's contemporary competitors.
Journalists are the easiest to delight so if they can’t even do that…
All that said, I do think they will succeed eventually with this product, with years of using us as beta testers and shrinking the size of it.
From my experience with VR, the only thing I've been absolutely and definitively blown away by was sim racing. Before getting a PSVR2 I had played roughly 70 hours of Gran Turismo 7, now I'm at over 500 hours in the five months I've had a PSVR2. I want to buy a PC-compatible headset to get access to better pedals, wheels, and simulators (games) than I can get on the PS5. It's quite easy to sink many thousands of dollars into the experience. I believe the margin requirements are there for Apple (eventually) when considering the potential for professional training solutions.
But! Without taking ownership of something, creating some IP (intellectual property) to provide a killer app, and inspire other segments, they're going to be hard pressed to make inroads and get this to scale.
The spatially placed timers are one of the most compelling use cases I’ve seen so far, but I wouldn’t want to wear 1.3+ pound goggles plus battery for that.
The Vision Pro is like Google Glass, a none essential luxury item that seems cumbersome.
I don't think this will make it TBH. But perhaps it does. And if so, seems a bit dystopian.
You also seem to forget the huge success of not-so-essential AirPods and to a lesser extent, Apple Watches.
The Macbook went from an amazing piece of tech to a useless piece of RSI inducing crap. You have to buy from system 76 to get anything like the old macbooks.
The phone, well, I was forced into an upgrade this year (as part of the watch fiasco above) and was amazed how underwhelmed I was. I went from an X to a 15 and as far as I can tell, the camera is better and it's a little lighter. That's not enough for the money I had to shell out.
All in all, the company has seemed to be going downhill to me for at least 5-8 years. But, I'm just one consumer of many. Other people seem very amazed by these things which just do nothing for me.
This is what it will be like in 10 years. The current generation (teens and adulets) wondering around the streets with their head sinked to their phones, will be replaced wearing "specs" 24/7.
In the next 20-25, I would not be surprised if it becomes no more than contact lenses.
Monitors will likely be a thing of the past.. even giant TVs in the living room. Same for (physical) keyboard and mouse, being replaced by IR equiverlants being as good/responsive.
The technology is not there, yet. This is a glimpse of what our everyday will be, and in the working office.
Interesting to see where it goes.
I can see the current XR headsets shrinking down to the size of a pair of glasses within a couple decades, but contact lenses would require a giant leap forward in technology.
You'd need displays, electronics, sensors and batteries that can all fit together inside a paper-thin plane, and also, somehow, be invisible. Not saying it will never happen but we are really talking sci-fi tech at this point.
I continue to say that these PDA's will be a 5" touchscreen, allowing you to play games. Games far more powerful than the Mega Drive and can play with your friends from anywhere in the world. The PDA has a far superior, higher resolution screen beyond 640x480 and can render much faster 3D images than the supercomputers of today (ie SGI workstations)
All of these claims.. alongside explaining what a PDA is, which you can fit in your pocket that wont need charging for 5+ hours, etc...
Even people who do see the possibility will likely spend most of their efforts explaining that their RC Cars don't last 30 mins without recharding the batteries, so this wont work, either!
Of course by PDA (Personal Data Assistant) - I refer to what we call Smartphones today.
Point is - I try to be realistic about future tech even in the next 20-25 years.. but I leave some areas open to being more "advanced" than we anticipate.
Yes.. contact lenses is a stretch for "next 20-25 years" but lets not ignore the suggestion. Young kids in 2040 will laugh at how we managed to wear these "heavy" VR headsets. Who knows how this type of tech will evolve and mix with other tech.
Presumably the main concern is the uncanny not-very-lifelike nature that's putting people off and the rest is self-consciousness. Maybe they need longer scanning to build a more accurate facial movement model?
I still find it very odd when the eyes the device displays to others have such a raised position compared to the true eye position. If I had one, I would rather something static went there or nothing, and maybe overlay that with a gaze direction indicator "spot" instead of faux eyes.
I feel like that _has_ to be why all major companies are pushing hard on vision products like this. They know AI is coming and need to be there first so their glasses are efficient and adopted where models will be easy additions.
Holy moly that website (https://www.viture.com/). It looks like a huge amount of development effort went into it but it's almost completely useless. I went looking for detailed information about the product and was relieved to find the "learn more" button (which I'd initially mentally dismissed as a GDPR cookie compliance button), but it just opens an autoplaying marketing video with all the controls disabled.
(If you do want to read about the product their Kickstarter page was a bit more digestible/normal for me: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/viture/viture-game-and-... .)
Won’t be surprised if some android manufacturer like xiaomi release something like this.
Also, makes sense why Meta kept the form factor because they never had their own mobile device!
Maybe it’s apple trying to push the limits of this tech, a16 bionic compared to m2 is like 40% slower in the various computational performances so won’t be surprised to see the form factor show up in android devices soon for sure.
Honestly headset weight is more of an issue for 4+ hour working sessions than exercise.
As with most Apple products, just like the Apple Watch and the iPhone, I don't think this first gen product is a good buy. Wait for the 2nd gen unless you just want to play with the tech.
Or, I dunno. Clean the living room? You can even watch a movie while you do that!
1. Vision Pro will definitely replace all kind of monitors, such as TV, projectors, etc., because it provides a completely immersive watching experience
2. Besides that, due to the limitations of latency and noise issues in the low light situations, it will still be an entertainment toy instead of a productive tool
One thing I really notice about this stuff is that unlike mobile phones and TVs, this will not be for everyone. There's a big chunk of society that does not want home automation, VR/AR, fitbits, smartwatches, etc etc. Me included.
Seems like kind of fun if you're into that sort of thing, though.
Call me crazy, but if Apple can't figure this out, maybe the concept itself is flawed.
Reading these reviews, I just keep thinking -- yes Apple does this better, and that is interesting, but... the Quest 3 can almost do all of these at a fraction of the price.
And the biggest investments -- screen and cameras -- need to see real use cases yet. I am not convinced that people are actually going to replace their monitors or TVs with Vision Pro and wearing this for many hours straight at this point.
And Apple is supposed to be the master at taking a bit longer to nail it.
If anything they just inadvertently demonstrated how flawed strapping a screen to your face is if you're trying to do something.
As an anchoring point, Apple couldn't figure out a better solution for movie watching than Google's or Amazon's offering (cheaper yet better than the Apple TV), and I don't think the concept is flawed in any way.
If anything, it's probably healthy to see Apple stretch and hit some walls, try new ideas that might or might not succeed, and overall experiment in the open instead of always assuming they've got the perfect solution.
This is a solution that creates 20 new problems.
> too much credit to a corporation
What does this mean? Are indie developers supposed to do a better job than a corp (see: a group of people) with billions in R&D?
> too much credit
Sorry for the weird turn of phrase. I just think Apple is a company like any other, with sometimes good ideas, sometimes bad idea, sometimes they'll hit the jackpot and sometimes they battle the EU.
Apple not figuring a good approach to a problem doesn't feel like any further indication of how hard the problem is. I mean, we could say they haven't figured out how to charge a wireless mouse either.
People forget that the brand Apple carries so much freaking weight.
People buy the Apple lifestyle. Which now includes AR goggles.
Pilots use AR and skiing is a lot like flying. I hope this sort of technology gets so common in my lifetime that companies can bother to build it into legit ski goggles.
And while you're strapped to those items you can't use keyboard or anything else with your hands. You can't scratch an itch or put something in your mouth. Your hands are occupied and you feel like you're in jail. Surprisingly you actually want to have hands.
This is the single most important innovation in Apple Vision. It gives you hands.
I went back to my Arch laptop instead.
Unless the problem is Apple fans having too much disposable income, in which case I guess this is an excellent solution XD
That's... embarrassing.
This should have been a dev kit.
Third party immersive apps might break that rule, of course.
So some might argue it is better even.
Nah. I've tried using the Quest 3 for various things, and at the OS level it just fundamentally sucks for anything but fully immersive games. Multitasking support is close to nonexistent, the hand tracking is crap, the UX is mediocre for even basic things like "sit on the couch and watch a movie", the system is end-to-end filled with small annoyances every time you use it, and there are no signs that Meta has even recognized these problems, let alone have any plans to improve on them.
The difference in functionality is night and day, even including the downsides noted by reviewers.
I cannot imagine having to do this review. It's:
- Likely to be read and seen by a substantial number of people
- On the highest of high-tech devices
- From a company that splits the world into Fans and Haters
- Where the real question is how does it feel, and how do I look?
- And for heaven's sake should I spend $3,500+?
So much potential for embarassment!
She did a great job, and identified its killer app: home 3D movies.
Selfies are so passe, when you can actually re-experience something, and perhaps notice what you missed before, and reinforce memories. It's ideal oldsters to experience trips that their grandchildren take.
Gating factors: My concern is mainly that this will need another generation of chip miniaturization to get the headset lighter AND more performant AND using less power -- and may require a faster bus between the chips.
Win/lose factors: Probably enough people will buy it to make it not a financial mistake. But the big win is that developers will have to start solving the problems with this device, and only those using this device will have solutions under their belt. To get to VR + 3D media, go through Apple?
VR enthusiasts, which I guess now includes Apple, assume there's some natural, obvious mass market demand for such a solution if only the tech is good enough.
I'm telling you that this mass appeal doesn't exist. Nobody cares about AR/VR. We've had AR on iOS for a decade and other than navigation and Pokemon, there's no killer apps, no ecosystem.
I took my colleagues to a VR center, where they could experiment with lots of setups, try out games and experiences. They had a great time but nobody spoke about it ever again and nobody bought any device. And these people work in tech.
The tech isn't the problem. The entire interaction simply isn't a fit.
I don't think that is true. I think 'most people' don't need a computer for more than what an iPad can do, and that your use case is more exceptional than common.
Computers as we think of them, with a somewhat permissive operating system that let's you execute whatever you want are probably going to decrease in relevance to somewhere akin to how they were in the 90s -- incredibly powerful devices useful to some people who need them for particular reasons or just like using them. Everyone else will be fine with whatever the equivalent of the smartphone/tablet OS is.
I've never made my iPad work for me on a business trip except for something very short where I won't really be writing. I also don't draw and, while I could probably do photo editing on it well enough, I wait until I get home and use old-school Lightroom.
It’s true that they’re limited but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t work that’s well-suited for them.
Meta isn't really opening up their headset, since the whole point of that adventure for them was to have their 'iphone' type kingdom.
Our best bet might just be Microsoft but they gave up on mixed reality windows, and Idk if they're really gearing up to jump into this product space.
I'm fascinated in the idea of Vision pro, not sure I'm ready to shell out for what is basically just a really great movie watching experience. I can see the movie pretty well on my 4k tv, and I'm not sure the improvement is worth the cash.
My understanding is that Apple is making excuses about being slow to support WebXR.
As much as the media has benn fixated about the failed Horizon Worlds (which is a very interesting story that I've never seen elaborated from a software dev's perspective) you might not know that the successful model for Quest is the same as publishing on other game consoles. The market for single-player games for MQ is really healthy but multiplayer games are really thin on the ground which makes the "metaverse" idea look pretty dodgy. I mean, there is the multiplayer VRChat but you're going to have to rub shoulders with weaboos and furries which keeps other obnoxious people away.
https://www.roadtovr.com/apple-vision-pro-webxr-support-safa...
While this is true for the desktop and iOS/iPadOS Safari, their VisionOS version of Safari comes with full WebXR support. Which was confirmed explicitly in this Apple’s tech talk[0] and by the fact that it is indeed supported in the VisionOS simulator (which has been available for quite a while already).
0. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10279/ (ctrl+f “webxr”on the transcript, as I don’t know the exact timestamps, but I confirmed by doing ctrl+f myself)
This is something I've been wondering about. The Vision Pro's displays are 4K per eye, for the entire field of view. The monitor I'm sitting in front of is 5K, and takes up quite a bit less than my full field of view.
Surely the virtual Mac screen (and everything, I guess) is gonna be substantially lower resolution than traditional high-DPI screens at normal viewing distances?
Depends on your typical FOV to your monitor.
If the headset manages to be 4000 pixels wide, but that is filling say 110 degree FOV, then if your virtual display is 44 degree FOV, it's only going to be represented by about 1600 pixels wide. 4000/(110/44) = 1600.
I wish we knew what the actual resolution of this headset is and what the FOV is.
They say it's 23 MP total, so if the screens were square that would be 3391x3391.
If the FOV is 100 and our virtual screen was 50, then the screen would be 1695 pixels across.
And finally you lose some effective resolution because of the nature of the virtual screen being not aligned perfectly with the headset's panel. Since your head would be slightly askew in relation to the virtual monitor due to head tracking.
https://kguttag.com/2023/08/05/apple-vision-pro-part-5a-why-...
If you hold your head steady while looking through a window with a plastic screen on it, things outside are obstructed. If you move your head slightly back and forth and focus in the distance, the screen pretty much disappears.
Your brain can do some motion smoothing to determine the "actual" content, even if it's sampled. I'm not sure how you could quantify it, and it only helps a relatively small amount, but it's there.
Another comment mentions that you’re confined to the host computer’s “screen” and can’t break applications away from that rectangle. But you could imagine that being a possibility in the not-too-distant future.
I think it's worried about not being able to apply a 30% tax on third party software.
That's exactly what corporations like Apple want their devices to be.
I think it's meant to be used with a Mac for most productivity use cases. That's how I intend to use mine: VSCode, terminals, compiling all happening on my nearby laptop with the Vision Pro as "just" a 4K monitor, and then extra apps like Slack, Zoom, Safari, Mail, music, etc, floating around as native visionOS windows.
In addition, it can be used as an iPad-like media consumption device, e.g., on an airplane, but I see that as an additional (and for me only supplementary) use case.