Hacker News Reader

Same for me but there was a single sentence that more than halved my interest in buying this: you can’t have multiple floating windows of MacOS. It’s all in one single floating window. This is by far the biggest flaw for me, and a really stupid one. Hopefully a software update changes this

But you can have one floating macOS window (for your workhorse app) and then infinite other visionOS and iPadOS windows. For me, that’s good enough, most of my other monitors are just Safari tabs or something that can be replaced with iPad apps anyway. Anyway the fact that you can continue to use your phone with the headset on means you could theoretically use another computer with external monitors for desktop apps while having lots of extra virtual space for iPad/Safari apps.

The 1 monitor cap and the fact that it's only a 1440p resolution makes me think it's a bandwidth/latency limitation, I wouldn't hold my breath on software fixing it.

Yeah, you would likely need a hardwired connection over thunderbolt to do more. It's unlikely such a connection is possible with the specs today (only usb-c is on battery, and unsure if that can transfer data).

The MacOS compositor already has different buffers for every window. It could stream updates of those buffers and do final composition on the AVP instead. But likely out of simplicity it seems like they just opted to use a generic, preexisting remote desktop solution. I also wouldn't hold my breath on software fixing it as even though it could it's all but certain Apple would certainly rather have you using native AVP apps instead and sees MacOS streaming as a stop-gap solution, not a valuable part of the long term strategy.

Fair point but I wish they’d allow more when I don’t need perfect latency video, just mostly static ide material

+1, this makes it harder to interop with mac working environments which was my biggest usecase for this device.

Sure, I can do other safari windows for research and stuff, but what I really want is different windows of IDEs, code search, docs, and work artifacts. Many of which may not be accessible through the vision pro (VPN, device certs, etc.), but are through my macbook.

If we could have at least 4 or 5 mac windows, it would be much better, otherwise it's akin to a macbook + external monitor. Hopefully they figure out a way to add it in, but it's hard to buy with such an obvious usecase missing.

VSCode native app when

If it uses the Mac as a devserver, probably really soon.

> the ability to walk around the room and place different open Safari windows and apps around my physical space as I think and study some new topic

That right there might be worth the price of admission.

The hand tracking system is among the faults in the review. I'm not sure whether this will be addressed by having a real keyboard and mouse. The reviewer never tried the device with a real mouse. Do you know how the experience will be when using a mouse rather than the hand-tracking system?

Anyways this sounds infuriating:

> you have to be looking at something in order to click on it, and that means you are constantly taking your attention away from whatever you’re working on to specifically look at the button you need to press next. I spent some time playing a lovely little game called Stitch that quickly became maddening because I kept looking away from the piece I wanted to move to the place I wanted to move it, which meant I wasn’t picking it up when I tapped my fingers.

And also:

> I talk through writing video scripts to make sure things flow, and I talk with my hands. So as I was writing the video script for this review in the Vision Pro, the system kept catching my hands moving and started scrolling and clicking on things by accident. I cracked up the first time I realized what was happening. But eventually, it meant that I took the Vision Pro off and wrote the rest of the script on my Mac, which only does things when I actually want it to.

Brian Tong's review shows use of it with a trackpad, 9:09 in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkPw6ScHyb4&t=549s

This seems, to me, the only possible way to use this as a productivity device and wish more reviews would have tried it to get a better sense of whether it changes things.

Gruber's review also talks about the trackpad a bit:

https://daringfireball.net/2024/01/the_vision_pro

Can you describe the tasks you will actually be doing like this and why this headset is actually helpful?

> the ability to walk around the room and place different open Safari windows and apps around my physical space as I think and study some new topic

This seems like a perfectly reasonable task and why it is useful.

GP has said

> I plan to use it with a keyboard and mouse anyway

And judging from reviews this seems required for productivity.

I cannot imagine walking around the room with one hand holding a keyboard and another holding a mouse. Maybe they need to sell a contraption that straps a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse to your body so much you can move around hands free?

Just because you don't see a use case doesn't mean one doesn't exist.

The original comment explained perfectly well how they would use it. If that use case suits them, then its their prerogative. This gatekeeping of use cases is so odd; why does it matter so much how someone else uses the device?

Just because I don't see a use case doesn't mean I'm unilaterally stating a use case doesn't exist.

I'm simply stating my opinion as to why this device doesn't suit me; to be more precise I'm stating why somebody else's use case is not my use case. Why do you assume my comment is supposed to generalize to everybody's use cases?

It's not perfectly explained due to the apparent contradiction

It isn't explained in enough detail to understand the benefit. You think just walking around a room and placing windows is a good use case for this incredibly expensive headset? Does that really improve any workflow beyond just being a novelty? Do you think that is a very wide target demographic?

My train of thought was similar to this, but I’m worried about my eyes. Although I’m not sure whether it’s worse than me looking at a regular screen all day long.

There is always an idea what one needs, the idea itself is perfect, flawless. Then there is reality. Those never meet, good luck with getting them at least close

So are you going to use a keyboard and mouse or not? It sounds like you're going to buy this regardless. Why are you trying to justify it to us?