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Comment by aloer | Hacker News Reader

It is interesting how many here are excited about this for productive computer work. It’s also what Apple advertises with.

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

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> But is the Vision Pro like that as well?

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.

Of course. They want to sell them locked to a user so that every employee or family member needs their own, and can't use the same one at work and at home.

The only reason the guest mode exists is to incite the “guest” to also purchase an AVP after having experienced it.

I don't think the question was about multiple people sharing a VP device, but about the same person using a single VP device with multiple Apple devices on multiple Apple accounts - can you easily switch between viewing your personal Mac's screen and then switching to your work Mac?

Man I've felt this for YEARS and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills with all the youtubers and influencers proclaiming Apple's Connected Ecosystem as such as productivity advantage.

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 thought I was the only one bothered by that! I'd love to use my private iPad with my work Macbook. And at least in my case preventing that definitely won't increase iPad sales: My company won't provide me a work iPad and even if it did it wouldn't work as there are no iCloud accounts attached to our work Macbooks.

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.

Basically the business and education group is about selling to businesses and schools, so they give them the tools they say they need. This means you wind up having configuration options which sound good to operations, but which break ecosystem support - and on BYOD break personal usage.

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.

> 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.

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.

Apple’s solution is that your corporate should buy you a second watch.

On the upside, once somebody figures out how to use smartwatches for VR haptic feedback, nerds will have a reason to wear six watches.

Four limbs, two nipples. Math checks out.

No security-conscious corporation is going to allow you to approve any actions with security implications using an Apple Watch secured by a four-digit passcode, rather than an alphanumeric password on a Mac.

MDM is supported by the watch. My organization requires a 10 digit code for watches plus requires biometrics to be resolved on the primary device prior to the watch being able to control that device or interact with apps on that device

> 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.

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.

> Things like sidecar for a quick virtual whiteboard are basically impossible.

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 suspect multi account support is not ‘down the priority list’ but purposefully not implemented at least when it comes to iOS. Why make it easier for customers to share iPads at home when they can buy multiple iPads.

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.

The entire screen sharing setup they demo'd in the original Vision Pro demo reels always made me laugh. They've had years to get Sidecar right, and have failed miserably every time. How am I going to believe that they'll get wireless display transmission to work perfectly for this thing?

I haven't used it in quite a while so I'm wondering what the current issues with Sidecar are?

I haven't used the Vision Pro, so I can't say how well it works in practice... but with macOS 14 this year they redid their screen sharing app to, presumably, use whatever technology is underlying the Vision Pro display-sharing. It's really good. Vast improvement over the previous tech (presumably VNC?).

Assuming the Vision Pro screen sharing works using the same stuff, I have high hopes.

It does use the same stack; I assume it was redone precisely to support this feature.

I have this issue in a consumer single tenant setting too. I couldn't figure out how to remove photo access from AppleTV.

Ended up creating a new account that was part of my family.

Using Vision Pro with my work Mac while traveling would be ideal, but work locks down my Mac limiting most of the Apple device interplay.

I maintain that the Vision Pro/its battery pack should have at least one displayport input. It wouldn't support keyboard+mouse sharing, true, but latency would be improved and you'd sidestep all the problems with accounts and locked-down work devices.

> AirPods have gotten better over the years where today I can freely switch between devices belonging to different Apple IDs with the same AirPods.

What the fuck. The fact that an apple ID is even involved is absurd. Should be able to just Bluetooth to any device.

You can 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.

that doesn't explain the previous status quo, which appears to be that previous (and maybe current) incarnations cant Bluetooth pair without an apple ID.

This just is not true, you can pair any model of airpods to any device that supports bluetooth. (Maybe there are exceptions but I'm not aware of them.)

I use my airpods with my Nintendo Switch and Samsung TV all the time. No Apple IDs on there.

I have many fights to pick with Apple. Pairing of accessories is not one of them. Honestly, if I stop using iPhone in the future, it’s likely I’ll stop using my AirPods as well. There’s in either case very little point paying premium for Apple accessories and pairing them over Bluetooth.

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.

You can.

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.

> But what is the account situation like?

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.

Sure you will. Plenty of families share a single VR headset.

The facial interfaces are just held on with magnets, so it's not unrealistic to think that people might swap them out regularly depending on who's using it. The interface is sized for the user so hygiene aside you'd probably want to swap it for a different one anyway.

Unfortunately Apple is charging $200 per extra facial interface though.

The part that touches you comes off and is personally fitted anyway, so you just don't share that.

OP is talking about the reverse. Using one Vision attached to two different laptops with two different iCloud accounts, so they can use it with both their work and personal computer.

I think Apple want to discourage sharing to increase device sales. It’s a great question though.

Its wireless operation seems to depend on Hand Off in some capacity. Most companies probably wouldn’t want to grant a personal device access to that on a work laptop, and I bet there are some thorny questions about what to do with incoming Hand Off data from multiple accounts.

You are so right.

The moment you use different Apple IDs you lose a lot of nice features of Apple‘s products

If your company Mac is locked down to the point where you couldn't just create a separate account on it that is tied to your iCloud account, then it is also unlikely that they would allow you to hook up another device to their network and your work computer in order to have this convenience.

(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.

There’s plenty of reasons why you would want to have a separate Apple ID for a company Mac that have nothing to do with overly restrictive permissions from IT.

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…

Sure you can create a separate account on your company Mac. But there's no assurance that whatever work resources needed would be available on that second separate account.

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.

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