Hacker News Reader

Comment by kj99 | Hacker News Reader

How can you assure us that Vision Pro is nowhere close to that? Do you have one?

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.

View on HN

Iphone was made from pretty much what was available to other manufacturers plus some secret software sauce, and was priced like a Blackberry of the time. There was immediately plenty of use cases that competitors kinda did, but not so well.

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.

> Iphone was made from pretty much what was available to other manufacturers plus some secret software sauce, and was priced like a Blackberry of the time.

Neither of these statements is remotely true.

Samsung CPU, samsung oled display, Balda touchscreen analogous to what LG has used previously, Marvell wi-fi, Skyworks cellular, various Intel and Infineon aux chips. $499 vs Blackberry's 8320 at $449.

Not even remotely.

Samsung OLED? iPhone X was first to feature OLED display. Surely you meant LCD?

The iPhone was also subsidized by Cingular/AT&T at launch. The $449 was the retail cost of the BlackBerry.

iPhone used capacitive touchscreen whereas the competitors used resistive touchscreens in their smartphones, which instantly added more usability to iPhone compared to Nokia N95/97 that was already a fully featured pocket computer in mobile case and likely much more powerful than the original iPhone. Apple did the dirty logistics trick on other smartphone manufacturers by buying all production of capacitive touchscreen factories and similar key components 3 years ahead, leaving other phone manufacturers unable to respond.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada

Except when the iPhone came out all the reviewers were like "holy shit, this is mind blowing" while with this one everyone is like "it's a shittier oculus quest with some apple polish"

No one is saying shittier oculus quest. It has a much higher resolution and I presume people will get used to letting their eyes linger a bit longer on what they want to click. We’re so used to a mouse paradigm we try to immediately apply that here.

The verge is probably the most critical. Here’s what they say:

“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.

Almost every outlet is calling it a better Oculus Quest but one that is fantastically expensive.

I mean it's been over ten years since the new generation of VR headsets (I'm thinking of the Oculus Rift) came out; if at this point in modern VR development it wouldn't be better than existing offerings, I'd be deeply disappointed in Apple's R&D.

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.

I think it's fair to say that having sharp text without screen door alone is doing something different than the existing headsets, and is very important for the more serious uses Apple is imagining.

Definitely looks better for productivity, but for gaming and social?

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.

Hard to tell if Apple cares about Beatsaber.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com