Vision Pro Teardown – Why those fake eyes look so weird | Hacker News Reader

Vision Pro Teardown – Why those fake eyes look so weird

ifixit.com

330 pointszdw349 comments

I think the fake eyes and avatars would be a lot more palatable if they ditched the realism attempt and just used cartoon eyes and faces. You could choose different styles like Western or Anime, and people already buy things like eye masks with cartoon eyes on them. It would at least give the device and avatars some personality, not just "oh man he's using that creepy new Apple thing for the call." I guess if they're trying to sell this toy as a Serious Business Machine for Important People, that might be seen as too juvenile, but IMO silly beats creepy.

Didn't you forget that Facebook did that and everybody hated it?

Also apple did that with memoji and everybody seems to be using it.

Everybody?

Yes.

I've even no idea what you're talking about?

I don’t know anyone using it. Are there any stats?

If anything, I’m associating cartoon avatars with Meta, I see more of them on fb and Instagram.

I always assumed the younger users use it. But I have no stats on it.

Here another data point from someone who should be in the everybody collection; I know 0 people who use that.

I'd say these are mainly popular among people who could be categorized as Apple enthusiasts; I've seen these on various Apple-related discord servers, news sites like macrumors or mastodon, bluesky profiles.

Nobody from my friends who happens to own an iPhone uses memoji avatars - they either prefer plain "old" pictures in their avatars or no avatars at all. Maybe not everyone wants to look like a cartoon character - I wouldn't be surprised if this could be perceived as childish behavior on levels of using anime avatars.

100%

having a memeoji avatar indicates you're a tech person like having an anime avatar indicates you like anime

(opinions from a twitter perspective, may not reflect real life)

Did it _poorly_ and everybody hated it

Meta did a bad job at it.

Apple had a good show on stage, but I think the fake eyes is something you just can't optimize enough to make people like it.

No matter how you trying to make it look "natural", it just can't, there are countless edge cases out there, it will never be "natural looking". For example, what if it shows others that you're staring something straight ahead but when "in fact" you're looking at a giant window playing a movie? Isn't that a bit awkward?

Not to mention, the devices makes you constantly look like that you about to nick something. It's just look so funny.

From what I understand it shows eyes only when you are interacting in real world soI guess it shows those colorfull waves and gradients when someones is looking at mentioned window

In practice, the front-facing eyes are barely visible to those looking at your face.

> For example, what if it shows others that you're staring something straight ahead but when "in fact" you're looking at a giant window playing a movie? Isn't that a bit awkward?

I dunno, sometimes people stare and think about stuff. I try not to reflexively grab a gadget in such times. But it does remind me of this:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bSsb9B1163k

They already solved this. The eyes are only visible when the person wearing the headset can see YOU.

Meta went the cartoon method, (so did apple with memoji) the problem is that it looks cheap.

So I suspect the front display was a compromise, between buildability, and not staring people out by accident.

It only looks cheap because meta made cheap, low effort avatars.

Apple could make stylized eyes look good if they wanted, I’m sure they have some Pixar connections too if they really wanted to bring on experts.

> It only looks cheap because meta made cheap, low effort avatars.

There is a wider societal statement packed in there, but that's for later. I would point out that memoji looks equally as cheap. However, there are slightly more rich people who choose/chose to use memojis

Memoji do not look as cheap. They don’t look great, but not nearly as cheap. You can see the polygons on meta’s models. They look like characters in PlayStation 2 era games.

Besides that, it’s an apples and oranges comparison. Avatars in VR are full-body (ish) and are meant as your primary method of viewing and probably interacting with others in a Vr space.

Memojis are just little faces you can put in your text message conversations.

The fact that people are making this comparison shows how little effort went into the visual design of metas avatars.

Heres a thought experiment:

You are looking at potential videos to watch on $subject. There are two videos you can see, one with a thumbnail of avatar/memoji/emoji, the other with a real person. Which one are _most_ people going to clock on (hint we can test this by analysing youtube)

The point I am making is that avatar/memojis look cheap, not because of how they are created, but because of ease of creation/lack of differentiation.

I don’t see the connection between those two statements, but I wholly disagree with your point.

3d humanoid models (avatars) can look like anything. Some look cheap, some don’t. Look at the sheer variety of avatars on vrchat.

VRchat has technical limitations that prevent avatars from looking straight out of a AAA game, but the sheer variety of the avatars and how they’re made and how they’re designed (maya, blender, with shaders, with props, etc) makes VRChat feel more alive and engaging than metas offering.

Any project that has billions of dollars of funding should be able to make good looking avatars that lend a distinct style. Hell, video games do it yearly on several million dollar budgets.

Sorry, but you’ve convinced me that you don’t know what you’re talking about.

I don't want to see Toy Story representations of people.

Memoji looks cartoonish. Cartoonish is unpalatable in professional contexts. There's a reason people don't like comic sans.

What a sad state of affairs for professionals.

Not one professional is sad about this.

Then you don’t really want avatars. You want a 3d scan of someone which can be animated.

That’s fine, but to hit the massive appeal that meta wants for its metaverse, they cant do that and scale.

Also like who wants to go to the metaverse to get on a zoom call?

Zoom is enough for professionals and their meetings.

FWIW, "never say never" but I don't think I'll ever opt into being represented by a Pixar-like avatar.

If you believe I'm not alone, then by default you're alienating all of us if that is our only choice. The question then is whether my repulsion to being a memoji is greater than someone's repulsion to being an uncanny valley avatar.

I think the latter can be iteratively improved until people no longer find it uncanny—indeed I'd argue the latest research pieces from Meta AI that have been posted here on HN do seem to point that way

I don't think cartoon avatars can be improved to become palatable enough to those who dislike them

I keep thinking about - which one would i prefer my coworkers using when on a work call.

I think i would prefer neither, and they just 'turned the camera off'.

It amazes me that “realistic avatars” is one of the key points in Snow Crash, 30 years ago, and here we are!

I think the issue with EyeSight is that Apple wanted to create the illusion that your eyes were positioned where your face is (and not where the front glass is), and to do that required a lot of compromises to image quality. Replacing EyeSight with an Animoji or whatever wouldn't fix that fundamental issue; you'd just have a dark and blurry Animoji instead.

I speculate the fake eyes functioned exactly as they needed to: they let Apple market the device with photos that make it look almost transparent.

In reality, my wife can hardly see my eyes on mine, so I don't know what function they're supposed to serve to the customer. But it makes the picture of the device you see front and center on apple.com right now more of an exaggeration (or unrealistically and perfectly staged) than an outright fabrication.

I suspect they'll drop it in the next generation. It was just for the initial rollout and marketing until people get used to what it looks like (black or colorful swirls) in real life.

I think you’re exactly right, except I can’t see Apple moving backwards to the eye-exam blinders that everyone else uses. They need to maintain that impression that Vision is less alien than the rest. (“They’re like ski goggles!”) I think the effect gets a little better, until they’re ready to go transparent with AR.

High end ski goggles come with reflective lenses by default these days.

It's so that people can stay with the goggles on longer. The only way to normalize people wearing this in public, or to be able to see themselves able to do things with them on is to make them think they aren't blocking someone's face.

> In reality, my wife can hardly see my eyes on mine, so I don't know what function they're supposed to serve to the customer.

Can you see each other’s eyes when you are each wearing them? Or does it AR wipe out the device and replace your heads with Animojis?

>Can each other’s eyes when you are each wearing them

What?

People playing animations on their face on public are going to get paint thrown at them. Walking animated billboards are not acceptable.

If it has to be tethered to external battery always, why not move processing and fans to that also?

I suppose it's easier to cool something off your forehead than off your pocket, even if that means extra weight -- it's lighter than other VR devices (although maybe that's not a particularly high (low?) bar

What other devices? It's heavier than the Quest 1/2/3 and the PSVR2. The Quest Pro is heavier but more balanced with the battery on the back of the rigid strap.

You're right about cooling. It would go from something you can pocket to something that has to be clipped on a belt like the Magic Leap.

I would imagine they didn't want to have an external pack and that's just a compromise they had to make for this initial version, with the intention of getting rid of it in a future iteration. It wouldn't be worth overcomplicating the external pack if they don't see that as the way forward.

A "Vision Air" that exchanges the glass and most of the metal structure for plastic, and maybe ditches the underwhelming front display, but integrates the battery like the Quests would be a pretty good trade IMO.

The front display is underwhelming, but it also lets you have a conversation with someone else in the room. When you're wearing it, it's easy to forget it's there while talking with people. That was something that was hard to do with previous headsets, such as Valve's Index. I honestly think that the front display is going to become something that every other vendor replicates in some way.

It'll depend on how people actually end up using the Vision Pro in the real world I suppose - being able to easily talk to other people isn't a high value feature if the average AVP owner ends up treating it like a VR headset you use alone, rather than wearing it around other people or even in public like Apple envisioned.

They haven't advertised people using it "in public". It's home, office, etc. In those contexts, it's more appropriate.

I've seen Instagram reels of people wearing these things while crossing the street, sitting on the subway, and, worst of all, while driving a CyberTruck...

If you are having serious conversation where expression matters, just take it off or all person may wear it in the Metaverse. In current form it is gimmicky.

I would say that for quick, <10 minute conversations, it's fine. It's one of those things that doesn't seem impactful until you interact with it for the first time. I used to think the same way.

<10 minutes? If I think the conversation is going to take more than 30 seconds I am taking that thing off. Care to imagine how much extra cost this gimmick adds to the device? A high definition second screen just so you can make "eye contact" with someone while simultaneously not paying full attention to them anyway.

I get the point of it, but I’ve had countless conversations with people wearing sunglasses, or ski goggles, where I couldn’t see their eyes and it wasn’t a major problem.

If I’m having a serious conversation with someone, I’d expect them to take the headset off, just like I’d expect them to put their phone down, or look away from their laptop.

With all the negative press they’ve gotten for it, I assume they will put a significant amount of energy into improving the quality of the eye sight for version 2.

Back when this all started, there was a word for people who insist on interacting with others while wearing tech on their face: glasshole. The message it sends is, "You're not worth me putting my screen down for a minute to have a conversation."

That was also a time when it was rude generally rude to have earbuds in when interacting with people, meetings needed to be done face to face, and having anything covering you face was just viscerally rejected by a chunk of the population.

The consensus has changed a lot in the meantime, or at least you'll find your group that doesn't care about any of that.

I still think it's rude to not remove your earbuds when talking to people. I even feel that way when people don't remove their AirPods when they quickly interact with the person working at the check-out counter in the grocery store. It's kind of degrading.

I kinda saw the point a decade or two ago. As of today we have transparency mode where the person might actually hear you better with the buds on, then bone conduction where putting or removing them makes no sense, then ear cuff types etc.

It's just so much more complex that having someone remove whatever they're wearing feels like an anachronism. It can still be a nice gesture, but as it becomes devoid of meaning it's also to me signaling that we don't trust the other person to understand they have our attention (through eye contact, actual conversation etc) if we don't overdo it.

arguably there is not so much difference between AirPods in transparency mode and a hearing aid these days.

i share your feeling and remove earbuds. but it’s starting to feel like taking your hat off — purely symbolic gesture.

Being a glass hole wasn’t just about wearing tech while talking to people. It was more about how smug the users were and how overtly “look at me” the interaction was.

It was just because glass rhymes with ass, and people didn't like other people wearing cameras.

Google glass user behavior also rhymed with asshole.

Before that was “Bluetooth Johnson” that you’d see running around at airports with their Bluetooth ear piece and a BlackBerry.

That’s changed a bit with Airpods (and the like) has it not?

People don't like people who can afford more expensive things.

The exact same product features with savvier marketing makes the Apple users appear more suave: it's still a Bluetooth headset or a camera strapped on someone's face, just with Apple branding.

With Google Glass at least you were actually seeing their real eyes. I always got the vibe that the attitude came from the fact that 1) looking at you also pointed a camera at you 2) you could never tell what the person wearing the glasses was looking at while talking to you, if anything.

If people start wearing this thing to go grocery shopping, you'll probably get similar reaction. If people are obviously in the middle of doing something and you walk up to ask them a question, I'd expect that would be less of an issue.

Glasshole - love it.

Gargoyle is also apt.

> Gargoyle is also apt.

For those who don't know, this is a Snow Crash reference. Quoting Wikipedia: "Stephenson also describes a subculture of people choosing to remain continuously connected to the Metaverse by wearing portable terminals, goggles and other equipment; they are nicknamed "gargoyles" [...]"

I think the goal is that people live their lives with their cell phone strapped permanently to their face, so they need to incentivize you to take it off as little as possible.

Honestly I think the front display is the first thing they will drop when they try to get the price down so regular people can buy it.

I absolutely hate talking to people who are wearing sunglasses. Not seeing peoples eyes is very offputting.

narcissism: it's easy for the wearer to forget.

perfect Apple products for the perfect individuals narcissism.

Alternatively, ditch the glass & metal + display and keep battery separate; then it might actually be comfortable.

It could be done, but there are more tradeoffs than at first glance. They probably didn’t do this because when they took the battery off the head it was already too late to redesign the thing again.

You would need to propagate signals from all the sensors back and forth which adds some overall weight in copper, and perhaps latency for more encoding and decoding. Could be worth it, we’ll see in v2.

Tried it today. The weight is a real problem. I'd gladly have a larger side pack to lose weight off the headset. If they ditched the useless eye screen, and moved the m2 to a pack they could probably drop 100g from the headset.

ISTR somewhere someone saying that moving it to the pack would break their really low latency processing requirements. Distance / latency options are fundamentally limited by the speed of light.

Light travels 300km in one millisecond, so I doubt that's a limitation here.

I believe it's more the processing that would be needed to send the data over the larger distance in fewer wires which would add latency.

You can't just take the absurd number of traces off a PCB and shove them into a wire without hitting issues like voltage drop, crosstalk, interference, or having a cable as thick as your finger.

You'd need optical transceivers and at that point the added complexity and similar board space required might negate any weight savings (and drive up the price further).

This is true but keep in mind that once latency starts to go over ~10ms it starts to become noticeable for a lot of people, and even if it isn't directly noticeable it's likely that VR latency still causes some physiological issues for most people.

There are reports that they tried it. Not just wired but also wireless.

But the increase in latency in transmitting 10k+ of video data from the displays to the puck and back was enough to make the user more nauseous. I suspect because they wouldn't be able to process the data in time for the next frame.

Meta can do wireless VR streamed from a PC with airlink. That’s at lower resolution, but it’s at least theoretically possible.

The latency is terrible though. I have an oculus quest 2. Maybe it’s an offer of magnitude better on the 3 but I doubt it.

Usually the WiFi setup is the biggest culprit. You’ll want to have wifi 6 and wire your desktop to the router.

Apple could theoretically directly connect between their compute puck and their headset.

I think this would theoretically work in the optimistic case. But it doesn't make a lot of practical sense: if the puck has the battery, you need to physically connect it to the headset anyway. Even if you used wifi for the data transfer, you're subject to any interference (retransmission of packets for a real-time OS sounds like a nightmare) and people leaving the puck on their desk and getting too far away. In a way, the cable is a feature and not a limitation.

Since it doesn't have a headphone jack (as far as I know) this is actually still a problem since you have to wear wireless earbuds with it, if you don't want other people to hear it.

I'm having an absolute blast with a Quest 3 and Skyrim VR running off my PC, via Steam Link, wireless. Not experiencing any latency (obviously this is all local - copper to my PC, Wifi to the Quest).

Wireless streaming VR seems like a non-starter, just an optional bullet point for marketing material. Shorter latency is always better in VR.

1080p feed (2m pixels) compared to each eye (23m pixels).

So you need 10x the network bandwidth at the same power levels.

The solutions I've seen adjust for head rotation on the headset (they render and transmit slightly more than the FOV), so latency only affects translation (which happens less frequently and less quickly) and actual scene updates (which are less latency sensitive than head rotation).

It would be neat to have a version that plugs straight in to a Macbook pro and uses that for all the processing + battery. Then it's basically just a portable external display.

Posting from Vision, right now. I can say with some serious confidence that this wouldn't work well in that way for multiple reasons. Moving around, not being tethered, being able to take it on the plane, etc. Latency would be an issue. Not to mention, the cost of on board-computing is negligible compared to the necessary cost of the displays, R1, etc.

Although, I have been using it with my MacBook Pro as a remote client, to great effect.

Yall really going to be using these on the plane? Can't wait to watch zombies pinching at the air.

First of all, you don't have to move your hand or pinch "on" something for most tasks. The ones where you do move your hand, the range of motion needed is actually pretty small. You can have your hand in your lap or neutral on an arm rest, and pinch there. Hand position doesn't matter.

Anyways, this is going to be indispensable on the plane and for frequent fliers. Having a full 20 foot cinema experience? Being able to quickly pause and interact with an attendant or the person next to you without taking it off? Killer.

> and pinch there

Pinchers!

I'm only teasing honestly.

Are people looking down and flicking their fingers the hip crowd and the air pinchers the lamers?.

You don’t need to look down for this. You look at the windows that you want to move/interact with, which are presumably in front of you (not down below), and that acts as a pointer. While your hands are on your lap, which you use to click/drag things.

It is kind of similar to how you don’t need to look at your keyboard or mouse buttons to interact with things on your screen.

This was in the marketing for the previous VR headsets. They looked just as goofy as Palmer on the cover.

When I want to go to sleep I put on an eye mask on the plane, or I stare like a zombie at the screen on the back of the chair in front of me. Either way I have noise cancelling headphones.

Honestly, I just see something like a headset just making my experience a bit more personal, which isn't a bad thing.

Kids these days with their walkmans and their headphones, no respect at all I tell ya

Agree. I don’t think people realize just how many incoming video streams this thing has to process. I’ve heard it’s like 14 or so independent streams of video that needs processing in extremely low latency ways. Apple had to build an entire dedicated chip just to handle the realtime processing of this much incoming data.

> being able to take it on the plane

I see the point of portability. I also wonder how much people actually care about being entertained in airplanes. You put it as your 3rd bullet point after "not being tethered", does it mean you're spending a crazy amount of time in your life inside planes ? Or is such a soul crushing experience that it easily warrants 3500$ of investment to improve ?

And as a follow up question, did you buy a Quest2/3 under the same premise, and will replace your current setup with the AVP as an upgrade ?

(Not the parent.)

As someone who flies a few times a year, I do find it kind of soul-crushing, because of the physical discomfort of being crammed into a small space for 6 hours straight.

But I suspect a headset would just make this worse; the otherwise-mild physical discomfort of wearing it would compound with the plane’s discomfort. Also, I’d be worried about disturbing adjacent passengers. And my backpack has little enough space already without a giant headset inside.

…And yet I did buy a Vision Pro, for mostly unrelated reasons. (Hasn’t arrived yet.) So I’m looking forward to at least giving the airplane AR experience a try, for the novelty if nothing else.

You should definitely give it a try. I don't have the Vision Pro, but I do have an xreal air. I used it on a seven hour transatlantic flight in economy class. I had to cover on so I couldn't see anything but the screens, but everything around me kind of just disappeared and I watched my movies, did my budget, did some writing, and didn't even feel like I was on a plane.

It's worth noting that the xreal air has a form factor of sunglasses instead of a VR headset, so it's much later on my face so maybe that was a factor.

The external component is meant to fit in one's pocket, so the added size, heat, and moving parts would make for an awkward fit.

That was one of the things they tried while they were iterating on it in-house.

Ming Chi Kuo first reported details of the product as shipped at the end of 2021.

> Kuo's prediction that the headset will be a standalone device goes against a report by The Information from September claiming that it will need to wirelessly communicate with an an iPhone, an iPad or a computer to handle most of its computing.

https://www.engadget.com/apples-mixed-reality-headset-standa...

I assume there would be concerns about latency and throughput.

That seems reasonable. Also, wireless bandwidth would be an issue with so many sensors running at the same time.

You would need to stream all the sensor data in one direction while also streaming two 4k display streams in the other direction.

That seems like a really tight latency budget to run through even an optimized wireless stack.

Working backward: frame needs to be received by headset in time to refresh, which means it needs to be sent by host device in time to make its way through the headset wireless phy and be decoded.

And working forward: headset needs to encode sensor values, send across wireless, be decoded on host, before frame can start to be generated.

Which leaves the time in-between those for actually doing all the processing and frame generation.

Ditching the wireless phy and low-level steps seems like an easy trade-off for more processing time.

Even wired that seems like it’d need a lot of copper. The power cable connector right now is pretty pliable. Most thunderbolts cables are not as much. And who knows if it would need to be even thicker than that.

Plus nobody wants hot pockets.

Well, I do now. I'm hungry.

Also, judging from the cable on the valve index ... a much heavier and harder to manage cable...

You could do something like an active optical cable if you wanted - adds expense but given the price tag of this, probably not insurmountable.

> You could do something like an active optical cable

Wouldn't that add more latency due to the extra encoding/decoding step?

That extra latency would be on the order of nanoseconds, which is negligible for this use case.

It would add too much latency (even if it would be only a few milliseconds.)

Few milliseconds is way off. Over fiber I get sub-milli ping to the datacenters in the same city.

A cable doesn't have the bandwidth of chip to chip so it will be have to serialized/deserialized or decoded etc.

If we take USB4 80 Gbps as a guideline: That's 80 mbit per millisecond. Apple says their goggles have 23 mpixels. So if we multiply by 24 bits for color, transmission has a lower bound of 7 ms per frame.

So I agree now that the delay is in milliseconds which can push perception into nausea. I hadn't considered the pixel density. Of course they could use something faster than USB4, but it wouldn't be easy to go below 1 ms I guess.

You forgot the five sensors, six microphones, and 12 cameras in the other direction too :-)

Oh I ignored them because the 23mpix dwarf everything else.

I think eventually when they have an m2 on an iphone then it can work but they’ll probably have to remove the fans somehow. Also the front display I wonder if it will go away one day. To reduce the weight further, cost, and with sunglasses you can’t see the persons eyes. However, it does differentiate the look from oculus

You keep the battery pack in a pocket. If they did what you're suggesting, size would be a problem, and fans are ... usually less effective in pockets.

nah, just make it a trendy belt pack like those early iPhone cases.

3D-knitted battery bandolier, with slots for your AirPods and Apple Watch.

Also comes in a silicone sport option for those times when you need to do spatial computing while trail-running.

I think it’s a smart option. Fair chance there was a LOT of thinking that went into it.

For example, wondering about the characterisation of it with processing in the battery appliance. It would be “an expensive portable device with a dumb headset screen”. Could someone else sell a different headset for the device? Could they sell a Linux machine that is good enough to power the headset? Might people just want one or the other, and bitch about the cost of an ARM based mobile PC that burns up your bag because it has no free-flow air?

Might be Apple releases pricy larger batteries. Or some cable that allows you to hot-swap them. I see there is a cable where you can plug the headset into your Mac for development.

They hopefully considered the multi-year evolution of it, not just this year’s version.

Latency

> why not move processing and fans to that also?

my guess is to minimize latency.

Latency from 2-3 feet of wire is not problematic. But depending on how much data you want to move that distance and how thick a bundle of wires you are willing to use, power to move all those bits could be an issue.

USB-C can do 40Gbps. That's more than enough for a bunch of screens and cameras.

40Gbps is not enough to run the screen for one eye at the resolution/framerate/HDR it's running at. You'd have to chop the bpc to 8 or the refresh rate to about 80hz. And then you'd still need another one for the other eye, and a third one for the cameras.

This is my main complaint with the design. Comfort is king for things you wear on your face, and a lot of the design decisions compromise comfort. If I was designing v2 I would delete the external facing display and glass cover, move all processing to the battery, and ship a rigid strap.

None of the arguments against putting the processor in the battery make any sense. It adds latency? No it doesn't, if designed correctly, and I guarantee you can fit the correct design in the budget for $3500. You can't cool it from inside a pocket? The wire is sticking out already, you could add a short air intake to it. It would be too big? I guarantee that size is easier to carry in the battery than on your literal face!

The only thing that makes sense to me is the battery was supposed to be internal and the external battery was a last minute compromise for comfort. Unfortunately I suspect that Apple will go the direction of moving the battery back in for v2 rather than moving processing out.

There’s 12 cameras and 3 screens to drive, how many lanes would you need for that through the cable? How chunky would the cable be after adding necessary shielding?

optical fiber ? it may cost a bit more than copper for the transceivers (is that still true nowadays?) but given the price of the hardware i doubt it's really an issue.

Until the cable gets crimped while someone's doing VR and the display goes to shit.

Meta already did it and it works great

The cable needs to withstand a lot of flexing and rough handling. Much easier to make it durable when it doesn't need to transmit 10 gigabits of data.

You can also power it with a standard wall adapter. So, then you'd need to plug the wall thing into the battery, and the battery into the headset?

Would fans would work well on an external unit if that unit is in your pocket, or even if it clipped to your belt, possibly with a shirt hanging over it?

Huh. Apple seemed to have finally completed their conversion to USB-C. And then they came up with yet another proprietary connector for the battery pack? That's frustrating.

Look at the bright sight: they could have brought back the 30-pin plug.

It’s a power cable that locks on both ends so it doesn’t come loose and cause the device to shut off. Why does a USB-C plug matter, when no one has a locking USB-C cable anyway?

They could have trivially made that connector USBC with the locking tabs such that you could insert a normal USBC cable, just without being able to lock it. Instead they decided to force a new connector on everyone.

It’s not intended to be a consumer replaceable connector. People opened up the device and figured out that you can get to that cable, but it’s not mentioned anywhere and not designed to be used directly.

They’re not trying to force a new connector on anyone - they don’t even sell anything that uses it that part.

It’s the way one proprietary part talks to another proprietary part.

If you want to charge the system through USB-C, it has a port for that on the battery pack.

It designed to be consumer replaceable https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT214013

I think we’re using different definitions of consumer replaceable.

That link is for sending it back to Apple for warranty service.

My point was that as far as I can tell, they aren’t expecting you to swap battery packs or change anything that uses that cable.

They don’t sell extra batteries so it’s not like they’re trying to upsell on a proprietary connector.

Anyway, I do agree that it would be better if it used a regular USB connection — and better still if it didn’t need an external battery pack at all.

They do sell extra batteries. $199.

Wow, I thought I had read otherwise. I guess I was wrong, thanks.

> It’s not intended to be a consumer replaceable connector.

Isn't this exactly what people are complaining about though? Yes, you can design this to not be consumer replaceable, but would it be that much more effort to just use a more standard connector instead?

The point is that you have to lock in a source of power while in use. There is no battery in the device and you’re meant to move around while using it! The other end is a special plug that locks yet can spin around so you can move the battery pack or with the regular power cable more freely.

Plain old USB-C cables are simply not suited for this kind of device. That’s why USB-C is only used to charge the battery. Hopefully you’re not too blinded by political agendas to see the engineering that went into this.

USB cables can supply in excess of 100W of power, and that's just in Apple devices. USB C is not a political issue, much as you may think it is.

At least you can charge the battery pack with USB c

The battery pack does charge though a USB-C port.

However, given that this is a device you use while standing and walking about, it would be dangerous to have it suddenly turn into a high tech blindfold just because you snagged the cable on something.

There are lockable USB C connectors designed to prevent that from happening:

https://www.neutrik.com/en/product/nmc-c-hr

It's hard to tell given the lack of appropriate pictures, but it seems like that "solution" is basically recessing the USB-C port so deeply that only their cable can reach it.

I doubt that using a different proprietary locking connector fixes the "why didn't they use standard USB-C" complaint.

That one does look like a proprietary design, but USB IF has a locking connector standard too! Makes it look like VGA.

https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/documents/usb_type-c...

Looking at that elegant design, I can’t imagine why Apple didn’t use that. /s

Lol! I can't tell if that design is a parody. That's seriously the best they came up with?

USB always had it, this isn't just what they came up with for USB-C. Panasonic Toughbooks have that single screw versions and matching gasket countersinking for USBs.

I guess I'm not really surprised, if this came from the same group who gave us USB 3.2.78 Fast Version Gen Z Type S.

It just works. Proper screws just work. Latches has its own pros and cons, button-less latches like USB are technically even worse. It's just collective memory of cheapest parodies of these for VGAs never working that you have internalized.

I don't know about that. They were pretty bad for not just VGA but serial ports, parallel ports, SCSI and ZIP drives, etc. The screws would never fit all the way in, the holes would be misaligned, cheap plastic would get in the way, they'd often be stripped, etc. They were nightmarish enough for desktops that rarely moved or got unplugged. I would never want something like that in a mobile form factor. Apple was right to go proprietary here. The screw locks sucked.

Apple would be free to work on "more elegant" common standards instead of trying to force people into their ecosystem by using proprietary garbage, which then has to be forbidden by the EU yet again.

I love how they actually defined two mutually incompatible locking connectors in one document.

The locking connector on the battery pack cable is really nice.

It not only holds the cord safely, it rotates into an orientation guiding it the right direction for the cord.

It would be better to have no cord, but the design is worth a close look.

For the YT inclined, here's a video review by MBKHD which I found super helpful earlier today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtp6b76pMak

I liked that and would recommend pairing it with the review from Casey Neistat - which is much less technical and more "vibes"

https://youtu.be/UvkgmyfMPks

Thanks for sharing. Now I really want one despite knowing all the limitations and problems. It always looked so dystopian to me but for some reason I just want to play with it.

This is a great review. I love the cuts between what he is seeing in the vision pro vs reality. I can't get over how delusional the wearer looks using it in public. That moment on the staircase when he is sending a text, for instance, looks uncanny in a way that texting doesn't. It'll be interesting to see how the vision pro will be used by the general public.

It'll be like how people looked crazy talking to themselves with airpods in. Once enough people do it, no one will notice.

> MBKHD

most of the big YT "review" accounts are just giving you a list of reasons to buy {product}.

Commented in reply to a video where he tells you not to buy it...

I know it seems compelling to just brush off any YouTuber that amassed millions of subscribers – since it's usually rightfully so – but MKBHD has kept to his roots and still puts out reasonable reviews apart from the occasional "detached" statement imho.

Edit to add to the discussion: If you want to hear what a VR enthusiast has to say about the AVP, I've been watching SadlyItsBradley's unboxing & testing VOD and it's pretty insightful, though over 2 hours and not neatly packed into a short review: https://youtube.com/live/ZZ2aM8kw1ww

I can no longer take MHBHD, Jerry Rig Everything etc. seriously as they've tried to seamlessly go from tech youtubers to rich lifestyle vloggers.

Very hard to relate/care about their content anymore, knowing their influences and "hobbies" have changed so so quickly.

literally the only selling feature that has worked towards making me appreciate the vision pro is the automatic IPD adjustment; but that adjustment is so trivial (and never touched again) on other headsets that it seems like needless weight, especially given the front-heavy nature of a battery-free headset.

also I think it's pretty crummy to throw in a proprietary battery plug when there isn't some power profile requirement to do so; it's just strictly anti-consumer.

> I think it's pretty crummy to throw in a proprietary battery plug when there isn't some power profile requirement to do so

I'm not one to defend Apple, but what else would they use? USB? Folks would just use whatever cord they have lying around, and it probably wouldn't work. USB, for how incredibly amazing it is, has so many incompatible cables that aren't labeled in any way that it's almost a certainty that folks would get it wrong. And with the number of noncompliant cables and chargers out there, you'd already be reading about people frying their brand new Vision Pro devices by plugging them into the wrong thing.

At the very least, if you use a knock off Vision Pro battery cable and it fries your device, it's because the cable is manufactured in a grossly negligent way and not because the wrong combination of items were innocently chosen.

I agree that it made sense from a pragmatic point of view, but airpods and ipads come with USB-C and I've never heard a story of anyone frying them with a random cable. I mean, surely it happens but it seems a pretty low frequency event.

I feel the intersection of the set of people buying really expensive apple stuff, those who get really cheap USB-C cables, and also not being aware of the issue, is somewhat small.

I mean, there could be many reasons.

Perhaps USB-C was too easy to knock out of the socket. Perhaps they had special power delivery requirements. The headset has no internal battery, whereas other apple devices do have internal batteries which means they can still work if the power is inconsistent or low.

The macbook pro comes with a USB cable and charger, so that's something Apple is OK to do on high power devices.

The cable doesn't sit between the MacBook and its battery

Not surprised about the proprietary battery plug. This isn't a charger, it's the devices only power supply. If the power sags or glitches, you get a crash, and the other side has to deal with a lot of variation in the current pulled. Letting people use random power banks wouldn't work well, and constraining yourself to USB-C for what is essentially the connection between your device's battery and the device itself sounds painful.

Yeah it seems like the batter is more of an uninterruptible power supply. It has a USB-C power input on it to plug into the wall.

It doesn't have _any_ internal battery. That USB cord has a short or comes unplugged, you are suddenly wearing a blindfold.

The same, especially the short concern, applies to the proprietary cable, no?

In general, it seems that the lack of a built-in energy storage (even if short-term, for 2-3 minutes) is an issue; for instance, it makes hot swapping of batteries very hard.

The battery pack can be charged with usb-c. I suspect the battery pack is not just a battery pack.

Having a device suddenly turn off can be an issue even with an internal battery. This should be something anyone using Vision Pro keeps in mind. And by that I mean don’t go driving in it, or model Casey Neistat and wear it while riding an electric skateboard in the middle of NYC streets. In normal situations, sitting in your home or on a plane, having it go black isn’t a big deal. Just take it off.

This is where AR will really shine, if/when we ever see true AR with similar image quality. Then if it turns off, it comes glasses and not a blindfold.

Yep. Same for the other end of the cable. I’ve heard folks ask why it doesn’t use a mag connector like on the Apple Watch since it appears to mimic the shape.

Are you sure about this? I heard someone answering that it stays on for a while so you can switch between battery and mains power. Not sure though.

there is no battery in the linked teardown except in the battery pack.

Now if only it actually supported multiple users where the automatic IPD adjustment would come in useful. Instead, every non-main user is a guest that has to go through he setup flow from scratch on every use...

At least that's likely just a software thing, so it could theoretically be fixed via a software update.

It notices and handles IPD adjustments immediately when the device moves between users. Even in the current rev.

People will presumable share these devices with various people in their family. I could see the auto adjustment being pretty critical.

Really? IPD is the only feature you appreciate?

None of the other cutting edge tech is worthy of your appreciation?

It doesn't actually bring anything new to the table. The manufacturing is very advanced but that nets you....literally nothing.

Yes it has the computer in the face part but it still has an umbilical so practically speaking it's no different than a normal headset and a laptop.

And a Lamborghini is the same as a Toyota because they both have engines.

You can point to pretty much every part of the Vision Pro and see something taken to the next level compared to existing headsets.

Blatantly false. The FOV, which is one of the most critical performance characteristics of a headset, is inferior to the Quest 3. I'd _expect_ every single thing to be better if I'm paying 7x, but it just isn't.

This comment screams "I just want to be right about something".

Yeah the fov and the weight leave something to be desired so my comment isn't 100% accurate, sue me.

But you're purposefully ignoring the boatload of other things that ARE better.

I'm not ignoring anything, but if my Lamborghini got out-accelerated by a Toyota I'd be upset about that, too. There's all sorts of other things to be upset about, again compared to the Quest 3. External battery pack and weight issues. No PCVR support, so you can't use the established ecosystem of games. No controllers at all, even for what could be an emerging ecosystem of Apple games. No headphone jack (I can't believe we're still doing this). The EyeSight thing doesn't work and it seems like all the marketing for it was simulated images.

The parts that are better end up not mattering. Why do I care if the resolution is better if what I want to do with it is play PCVR? Why do I care if it's great for watching movies if I'm not a loner who lives by myself? Why would I ever want to be represented by some nightmarish Persona thing?

Again, there are just way more compromises here than is justifiable for something that's literally 7x (at minimum!) the price of the competition. I want the iPod of VR/AR, this ain't it.

This is like saying your Toyota is superior to a Lamborghini because Lamborghini's suck for road trips. After all, they're cramped, run out of gas too quickly, don't have enough cupholders, and it's hard to find repair shops on the road.

Yet if you made that argument people would look at you funny, and rightly so because when you're comparing Lamborghini's to other cars you usually talk about things like car performance, air drag, etc.

Likewise, on a technical level the Vision Pro is superior in pretty much every way except the FOV is slightly smaller and it has an external battery pack. The last of which is debatable because being external makes it swappable and upgradeable.

Otherwise, the vision pro is an incredible piece of tech. Better lens technology, better eye tracking and foveated rendering, better passthrough, superior display quality, far higher pixel density, superior hand tracking, real-time environment mapping with LIDAR, higher quality build materials, etc.

All of those things add up and push the boundaries of AR/VR tech. Is it pricy? Obviously, but I wouldn't be surprised if the build cost is significantly higher.

Alright dude, you clearly just want to enjoy your $3500 toy, don't let me stop you. I love and support you, brother. Meanwhile I'll keep doing a ton of stuff on my technically inferior VR headset that the AVP can't do at all, like actually playing games.

You know it doesn't have to be like this right? I'm fine with the vision pro and the quest 3 existing. This discussion only happened because you refused to acknowledge what is obviously true.

Not Seen this is being discussed anywhere. The Lighting in [1], actually shows 3 different pins count. The common / original with 8 pins. the much larger one on the right has 10 pins, while the middle one has 12 pins, the same pin count as USB-C. I would assume their dimensions would be similar as well.

I actually wish it was the middle 12-Pins Lightning to be opened spec and used rather than USB-C. Along with that Sim-Lock or a push button-lock design.

[1] https://valkyrie.cdn.ifixit.com/media/2024/02/03134020/AVP_T...

There's also a higher-pin variant of the chonky boi on the very right, that plugs into the headset for debugging purposes:

https://9to5mac.com/2024/02/02/apple-selling-300-developer-s...

It's a relief to see so much unnecessary stuff in there. Hopeful that it's possible to strip this down to 200g.

Almost seems like they made it too heavy on purpose, which might be explained by incentives on weight reduction. Better make the first version very heavy and reduce weight by 20g each version.

I was a little surprised to see not one but two huge fans. Reviewers have mentioned hearing no fan noise, but maybe they crank up a little if you really push the GPU + CPU with a 3D game.

Probably precisely why they use two fans. Have them really silently instead of one audibly.

Also probably why they are relatively big for a device of this size.

If you're designing for a specific airflow target, making the fans larger lets you make them quieter because they can spin slower than smaller fans while displacing the same amount of air.

That and there are two major chips, the R1 and M2, acting as distinct heat sources. I don't know if they would spin the fans up and down independently, but the two chips' heat output could differ over time.

Any PC builder can tell you that the bigger and more fans you get the quieter and slower rpm they can run

But also more weight

Someone managed to get a mention of them out of someone at Apple a while ago.

Not only are they quiet, but the EarPods (built in headphones) do active noise cancellation against them for the person wearing the Vision Pro.

I don't think it is possible to do open air noise cancelation like that. Do you remember where you saw that mentioned?

Why not? There are active noise cancellation systems for airplanes and cars where the distance between the speaker and the ear is much greater than in this case.

As I understand it, niose cancelation requires an enclosed volume of space. It's why you never see it on open back headphones. Cars and aeroplanes are completely enclosed too.

Active noise cancellation is just destructive interference. It doesn't fundamentally require any sounds to be bouncing off surfaces, and mechanical isolation would be passive noise cancellation.

The main caveat to active noise cancellation is that you cannot construct a destructive interference pattern that cancels the noise everywhere. Creating destructive interference to cancel out the noise at your ears will unavoidably mean creating constructive interference somewhere else.

see galaxy buds live, the only limitation is that active noise cancellation works up to certain frequency when passive cancellation must take over

I think they have a lot of advantages here. They have tons of microphones, they know exactly what the noise sounds like, exactly where it is positioned and exactly where the speakers are relative to your ears.

I suspect that makes the problem constrained enough that it becomes possible.

its possible, but expensive.

Every Honda, even the cheap ones, do active noise cancelling in a whole car cabin. It’s definitely possible.

$800 to repair cracked glass and $2400 to repair "other damage". Make it make sense, Apple.

How this can make sense: They have a process for exchanging the cover glass, they don’t have a process for exchanging anything else, meaning you will always get a replacement device.

$2400 is just the price for the device minus the profit margin (would be a 31% margin, which fits with Apple‘s typical margins).

That's what I thought at first, but the teardown revealed a lot of different parts internally, more than I've come to expect from Apple products. And the only absurdly breakable part seemed to be removing the glass.

Oh, I don’t want to claim that it‘s not repairable, I’m just saying that for now they only have procedures in place for the front glass.

Doesn’t mean they won’t establish procedures for other repairs in the future or find ways to reuse parts in refurbished (repair replacement) devices in the future.

The fake eyes remind me of the bit about video calling in Infinite Jest: http://www.telos.tv/infinite-jest-by-david-foster-wallace/

I think between high definition VR displays, the apple watch and Stable Diffusion we have the pieces to assemble 'The Entertainment'.

Imagine if rather than clip guided diffusion of images, the noise is guided to render by pupil dilation, heart rate, skin conductivity and any other signals that indicate excitement and pleasure for a specific indivual.

What you'd see is what your heart most desires as in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker.

That x-ray shot made me thinking I was looking at the head of a futuristic robot.

In some ways, I guess I am.

I think this is the first review that mentions there might be some issues with people who have astigmatism? Like me.

The Zeis Lens inserts support cylinder prescriptions just fine (and I can verify this as I tried them in store), so idk what the author was talking about.

A lot of people seem to think astigmatism is the term for needing a prism prescription, or that astigmatism is somewhat rare.

If you can wear toric contacts or get the prescription inserts then it's fine.

I’m curious as to the limits. I have very high myopia (10+ diopters) and would never consider a VR headset where I can’t wear my glasses.

>> Apple has managed to pack the power of a Mac, plus the performance of a new dedicated AR chip, into a computer that you can wear on your face.

Regarding the external battery, I recall watching some movie where an AI discovered that the human body could be used as a battery. Seems like Apple could solve a lot of their battery issues by working on that.

Human needs 2000 kcal on average for daily activities, which is equivalent to 470 mAh. So... no.

2000 kcal is equivalent to 470 mAh at like 4946V.

I don't know how you did that math, but you cannot convert kcal to mAh, you need a unit of energy like watt hour

2000 kcal * 4184 (J/kcal) / 3600 (seconds) ~= 2324 Wh

which is... a lot of batteries (a large laptop battery is around 100 Wh)

A human at rest uses around 100W, which is easier to remember.

2.3kWh is about 10kg of battery (more if LFP, less if NMC).

This is not how unit conversions work.

Not sure a hand cranked VR goggle would be very popular. Or are you suggesting it should suck sugars from your bloodstream to power itself?

yes

It will eventually come when machine eyes are better than human eyes. Replace the eyeballs with a processing unit connected to optics, use the body's energy through a connection to the eye stalk.

Marketing: Your vision will be much better, but the downside is that you're going to need to eat two pints of ice cream every day. Or if you want to lose weight, just eat one pint of ice cream every day.

Solo knit headband seems concerning. Keeping it firmly on your head is critical, and if it’s the same/similar solo knit stuff they’ve used on the Watch, that stuff starts to notably lose its elasticity in under a year, and that’s in a use case where it isn’t supporting half a kilo of weight.

The elastic isn't used for support. There's a BOA style dial that tightens things down.

I can’t help but read that as Bank of America.

FWIW that's generally abbreviated (and pronounced) BofA (or BAML when you include Merrill Lynch for their investment banking division)

BAML is their investment banking division alone, not BofA + ML.

It's renamed to BofA Securities nowadays.

MKBHD mentions in his review that the elastic strap is more of a marketing gimmick to make the headset look unique. The solo strap makes it really uncomfortable for long periods because all the pressure goes to the front of the face. They actually include a traditional double strap VR headband with it which is much more comfortable.

I feel like if Apple allowed vtuber-esq avatars for FaceTime, it might look better than the uncanny valley of human avatars.

I have found they are so much better in practice than initial reviews made them out to be. I quickly forgot it was a persona when FaceTiming with another person in the AVP. The flat screenshots look terrible. The fully dimensional version is good.

I agree. Mine looks much better than I was expecting. I suspect some people don’t like them because they are too realistic.

When I think of people who use Memojis, they rarely choose designs that resemble them. In some cases I think the rejection could be this. People want more control over virtual versions because normally they have it.

So, do we think there is a path to using some future version of the transparent OLED's that were being shown off at CES here?

If the same density can be achieved you can imagine how much simpler the entire device would get with just a transparent screen – you'd have to move the rest of the electronics into the edges but that seems very doable.

That feels like it'd cause light bleed issues when you want it to act as a proper VR headset? Can you make transparent OLEDs which can go fully 100% opaque when desired?

Xreal (Nreal) has a product using electrochromic glass which apparently works pretty well although doesn't quite become completely opaque; that might be an option.

I think Apple isn't really interested in VR though, so they might accept some light bleed in a "just glasses" form factor Vision product.

Proper VR is an important aspect of the device. The main focus is on the "spatial" AR-style experience, but there's also a lot of focus placed on being able to be in a completely virtual environment in both the marketing materials and the OS. I don't think something which "works pretty well but doesn't quite become completely opaque" sounds good enough, especially for something whose only real advantage is possibly slightly improving how the wearer looks to others.

For a different product that's glasses instead of a VR headset, sure, it might work (although I don't see why you'd want to go semi-opaque at all with glasses really, it won't be close to an immersive VR-style experience anyway?)

At the very least there's the low tech solution of an opaque cover you put over it

AR and VR have always felt like duals to me - with AR, you just put something behind it and you have VR. With VR you do passthrough video

Two deal breaking issues:

1) The reason that the resolution is so high on the AVP is because it uses Micro-OLED which is also known as OLED on Silicon i.e. there is a layer of silicon behind the diodes which would block the light.

2) Transparent OLED TVs required a motorised screen to put a black panel behind the display. Only options are that or electrochromatic glass. Both of which are not black enough for watching movies etc.

> The reason that the resolution is so high on the AVP is because it uses Micro-OLED which is also known as OLED

well, its more that they managed to get them efficient enough not to melt/produce useable brightness.

But the actual biggest issue is optics. You can't just slap a transparent screen where your glasses are, and be able to see an image. You need to correct the image so its focused almost at "infinite".

Thats why wave guides are a thing, they (simplistically) project an image as if it was focused further away than is actually was. However, they aren't very efficient, which means you either need to dim the outside world, or overdrive your LEDs so they only last a few hours(and melt your face.) They have other issues like rainbow artifacts.

I wonder how light could be vr glasses if they moved everything except the displays to separate pack connected to the glasses with short thin flexible cable.

I'd prefer to carry the weight on the back or as a necklace or a collar than all of it on my head.

How thin display port cable could be if it was optimised for sinhle purpose and lenght of up to half a meter?

https://www.visor.com/

Pretty scarce on the tech details but interesting. We'll see what actually comes out.

I regularly switch between the Quest and the PSVR2. The Quest has a whole system running on your forehead, while the PSVR2 is always-wired, and leverages the PS5 for compute.

The difference in weight is phenomenal. I would absolutely love to have all of that extra stuff offloaded into a pocket pack. Or, at the very least, parked behind the head as a counterbalance.

in addition to the latency of serializing things over the cable, that would essentially be a Mac mini. They surely could make the size work, but it would need active cooling to keep the temperature in a usable range and that wouldn't work inside a pocket.

People are very happy to play competitive VR shooters over a cable, so I can't imagine latency would be an issue broadly.

Fair point w/r/t cooling. Again, I think distributing components around the whole head, rather than 100% on the face, is the way to go.

As an extreme example, lots of people play PCVR games on Quest headsets by streaming them over WiFi. It seems to work fine for most, even with compression artifacts and added latency.

> in addition to the latency of serializing things over the cable

That doesn't add meaningful latency if bandwidth is sufficient. A 80Gbps bidirectional link (which is around what latest DP/Thunderbolt/USB handles) would work fine. You can always add more lanes if you need anyways, at the expense of a thicker cable.

Quest 3 is lighter than PSVR2. Even Quest 1 is only 10 grams heavier.

I would love to have a compute backpack that can charge my phone or serve as the computer for my VR headset

I would still want it to be relatively lightweight, but you could go much heavier than on the head and have it still be comfortable

$799 to replace the non-functional glass if broken. That's almost half the monitor stand.

If ever there was a case where a high price could be justified, surely this is it?

Was a glass front necessary?

Justified? For a 30 minute job to replace a bit of glass worth $20 tops?

It's 8/10th of the monitor stand.

I wonder whether they looked into fiber optics for direct image pass through. Like a system of lenses that move light from the front of the headset to the glass lensw

Fiber optics don't really work that way. They transmit light, not images, over the fibers.

> Fiber optics don't really work that way. They transmit light, not images, over the fibers.

Images over optical fiber was originally developed in the 1960s, although the concept goes back to the 1840s :

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

It is possible the concept was observed much earlier than that if someone had polished an ulexite rock:

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

Do we use it for any practical applications in practice? The light losses alone would make this only able to be used in very specific applications.

I remember a lab working on it like a decade ago (using a batch of fibers, not just one)

Edit: Found it https://phys.org/news/2014-02-optical-fibers-transmit-high-q...

Yeah, but this isn't practical at all for this application

There are fiber optic image inverter used inside military nightvision image intensifier tubes(IITs), I think that's the "fibers" mentioned here, although I am not sure if it's relevant for this application.

IIUC, it's a disc shaped dense bundle of fibers, fused at the ends and twisted 180 degrees, so to behave like a Porro or a pentaprism, but are lighter and simpler in specific ways it is in an IIT manufacturing line.

Totally, those are an amazing use case.

In those, they use CRTs to amplify the light thousands of times.

It's like that famous scene in Patriot games where Jack Ryan turns on the lights in his house and all the terrorists have their vision blown out.

Those crts are expensive, big (long), they're electron guns after all. They are not a better for this application.

That wouldn't work, but waveguide displays are real and may be the future of AR, as passthrough will likely always have some latency (even the stated 12ms latency on Vision Pro is higher than you want in some contexts.)

Some modern military night vision goggles works with fiber optics like this, but I don't believe the "quality" of the image would be good enough for the AR use case. You end up with a lot of little smeared dots.

Wouldn't it be simpler to just print out a picture of your eyes and stick it on the front?

> But Apple has managed to pack the power of a Mac, plus the performance of a new dedicated AR chip, into a computer that you can wear on your face.

The M2 chip, like any modern SoC, can easily heat up enough to burn skin under powerful workloads.

"The power of a Mac" is misleading; does this mean a Macbook Air (constrained cooling means a tighter thermal, and thus performance, envelope), a Macbook Pro (better cooling = better performance), or a Mac Mini (best cooling = best performance)?

Given the facial proximity and battery, I expect we'll never see that M2 at full power.

The macbook air has no active cooling. I would expect this machine to have better thermals.

> "The power of a Mac" is misleading

yes, its marketing fluff.

at best its an ipad, at worst an iphone. There is no way that you can practically dissipate 35watts of heat, especially as there is only 35whour of power in the battery.

Maybe they expect the user to provide active cooling by constantly blowing cold air upward.

i'm interested in this product from a cultural theory view

80% struggling to pay their groceries while 20% playing fruit ninja in a dystopian walled garden

i feel there is some underlying narrative which i'm trying to construct

I don’t have spare money to spend on a Vision Pro that I couldn’t spend somewhere better but I have this thought when I was taking a hot shower. I’m here just living normally while there are millions running for their lives from war zones like literally.

I’m more worried about the multibillionaires than anyone else, glass hole or not.

> I’m here just living normally while there are millions running for their lives from war zones like literally.

capitalism and consumption is all about escapism. escaping from the mundane (and horrific) realities of life. seek fulfilment in material pleasures and distract from real world issues and concerns.

this device literally commodifies our personal experiences. its a branded and status-driven consumerist invasion of our inner space. even further cutting us off from reality.

Every Lincoln, Cadillac, Acura, Infiniti, Lexus, Audi, BMW, Mercedes, GMC, Porsche, etc. you see on the road represents someone who decided to spend more money than “needed” on transportation, simply for their own enjoyment or pleasure. And the delta here is way more than $3500. Why are you not struggling with the dystopian inequity and cultural theory of it all on the way to work every morning?

Her third eye on the left of the lenticular lens was interesting.

The tech in that outside screen looks a lot like how I remember the Nintendo 3DS's screen works. I'm surprised it's so bad given how much time has passed since then, although I guess patents could be one reason why

Overcomplicated, unfixable mess.

do you have to use the battery? Does it have a passthrough for a power adapter?

You must use the battery but the battery has USB-C. Although it will slowly lose power while using if you only supply 5v1a via a USB-A to USB-C cable, using a more powerful brick is required to gain battery during usage.

well sure, i have a 65w usbc supply in my bag at all time though. Good to know you can workaround the battery though.

External battery pack? Have I just not noticed that in product shots or reviews until now?

Apple has worked _very_ hard in the press not to show it. Wasn’t a deal-breaker for me though.

Yeah, great observation.

Look at the Tim Cook photos in Vanity Fair - https://www.vanityfair.com/news/tim-cook-apple-vision-pro

It's a great thing, swappable batteries makes running a fleet a lot cheaper.

Has anyone figured out what the main lenses are made of yet? VR lenses are usually plastic to keep the cost and weight down, so you have to be careful when cleaning them, but Apple wasn't overly concerned with cost or weight when designing this.

The counterpoint to the weight criticism is that other leading headsets are heavier just balanced in the back more. Apple will probably do something to distribute weight to make it less noticeable too

Or at least through third party head straps.

a bit of velcro on the battery attached to the rear of the strap? that should balance it out a bit.

Genius. Such a ground breaking, original, and industry defining idea is even patent worthy: https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO20....

I'll never understand why Apple feel the need to act as a patent troll. Their brand is so powerful they could take any electronic device, slap their logo on it and sell it to a huge amount of people at much more profit margin than most companies that make functional things can get away with.

Maybe this is just to Apple's patent lawyers what pointless UI redesigns is to frontend devs. Gotta do something.

I'd hazard a guess this may be primarily for protection from patent trolls and as a mitigation for accidental patent violation. It's likely cheaper to gratuitously patent than risk ceasing production or sale of products.

That's what we do for night vision goggles. https://tnvc.com/shop/ab-night-vision-lpbp-go/

NVGs are also typically designed to be attached to a kevlar (combat helmet).

Mine are usually mounted to a Crye Nightcap: https://www.cryeprecision.com/NightCap

Basically, you need either balance or more points of contact. As long as it’s solidly attached you’re good.

I would be a little surprised if they weren't PMMA or something like it. It's such a useful material for complex applications like this.

Para-methoxy-methamphetamine? Seems like a dangerous choice.

I like the fake eyes - both on the outside screen as well as FaceTime calls. I think it’s quite striking how well they let one see if you’re paying attention to them.

Also, Vision Pro seems to manage to relate whatever emotion/facial expression one is currently making despite wearing 600g of chips and glass on one’s face.

I think the strangest design decision is not even EyeSight display, but the battery pack design. The whole thing is so insanely overbuilt, with the metal frame and the battery itself weighting only half of the entire device.

It looks completely align compared to the Nitecore powerbank I use for hiking trips, which packs 10000 mAh into a 150 gram shell.

Apple , you did it again. I have no idea how you convinced to join you all those talented people that pulled this off, but you did, and everyone that was part of this should be proud because you just changed the humans for ever once more.

I know this won't be iFixit's answer but maybe we should converge on the idea that it's because faking someone's eyes on a screen when their real eyes are just behind it is a genuinely sick, actively dystopian idea that is intended to offset the sense that they've developed a piece of technology that allows people to selectively pay attention to a human in the same room, even though they are marketing it to people who spent all that energy amplifying the idea of the "glasshole"?

This is easily the thing that makes me most uncomfortable, no matter how much it could be improved. The ick-factor of it all is difficult to describe, and if it doesn’t bother others, I’m not even really capable of arguing why it matters to me. There’s functionally very little difference from an “immersion dial” and a person who puts on noise cancelling headphones and uses their phone with intent to disconnect for a bit. I know.

As much as it makes me feel like some angry senior who dislikes the kids and their phones… I don’t like it.

It is just unavoidably creepy, and yet it was excitably launched with a video that was the most dystopian, unsettling portrayal of the target consumer's life.

It so profoundly undermines what Apple is; no other Apple product has ever been remotely "hell is other people", especially not "hell is other people who are in the room with you".

I think there's a lot more than just the airpods comparison that i've seen elsewhere, too. Because the people with the Apple eyes are using fake eyes; it is not filtered attention, it is actual misdirection.

Though I personally find having a conversation with people who won't take their airpods out is a sign that I am having a conversation with someone who devalues interacting with humans.

> Though I personally find having a conversation with people who won't take their airpods out is a sign that I am having a conversation with someone who devalues interacting with humans.

And that's a generational difference.

You and me may feel like that but a lot of kids these days don't.

I’m sure if they can get AR glasses on kids from an earlier age then future generations won’t find living day to day with a cell phone resting over your eyes strange at all. Something like one laptop per child, but with Vision Pro.

Difference is video is captured at all time since camera is on at all times for tracking. It's icky not knowing if you're being broadcasted while making eye contact as more than background character. I suppose that's true with audio being recorded as well.

> allows people to selectively pay attention to a human in the same room, even though they are marketing it to people who spent all that energy amplifying the idea of the "glasshole"?

Perhaps we could learn the lesson from Google's Glass that people didn't like the notion of being recorded without knowing it was happening.

> The main critique of Google Glass wasn’t really that they looked stupid (although, to be clear, they did). People were kicked out of bars for wearing Glass because the device represented a form of ubiquitous recording. Glass was outfitted with a camera that the user could activate at any time

https://www.wired.com/story/google-glass-reasonable-expectat...

Apple decided to give people an indication of whether the people using this device could see them or not, in addition to adding a big button on the top of the device you have to press to take a picture or video.

I personally think these things are much worse, at this point, because ubiquitous recording is now an old concept, and these things are a literal eye mask with faked attention. There is something so broken about it.

But I do take your point, and don't think you deserved a downvote for it. So much downvoting going on.

There is the ubiquitous presence of devices that have the ability to take a recording today.

However, unlike Google Glass, modern smartphones play a "camera shutter" sound to at least give some indication that they are capturing an image to the people around you.

Likewise, Apple is giving people an indication that the person wearing the headset can currently see you.

The lesson from Google Glass is that people didn't like not knowing what was happening.

> The lesson from Google Glass is that people didn't like not knowing what was happening.

I think that is at least in part a highbrow post-justification, though I accept it's going to be more common among Apple pundits who need the Vision Pro to be a success but spent time deriding Google Glass.

The instinctive reason is quite different; it was about inattention and rudeness. Google "google glass rude" and you will see _plenty_ of coverage about it at the time. People don't like this stuff on other people.

I certainly reserve the right to dislike these things on a purely instinctive level. Whether or not they have to choose to take a photograph of me or not.

> I think that is at least in part a highbrow post-justification

I think that the ability to record people without them knowing it is quite literally what people said was the main point of contention with Google Glass.

> If you see someone wearing Google Glass wink at you, you might want to get out of the way because they're probably not flirting with you.

A new app that's just been developed and released for the futuristic piece of technology lets users take a photo by simply winking an eye.

https://phys.org/news/2013-05-google-glass-photo.html

> However, unlike Google Glass, modern smartphones play a "camera shutter" sound to at least give some indication that they are capturing an image to the people around you.

I mean, they mostly don't. They do in Japan (maybe Korea too?) but otherwise you can mute it.

Being filmed with other people bothers me a little, sure. It's the rudeness that bothers me the most.

I wouldn't let someone be a guest at my place if they're gonna wear this thing. Leave it at the door.

The shutter noise on smartphones is entirely optional. My normal iPhone doesn’t make any noise when it takes a photo.

> However, unlike Google Glass, modern smartphones play a "camera shutter" sound to at least give some indication that they are capturing an image to the people around you.

I just tried with my modern smartphone: it's completely silent, both on photo and on video mode. The default might have been to play some sound, but I probably toggled the option off when I first got it, because I find these fake shutter sounds (unlike the real mechanical shutter sounds from DSLRs) to be annoying.

No, the real difference is the positioning. To take a photo or record a video with a smartphone, you have to hold it in a particular position (back or front pointing directly at the subject), which isn't usually the normal "relaxed" position to hold a smartphone, and this gives people around some indication that you're capturing an image. With Google Glass and similar, the normal position is the ideal one to record video.

Because people would never ignore someone in the same room as them were it not for tech like this.

Right! Most people ignore each other in coffee shops and airport lobbies. Our attention is already stretched so thin, parent should not feel entitled to mine

Nice little straw man.

I tell you who should feel entitled to someone's attention: the kid in the Apple Vision Pro launch video whose dad plays with them while wearing an enormous eye mask that has fake digital eyes.

That was such an appallingly dystopian marketing message it made me physically nauseous.

Lighten up Francis. It will be seen as no more dystopian than filming from behind a camcorder or a camera pressed up to their face blocking the face completely. This Gen Xer thinks that people making videos or pictures with the Vision Pro will be no more annoying or off putting than any home movie shooting dad was in the past. There have been geeks with obtrusive cameras gear as long as there have been cameras. The Vision Pro will allow people to be involved in what they are filming much more than holding a camera in front of them. You can still drink, talk, hold hands, etc. At least he can still play with them while filming.

This is such a weird sentiment to read given that it's conveyed over possibly the most artificial and de-humanizing communication channel ever invented, the internet. I mean if we want to get all dystopian, what kind of world are we living in where millions of people spend millions of hours pushing buttons all to mindlessly scream into an unfeeling void full of nothing but computer generated letters that you hope maybe somewhere at the other end might be a real person who's being genuine with you, but is also just as likely to be a dog, a person getting their jollies off trying to rile people up or a bot. At least with the Vision Pro, to be experiencing the dystopian future, you have to be in the same room with another actual human being. On the internet, you can lock yourself away from all human contact and you might as well be communicating with aliens for all the humanity that sans-serif fonts on a plain background with user names like "fuzzbunny382" have.

I can certainly see how you can find it uncanny, or just plain dislikable. But I feel like "genuinely sick, actively dystopian idea" is overstating it by a bit.

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