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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

The thing I find weird is how many of these reviews and experiences are coming from people who (1) genuinely believe Apple has an innovative product and market positioning, yet (2) seem never once to have purchased or used an Oculus or Meta product in the same space.

I mean, so many people are like "OMG Amazing Apple Demo" (or "This is the future" in the linked tweet) not realizing that the Rift was doing the same thing a decade ago. Is the Vision Pro better? I guess it must be given the price. But realistic 3D headsets are a long-solved problem.

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I think of this as “what does the launch product look like compared to five years from now?”

The Quest (2019) compared to Quest 3 basically gives you speed bumps, a pass-through camera, but the overall experience of what you’re doing in there is very similar.

Valve didn’t even make a new headset because the experience is still good enough (and they probably don’t see much of a future in it, to be honest).

Microsoft gave up despite having one of the more viable commercial solutions.

This amazing AR experience that Apple is pretending to deliver is just an incremental improvement to VR. It compares well to going from the launch iPhone to the iPhone 5.

What this means is that the VR/AR product market is likely already close to its technological end point. This is as far as we can go: we can strap displays to our heads. We can pass through a camera feed. We can remove the external trackers (though not without introducing blind spots, which will never be a solved problem).

That’s about it. How do I know we are at the end already? Because look at the iPhone 10 compared to the 5, or look at the 15 compared to the 10. What is different about it? The screen is a little bigger? You can unlock it in a fancy way? It’s got a nicer camera and faster processor? It’s the same device that does all the same things. Every year the increments get smaller. VR has already gone through its fastest era of development. It all slows down from here.

It’s decent tech that can be fun or even productive but I just don’t think it’s for everyone, and for the people who it’s for it’s not really something you are going to want to use for 4+ hours a day like most smartphone and computer users. And we aren’t getting this tech in a pair of glasses or a projected hologram in front of our face or anything unobtrusive like that. It’s physically impossible within any foreseeable period of time.

I've had a HTC Vive, Quest 2, and the Valve Index. It's much higher fidelity than any of them by a very large margin.

The virtual desktop feature is pretty similar experiences.

The hand tracking controls are classic apple (it just works). The eye tracking can use some more work.

I do feel that this could be the future. It's a huge step forward in certain areas, and I think the rest will be fixed. In a generation or two, this is going to be really compelling. I never felt that way about any of the other headsets I own.

Slightly better resolution but a narrower FOV and worse reflections is not going to turn any HMD from a single digit millions user device into a hundreds of millions of users device. This entire approach is, I think, an evolutionary dead end. People who care about their faces and hair aren't going to strap a 1.5 lb dorkbox to their faces. And no, making it a 1 lb or even an 0.5 lb dorkbox isn't going to fix things if you still have to mash it to your face. People like their faces and won't agree to have their faces look silly for little appreciable gain over a phone and/or laptop.

Will mirror this as someone who uses a Quest 2 somewhere around 10-12 hours per week. In terms of hardware the Vision Pro is much better, which already shows and will only become more evident as intense apps make obvious the difference in CPU+GPU horsepower between the two headsets.

Right, but this gets to the flip side of my argument: what you're saying is that it will do what the Quest does better, at a higher price point.

But... no one is buying Quests. I mean, my kids have one and claim to love it. I had a ton of fun with Google Earth on a Rift S a few years back. But the market is a tiny niche thing.

How does selling a premium version of a niche product make money? I just don't see it. And what I find striking is the number of "Apple People" out there who haven't bothered to learn the particular product niche making statements that seem not terribly informed. Most of the "wow" reviews could have been done with an original Rift.

It’s niche in its current form yes, but I don’t think the AVP is Apple’s endgame for visionOS. It exists merely so a robust platform and ecosystem can be developed and will be there from day one for more broadly appealing products in the future.

That just sounds like marketing non-speak. Couldn't you have said exactly the same words about Quest 3 when it launched? All these discussions come down to something to the effect of "Apple will be successful because Apple". But... I don't see it. They're a follower in this space, not an innovator. If there was magic dust to sell a billion headsets Meta would have found it by now.

I touched on this elsewhere, but it’s my belief that Meta has largely fumbled its strategy with the quest.

In short, outside of games it’s not a very appealing platform. It’s underdeveloped, with a middling SDK and shoehorned-Android UI that isn’t great for much except games, but despite this Meta thinks it’s good enough for developers to willingly lock themselves into their tiny walled garden. Enthusiast users aren’t too interested in the Quest as a platform either; see how many use the standalone Quest headsets exclusively for PCVR (including myself) — why buy games on Meta’s platform which is almost certainly seeing its demise sooner than later when the same games can be owned on the proven Steam instead?

Meta has also been weirdly rigid, with an inability to read the climate and roll with the punches. Their metaverse stuff has all fallen flat and yet they press forward with it instead of embracing what is working and moving in that direction.

And of course, Meta has a less than sterling reputation, being Facebook. A lot of people are reluctant to spend money to invite an array of Facebook cameras into their homes.

Apple is unlikely to suffer any of these problems to any significant extent. Their attempt may also fail, but they have a lot more going for them.

At best, and most forgiving, the AVP is trying to not be a VR headset. I guess it's pretty "resolutionary" to not be the thing that you obviously are.

I find amazing how they keep being surprised by stuff Microsoft was demoing in 2015 with Holo Lens, do those people never read any kind of news?

I think thats a pretty typical apple fanboyism response you are going to get from anything they release. Basically all of their products are iterations of some other existing product on the market. All the new things coming to iphone or mac. Its all been done because it has to have been done before, since unlike how they pitch them, computer companies don't make new things, they assemble existing things in potentially new ways perhaps, but nothing is novel; "apple silicon" is just another TSMC product running ARM architecture, not hand crafted in cupertino by free range artisans or anything. Boring hardware vendors are the ones who make things, who then sell these components on the market, and then Apple cobbles together a computer from what is available among the hardware vendor's inventory same as any other computer on the market. The layers get deeper still, when you consider what the hardware vendors produce is just what is able to be produced on the tooling the toolmakers are currently selling to them. Really its the toolmaker's toolmaker's toolmaker who brought you that iPhone, but Tim Apple walks up on that stage and gets the applause.

This misrepresents and belittles the amount of effort required to create something. Generally speaking, people don't buy tech, they buy products — Ideally great products.

While the iPhone 1.0 was incredibly primitive by today's standards, and wasn't the absolute cutting edge tech/compute-wise, it was indeed very polished and fantastic at what it set out to do: Combine an iPod + Internet Communicator + Phone. It had real mass-market use cases it set to solve during development, and solved those right out the gate, despite the many improvements that would follow.

Vision 1.0 doesn't seem to have many particular use cases in mind, and the ones it has seem incredibly niche. There's a lot of really cool tech that's meandering for a reason to exist. This alone makes it unlike any Apple product they have released in recent memory.

The iPhone 1.0 was a $499 product though and it was also a very useful smartphone when it launched, which was already basically an established market by Blackberry and others.

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