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Comment by cramjabsyn | Hacker News Reader

The quest 3 does essentially the same at roughly 10x lower price. I say that because I think the price tag makes AVP a non starter for vast majority of families with kids. I think its out of reach price-wise even for a lot of professionals without kids tbh.

But also this is the first version. The original iPhone didn't have copy/paste or the ability to shoot video.

The software will continue to get refined and the hardware will get smaller. It'll eventually fit into roughly standard sized glasses and I think that's going to change everything

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I own a Quest 3 and on day three of AVP. I can assure you, the difference in quality - and therefore movie-watching experience - is night and day between these devices. Watching a movie in AVP is outstanding. This device doesn't shine in all cases, but it shines there.

It's like saying, "Sure, Ferarris are cool, but my VW can also drive to the track." (No shade thrown to VWs. Love the boxy, 90s-era Jetta.)

Usual disclaimers: Is it for everyone? Probably not. Is it expensive? Very. Is it perfect? No. "Essentially the same?" Not at all.

There's no difference in detail for 1080p content.

There absolutely is for 4K content though.

If you're happy with 1080p the Quest is perfectly fine. Not for the AR experience of a screen in your living room, but for a VR experience watching a floating screen in space.

Yeah the VW/Ferrari analogy is good, because as two cars they do essentially the same thing.

Also I think the group of people who are shelling out $4k for the AVR are going to be heavily biased to justify the expense. I don't think there's a $3000 difference between the two devices. Maybe $500.

Fundamentally though, that's just the nature of diminishing returns. Of course the value proposition for the Quest 3 is far better than the value prop of the Vision Pro.

It's no different than consumer GPU's. There will be enthusiasts who purchase the GTX 4090 for $2000 but the average consumer is far better off buying something like a 3060Ti for $340.

My favorite example of this is a site called Logical Increments [0] that clearly shows just how expensive pushing to the next tier of quality is as you scale up.

[0] - https://www.logicalincrements.com/

It's always that last 20% of performance in any product that's creating a huge chunk of the cost.

The cost for quality scales exponentially. Doubling the cost only gets you 50 percent better in my experience.

You're being flippant to the point of absurdity, and past the point of being rude. "Yeah" when you don't mean it, and "you must be biased"

I wish the Quest 3 was as good as the vision pro. It isn't. It's not even close. The display specs are way more than enough to be able to observe this.

Did you happen to buy an apple vision headset?

You’re not arguing in good faith because you’ve already laid out your assumption that anyone who bought it is inherently biased. How do you expect anyone to discuss anything with you?

Have you used VR much? Quest 3 FOV is much better. And FOV is kind of the holy grail for immersive VR and interactive experiences. So saying Vision Pro is strictly better (and at 7x the cost) makes little sense to me.

for sibling, as I'm over my post quota: https://imgur.com/a/l6nqhvX

Yeah, Vive -> Index -> Quest 2 -> Varjo Aero[^1] -> Quest 3 -> Vision Pro.

Yeah FOV is worse, yeah it costs more, virtually order of magnitude more.

People are responding to "The quest 3 does essentially the same at roughly 10x lower price.", i.e. dismissal of there being a significant qualitative difference.

I never, ever opted into watching video on any headset until now. Like, yeah, I tried it. I watched stuff. This is organic "I want to watch stuff, where's the VR headset?" instead of "here's a VR headset, I can watch stuff"

Something that escaped me until a week ago was a good visualization of the pixel density. I thought the Aero was amazing. It is/was.

I assumed Vision Pro was marginally more or less than the Aero.

Actually, Aero::Vision Pro is roughly Vive 1::Aero.

[^1] that one is important, that's real street cred, you know I care, invest, and know what I'm talking about

> dismissal of there being a significant qualitative difference.

I think it depends on use case. Is having a bunch of high resolution floating screens the killer app or just a gimmick? For most current VR users, they're not going to see a significant benefit from higher resolution Beat Saber.

FOV/immersion is not the holy grail of XR usability. A virtual screen in the Quest 3/Pro isn't so great, and I've spent hundreds of hours reading text in the Quest Pro. For screen replacement, aka "spatial computing", Vision Pro is strictly better.

> I wish the Quest 3 was as good as the vision pro. It isn't. It's not even close

That in itself is a false question, no? Nobody says they are as good. I haven't seen even the most ardent Meta fan suggest such a thing.

It's not a question of whether they are as good but whether the difference matters enough. There is a curve with very sharply diminishing returns and a lot of threshold effects (once you get close to screen door effect going away, nobody cares that you made it 1% less noticeable any more etc).

I have a Quest 2, 3, and Pro, and have been doing spatial computing for years now, and the Quest 3 is nowhere near the point of diminishing returns for resolution. The Quest 3 is a relatively terrible monitor replacement, with a PPD of 25. The AVP has a PPD around 50. Around 56 is the point where diminishing returns happen (but with the edge detectors in your eyes mostly left dormant).

I will just say that I think you're an outlier on the quality / perception spectrum.

It's definitely very personal, so this is completely normal, but I don't think you are even slightly representative of where the general public would fall. For reference, I myself and a number of people I know quite happily use Quest 3 as a monitor replacement. It's borderline - Quest Pro was not good enough - but Quest 3 is - for me.

> For reference, I myself and a number of people I know quite happily use Quest 3 as a monitor replacement.

If it's in Immersed, then I've probably talked to you. I'm not saying it can't work, I'm saying it has around double the clarity. This is trivially perceived. I'm definitely not special here. You should really go look through an AVP at an Apple store. If you have a high res computer display, you can also somewhat emulate it.

For a lot of people, $3500 is nothing especially if they are going to expense it to the company.

A lot of companies are going to buy it just to figure out what types of apps can be made for the platform.

I can say the same thing between my car and a Ferrari, never having driven one…

> Yeah the VW/Ferrari analogy is good, because as two cars they do essentially the same thing.

Users want to be able to do things like connect to their computer and be able to read small text on the virtual monitor.

Both headsets are not equal on the "readable text" metric.

You can buy a LOT of TV for what you paid for the AVP, and other people can watch with you!

> The quest 3 does essentially the same at roughly 10x lower price.

Only if you claim that having "a screen" is the only metric that counts.

> Apple is very proud of the displays inside the Vision Pro, and for good reason — they represent a huge leap forward in display technology...

They also look generally incredible — sharp enough to read text on without even thinking about it...

The displays are the main reason the Vision Pro is so expensive — they’re at the heart of the Vision Pro experience and what makes the whole thing work. You are always looking at them, after all.

https://www.theverge.com/24054862/apple-vision-pro-review-vr...

> The original iPhone didn't have copy/paste

I eventually did get iPhones, but vividly remember being laughed at -- as a Mac user -- for choosing the little white HTC Magic with a trackball because I prioritised the idea of actually being able to edit text (which we now do on iPhones with a force-touch gesture not much more elegant than that trackball and lacking some of its nuance.)

There have to be limits to miniaturization. I have seen the industry evolve from 8088 chips to now; and what we have now was likely unimaginable then; but aren't we going to run into limits eventually?

When I look at my Apple Watch, even that feels too big (thick) to me, so thinning AVP is quite far off IMO.

On the other hand, all the research to make things thin will finally pay off when it happens. If Vision Pro can go half its weight and double the battery (even if detached like now), that will probably be the point when it becomes a serious platform.

There is a counter argument to this - the iPhone shape did not change, the shape evolved. Apple is never known to change shapes or geometry, they evolve from the same geometric construct.

The AVP fitting into standard sized glasses like swim goggles is a possibility but it'll be more like Cyclops visors. I am not sure if it will ever achieve a Rayban form factor.

A card board home also can be argued to do essentially what house does. Please do not write such arguments

> I think the price tag makes AVP a non starter for vast majority of families with kids.

I don't have kids and the price is still outlandish for my household of well-earners. I would never pay more than $2k for this.

I think it’s that and also more than that.

For example I would like, and could reasonably afford, a decent technical camera rig and a 45mp+ digital mirrorless camera to go on the back of it. I know how to use it properly to get value from it.

The outlay for this is more than the Vision Pro by a small margin.

But there are many things I probably should spend that money on before that.

The Vision Pro, as amusing as it surely is, is way, way down the road beyond even that purchase.

Having the money to spend on something — whether a personal or business expense - means engaging with the opportunity cost of spending the money.

And even if you comfortably have the money, you still question the value.

What is going on right now is a lot of people have a Vision Pro on fifteen day approval and they are all feverishly writing blog posts and tweets to explore every possible way that they could get other people to validate their impulse purchase. Because that’s what it is. Unless you’re going to build an app for it —- go all-in on that ecosystem —- it’s a weird thing to prioritise spending $3500 on.

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