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Comment by kungfupawnda | Hacker News Reader

I have the disposable income but I already feel so alienated from the world as a software engineer. Especially post-covid. My mind is nudging me to go out and socialize or go on an adventure. I might purchase this as a tech geek, but I know I would benefit more from investing the small fortune in something that maximized my social growth (i've no idea what that would be..) All in all, I guess if it was cheaper, I wouldn't evaluate this on such an intellectual/philosophical level..

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The equivalent sum of money gets you _several_ somethings that maximise your social growth. A musical instrument and an amplifier. A competent bicycle. A squash racquet. A digital camera or a vintage camera, a kitted out darkroom and a membership to a photography club. You could do all of that for the price of Vision Pro.

...and get none of the benefits of it.

This is like saying "for the price of car, you could buy 20,000 bicycles". While that's true, I'm not going to ride my bike from Texas to Disneyland.

The point is not to get the “benefits” of a VR headset, but rather to maximise one’s chances of doing something interesting without a VR headset.

I would not suggest getting all of them anyway. It’s just to observe that the opportunity cost of disappearing inside an expensive virtual device is matched by the financial cost.

One gadget is the equivalent of the outlay of an entire well-funded hobby that might broaden your horizons.

What's to say (and who are you to say) that a VR headset may not broaden someone's horizons, though?

I had the unfortunate experience of trying the metaverse. It was vile to the point I logged out and returned the headset. Maybe Apple will offer a better alternative. The experience is nothing like real life, where a few bad people are usually limited in their verbal assaults. Also you wouldn’t generally have exposure to such indecent behavior generally in real life.

There are plenty of ways someone could expand their horizons and develop a hobby in VR that doesn’t involve or require them to do any of that.

A good bicycle can be easily as expensive as the AVP. Imagine the experience to ride a bike, would be marketed to us the same way we are told about seeing a 3d AVP experience. Riding a bike through the landscape is 1000 times the sensory experience.

One can choose to go into a consumption mode with an AVP or be active and move oneself outside through a real 3d space, the landscape we live in. What is better for the health? Mental and physical.

I would guess that the AVP is a temporary device to get 'us' into a future with different hardware for spacial computing. Something for the developers and early adopters -> the actual mass market(s) then will look differently.

The current trend in tech is that the stuff&servives we use is becoming more and more a mental burden to us: information overload, distraction, noise, manipulation, control, ... the future that has been warned about is now here and a lot of people can't handle it.

The AVP is the 3d version of it. It has potential, but there are a lot of warning signs on its effects on society. People get more and more disconnected from the reality. We'll already see lots of people staring at screens, instead of interacting with their immediate surroundings. This will get worse...

$3500 buys you quite a few rounds for folks at a bar... bound to instantly make you some friend hehehe.

Or better yet, invest in being able to tend bar yourself.

For a brief period you'd have lots of interaction from people saying hey what's that thing?

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