Vision Pro teardown part 2: What’s the display resolution?
ifixit.com
ifixit.com
I'm really hoping this improves because it's nice to turn my 14" MacBook Pro into a theater screen of sorts alongside native apps. For the moment, though, AVP doesn't seem very useful apart from watching movies (which is amazing).
Overall, the AVP is a disappointment for me. Most of the new UX patterns I find far worse than keyboard shortcuts. (For example, a window manager is _much_ easier to use than having to pinch to drag windows around. For example Vimium is much easier to use than looking at elements and pinching at things.) I don't consume much content (e.g. TV), but of the content that I do consume, it feels lower resolution to me. The demos they have (e.g. the Alicia Keys video) feels nothing like real-life to me. As a parallel to what you said — real life has never looked better (after taking off the AVP), haha.
The virtual display doesn't look as good as the laptop screen, but it looks as good or better than the 1440p monitor I normally use at my desk.
To achieve the same effective pixel count as a MBP, a virtual screen at the AVP's PPD would have to be resized to 90° horizontal FOV, which is just too big to be comfortable, equivalent to sitting 6" from a 14" MBP screen.
The technology just isn't there yet. We need at least another doubling of PPD. See you in 10 years.
Many people are accustomed to working with 3x or more display devices where at least one of them is out of their field of view no matter where they are looking so I imagine the primary adaptation to using a vision pro would be the weight.
I am a color accuracy and resolution snob so I only use professional monitors: BenQ at home and Eizo at the office.
If one day the vision pro can match the performance of color-critical monitors for less than $5,100 it will be a definite "oui-starter".
If one day the vision pro can BEAT the performance of color-critical monitors for less than $5,100 I will hire a personal trainer for the sole purpose of getting my neck buff enough to use one without strain.
Currently though it cannot match the efficiency of a single monitor with a tiling WM.
This.
More than anything else, I've found tiling to be the single most important improvement in my workflow in ages.
Specifically, the Pop OS Tiling extension, which is zero-config.
The closest I've found on Mac (besides some wm attempts), is Rectangle.app, though it's still a long ways off from a tiling wm.
Very, very few people. I would be surprised if it's more than a fraction of a percent of the home computing market.
In fact, most people seem quite content to downgrade. They have laptops or desktops that are collecting dust while they're browsing the web on their phones while at home. My entire family does that, I'm the only outlier.
I'm sure that cost and convenience are factors and there would be a larger market for zero-hassle "high-FOV" computing, but a bulky headset isn't it. As it is, the market for Apple Vision Pro is almost nonexistent - not without some killer use case that appeals to more than just hardcore geeks.
Well, that only leaves one question: Why so few monitors?
More seriously, I'd be really interested to hear your system for arranging things across all that real estate and how you use it optimally.
I used to have 2.5 monitors (two widescreens + a laptop off to the side) --- but after several moves, the inexorable passage of time, and my growing laziness, I now just spend my workdays hunched over a single laptop.
One downside is that my neck does not exercise much because I do not look in different directions while working. Another downside is that at certain times context can involve multiple window sets, but that is rare, and it comes with an upside: it is easier to focus on one task without windows on other monitors distracting me.
My experience was a few weeks with pcvr gaming on quest 3 was all I needed to get the neck strength. The AVP feels lighter by comparison.
Middle: Solidworks and/or CST Studio Suite
Right: Browser and as many terminal windows as I can stand before I start to go insane.
Laptop/TV: personal stuff
I design satellites. Specifically antenna tiles and onboard processors that do RF things. I also assist in the testing of new RF signal processing methods.
(website says that is ~186 PPD)
In summary, with an 88" screen at a distance of 5 feet, some viewers rated 8K content (118 PPD) higher on average than equivalent 4K content (59 PPD), particularly those with better than 20/20 vision (~60 PPD). Most would not notice. It wasn't directly tested but I'd guess most people do notice the difference between 30 and 60 PPD, but only those with above average eyesight will see improvements beyond that.
I keep trying newer lens technologies as they come out, but mostly it's been a bust. However I do also like Precision1 for Astigmatism water gradient lenses, which came out in 2021. They are thicker and more stable overall, with slightly higher vision quality, but prone to drying up if I don't blink.
Occasionally for a change I'll wear Acuvue Oasys 1-Day for Astigmatism, which came out in 2017.
All three work well for me but the Acuvue Moist are the ones I tend to reach for the most often. It depends a lot on the individual and the fit, I think.
keep it up good man.
There's some interesting analysis here: https://kguttag.com/2023/06/26/apple-vision-pro-part-4-hyper...
He concludes, by making comparison with the Meta Quest which has similar pancake optics to the AVP, and by scaling up the PPD, that the AVP's PPD could be as high as 39 PPD in the center of the image.
I think most of the conclusions derived from the analysis here will still hold true if the central PPD does turn out to be as high as 39, rather than 34. It's still a very long way from 20/20 retina at 60, from foveal cone density at 110, and pales in comparison to the PPD achieved by even entry level 14" laptops or 27" 4K displays.
I agree it feels "worse" than a physical screen - it is certainly less crisp. But I ran an experiment, and created a doc with font sizes from 1-15 pt, then viewed it on my physical 24" 4k monitor, and on a mirrored Mac display in the AVP set to the same (virtual) dimensions and distance away.
Interestingly, text became illegible (without leaning closer in either case) for me at around the 6pt mark for both of them. Objectively speaking, the size of font I can read is pretty equivalent, although I find myself preferring fonts about 2pts larger on the AVP than on my physical monitor.
I suspect this is because the physical display is able to benefit from precise pixel alignment and subpixel rendering, which the AVP can't. But the "average density" feels pretty equivalent... it somehow feels more an issue of optical sharpness than of "pixel size" (even I know the two are related.)
I wonder how so different opinions exist on things that should be pretty much the same for everyone.
Aside from sheer eye sight, I think there's also attention and sensibility to these specific things. The same way web designers recognize fonts from 4 letters when generic users barely pay attention to whether it's serif.
However, my strong suspicion is that the visionOS native apps have a larger font size and bigger, smoother UX elements. In this case, the mind doesn't notice a little blurriness around the edges.
Whereas with a mirrored display, there's tons of tiny thin lines where it's easier to notice that visual acuity is not 100%.
I think a big part of the difference is that your feed is rotated and skewed raster graphic. That might work fine for photographs and movies. But UIs and text will quickly suffer from washed out edges when you apply transformations to otherwise "perfect" pixels.
The resolution of the pre-transformed image would have to be vastly higher to counteract the fuzzyness.
An even better solution would be if the UI could be rendered directly to the AVP rather than being a screen capture.
macOS renders to 5120x2880 'display', then it's downscaled to 4k, which is then streamed to the Vision Pro with whatever compression or bitrate, where it's scaled to whatever size you display it as.
It makes no sense that they built and advertise this "feature" when it could have been so much better with a thunderbolt/usb c input on the battery pack...
It doesn't spell much good for the future of the device, because it seems it will be largely locked down and limited like the iPad but even less enticing uses cases...
e: I stand corrected, the reviewers I've watched mostly preferred the dual loop but there's plenty of solo knit fans here. I guess that YMMV factor is why they include both.
As the owner of a long head, I definitely struggled with feeling like I couldn't get the VP to sit right for my eyes with the solo loop. The dual resolved that easily.
Then you get to have the single loop as new fidget toy.
Most impressive to me is when every unnecessary component has been removed, and every remaining component is as simple as possible. (The example that sticks in my mind is the humble $5 drip coffee pot. No moving parts except the switch to turn it on!)
Where I'm coming from: I'm picky about coffee making and am not interested in the espresso investment for home. So I made delicious Chemex and Hario pourovers for myself, family, and friends for 15 years because I never thought I'd enjoy the compromises of a drip coffee maker. I was wrong. The Moccamaster makes an excellent half or full carafe, consistently, every time. And I don't suffer Pourover Interruptus on busy mornings. The thermal carafe version was my choice. No regrets.
Glad to hear you e got such great use out of it!
So we got a Krups grind and brew unit, though the exact model we have isn't available anymore, it's been going strong for maybe 7 years without any issues. It has a hopper you can just fill with beans and it grinds an approximation of the right amount for home much coffee you want (and you can put water in the night before and set it to have coffee brewed when you get up). My only complaint for our particular model is the burr is really loud, but I don't recall if it's always been that loud or it's just beginning to get old.
[edit: this is an addendum because I saw u/emptybits suggestion and just wanted to acknowledge that it's a nicer brewer but I'm a pleb and here's the reasoning I have for preferring my lazy-omatic brewer (maybe I should trademark the name?) :D] It's not as expensive (or as nice looking) as the Technivorm that u/emptybits recommends, and I would absolutely expect better extraction from the technivorm as well (at least vs our model, which has the very old school single drip point), but the convenience of a single appliance is honestly more important to me than the price difference. I think there's also an element of how much the ritual of coffee making matters to you? I don't care at all, so it's just an appliance in the corner, and there's the other extreme where people have millions of gadgets and/or siphon brewers (which I admit do look super fun, but they also apparently don't even produce good coffee?).
One thing I do wish is there was a thermal carafe option for our unit, even though it does keep the element going to keep the coffee warm I do think that even I can taste some harshness after it's been sitting on the warmer for a while, and then when the warmer does disengage it becomes cold very quickly.
If you want something to produce a vat of coffee in the morning on a timer, which is totally understandable, there are some good options. Buy whatever James likes here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8eYs2vxT-8 (I watched the video 2 years ago and forget ;)
The problem I have is keeping coffee fresh for how little I drink. I ended up switching over to a subscription service that just sends me frozen single-cup pods of coffee. It's pretty good and very easy to make; just add to hot water. It's like $70 for 32 pods, though, so not particularly economical if you drink a lot of coffee. But it is easy and the coffee is fine.
My favourite methods to date are Moka pot, and French press. So I reckon the vat of coffee approach is probably they way. I reckon my favourite from the hoff video is the Technoworm.
Absolutely not. Juicero was absolutely terrible engineering. Any mechanical engineering intern can whip up a big chonking hunk of a juicer or any other kind of product in SolidWorks.
Filleting every edge does not mean "engineering".
The vast majority of the work and difficulty in engineering is NOT getting something to work, but doing so while also working within constraints. There were no constraints in the Juicero. It was impressively manufactured. But terribly engineered. Which is why the entire thing went down despite an absurd level of fundraising.
The ballsy thing about Juicero was that they didn't give away the razor. It was priced at something like $400. They were awfully high on their own supply.
Initially $700!! They dropped the price to $400 after poor sales.
Though I get the impression they put most of their real engineering effort into their obnoxious juice drm scam, and everything else was just overbuilt to make it feel premium.
Batteries are heavy, the optical aspect is bulky, heat dissipation is challenging. I haven't seen any tech on the near horizon that can answer those challenges. I wonder what Apple has in their R&D plans.
However, my impression from iFixit's teardown is that there's a ton of tiny boards, screws, and ribbon cables. I bet in v2 they'll figure out how to package it even more densly.
I genuinely enjoy the positivity around the product and the effect it could have on the field (even as an anchoring of what any new headset wants to be from there)
But that supposes the AVP is put in context, and I think we miss a lot of it.
I kinda feel we're back again in the PowerPC macs vs the rest of the industry days, with Apple set in its own impermeable bubble.
No headset will of course be ahead in all aspects, the same way the AVP isn't ahead on everything either.
All of those devices still suffered from the same issues: they can put only whatever Qualcomm can make for them. XR2 Gen 2 is slower than Snapdragon from the same generation. This is due to how "inefficient" Qualcomm SoCs compared to what Apple makes for themselves. (not M2 is meant for desktops and XR2 Gen2 is based on SoC used in mobile phones, so they were created with different power and thermal budgets in mind)
I find it interesting how apple went about the "number crunching" part of AVP by making a separate coprocessor just for that. Yeah, XR2 Gen2 has similar capabilities on SoC, but I want to see benchmarks.
That screen is simply incredible as a piece of technology.
SimulaVR (a competitor) has an extremely good blogpost about this [1] where they argue that the PPD in the central 30 degrees is far more important than the average PPD over the whole headset (because you very rarely turn your eyes more than 15 degrees off center, and your eyes have the highest resolution right in front of them), justifying the same sort of lenses that Apple appears to be using. They claim that this allows them to reallocate pixels for ~45% higher "foveal PPD" than would otherwise be expected.
…
This, says Karl, makes for a virtual Mac display with low enough PPD to see individual pixels—not quite the standard desktop display”
So rather than just trying it for themselves and realizing Karl is wrong, they quote this uncritically?
For what it’s worth, there’s nothing wrong with Karl’s math. He’s just not taking into account the fact that the Vision Pro isn’t mounted in a fixed position and that your brain integrates information over time.
In practice it certainly is as clear as my 4K display when I use it for mirroring.
It’s definitely not as good as a 5K studio display, but then Apple never makes that claim.
That big span of numbers should be fairly revealing of its display capabilities, with all the lines and columns.
How is the fringing and aliasing as you look at different angles?
Is a large pdf filled with math and tables comfortable to spend a few hours with taking notes?
https://kguttag.com/2024/02/05/spreadsheet-breaks-the-apple-...
I love it when someone smarter and more diligent than me does the work :)
Slightly different problem, but related. I'm sure it'll get there over time.
But then I started to think harder about what I was consuming display space with, and started to peel those things out into their Vision or iPad app equivalents. I'll not get into the obvious trade-offs of using iPad apps, but it largely suits the need.
Once I had Slack, Outlook, a Terminal, and TablePlus floating separately from the Mac display, I started to see a path toward potentially not caring if I even had the Mac display.
It does that as well as the promised, but nothing more.
Agreed - lots of pros. Not sure 'cons' is the right word, since there is no competing product, but I wouldn't recommend it to just anyone.
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/02/06/vision-pro-virtual-disp...
For a device like this where there is so much more than just raw hardware impacting user experience anyone who doesn't own one should have their opinion immediately discounted.
As someone that has prism in their glasses, that sucks. I do have custom lenses with prism for my Quest 2. Not sure why apple can't offer it as well, especially if the lens comes from ZEISS.
Could this be used to simulate a higher pixel density? Maybe doing something crazy vibrating the display in some kind of circular motion or something silly?
I mean, if you can see a pixel you can see a pixel, there is no getting around that. It's like once you notice a blemish you can't not notice it anymore. From what I hear from users is you can absolutely see the pixels.
I think the key detail here is that each eye is getting its own set of pixels for looking at the same virtual content. This can lead to more detail, because the pixels aren't 100% redundant (they're both looking at the content from a slightly different angle.)
If I'm looking through the AVP at a "square inch" of my virtual Mac display, it may be that each eye is getting say, a 100x100 grid of pixels in this angular area. But since each eyepiece is giving me a slightly different projection of that same inch of space, the pixels themselves are going to be of subtly different values, essentially contributing more information to what I'm looking at. This is a lot different from a "real" display, when both of my eyes are staring at the same physical pixels. I think the idea is that my brain will be combining this information into a perceptual image in a way that will appear slightly more detailed than the equivalent-sized pixels in meatspace.
> It's like once you notice a blemish you can't not notice it anymore
Interesting that you say this... because when you move your head towards a virtual object to inspect any pixels you saw, the image literally gets clearer (because you're getting "closer" to it) and you don't see the pixels any more. IME this goes a long way towards tricking my brain into thinking the pixels aren't real and therefore aren't there. (I've been using my AVP for real work all day today and I've been mostly very happy with it. The resolution is absolutely the least of my concerns, and it looks subjectively phenomenal to me.)
But if you're in a car driving past, the chain link fence gets blurred out and you can see everything again.
Something similar happens with the constant resampling happening in a VR headset. The hardware pixels are constantly shifting over the image pixels, as your head constantly moves just from breathing and whatnot. So not only does the signal-over-time counteract any blurriness from resampling in a single frame, but I find myself wondering if it enhances the resolution slightly.
(After all, you can buy 1080p projectors that "jiggle" the image by half a pixel diagonally, several times a frame, to effectively double the resolution and claim it's halfway to 4K. And what is the constant movement of pixel resampling if not a similar jiggling?)
I'm curious if there's an image processing term for this effect? The effective signal resolution from a constantly shifting pixel grid over time, and how to calculate it mathematically.
What matters is illuminated pixel aperture size, in the end. The smaller the pixel aperture, the less smearing you get from overlapping.
While it still can't fully resolve shapes smaller than a pixel, it definitely helps with identifying forms.
Is this double loop, or cloth band?
If Apple has a roadmap to keep scaling up the resolution, while only incurring a fixed manufacturing cost of producing a small 2cm display, there will soon be no other device category that will be able to offer such image quality at so low a cost, not laptop screens or desktop monitors or TVs or movie theatres.
Long term wide adoption cant really happen with a VR device, the pitfalls (Weight, long term pain, hair being messed up, red marks on your face, poor battery life, etc) are too high of a barrier.
I wouldn't be surprised if the headset continues even in the future where amazing perfect AR glasses are possible.
You can't consume media e.g watch sports, movies etc or do any real work with those glasses which is a huge part of why Apple built Vision Pro in the first place.
And the battery technology doesn't exist for them to last anything longer than a few minutes in such a form factor unless you have it tethered.
Phones?
You could try to miniaturise it all (up to a point) and include it as part of the device itself, similar to Google Glass, but who would want such an energy "bucket" so close to one's eyes and face? That's just disaster (and a big lawsuit) waiting to happen.
It’s an interesting thought though, let’s see how it develops.
That lines up with the 27.5x24mm size of the panels in the Vision Pro - that's 660mm², already close to the largest silicon die you can make.
[1] https://www.sony.com/content/sony/en/en_us/SCA/company-news/...
... will never be manifested, because Apple won't let you have it. Use your imagination to tease you, but you won't ever get it. Lock'n'lol. iPad paperweight. Maybe next time, tiger.
Sweet jesus.
I know that PPD is the actual important measurement here, but still, a display with 3K PPI is outrageous.
* Assuming the virtual display is virtually positioned at the focal plane of the lens, which is usually around 3m.
No idea what focal length has to do with anything, we're talking apparent pixel density which is directly related to screen distance.
If you ignore all the glass/plastic between the screen and your eye that's required to focus on it.
I wonder if that's possible with todays technology
Edit: Seems like there are some news from last few years about samsung having 10k PPI displays
I haven't seen any reviewers saying they can see pixels in AVP, in fact they usually say the opposite. So this part is surprising.
There's also a strange complaint about "not real 4K" but I'm far more interested in if it's a retina display or not.
i.e. if it visually manages to look like 227 PPI or better, then I'm happy.
In Apple world, retina 4K is 4096×2304, which is 9,437,184 pixels.
Is it a good display? It's incredibly good, far beyond the DPI of your phone or monitor. Does it look as good as your phone or your computer monitor when used? No, at the distance you'd look at them from, it looks much worse.
(Maybe the TI-83 calculator?)
In 10 years, my hopeful list is:
* More custom/specialized silicon for XR. There's aren't many players here currently.
* Retina/~60 PPD.
* Micro LED (not OLED), making varifocal and HDR possible.
* Varifocal lenses, which are just as important for comfort as high res.
* Cameras optimized for passthrough, rather than borrowed from cellphones.
* Lighter weight. They're almost tolerable, rather than acceptable, as is. This almost certainly involves offloading some of the compute.
Do you have an example of these people, or what they're envisioning? Are they expecting ready player one type glasses in the next 10 years? I think there will be different classes of devices: everyday wearable AR more than XR, and screen replacement/heavy compute XR, with vastly different experiences.
> lots of incremental improvements
As should be expected. This is the only way tech has ever progressed, without exception. The only perceived exceptions involved shifting existing tech into a space that it wasn't present before.
> from v1 to v10 or even v15.
I think it's a little more than that. I think most would agree that it's not usable, in its current state, for a screen replacement, or as a primary computing device. Even Apple suggested so in their announcement, saying something like "short trips". I suspect that V15 will be the primary computing device, for most people. If that ends up being true, that's significant.
Think back to when the iPhone first came out - could you have predicted how it would improve over the next 10, or 15 years?
Sure some things are obvious like faster networking, higher quality screen, better camera and just faster processor. But in all honesty I'd say some of the biggest improvements are apps that now define how we use it and what we use it for. It's obviously so much more than a phone.
I'm not sure anyone quite knows what the future of VR/AR truly is, but I'm betting it will apps which will change how we use it and what we use it for that will make it "light years ahead" of where we are now.
Meaning that our eyes (and the associated "mechanics" behind them) for sure weren't meant to fiddle with computer windows on a "screen", the same as our hands weren't meant to type on a keyboard/click on a mouse for hours on end, that's why I'm curious about the potential side-effects.
Wow, really? I don't see how that makes any sense. Bifocals are for things that vary in distance, but the displays are at a constant distance from your eyes. Are people really so used to looking through bifocals that they need them in a headset just to feel comfortable even though they aren't necessary to focus?
I'm disappointed there is zero detail about the eye tracking cameras. Where they're located, what kind they are, how they see around/through the lenses, where the infrared illumination is. Has anyone else been investigating this?
The screen analysis was interesting but they rushed through the rest, and didn’t even look at any of the cameras???
The tracking system is inboard of the lenses, so it doesn't need to look through them. There are two cameras per eye, below and on the inside (near the nose), and infrared illuminators (not sure if they're just LEDs or something more complex) surrounding the lenses on all sides.
Nitpick, but the focal point is about 6 feet away, which is the important thing for this discussion.
You can ask your optometrist for "computer glasses" if you want to see this in action.
I think it's too complicated and what people do to work around it is just make the font gigantic or whatever. I have bifocals but honestly have enough control over focus to not really get tired looking at my computer screen through my distance prescription. But if I'm tired it does get harder, and I just lean back a little bit and look through my close-up prescription. (I have progressives so infinite adjustment between the two. It is nice when you get it perfect but only a tiny area of your vision is in perfect focus.)
Also something that annoys me is that glasses lenses are super primitive compared to camera lenses. I have a pretty heavy prescription and always notice the chromatic aberration. Camera lenses use multiple elements to minimize this problem.
I'd spend $3600 on a pair of glasses that could focus the entire field of view on one plane automatically. Prescription changes would just be firmware updates, so you wouldn't even be buying them every year. But, I don't think the tech is anywhere close to that yet. The vision pro isn't suitable, it's low resolution and has low battery life. You need 16+ hour battery life for glasses. But if someone invented my thing I'd buy it.
I imagine popping on a pair and suddenly you have a huge wrap-around workstation in front of you.
AVP v1 does the eye tracking quite well. I bet real $ that v2 will have motors internally to reposition the screens.
I'm not sure that is interesting though. I would expect tradeoffs on PPD for my peripheral vision, higher density for the center of my vision.
I want PPD numbers like perhaps an average PPD for the center 30 degrees FOV.
Spatial Computing is not about arranging windows and using interfaces designed for flat surface devices.
It is about addressing problems using a three dimensional space. Instead of dashboard panels showing graphs in a window floating in the air, there are zones laid out in front of you showing data illustrated using 3D infographics
Apple has had to provide many examples and artful ways to work with windows because it is the only way people understand multi-tasking applications today.
"This device has to be good at window management or it isn't a useful device" is the reasonable thinking of a person who will continue to spend most of their time in flat-land, relating to others who also live in flat-land computing.
I think Apple knows very well that traditional application presentation is not actually where visionOS / spatial computing aspires to be. You can almost derive this from the types of games they put in the Apple Arcade of the app store. These do more than anything else to show where productivity will go.
Even for programming, spatial computing will shine by providing intuitive and interactive visualizations of software systems and infrastructure. Not because it renders an IDE in a window really well. That's what monitors are for!
In some way, how we solve problems has to evolve to make use of what spatial computing can provide.
Focusing on how the Vision Pro falls short of presenting the old interaction model served via hardware designed for that model is missing the true intent of the product and where it is all headed.
Apple is in a tough spot with this, because without handling some of the old way, the Vision Pro doesn't solve any "real world" problems. However, spatial computing solutions to old problems do not really exist yet. Most VP apps are just rebuilt iPad stuff in windows.
I think this is why the home screen apps are locked and Apple is so careful to subjugate apps not designed for VP. Also, why the App Store doesn't just show you a list of all apps published with VP entitlements.
I suspect they already have internal disagreement between product and marketing on what the low bar should be to qualify for an app getting to be listed as a Vision Pro-ready at all.
[1] I use an XDR Pro at my home office and a Dell U2723QE at my coworking space and the 4k is cringe-worthy in comparison. The VP comes nowhere near the experience of the Dell.
They should have measured the angular screen area for those scenarios, because this is entirely backwards.
> Currently, iFixit engineering intern Chayton Ritter has Apple’s proprietary battery cable splayed out on a breadboard, and is trying to determine what sort of electronic handshakes are required to make the Vision Pro accept battery packs.
Apple really dropped the bar on this one. It's high time the EU forces companies to design their hardware in a way that allows the user (or a recycling company!) to replace the batteries inside without destroying it in the process, and for fucks sake what happened to the USB-C requirement for electronic devices?
I asusme the custom connector on the head unit is better fit for purpose (comfort, not getting snagged) than USB-C would be.
You need a connector that can tightly lock and be capable of withstanding significant angular loads on the cable ends.
Twist locks have been proven to work well.
Why? The battery pack is external. I have not ever seen a requirement that battery packs themselves need to be repairable. Not many devices come with external batteries these days, but do you really want to open them up to replace the cells? Where are you going to source reputable prismatic cells to use with such a device? They are also pretty delicate, you don't want most people handling them. If it used standard 18650 cells I could kind of see the point, but it would be much larger.
A recycling company can destructively open it up to recover the material.
A better 'mandate' would be to require it to accept third party power supplies.
> for fucks sake what happened to the USB-C requirement for electronic devices
USB-C would suck for this application. It already does for headsets like Meta's Quest, where you can use a link cable to a PC. You need to secure any USB-C cables pretty well if you don't want to risk damaging the port.
Indeed it is, but it would make the life of recyclers way easier. Having to use a hammer and pin to open it risks puncturing the pouches.
> Not many devices come with external batteries these days, but do you really want to open them up to replace the cells?
Uhhh... yes? That was the state of the art for decades before removable batteries were sacrificed for optics. You can even do watertight devices that way, Samsung's Active Tab 3 is watertight and supports swapping batteries.
> Where are you going to source reputable prismatic cells to use with such a device?
The aftermarket supply chain for devices has gotten pretty well in serving that market, although I'd also love some standardization effort in that space.