Apple Vision Pro – Why Monitor Replacement Is Ridiculous | Hacker News Reader

Apple Vision Pro – Why Monitor Replacement Is Ridiculous

kguttag.com

30 pointsxqcgrek284 comments

This is a guess from last summer, wouldn’t we want to hear from people who’ve actually tried it? The reviews I’ve seen directly contradict his assertions, and I know which of those is more believable.

I have an AVP and a 16" MacBook Pro. I can't see any reason I would want to use the AVP for its display over the laptop itself.

Firstly, I need the laptop's trackpad and keyboard to use the computer. So it has to be positioned where it normally would be. That makes it difficult to place the screen in the space in a reasonable location.

The screen real estate is slightly larger inside the AVP, but the downside is it looks worse compared to retina resolution. It’s definitely usable though. And the latency is fine even for playing a video game.

I get eye strain after using it for 1.5 to 2 hours or so. (I don't wear glasses or contacts.)

I've never been much of a multi-monitor person. And the idea of surrounding myself with shitty iPad apps is even less attractive. There's no way you're getting much work done besides email or Slack with native Vision or iPad apps.

Frankly, I don't see any use cases for this device. I don't get why I would want to decorate my house with iPad apps. Manipulating the windows and stuff feels very cool, but the pinch gesture is uncomfortable after a while, eyetracking is precise but a bit fiddly, and there's just nothing better about that interaction model than a trackpad. A trackpad seems less likely to trigger RSI than the look and pinch.

AR games are kind of neat, but manipulation is indirect and difficult.

Watching a movie is lower resolution than watching on a nice TV. If I'm not in front of the TV I'd rather watch on my laptop.

I just think the laptop form factor is undefeated. I don't get what this is supposed to add – especially if you ALSO need a laptop to do most real work since visionOS has no apps and will probably stay locked down to prevent anything useful like a terminal or Git or dev tools.

A friend got one too and they could not get a facial interface that fit his face properly, and eyetracking kept drifting for him, making it frustrating.

In-store demo is very impressive and its very cool. I am just positive I'll never use it for anything other than demoing it to someone else. Planning on returning it.

> Firstly, I need the laptop's trackpad and keyboard to use the computer. So it has to be positioned where it normally would be. That makes it difficult to place the screen in the space in a reasonable location.

I, personally, use the dedicated magic keyboard+trackpad with my macbook, because it is connected to an external monitor for about 90% of its usage. And you can use those with AVP too.

I have tried the magic+keyboard and trackpad with the AVP. If you connect them directly to the AVP then you can use them for lots of stuff, which works fine. But of course you have to use iPad apps. I just tried connecting the laptop and it seems like the keyboard and mouse don't forward through the screen share to the computer. Or I set it up wrong? So I guess I'd have to pair them with the computer directly? But that would be fiddly and I couldn't control visionOS with them.

But still, if I was sitting in front of an external monitor with my computer I would just use that instead of the AVP.

For me the main value add over a laptop is ergonomics in some situations. If at a desk or table a portable laptop stand can also address this, but that won’t work in an airplane or while lounging, both of which are situations where craning one’s neck down to see the screen is fatiguing.

That alone probably isn’t worth the cost for most but I could see people buying future cheaper versions for this purpose.

For me I have no real issue using the MacBook Pro 16" on a plane, in bed, on a couch, at a desk, etc. Much more ergonomic than AVP for every use case I've tried. (Laying in bed is especially bad with AVP). I’m sure some people will prefer it though.

I can do the same machine (MBP 16”) for about 30m on a plane or couch before my neck/shoulders start bugging me (not severely, but enough to notice and act as early warning for further problems). Can go for longer sitting up in bed but have to shift between legs flat and legs folded supporting laptop frequently.

AVP on the other hand feels more like sitting at my desk with 27” monitor centered just below eye level which is easier to keep up. I have to use the cross-strap though, the solo knit band isn’t great for long term usage.

I couldn’t get the top strap thing to work well for some reason.

Thanks - that’s way more interesting than the original blog post.

Take it from an older software engineer. Eye strain is one of those things that creeps on you and suddenly realize it's affecting you in ways you never thought possible.

iFixIt Vision Pro Teardown Part 2 [1], do confirm his guess was right. In fact they mentioned this article in their PPI/PPD analysis.

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/News/90409/vision-pro-teardown-part-2...?

They confirm the published numbers for resolution but his claim that it’s “ridiculous” is a subjective judgement. I count the people saying the opposite after using one as more persuasive but it’s very much an area where people have different opinions so mostly I would be skeptical of absolute assertions. I know people who say it’s impossible to work without a second monitor, or high DPI, etc. but they clearly don’t speak for all or even most users.

The display is good enough to use for a monitor replacement. It's not the same quality as my 4k or 5k monitors, but it's good enough to use, which is different than the Quest 2.

It's clear that this is a first gen problem.

I remember owning the very first iPhone. It didn't work at first in Australia, the cellular band wasn't the same. It had no store, very few Apple apps. But it still felt like the future.

It's worth remembering how silly things look today and ask the question, what will it look like in 10-15 years?

iphone was kickass for many on day 1. Very different scenario here.

The scenario here is that people are believing this article, which is simply incorrect.

This is rewriting history. It was good, but not perfect.

Cameras were pretty common on phones, even with video, and the iPhone couldn’t shoot video for years.

There was no customized Home Screen which had a lot of hand-wringing.

Again, as everyone mentions no apps and that’s huge. Let’s not forget that the backup to apps, websites, weren’t made for mobile yet. Not even apples own website.

When the iPhone first came out it was halfway to a luxury feature phone in terms of ability. Until mobile web and apps became readily available, it wasn’t particularly “smart”.

It was subpar in ways people expected more from (basic phone stuff), and great in new ways (Touch! Web!). That sounds exactly like the reviews for this headset.

Kickass isn't perfect.

Quite the opposite

It was so smart that you could browse the desktop web properly, and zooming worked great for it.

You’re making things that in the context of the launch were irrelevant.

The iPhone was lock ass from day 1

Yeah but you couldn't be on a call and browse the web at the same time

No copy/paste

Terrible camera

No apps

I don't know about that, yes you're right with regards to what the phone didn't have. But I still remember it being an evolutionary change when I watched the release. I don't feel that for the Apple Vision Pro.

Think about what the iPhone had at the time compared to what we were used to, provided my first was the iPhone 3GS.

It was one of the first phones that actually had an incredible touch screen compared to the best phones of the time, it was one of the first phones you could scroll and navigate smoothly without hitching, something Samsung struggled with for years. The ability for the device to seamlessly rotate between portrait and horizontal views. The ability to toss away my MP3 player and play music in the same way from my phone in a user friendly interface. The ability to do all of these things on the one device and have an interface that allows me to switch between active applications that could run in the background. The iPhone introduced the idea of gestures that actually worked, even just the idea of pinch and zoom functionality was an absolute game changer for mobile phones and Apple nailed it. It took companies years after the release of the iPhone to implement a decent touch screen that allowed smooth pinch and zoom functionality.

These were at the time some of the things that made the phone smart that we didn't have before. I think sometimes people forget some of the subtle things the iPhone brought with it that were a complete game changer

The 3GS was light years better than the original iPhone, and by that time it had things like actual GPS, the App Store, and usable mobile data. The original iPhone was seriously limited.

Ironically many of the things you are identifying about the iPhone are also true of the Vision Pro - for example the eye and hand tracking that enable gestures that actually work in an incredibly intuitive way is a game changer - including literally pinch to zoom.

I think there are other things you are seriously underestimating about Vision Pro - for example the quality of movies, including 3D, is better than anything I've ever seen in any home, movie theater, or other headset. It's simply stunning.

I also don't think a lot of people have tried thing like using FaceTime with the first person camera. I have, and it's an incredible way to give a presentation or explain things to people even if they are using a phone at the other end. Incredibly natural.

There really are as many steps forward, if not more so with the Vision Pro than with the iPhone.

Never said perfect but was ahead of others in many ways. If I plan to rewrite history I would start with the VHS & Beta war. Cheers.

This is just revisionist history.

iPhone 1 sold 1.4m units at a much lower price point.

It was better than the competition at its time but definitely not a mainstream phone.

You’re crazy. The iPhone 1 was amazing on day one—even with all its limitations: no 3G, no App Store and no copy paste.

BlackBerry and Windows Mobile looked like horse drawn carriages comparatively. The writing was on the wall.

The limiting factor for sales, IIRC, was the $500 price tag. That was fixed the next year.

Thanks for jumping in! I still own my iPhone 1 and still works perfectly - cheers.

Yup. Nobody bought one and said, This sucks, but it’s the future… It was great on day one.

>It's clear that this is a first gen problem.

Not really. Rendering a plane in space, distorting it, then having a lens distort it back and stretch the image over your field of view has many losses that just viewing a panel directly doesn't have. The only advantage for headsets is that the screen can be smaller than a full monitor which means that yield doesn't need to be as high to get a working display. If you want to render a 2d screen, physical monitors will likely always be the better choice. Headsets have an advantage of flexibility of where panels are and their sizes, but their picture quality will be worse.

> It's clear that this is a first gen problem.

AVP is an incremental improvement on literally a decade of 3D headset development. The idea that this is some kind of MVP to be followed on by rapid improvements in an emerging technology seems pretty strained. What it actually is, is a luxury-targetted Quest 3 clone that weighs 50% more and costs 7x as much.

What we have here is a Rolex, not an iPhone.

And yet everyone who knows anything about VR disagrees with you.

Vision Pro is far from incremental. Expensive, needs more work etc. But not incremental.

Angular pixel resolution on AVP is about as much better than a Quest 3 as the Quest 3 is over a Rift S. Sounds pretty incremental to me? Where's the revolution here?

And yet people using the two point out how much better it is. Maybe this seemingly arbitrary metric is as relevant as comparing amount of ram between iOS and Android devices. It’s more complicated than can be expressed by some stat.

I owned the first iPhone right when it came out. It was a revelation. It’s original cost was about the same as Windows Mobile devices off-contract, and it quickly got a price cut weeks into its launch, so it really wasn’t more expensive than any other Windows Mobile device or BlackBerry. And it was a revelation - blazing fast, did everything important the competition did (except enterprise support), and it truly was a giant leap. Nobody bought the iPhone and said, This thing sucks now, but just you wait… It was great from moment one.

Vision Pro is a bust. Tim Cook’s Apple is one where bean counters rule. Steve Jobs would never have shipped this. He would have felt like a dork with this heavy monstrosity without purpose, and he would have killed it. That’s what leadership and taste look like. Today’s Apple is not capable of bold things like the iPhone anymore. The model is the Apple Watch - put out an unusable piece of shit, and then iterate until it sells well.

You might be right about Apple under Tim Cook, and the Vision Pro, but this is revisionist history that I’ve seen repeatedly about the Vision Pro comparing it to the iPhone.

The original iPhone was many thing but certainly not blazing fast. And yea, many people said it not that great now but this is the future, most of the reviews if I remember correctly.

CNET: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/original-iphone-review/

Ars: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/07/iphone-review/16/#h1

> “ We love the concept of the iPhone. It's extremely easy to use and almost entirely self-discoverable; the interface looks better than any other phone—smartphone or not—currently on the market, and it's just plain fun to use.”

> “However, we are not buying something else either; we plan to wait to see what software (and hardware) updates might come out for the iPhone in the near future. We believe that the iPhone is cool enough to wait for whatever might come out, and we have confidence that many of the nits we have picked can be fixed through a major software update.”

I remember very frequently switching back and forth between my iPhone and Android or Windows Mobile devices.

I owned one shortly after launch day. It was absolutely blazing fast, especially compared with the Moto Q I had just come from. Not the mobile internet speed, of course, the speed of the interface. It was completely smooth and fast unlike any other phone at the time.

The Moto Q was particularly slow, I had one. Not a great comparison imo.

The interface was buttery smooth, everything else was ok especially before the App Store. Once you had third-party apps I remember being disappointed. The 3GS was fast, the original was not.

Regardless most of the comment, including that bit imo, is complete revisionism. Almost every review of the original iPhone talks about the imperfection and promise of it.

Uh, it’s revisionism to say that third party apps were slow, and therefore the iPhone was slow, when the iPhone was out for an entire year before the App Store launched. I’m talking about the original iPhone at launch, not capability that was added a year later. I don’t care what the reviews said, I had one and experienced it, after several years of owning other phones. The reviews also moaned loudly about the software keyboard, which I thought was great on day one. It’s not revisionism that I (and lots of other people) have a different opinion of the iPhone launch than you do.

You really have no clue, if you had owned one you would know how much faster to use it was than pretty much all the competition in practice. Maybe it was beaten on some benchmarks or whatever but it is largely irrelevant and its exactly what people wish Apples would go back to...

Yup. It was one of those truly magical devices that leap frogged everything else. People who dispute that must not have actually used it when it came out.

Sure Jobs was a legend but I don't think Tim Cook is doing a bad job at all - under whose leadership Apple came up with Airpods which quickly became a cultural icon, and the M series Apple Silicon.

Both were great moves under Cook. But great writers need great editors, and Cook is not a great editor. It takes tremendous fortitude to kill an iteration of a device before its launch, and Jobs would have done so without hesitation, as he has done many times before. And honestly, I’m down on Apple right now for its truly awful rent-seeking approach to technology, thinking it has a right to collect a fee on digital transactions just because you use the device they made (and already paid handsomely for).

Thank god I'm not the only one to think that.

This thing is a farce, as you said, it lacks taste and purpose like most of the stuff of Cook's Apple.

And as an Apple Watch owner (2 models over 5 years), I can attest that in many ways it is still a piece of shit and in fact for what is the only relevant use case (sports) Apple has no proper cohesive approach and makes very little investment. In fact, they try to push their garbage subscription on you. For the price it is sold at, the Apple Watch is a piece of shit, the price of the SE should be the price of the standard model basically...

Anyway, I don't understand how people are so delusional about the iPhone history but I guess this is Stockholm syndrome trying to defend Apple on everything. Reality is that all the products they made since the iPhone are "meh" at best and not exactly groundbreaking especially when you consider prices...

Yeah, Apple Watch is still a piece of shit. I’m on my third since launch, its functionality is basically nothing for me except telling the time and buzzing way too often for alerts I don’t care about.

i disagree.

the iPhone wasn't mainstream because it was $500 with a two-year contract, but there was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING that could touch it from day one. Even before day one. Watch the demo. Moscone Center was LIT UP that day.

I used so many "iPhone killers" because I was broke back then and didn't have a choice. All of them "could" do more features-wise, but all of them were hella jank by comparison and looked significantly worse. If I had the money for an iPhone back then on launch day, I would've gotten one for sure.

It's not even just the iPhone. When the AirPods came out, I had been wanting truly wireless earbuds for many, many years. I even spent $600 on a pair of custom Bragi Dash Pros, which were CRAZY ADVANCED for their time but had extremely poor QC. The AirPods absolutely destroyed the "competition" when they came out, and the AirPods Pro set the standard for ANC-capabale truly wireless earbuds. Nothing _still_ comes close to these devices.

Same with the Apple Watch. I had been a Pebble loyalist prior to this coming out but still got two a few weeks after release (one for my wife). The Apple Watch was crazy limited and apps were a joke, but the value was immediate. No watch still comes close, IMO.

This...is nothing like that. I could buy one, but I'm also a guy that doesn't watch movies and works off of a single monitor. There's nothing irresistible about the AVP yet like there was for the iPhone, or the AirPods, or the Apple Watch.

I guess people who already use headsets might feel the wow-factor of using these, but this is the first major Apple product in recent memory that feels like a solution looking for a problem...unless this is a stepping stone for regular glasses. The Vision Pro's AR capabilities in a regular glasses form factor a la Google Glass would be earth-shattering.

this article doesn't even analyze AVP, it analyzes a quest pro and 'extrapolates'

Exactly what I was going to write. Why not at least demo the AVP before writing a whole article?

The article was written last year.

Why not wait? What’s the rush in getting your incorrect and apparently poorly informed hit-piece out?

“We only need to be right for a day.” Glenn Close in The Paper (1994).

This is why I'm returning mine after four days, despite it being the best device I've ever used in my life.

Apple has thrown around the word "magic" for different devices, but the Apple Vision Pro is truly worthy. I'm so sad to be returning it because its highs are very high: movie watching, hand and eye tracking, dragging windows around in space. Steve Jobs said the iPhone "works like magic" — and sure, multitouch was a big leap forward - but this really feels like magic.

Why return it? Exactly because of this article. I can't justify the expense for occasional movie-watching alone. To do work, I need it as a Mac monitor replacement. I LOVE the idea of extending my small MacBook Pro into a bigger space, but the quality of the image as streamed over WiFi is just too poor. It's distracting how fuzzy it is.

When they solve this (either by improving resolution of the cast image, or maybe some other neat trick of running Mac apps natively on device) I'll be back because I am certain this is part of our computing future.

Some interesting analysis that is tainted by the fact the author doesn't actually have an Apple Vision Pro and is instead pretending his Meta Quest Pro is basically equivalent (just with higher resolution screen). This does not seem to be consistent with the experiences of the various reviewers who have actually had their hands on both.

Additionally, Apple claiming something is a "screen replacement" does not mean they are claiming it is a 1-to-1 replacement for your 4k desktop displays. You can replace normal desktop displays with a VR headset for work – people have already been doing it with at least the Quest 2[1], which is inferior to the AVP (and the MQP) in every dimension except price. The resolution is still higher than the average display of 20 years ago, and people were getting a lot of real work done on those.

[1] https://medium.com/immersedteam/working-from-orbit-39bf95a6d...

IMO the bigger issue is the fact our eyes are biological and degrade over time.

Most tech reviews and culture only give limit oxygen to accessibility.

But the reality is, if you spend a lifetime on a computer screen your eyes will degrade a bit quicker than most.

(granted: new tech is a boom for Accessibility in many ways)

Sticking a screen a few inches from your eyes will always have limitations. The older you get the more reluctant you will feel.

I am still not understanding who the target audience is for these type of devices - does it really have a mass-scale audience, or just a highly specialised one? is it used for 10 minutes at a time, or hours?

> But the reality is, if you spend a lifetime on a computer screen your eyes will degrade a bit quicker than most.

Why?

Ah you downvoted bc of that?

Maybe read a little?

When you make claims and people ask you to back up those claims, it is reasonable for you to do so. Expecting other people to do the work to back up the claims you are making is not really the ethos of this forum.

If you are asked for sources and are unwilling or unable to provide them, people will (rightly) ignore your claims.

I'm fine with not answering questions about basic things, thanks.

Most of the research I've read around this subject seems to indicate that the important thing is getting actual sunlight exposure for eye health. It is not entirely clear if this is related to the broad spectrum nature of the light, the intensity of the light, or other confounding factors.

You seem to be claiming that light which comes from screens is inherently bad for your vision, which is a very different thing, and which I have not seen credibly evidenced before.

So yes, you might want to do a little more reading about "basic things", or consider sharing the things you're reading with the rest of us.

Computers have been around for 40 years. TVs even longer.

We would know pretty definitively if they degraded your eyes.

Do you have some evidence we are all missing out on ?

Fine. Shining lights in your eyes improves vision.

Your eyes are always receiving light, that's how they work. It's not at all obvious to me why an LCD backlight would be different from sunlight or an incandescent light or any other light source.

>Sticking a screen a few inches from your eyes will always have limitations.

Due to the lenses the virtual screen that people's eyes focus on will be further away than a regular monitor.

Well seeing as I am being lectured about providing references on how shining a light in your eyes is bad for them long term, maybe you have some...

The author finally got his hand on a Vision Pro and made a follow up here: https://kguttag.com/2024/02/05/spreadsheet-breaks-the-apple-...

I enjoy my apple products and am perfectly fine within their ecosystem. I also appreciate naysayers who shit on their products whether with good reason or not. I think counterculture or contrarianism is a necessary force.

The louder they are, the quicker the progress towards something better. Keep up the good work.

Monitor replacement, with monitors that stay in place, is absolutely the killer app for me.

I would love to have a desktop that can change and be adjusted for different work loads, or simply dedicated screens for things that don't warrant a window all the time.

The article mostly seems to concentrate on the visual quality of the screens.

Personally, I'm somebody who used to use dual screen and love it but then, when working remotely, I force myself to use a tiny screen exclusively so I can get a coffee shops and not feel any compromise. Everyone I know has a different set up and I know some people are gonna love the Apple vision, and some people won't, but I don't think it's because of nitpicking the display.

Transparent oled is already a thing. I guarantee you within 20 years it’ll be perfected and pass through will effectively be some combination of what you’re actually seeing plus cameras to amplify. Only Apple will have the clout to charge upwards of 4000 with tax for the privilege.

I do think using cameras for pass through exclusively is a bit of a dead end, even if tolerable for now.

I don't doubt his credentials, but:

"As per last time, since I don’t have an AVP, I’m using the Meta Quest Pro (MQP) and extrapolating the results to the AVP’s resolution."

For such a long and detailed argument, it's slightly odd that he's never even tried or tested the actual product he's criticizing.

And yet he's just wrong. AVP does do a good job of mirroring a single 4K display.

It doesn't do any more than that, not multiple displays, and although it will do a 5K display, it doesn't do it well. However for the one thing they claimed it could do, it works as advertised.

Is it comfortable to use for 2+ hours?

My XReal Air glasses are okay for mirroring a single 1080p display, but becomes fatiguing on the eyes.

2+ hours, yes. My sessions with it have been 2-3 hours, with short breaks for bathroom, refreshments, etc. within that session, and a longer break between sessions. A couple of 2-3 hour sessions in a day is reasonable (and I've done it). I wouldn't want to wear it all day.

In the latest Waveform Podcast, Marques Brownlee wore the display for 2+ hours. He didn't feel any eye-strain, just weight strain.

I've seen people complain about fatigue after 5 hours on a plane, so it's not impossible but it sounds like it's better than most.

The XReals aren’t even close a comparison to these.

But the vision pro has a lower PPD than them, so I think it would be fair.

It’s the screen quality. Every time I use the XReals, there’s intense blooming and bleed with the colors being super off. It’s basically impossible to read anything in the margins of your screen.

I bought them as “nreal” in dec 2022, I don’t know they updated the hardware when they rebranded.

Is the mirrored mac as sharp as the rest of the visionOS UI for you? For me it's not. Also, even visionOS UI elements are almost but not quite retina quality unless I move them 1-2 feet from my face, which is exactly what he describes.

Also the FOV is such that there's no point in having a huge screen, since I'd have to move my head from left to right to see everything.

Nope. The 4K limitation is a letdown and it’s in the virtual display implementation because native applications, and the browser look amazing.

Are you using it at 4K, or in downscaled 5K (which I agree is disappointing)?

It is for me. However it wasn't in its default configuration, where it was actually downscaling a 5K display to 4K. When I changed the display settings on the Mac to actually 4K it got a lot clearer.

Not sure why the huge screen is relevant. I definitely sometimes prefer to have what amounts to a large display further away, rather than a small display up close. I don't see why you'd make it bigger than your FOV.

For me the default is 2560 x 1440. If I change it to 1920x1080 things looks bigger and thus crisper. If I select 3840x2160 or 5K from "show all resolutions" then everything becomes small and blurry.

Right - so 2560 x 1440 is the default for a 5K studio display or old 5K iMac. 1920 x 1080 is the default in MacOS for a physical 4K monitor.

Note that these numbers are half the actual pixel count in each dimension because MacOS defaults to assuming the display is a 2x Retina Display.

So, if you choose the 1920x1080 option you get what I see using my actual 4K display. It also avoids the downsampling, because the stream itself is 4K and so is sharper.

I don't know why Apple set the default for 5K downsampled.

Ah ok that makes sense then, thanks!

Having used the AVP this week (and previously every VR and MR device) I have to fully disagree

Apple nailed text legibility and no semblance of eye strain or screendooring

I still wouldn’t abandon my monitor cause of other reasons but not cause of any technical shortcoming in the desktopish experience

Wow this article does a lot, and has a lot of really well thought out content and yet my closing thought was “wow more clickbait based on Apple-bashing”.

I haven’t used the AVP, but neither has the author. That said, the reviews are generally positive- even for the direct use case he’s claiming is ridiculous.

But I honestly find his end claim ridiculous:

> The image quality can be no better than its weakest link. If the AVP has 3X the pixels and roughly 1.75x the linear ppd, the optics must be much better than the MQP to deliver the same small readable text that a physical monitor can deliver.

I think this is a bad take. It doesn’t have to be the weakest link, because people probably rarely use the edge of the displays compared to the center.

I will concede that Apple calling it a 4k replacement is BS and he gets that right. But a 1440p monitor probably delivers similar readability and is good enough for most people, so the end result is a valid monitor replacement

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