Vision Pro Review: Apple's First Headset Lacks Polish and Purpose | Hacker News Reader

Vision Pro Review: Apple's First Headset Lacks Polish and Purpose

nytimes.com

39 pointsPKop72 comments

A single Thunderbolt (or HDMI) output. Then it could double as a Mac Mini on a desk. That would help justify about 1k of the total spend. I know it sounds a bit ridiculous, but I think it's less ridiculous than a 3,5k (minimum) face computer that, for most people, will not be getting nearly as much facetime (pun intended) as a normal desktop. One wired output, just one, for the love of God.

Can I get one of those for my iPhone as well? It has more than enough power for general purpose computing.

If you're not bound to iOS: yes. Samsung DeX is just that. I can plug it into the Lenovo dock at work and have a personal pc on the go.

Id imagine this kind of thing is way too geeky for Apple to make though.

Microsoft could have given the Windows phone some significant value with this kind of functionality. We’d be living in a different world.

Have you actually used it for general computing tasks? If so, how was it?

Oh yes, a lot. Our work environment is incredibly restricted so I can't easily connect to my home stuff. I have everything behind VPN which is blocked on the company network, I have no admin rights to do anything etc. I also require yubikeys (openPGP mode) to log into pretty much everything at home and the toolchain for this also can't be installed on my work stuff. SSH is also blocked, etc.

So, what I do when I have something I need to mess with at home, is plug in my personal phone into the work dock. It has a completely independent 5G connection so I can do whatever I want, without needing to circumvent company protections, and without even using the company network at all.

In DeX I mostly use outlook, webbrowser and Termux (which is amazing) for SSH using OpenPGP (using OKCAgent and OpenKeyChain to talk to the Yubikey). The office apps are also nice and very dex-enabled (they have a UI much more like a desktop than like a tablet in DeX mode) but I rarely use them. Same with Chrome etc, it has a full tab bar etc. Unfortunately firefox is not quite there yet, it's pretty sucky in DeX.

I use element for all my chats (using matrix bridges to whatsapp etc) and that works OK in DeX. It also lacks a good "desktop-style" interface unfortunately.

But overall it's pretty ok, it's definitely workable. There's a few annoying quirks but they're all pretty easy to work around. One of the issues is that the screen on the phone is often activated for no reason (leading me to worry about burn-in), but force-killing the apps in phone mode and then opening in DeX mostly fixes that. I wish Samsung would go all the way and really streamline this, but right now they're in a phase where DeX is basically neglected. Every few years they have a big marketing boost and they polish it up again but now they're in neglect mode :) Nevertheless it works ok though.

PS: One major usecase I've seen people use is also to use remote desktop in fullscreen which solves a lot of its quirks obviously but it's not quite as standalone as I'd like.

TL;DR: Great feature for when you need it and have a suitable dock nearby (or hotel TV and bluetooth keyboard/mouse), not something I'd use as a daily driver at this point.

Why not just buy a Mac? It really does sound ridiculous to ‘justify’ the price this way.

Unfortunately apple doesn't have courage to cannibal their other devices contrary to Steve Jobs that allowed iPhone kill iPod. Which is weird considering Macs (especially iMacs and Macs mini) are really tiny part of their revenue and apple is trying to diversify and earn from services. They sell just around 25m macs per year comparing to 250m iphones. MacOS still has around 10% market share. They definitely have big opportunity to grow here and move more people to their ecosystem.

Similarly with Apple TV - great specs and cheap device but too much restricted. Wish they make tvOS more open, apple TV having at least one usb-c port and allow to add some magnetic modules to add smart speaker, router, local backup (with removable ssd), wireless charging for smart devices.

You certainly do keep saying it again[0]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=39267923

What did you hope to gain from this comment?

What does it add to the conversation?

It has a usb-c charger and cable... it must have a usb-c or thunderbolt port. Did they cripple it on purpose?

Just take a look at this teardown video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVJPAYwY8Us There are like 50 captive screws and a gajillion ribbon cables in that thing

There's vast room for improvement and slimming down, and I'm not just referring to the silicon and battery!

Maybe an alternative using passthrough lightfield displays will come along eventually, but that's not going to happen for a while. Shrinking this technology is all it will take for similar devices to make workstation monitors and gaming consoles completely obsolete.

Improvement for whom? It's obviously not designed to be taken apart. They are packing a ton of stuff in a very small space, which is why the layers of screws and seals are also packed in tight. And it's not designed to take a beating because it's really just something you use in your house, not an rugged outdoor phone case type thing.

I'm sure if the lenses get simpler and the chips get smaller they'll be able to simplify construction, but they were probably under immense pressure to keep it as thin as possible.

Its pretty obvious from all the ribbon cables, there's quite a bit of orgitecture in addition to architecture going on here. I imagine each cable represents a different team at Apple working on a different chunk of the device.

The whole is greater than the sum its parts for sure, but it definitely could've been reduced to fewer PCBs.

I'm sure Steve Jobs would've thrown V1 into a fish tank and yelled at a few managers until the thing was 200 grams lighter.

> Shrinking this technology is all it will take for similar devices to make workstation monitors and gaming consoles completely obsolete.

Do people want that? I love playing games in my Quest 2 for an hour or two, or the PSVR2 at my friend's house, but I dread the thought of spending 8+ hours a day in it while I work. No, not just because of the weight, but because I like the feeling of fresh air on my face and sunlight reaching my eyes.

For that reason, despite being able to play non-VR games in cinematic mode on those headsets, I never do that. Sure, it's closer to my face, and it is larger, but if I'm putting a VR headset on, there better be a compelling reason to block out air and light to my eyes. And a bigger screen isn't a compelling enough reason for me.

Technically I can also use my Quest to have dozens of virtual displays, but why? There's almost never a situation where I need more than two things visible at once. I can look back and forth between two things pretty quickly and easily (my code and the library's documentation; the PhotoShop/Illustrator mockup vs. how it actually currently looks in browser; etc.) but I can't easily look at 3 or more things at once, so I feel it'd be more of a distraction that a productivity booster. I mean I could buy a 3rd monitor if I really wanted to but I haven't found a reason to do so. I don't need to see Spotify or Slack 24/7, I can just alt-tab to them as needed.

I love video games, I often enjoying coding, but I really think having a screen right up in my face for most of my waking hours is a bit much, even if they were more like regular glasses instead of goggles. When I'm outside or walk someplace I almost never look at my phone unless I need directions or am responding to plans, because I like a break from staring at screens. Even when I'm working, I try to stand up and look away from the screen when I have no reason to be looking at it, whether it's code compiling, waiting for something to upload to a server, or any other time when there's no point to be looking at my screen.

> There's almost never a situation where I need more than two things visible at once.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I point out that OSes have had built-in support for virtual desktops for years now, and that using them to extend your monitor infinitely and switch between them with a single keypress is far more ergonomic than having to crane your neck to see a screen that's not directly in front of you at the perfect position.

True. I mostly use virtual desktops to separate work content from personal project stuff, as well separate non-productive stuff from both of them.

But yeah you phrased it well, craning my neck to see a screen does sound much worse than a keyboard shortcut. I have my 2 monitors positioned so that I can mostly just move my eyes, but I can't fit more than 2 monitors in that space (either IRL or in a VR/AR without them being too tiny to read.)

If I didn't have virtual desktops, I'd have to just close out of more stuff, which isn't a huge deal but any amount of friction can disuade you from working on something you're not obligated to do. I definitely wouldn't have my work tools, two separate IDEs, a game engine, 3 different browser windows, Slack, Discord and Spotify all open at once in various virtual spaces, where I have to crane my neck to see them. Maybe the Vision Pro also supports virtual desktops, but I still struggle to see in what scenario it speeds up my workflow.

Good point - and is the fact that most people neither know nor care about virtual desktops even after years of existence an indication that most people don't need them? I'd even go so far to say a major part of the initial popularity of the iPad was that it didn't have windowing - and so most people found it much easier to understand and use. Just see one thing at a time :-)

I use the built-in 16” display on my laptop only for coding, and other developers can’t understand that I don’t want multiple monitors. I try to explain that I don’t want to crane my neck and plug and unplug monitors, and that alt-tabbing between windows is just as easy for me than looking at another window. Maybe it’s something to do with being old and learning to code on a tiny screen.

I’m not saying that other people can’t prefer multiple monitors (I’m definitely in the minority when it comes to programmers), I just don’t understand why they can’t understand my point-of-view.

As a media consumption device it seems really cool, but I don’t see how the 10th or 20th generation version is relevant for daily life or work. Magic Leap spent over $4 Billion on the physics of high definition light onto the retina. There just doesn’t seem to be any way around the reality of the limitations in the AR approach. In 20 years it will still be a bulky headset with battery life limitations preventing the all-purpose computing device. Still seems really interesting for media consumption and even short duration, high value healthcare applications.

I agree. AR is dead in the water until we invent magic displays that may be decades away.

VR has some nice gaming and fitness applications and I think like handheld gaming as a niche, VR gaming will never take over completely but will always be its own little corner of gaming.

Healthcare applications are also really interesting to me because those tend to be high value for 30-60 minutes. The Department of Veteran Affairs, for instance, is the largest health system in the U.S. and has a nationwide network of clinicians already using AR/VR applications.

https://www.innovation.va.gov/hil/views/immersive/immersive....

There is an entire generation of kids growing up with VR now, much like the NES a long time ago. Many of them spend more of their free time in VR than real life.

My kid has a VR headset, along with a few of his friends. He certainly uses it but it's a huge exagerration to say that he spends more of his free time in VR than real life. Minecraft / Roblox / Fortnite you could make an argument for maybe (depending on age).

Didn’t say your kid, I said many kids.

All of his friends with VR headsets as well. It's an occasional toy sort of device for pretty much everyone I know. I realize that the plural of anecdotes isn't data, so if you have actual data I'm happy to see it!

An addictive game that incorporates a full body workout will be the killer app. Meta will get there first.

> In 20 years it will still be a bulky headset with battery life limitations preventing the all-purpose computing device.

The nreal glasses show that a more compact sunglasses form factor is possible, though it's not doing anything cutting-edge, lens or compute-wise.

Yes. Nreal seems more like an Apple product than the Apple product.

Apple doesn't need it to be in a sunglasses form factor for it to be successful. Xbox never leaves the house and is a major product. They just need sufficent use cases that people will actually use and stuff like rethinking UIs from static monitors/TVs/ipad screens -> flexibly overlayed around you, how people watch movies or how data is delivered visually/contextually while you're at home or in the office is a pretty big deal on its own.

Everyone is so caught up in it not being an outdoor device which IMO is missing the point for the stage the tech is at right now.

Nailing down simple indoor use, for an entirely new computing plaform/interface, seems like a legitimate first step before people are walking around outside with it. All the 3rd party devs need to nail it down too.

Like stage 1 self driving cars, you use it on a closed track before you put it on the street.

Apple products are a status purchase. Half the value comes from reminding other people that you have them. Very little opportunity for that with this new device.

It is a long path not only to improve technology, but also find applications. It is like iPhone, was a long road to get where we are right now. It is possible that we might not find applications, and it is going to be dead end, as we had with 3D Movies. Sure it is fun to watch them on AVP as well, but it is way cooler to watch a movie even on smaller screen but with a good company.

I think the reason why they called it "Pro" was because this version is to work out how the market cleaves to which use cases. So next year will we get the "Vision Media" and the "Vision Workstation" that specialise in being just a TV and a computer monitor on your face, respectively? BTW things like short duration, high value healthcare applications is where Hololens is being used for right now I think.

Derek Guy, menswear writer: "Aesthetically, this is basically how you have to dress to make things like the Vision Pro and Cybertruck look cool. These things mainly look bad in public bc there's no congruity between the business casual gear most ppl wear and these futuristic designs"

https://twitter.com/dieworkwear/status/1755425085580869834

Vision isn't really designed for urban outdoor use, which is obvious from the more detailed videos of people trying it (ie, moving backgrounds turning off windows, the motion stuff walking etc). Influencers were just doing it for attention or randoms with friends as a joke. But everyone seems to be treating it like it's supposed to be Google Glass 2.0 because they saw some viral photos,

I'm just surprised we haven't seen more people rocking it while in a Cybertruck. Also, if these items really spontaneously mainstream cyberpunk fashion, pizza effect style, all of this extravagance and impracticality will have been worth it.

There will always be people who take a small subset of functionality of your product and push them to the limit to create new use cases. So there will definitely be the nerdy types trying to see how far they can push it outdoors and IRL. Even if it's off label use.

I believe that video of the cybertruck + vision thing turned out to be a skit by a youtuber though.

This is the first vision pro review I've seen that has mentioned nausea. I know it is a possibility with any kind of VR headset, but in my usage of it I was surprised how good it was at avoiding nausea. Are there any other major outlet reviews that also mention nausea?

It's good at it not only because frame rate but because it avoids the scenario where the user walks around in a virtual world without physically moving. That disconnect is the #1 reason. The vision pro has no thumbsticks to move inside a game, you always move in the real world. Of course that doesn't really work for most immersive games because movement is restricted to whatever physical space you have. One of the reasons gaming is not a priority for this headset I think.

No because the review is a dishonest hit piece. I’m super sensitive to nausea in VR to the point that I’ve had to drop out of an interview process to work in the space in the past.

Not one other reviewer has mentioned nausea, and I’ve been using AVP since Friday and not experienced it once. I was very concerned I’d have to return it and might never be able to use such a device.

I don’t know what’s going on with this piece but them reviewer has gone out of his way to exaggerate or even manufacture negatives and fill the piece with them.

He probably watched one of Apple's immersive videos (I think it was "Highlining") where for some idiotic reason there is some panning.

Maybe - although I watched that one and was ok.

The verge very briefly mentioned it in the “magic till not” video.

https://archive.is/UZQ9G

It’s really hard to swallow the “lack of purpose” argument.

If you work with Gen Z people, you start to notice it:

• They don’t want to be on cam

• When they are on cam, they either show their forehead or they have a $500+ studio setup with background LEDs, props and other new ways to show status.

• They go out of their way to be hyper-courteous with regards to eating into the mic, flash bangs (bright white screens), and looking like shit on a video call.

As the world goes more WFH, upcoming generations are going to find their own way to validate physical existence in the workplace. After using AVP for a weekend, I feel confident Apple gets it.

> Apple declined to provide an early review unit to The New York Times

I really wonder if Apple's PR department really knows the major tech reporters at various publications inside out, knows their general attitude towards Apple, and then decides whether or not to provide them with a review unit. Brian X. Chen is a long time reporter and Apple could have predicted in advance that his review would be mostly negative. Perhaps that's why they didn't provide a review unit for him. Certainly Apple is shrewd enough to pull this off.

I’ve used Vision Pro, as an experimentation to the future. It’s going to get there. Be patient.

But I do appreciate the criticism, that creates the market.

Hopefully, talented people start building things other than AI and SaaS.

> Hopefully, talented people start building things other than AI and SaaS.

Only if apple open up API and at least make it in parity with iOS/iPadOS (we can probably dream about MacOS). Hopefully they will show something this summer in WWDC.

We regrettably have one app under apples scrutiny…we won’t make that mistake again.

Open web is the best place for us to invest our time.

What a hit piece. He’s absurdly negative right from the beginning. I guess we can see why Apple declined to provide them an early review unit.

The device is not perfect, but this ‘review’ borders on absolute bullshit.

Harping on about ‘vision bros’ and ‘scaring children’ and the ‘games aren’t fun’.

They clearly have an agenda.

> I guess we can see why Apple declined to provide them an early review unit.

If Apple is so vengeful as to only provide review units to people who will give them glowing reviews, then that immediately invalidates every review from anyone who received an advance unit from Apple, because all of those reviews must have been made under the duress of knowing that anything other than a glowing review will put them on Apple's shit list.

In other words, by your own logic, the only reviews that can be trusted to have any degree of truth are those from people who didn't receive review units, such as the OP.

> They clearly have an agenda.

If it's so clear, perhaps you could enlighten us?

Do you hear yourself?

There’s nothing ‘vengeful’ about not trusting a news outlet that has lost its objectivity.

As for the rest of your comment - the logic simply doesn’t follow unless you believe axiomatically that the NYT is trustworthy and everyone else is not.

It’s well documented that the NYT is agenda driven and pushes its own positions over objective reporting:

When the New York Times lost its way https://econ.st/4bG2Kf8

People will look at this article in 20 years and laugh at the NY Times for being ridiculously wrong.

What does the version in 2040 look like? We’re 17 years on from the first iPhone, and it’s still the same basic device. Incrementally better every year hasn’t meant any radical changes.

It runs a desktop os and you can use your regular apps, along with a keyboard and mouse.

That is like saying doom and cyberpunk 2077 are fundamentally the same thing.

It’s not like saying that, but saying that doesn’t seem too absurd anyway.

as a game developer: they really are. the finer details are different, but the primary mode of interaction is pretty much the same. you bob and weave around rapidly while shooting at enemies who shoot back at you and a lot of the locations you fight your way through are pretty similar structurally to classic doom levels. they even have somewhat similar music styles.

it's not bad for them to have the same fundamentals! it's important to recognize our roots and know the difference between something truly and fundamentally different vs something that is just extremely refined and iterated.

it’s insane to argue that the iPhone 15 isn’t radically different from the iPhone 1. since 2007 smartphones have become capable of replacing so many of the separate gadgets people used to have. cameras and mp3 players (and phones!!) are basically a thing of the past thanks to the iPhone. i’m bearish on Apple Vision but if Apple can improve it at the same rate as the iPhone it will be here to stay imo

Smartphones can do more, but are they radically different? Same look and feel, modestly better battery life. From v1 the camera is the biggest addition to what Jobs said - iPod, phone, browser. If AVP has the same incremental improvements, it will still be a bulky media device at best and I’ll still want to take it off for phone calls, work, and even taking photographs. Still cool, but not spatial computing.

> cameras and mp3 players (and phones!!) are basically a thing of the past thanks to the iPhone

This was all true with the first iPhone though. That's the point. I'm sure that the Vision pro will be refined, but what will be necessary to make this a mass market device seems more fundamental than just a lot of refinements.

When the iPhone came out, I remember thinking it was too expensive and not for me, but I definitely wanted one and was jealous of the few people I knew who had one. I just don't have that feeling with the Vision Pro - to the point where I feel if I was given one for free I still couldn't see myself using it much.

That's sort of rare for Apple devices - even if I think some things are ridiculously overpriced I would always be happy with a free one and make good use of it.

It’s because you probably had a phone before the iPhone. If you’re not already a vr user then it’s hard to imagine how this will fit in your life.

For me, if I happen to get an opportunity to strap a vr device to my face be interested to play around, but not motivated enough to go out of my way for it.

As a developer, I already spend a fortune on devices and simply can’t see any of our products benefiting from vr…this was true with oculus, and is still true with vision pro.

The iPhone 1 is perhaps a stretch, but how have things meaningfully changed since the iPhone 4? (which in 2010 introduced the front-facing camera, something that radically changed how many people use their phone.)

That was over 13 years ago, and while SOCs have become faster (though OS's, apps, and websites have become more bloated), the devices have become larger (which makes it easier to type and fit a larger battery), and the cameras have definitely improved, but I can't think of anything I regularly do on my current phone that the iPhone 4's hardware wasn't capable of supporting.

The iPhone 4 already replaced many people's dedicated flashlights, watches, cameras, and GPS navigators back then. Sure, software has changed. Online dating is far more prevalent, but the iPhone 4 definitely could run dating apps, even if it was less common. Likewise, paying people through digital apps is much more common now, but it's not like Venmo or PayPal didn't use to run on the iPhone 4.

The way we use our phones since the iPhone 4 released has changed, but not because of hardware changes. I mean modders have gotten Android 14 running on the Galaxy S3, which released nearly 12 years ago.

Radically different, yes, but linear with the progression of all tech. I wouldn’t say that the iPhone has significantly outpaced Android devices for example.

Likewise, I’d be surprised if apples headset outpaces oculus in any significant way over the next 20 years.

Will it ever be a primary computing device? Not for me..maybe some future generation. Why? Cause I don’t want to spend my workday in a cave. When I pause to think through something, I look away from my monitor etc…

Same as the iPhone: thinner, 4x resolution, much bigger screen (means much larger FOV for the AVP). A budget SE version.

I think it's going to become very normalized for consuming movies, TV, and console gaming (2D). Super popular on planes, trains, even car trips for kids.

Agreed all around, just isn’t the future of spatial computing we’re being sold on. As an entertainment only device I’m sold if I were traveling more.

Where are they wrong? This is a review of the device as it stands and not what its future looks like. They're charging $3500 for this device and not for the promise of future devices

The criticisms of the original iPhone weren't inaccurate. Buying that iPhone didn't give you a free upgrade to subsequent models either.

People also said the iPad would replace laptops and it hasn't except for the 0.1% that have complement adapted to its limitations.

Doesn't mean the iPad is bad, but it's inherently much better at being a content consumption device.

I think this is how we should view the vision pro. It's not "the new laptop", it's something entirely new that has its own pro and cons that are not necessarilya complete match with existing products.

They never opened up iPad for general purpose computing. iPad and iPhones for that matter could easily power laptop and desktop devices if Apple wanted them to.

Well if you ask Apple they did. It's basically what the iPad Pro is. Apple certainly views the iPad as a general computing device.

Apple doesn't give you full access to your device, but they are also adding a lot of strings attached on Macs, with their notarisation, immutable OS partitions etc.

Sure, you can still turn it off on Mac but it's basically an all-or-nothing, so you have to turn of all protections just to change one little thing. And you lose functionality, like the ability to run iOS apps: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/if-you-disable-sip-all-...

Unfortunately the vendor deciding what you can and cannot do on your computing device is basically the "new model" which they managed to sneak onto us because there was very little opposition to it when iOS was introduced. It also enabled the app store rent seeking of course which was the main point.

Can I install VS Code, Apache, PHP, SQL, use a terminal, VMs, etc.. on an iPad Pro? No? It’s not general purpose computer.

Vendors deciding what we run never took off for general purpose computing.

Apple getting away with worse business practices than Microsoft in the 90s is ironic.

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