Apple Vision Nope: Why I returned mine
jorgeherskovic.net
jorgeherskovic.net
$800 to upgrade from 256GB to 2TB? A fast 2TB NVMe drive can be had for ~$130.
Not if the drive is soldered to the motherboard..
You can put your own PCIe SSDs in the Mac Pro, but that's so wildly marked up compared to an equivalently specced Mac Studio that it probably cancels out any savings.
There is: Not wanting to support end-user modified products.
Apple is never shorthanded on white knights, but more generally I can see why companies might opt to lock out customer modifications under practical pretexts.
Hell, I'm sure they could make it a tool-less operation if they wanted to.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/M-2-Adapter-Aluminum-Heatsink-Solutio...
When was the last time you checked this? SDD prices have skyrocketed back up in the past ~3-5 months as Samsung and SK have reduced production to halt losses. Prices are now back to where they were ~12 months ago. At least in Europe.
Maybe it's a little more than it was, but still hilariously cheap compared to what Apple charges.
For example, I bought an OLED Windows laptop that was nearly $2000 less than an identically equipped Apple device. Side by side, the Windows unit has better screen and at least equivalent chassis, keyboard, sound, and it has a better touchpad.
I have an iphone, and its primary purpose after being a phone is nav in my cars. 75% failure rate the last 4 trips I tried to use it for. Failure as in black screen. This is on top of Apple's increasingly useless nav that has tried to take me out into the boonies more times than I can count.
Eventually, people are going to tire of being insulted with high prices and subpar products and switch. I'm already there. The days of me paying to fuel Tim Cook's yacht are over.
Apple's headset is so poorly done that it is clear there is deep rot at the top of Apple. When I first saw that absurd front screen, I physically laughed out loud. How anyone at Apple let that through to final product is beyond me. Anyone who brought that crap to Jobs would have been fired on the spot.
This is evidently not true for the Vision widget, which is the topic at hand. The hardware is in a league of its own. I would argue this is also true of the Watch line. I decline to discuss the laptop question, and for phones, sure, if you are ok with paying Apple prices for an Android, you can get one of comparable quality for the same amount of money. Just not for less.
I've never understood this common opinion. The cost of materials is not a good representation of the manufacturing process, especially since the entire board is built as a unit and not a set of interchangable components.
Have people actually run the numbers on the costs of manufacturing the different variations or are they just comparing against the SSDs they can find on Amazon?
All of those are various compromises that also suck for various reasons.
What about people with hearing issues? Most of these alternatives are terrible for people that wear hearing aids.
The Quest is the same as the AVP. Both have surprisingly good audio. The AVP's built-in audio does a great job. You need headphones if you want privacy, first and foremost. Certain headphones will also enable spatial audio and stuff like that.
But Apple's audio approach here is very sound. It's nothing like the huge upcharge for more storage.
Well, all other V1 Apple products weren't half-assed, or at least when they were, they offered something more than the competitors.
Meta Quest 3 is better on everything, despite eye tracking(for a reason, it sucks for many things, I'm sure Meta can have just as good, if they wanted to, but they likely think it isn't a good idea) and the image quality(because it's expensive as hell).
I had much higher expectations. Apple made it clear to me that they've released this device mostly out of fears of phones becoming irrelevant and not having a device to replace it.
Also, to show that Tim isn't resting & vesting his stocks, and both are terrible ways to approach innovation, the kind of innovation Apple used to have with that fruitarian CEO that gave us the iPad, iPhone, iEverything...
Apple needs a new CEO ASAP, Tim is John Sculley, at first sales go up, profits are up, but then after a few years you are stuck and other companies are eating your lunch.
That is an extremely strange view of history. While I don't think other Apple v1 products were "half-assed", they were clearly unfinished, but showed a ton of potential. I think the exact same thing applies to the Vision Pro.
The original iPhone received a lot of complaints about not supporting 3G, not supporting custom native apps, not supporting copy-paste, etc. But the original iPhone was still revolutionary, and I loved my original phone.
Nearly all of the in-depth reviews I've seen of the Vision Pro say essentially the exact same thing: it is a technological marvel, but has a bunch of rough edges, most of which were simply necessary because you can't just, for example, pray super-light batteries into existence.
To emphasize, I think the Vision Pro (and, honestly, many other VR headsets) is largely a solution looking for a problem, and I don't intend to get one, but I think calling it "half assed" compared to other v1 Apple products is a strong misremembering of history.
For me that’s the biggest issue with the Vision Pro: its lack of usefulness.
Why? Because they need developers to make worthwhile apps. Yes, the original iPhone shipped without an App Store, but it could also do regular phone stuff (calls, sms, etc). What’s the “regular” stuff you’d expect to do on a VR headset? Other than watch movies on a big screen, there’s currently very little reason to own one, and encouraging everyone’s mom to buy one is setting them up for failure.
Give it a couple years for there to be some really groundbreaking apps, and Apple will open the floodgates with a cheaper/more ergonomic version.
But what are the "ground breaking apps"? The "we just haven't thought of it yet" seems absolutely silly given how long we've had sci-fi novels that have similar ideas and nothing I've ever read in any novel sounded "groundbreaking".
This just screams "3D TV" to me - a solution nobody wants to a problem nobody has. If you could fit all of this into a pair of sunglasses MAYBE there would be a market - but that tech is probably 50 years away if it's possible at all.
Based on what? Apple cultivates this myth that they wait to enter a market until they can produce the best device in the market. So, I disagree, I think Apple thinks this is the best device they could have built right now and it's for everyone with $3500 to drop on it.
I do think Apple thought this was the best device they could make that did this thing, but estimates are that they can make about 800k of these things. I think the price point intentionally pushes it away from the typical consumer. They want early adopters. Mostly they want developers.
Of course.
> I think the price point intentionally pushes it away from the typical consumer.
I disagree. I think they truly believed this thing is worth this much in it's current state and if they built it people would buy it.
You’re starting to hit on Apple’s strategy. Build something expensive and impressive, get all the media hype out of it with influencers making content and consumers watching it cause it’s the expensive thing.
Then it comes down in price over 10 years and soon everybody has one, because everyone wants to try to Apple thing they saw so much about years ago.
iPad went exactly the same way, as everyone wrote it off when first introduced as just “a large iPod touch”, and now it’s the defacto leader in the category without anything coming close.
And there probably won't be any until we get the tech down to just look like regular glasses.
The Microsoft HoloLens was $5000, when it first came out. I think that MS pointed it at a commercial target audience.
Wait, people think this thing is going to replace a phone? I can't imagine...
The second big path is the it's just a pair of glasses you wear use case, where you just always have it on, since it's literally just a pair of glasses, that can also send information to you, much like what the MIT wearables project has been playing with for decades now.
Will Apple move towards this second future? I don't know, certainly the tech is nowhere near that ability and still be "spatial computing" or AR or whatever you want to call it, but if they can figure out how to shove high-quality digital projections onto a pair of glasses, I can't imagine them ignoring that market, because that is what will replace the phone and probably watch.
It's 100% not real AR at this point in time. 10 or 20 years from now? shrugs. I'm not going to make that prediction. Can we make it a contact lens in 50 years? I have no idea, certainly Sci-Fi authors want to believe it's possible.
If engineers can figure out how to make that format work well, like in our sci-fi dreams, they will probably sell very, very well. Certainly that's not the near-term future.
I was expecting Apple would reinvent that with a concept nobody had imagined before. They didn't. Zero innovation.
Doesn't look like an Apple product to me.
Earpods from Apple was more innovative and had a better factor form than likely this Apple Vision Pro will have in 10 years!
Probably why the engineers didn't want to release it. I seem to recall a bunch of folks at Apple were pretty up in arms that this was coming out, and that upper management basically forced their hand because they were worried Facebook would run away with the market.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-teases-meta-wrist...
The first iPhone/iOS didn't? It had no apps, no MMS, no 3G
> Meta Quest 3 is better on everything, despite eye tracking
Apple is using eye tracking as an UX, so that "despite" is very big. That being said, I don't understand eye tracking UX, it seems to go against human nature to me. (I'm not continuously looking at my HN windows rn while typing this message)
> and the image quality(because it's expensive as hell).
There are many things for which even just 15% improvement changed them from interesting to a revolution. LLMs, capacitive touchscreens just to name a few. I could accept that the sames goes for VR
I'm clearly on the side "I see nothing the Apple Vision Pro is good for". The examples I've heard are pretty much "watching youtube while cooking": Well, buy a XREAL Air AR at a tenth of the price, and it'll follow you rather than keeping at a fixed position.
But I can see how the differences between Meta Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro can actually lead to completely different outcomes.
The Vanity Fair article says Tim tried the prototype “years ago; maybe six, seven, or even eight.”
And it is priced out of the consumer market by a factor of 10. Also, the developer program is not interesting.
What does this mean? Most developers I know are interested because of a technology or a product. What does the program need to be doing?
This will become more of an advantage for Apple as the platform matures because it’ll allow for (for example) automatic adaptations of existing apps for different device form factors, which Meta will not be as well positioned to match with their Android fork, unless they seriously ramp up platform development efforts and significantly diverge from mainline Android.
visionOS windows and controls have depth, different shapes and sizes, and different interactions than their iOS counterparts and are drawn as vectors which look good no matter how close they are to your face.
By contrast the Quest just draws Android apps as textures on planes, making them floating tablets. The visionOS equivalent is iPad apps running in compatibility mode, which while functional are a notably worse experience than native.
I predicted this many years ago, but the evidence I've seen convinces me I was wrong. I really disagreed with their past emphasis on the iPad as a computer at the expense of the Mac, but I feel they've course-corrected since.
Of course, on a long enough time scale you/me are right but I think that timescale extends beyond Tim Cook's retirement, at this point.
What evidence do you have?
But Apple? Even putting aside company value, in the past decade they've created the best selling watch on the planet, and arguably still make the only actually good smartwatch (thanks to Google floundering for years - even before Apple got to the market). They kickstarted the true wireless headphones industry with a product line that on its own could be considered an insanely valuable company with how many they sell -- because people love them. They moved all their laptops to custom silicon with incredible performance and battery life that for majority of peoples' computing use-cases completely destroys any reason to buy any other laptop. And young people are becoming more exclusively stuck to the iPhone by the day, almost 90% of American teens use an iPhone now.
I don't know why anyone would want to get rid of Tim Cook.
Can't think of an Apple product line in which the first edition wasn't half-assed in some important way. This is something the company is known for, it's a truism. Even the first iPod made significant compromises.
- iPod: 1,000 songs in your pocket
- iPhone: Phone + Internet Communicator + iPod
- iPad: Media consumption device
- Vision: ???
Of course all these products had shortcomings when they first launched, but there was a specific purpose in mind for them in their very first iteration. What the initial devices could do was limited, but what they did, they did better than anything else.
The Vision is missing that initial use case, and it's what makes it feel half-assed.
Apple first-gen products are often half-assed. But they iterate and improve on a regular cadence. The current Apple Vision Pro is a dev kit, it will get better.
> $5,013
Man does this really cut to the heart of it. It has a Mac chip, it costs as much as a high end Mac, but it’s an iPad with AR/VR strapped to your face. That’s pretty much what I’ve distilled it down to following all the reviews and discussing it with people. The technology behind that iPad with AR/VR strapped to your face is amazing, but an iPad with AR/VR strapped to your face is still just an iPad.
If they can make it less bulky, less heavy, similar to even Magic Leap 2, it would have a wider appeal.
You can’t swap the battery without losing power… Insane
Every successful Apple product to date has been indispensable from the moment it is first launched. On the other hand if people aren't able to extract value out of a $3500 piece of tech in front of them today then no future version is going to be able to fix that.
Counterpoint: the Apple Watch and AirPods were not indispensable from day one but became very successful product lines for Apple over time. I still wouldn’t call them indispensable (generally at least, I consider my AirPods Pro pretty damn indispensable personally though) and they still consistently bring in billions for Apple per quarter.
However I am not optimistic about Apple Vision Pro. It’s Macintosh money with an iPad’s software distribution model. The iPad could never replace the Mac with that model, and I don’t see these being any more ambitious with what is public knowledge at the moment.
1. AirPods
2. Apple Watch
3. An iPhone, if not visible was implied.
4. A messenger bag, backpack or purse.
5. Sunglasses
6. Some kind of mask to filter out the smog from the fires in 2019.
The price breakdown in this article was probably the most useful part. There was a slim chance I would have considered a product like this for $3700, but $5000 is simply too much for my budget.
I can afford the lump sum, but it's a lot nicer to smooth out the cash flow using Apple's money instead of mine. As long as you're responsible, what's the harm?
There really is no good alternative than to just omit tax and have the customer expect 5-7% typically.
Some states have higher sales tax also.
I think this is a product trap, trying to skip too many steps.
It is like trying to build a smartphone in the 70s.
They should go for a helmet.
And I don't mean even bulkier ski-goggles, but a real full face helmet, fighter-pilot or biker style. Full of high-tech hardware but balanced in a way that makes it useable for more than 20 minutes.
It is niche, but there is a market for that, the high-end simulation dudes are already forking good money into hardware. And that could also be useful as an actual tool.
From there, they could build the most important part: the software, and slowly improve the form factor.
I buy and judge a product for what it does RIGHT NOW, not for what I'm hoping the manufacturer could fix down the line, long past the return window. So asking consumers to gamble with 3500+ on what might be, is a tall order.
Maybe Apple should have kept it longer in the oven and not rush to half-bake it, selling what's obviously designed to be a dev-kit, as an end user product using users who paid $3500 as beta testers.
Steve Jobs would be spinning in his urn. He always understood you never release half baked products to consumers.
Every other VR headset in question costs a fraction of the price and has sold a multiple of the units. The way their strap interfaces with the headset also appears to be a significantly larger engineering effort than other VR headsets. So basically, you'll be spending multiple hundreds of dollars after having already spent $3500 for the vision pro. That's insanity.
Apple should have sold the strap separately and partnered with different manufacturers so that 3rd party options were available from Day 1.
For example, this looks less beautiful than Apple's version, but is more comfortable and functional and from what I've read by others, results in a larger FOV (since you can size down on light seal or... remove it): https://twitter.com/Azadux/status/1757469190095781900 -- And that's a hacked together version, not the official version being worked on.
And while Apple would have gotten criticism for nickel and dime-ing folks by them having to buy more stuff separately, I actually think it would have resulted in a cheaper set for folks buying 3rd party. Not enough to put it in a different price category or anything, obviously, but cheaper nevertheless.
On the contrary… I can already imagine the backlash against this one „oh, the profiteering, they don’t even sell the strap with it”.
These comfort problems should have been the obvious signal that they shouldn't have done what they do with the watch--which is bundle it with a band.
Between strap and light seal, it's about $500. Why would Apple want to make $500 less? Well, clearly they don't. But I think a $2999 intro price gets a lot more people in the door, even if they then need to buy a $90 3rd party strap. And is more comfortable, too, which is the main point in preventing returns like this one.
Creating engaging high quality spatial content/experiences is insanely difficult and expensive. It's something Disney can do, but not 99% of current iOS developers.
Using VR/AR for this purpose sounds like it would have the same effects as isolating by scrolling on your phone for hours. It's only a temporary escape, and I bet the depression side effects might be even more intense.
Until then, there are cheaper ways to wear a strap-on.
for AR to be useful, it has to be something seamless, comfortable and easy to integrate into your daily life.
if it's giving you neck pains or eye strains, then as others said, actual reality will always be the better choice.
Computer displays aren't any of these either, but we managed to integrate them.
you just turn it on, very seamless to me.
AR is augmenting your reality. But if that augmentation includes pain, dizziness and headaches then I would hardly consider that an upgrade.
Maybe they can fix the bulk, battery and comfort issues. Or maybe this is just peak hubris. who knows.
it augments your reality with pain
I'm very bullish on its potential, but I haven't put my money where my mouth is. There are other, more important, more immediately useful things I can and should spend those thousands on. I've been telling myself that if my bonus is at least $4k bigger than I expect, I'll buy one. Truthfully, I'm not sure if I will even at that point. We'll see (hopefully).
This is Apple. You got all you're going to get. If you want more, you have to wait for AVP2 because they'll either software lock features to it or find some way of having hardware that AVP doesn't and thus can't support new software features.
What I'm still trying to understand is: what is the use case that Apple thought people would pay that much for? Are people walking around Apple HQ in these things because they are indispensable for some purpose the rest of us have yet to figure out?
In a few years there may be tons of apps. And apple will drop gimmicks like external displays.
[0] I was a Macbook Pro user for many, many years until they started soldering everything to the darn MB. Apple is user hostile, imo, to the point that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. I strictly buy used workstations (Think Dell 7820's, SuperMicro, etc.) that are a generation or two behind the latest and greatest. TCO is just phenomenal here AND I can upgrade them or downgrade them very easily. A chromebook with internet access is all I need to have my own private, GPU enabled, "datacenter" when I am away from the house. I love my setup and its so gdamn practical that "justification" is not a verb in my vocabulary.
Meta has huge return rates on their headsets, which is a big reason for their 30 billion loses on it so far.
At $3500, people will play with these Apple units and return them. I can't guess what their return rate will be in terms of numbers, but I know it will be shocking.
> Sales were strong at its initial release on January 24, 1984, at $2,495 (equivalent to $7,000 in 2022), and reached 70,000 units on May 3, 1984.
I think Apple wants to sell more than 70,000 of these things though.
I bet it was more useful.
Are any of these surprising? I'm a AR/VR skeptic so maybe I have a more negative view than most but these things seem self evident to me.
It's not just pure nonsense or "not ready for consumers" yet. For people using VR daily, it is entirely good enough for their use cases, and they have useful use cases (even if "useful" means "entertainment").
But I would agree that very very few people need it and trying to get it mainstream where "this is how everyone is consuming media" is a bit outlandish.
Right now there just isn't a killer app. But I suspect Generative AI is the path to one- fully immersive, hyper-realistic, real-time generated worlds will be killer, and something only VR can really immerse you in.
We are nowhere close to that being feasible for anything like as cheap as $5k, the compute requirement would be insane. VR gaming is already intensive, add the inference of 'fully immersive, hyper-realistic, real-time generated worlds'...
Given the cost challenges, if this is ever a proper mass-market consumer product, you're probably looking at at least a few years down the road.
Vuzix AV920 is closer to that, and many years earlier...
I've been using VR since Quake and Descent came out in the 1990's. The tech still isn't there yet. I'm not sure why there's any new buzz over this old-n-busted "Now in 3D" tech from 3 decades ago. I prefer the slimmer form factor of Vuzix's (albeit older) offerings -- I simply WILL NOT strap a toaster oven to my face when I know that I don't have to do that just to get 3D imagery in my face.
Disclaimer: I've been developing a 3D GUI that doesn't use glasses.
But it also highlights how ridiculously cheap consumer electronics have become, and how much our expectations are baked into that. This reviewer paid a total of $5,013, including sales tax, for the Apple Vision Pro. The original Apple IIe, released in 1977, was priced at $12,740 in 2022 dollars for the max RAM model, not including tax.
> Tech companies want us isolated and constantly staring at screens because it drives profit
> the tech industry has been incentivized to push our society in the direction of isolation because it serves their business models.
Even The Verge admitted the Vision Pro is isolating
this is why you shouldn't buy one or if you did, you should return it.
The Verge gave weak ratings to the first AirPods and the first Apple Watch. Despite their issues (first version of watch was kinda slow, buggy on 3rd party apps), they were overall great devices. Maybe you agree with me here, maybe you don't, but the point is that the Verge is not somewhere that blindly says whatever new thing Apple creates is amazing.
I am NOT AT ALL arguing this is a good device. I am, however, arguing that talking about the Verge like that isn't warranted.
Also, to add in agreement to your overall point about it being isolating, MKBHD's latest video hits on the same point. So I agree with you, but just think the subtle swipe at the Verge was wrong. It's a great publication, even in the specific instances where I've disagreed with it. (And for AVP, I think they had the best review... which was somewhat negative.)
But if it was the reverse and iPhone was unpleasant to use and carry around for long periods of time due to it's physical properties like the vision arguably is, (at least as a "AR" device) I don't know if adding those features later would have saved it.
The other criticisms aren't unsurprising, but I'm curious what he means by this.
The cameras on my Samsung phone are very tiny and still very high res. I'd expect that to be one of the last problems on an Apple device.
Also, given how important the cameras are for high-end smartphones, and how damn many cameras the Vision Pro has, it wouldn't surprise me if the Vision Pro's budget per camera is actually less than on a flagship smartphone.
They're definitely not as good as the cameras on my iPhone, either.
They probably want: - Get feedback - See how the end consumer use it - See what programmers can built
In other words, it's the Apple version of a MVP. Minimal Viable Product
"It is not there yet but it will be."
"They just need to make (unspecified) killer app to make it useful."
Sure
They don't market it as a "developer device" or a "prototype." They are selling this as a consumer product. Watch movies! Look at pics of your family! It's your new giant computer monitor! Facetime with your friends while you're cooking and packing your luggage!
Apple might not be the worst, but do companies ever consider the long term negative consequences their business strategies? E.g. I'm never signing up to a social media platform ever again, strictly as a result of Facebooks and Twitters behavior. Knowing how much I struggle to limit the usage of my smart phone, why would I ever get yet another device that will remove me further from the real world?
They want to get feedback from early adopters and developers to iterate on their software and marketplace, while they continue to drive down weight and cost and refine the hardware side of the device. The expectations for devices right now is pretty high given the decades of development we're accustomed to, but as an early adopter of the first iPhone itself, I remember how limited it was.
If the iPhone v1 was released in the environment we have tooday, it'd be lambasted as being limited. No app store, no app switching, no notification center, etc. It took time and work with developers and users in the real world to start fleshing out the product. Same thing will happen with the Apple Vision.
I can appreciate people reviewing the product and saying it's not for them, it's too heavy, it's not ready for mainstream use - but to me, they simply miss the point. It's a showcase device, only geared to those with money to burn, who are early adopters or developers. It shows a ton of promise, but it will be a generation or two before they fill in the product category under the "Pro" designation, and have an Apple Vision Air, Apple Vision, and Apple Vision Pro, with specs that appeal to broad audiences. It's coming, and their strategy to get the device in the hands of users and get feedback and folks developing on it, is a good one.
Is it a keeper if $ was lower, etc. let’s play a game of switching the order of reasons around, reverse and flip it.
Not sure I see an intent to buy and keep it except to try it.
Maybe it’s the lack of apps that take advantage of the tech. Or the overall usability (in this case, significant eye strain/fatigue, heavy headset in the authors point of view m).
I was expecting more augmented reality rather than a simple block of an app and the ability to move it across the 360 view.
Just like the original iPhone. It was far behind the competition but years later it dominated the smart phone market. Albeit, Steve Jobs was the CEO at the time and that probably was a large portion of it. He was just a great salesman.
I can’t say the same for Tim. Great guy, I guess. But hardly memorable.
I suspect in the US it's more lax but the whole caveat emptor thing is out the window if you can arbitrarily return things - for worn products they won't even be directly resellable.
The in-person demo of the Vision Pro in the Apple Store is scripted to a few actions and apps that the user is allowed to open under supervision, and nothing else.
E.g. you should not open a website of your choice in Safari.
Apple staff said "we cannot tell you what the device can or cannot do, and we are not allowed to let you try it it out here in the Apple Store; you need to first buy it and try it out at home. If you find it cannot do what you want, you can return it."
With this approach, it makes sense that all returns are accepted.
"Even for a technological tour de force, 5K is a lot of dough. If I used it, and loved it, I’d keep it. But for discomfort, actual eye pain, looking through a periscope, and the inevitable resulting gathering-dust-in-a-corner? I’m not insane. It has to go back. I’m an early adopter, but not a throw-away-5-kilodollars early adopter."
Not all problems become evident in a carefully-curated demo at a well-lit store, either.
Or, another way to put it, if it's so certainly causing a loss other customers have to bear why would the company promote the return policy and lose out on that margin from paying customers?
Second, because it's a $5000 thing that was not clearly advertised and was over-marketed to the point where people are disappointed because it's not the magic they were sold. I feel like they'd have sold 0 of them if they didn't offer easy fast refunds.
Besides, you could buy your Apple products from Amazon instead and get ..I think it's 30?
You act like this is taking money out of others' wallet- imagine how much money shoppers would lose if they had no recourse when a product didn't perform as expected. It doesn't need to be broken to be disappointing, and returns are one of the few tools consumers have to protect themselves from companies that oversell and under-deliver.