Vision Pro: What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right
hugo.blog
hugo.blog
In short: Apple has made a fully realized spatial operating system, while Meta has made an app launcher for immersive Unity/Unreal apps for vanilla Android. You can get away with an app launcher when all you want to support is fully immersive apps that don't talk to each other. But that fails completely if you are trying to build a true operating system.
Think about what has to exist, to say, intelligently copy and paste parts of a 3D object made by one application into a 3D object made by another, the same way you would copy a flat image from photoshop into a Word document. The operating system has to truly understand 3D concepts internally. Meta is building these features but it is stuck in a really weird space trying to wedge them in between Android underneath and Unity/Unreal at the application layer. Apple has had the advantage of green field engineering it exactly how they want it to be from the ground up.
I had a Newton and loved it, and eventually tried a few Palm devices but nothing ever quite hit like the Newton for me, a real shame they dropped it imo.
Games are where it’s at for the foreseeable future. Games don’t need passthrough and they don’t need especially high resolution.
Look at how much of the vision pro is about giving people a connection to the real world while they are using the device. Games don’t need that, people want to be immersed while they are playing a game.
Hugo disagrees:
> thanks to a high-fidelity passthrough (“mixed reality”) experience with very low latency, excellent distortion correction (much better than Quest 3), and sufficiently high resolution that allows you to even see your phone/computer screen through the passthrough cameras (i.e. without taking your headset off).
Even though there are major gaps left to be filled in future versions of the Vision Pro hardware (which I’ll get into later), this level of connection with the real world — or “presence” as VR folks like to call it — is something that no other VR headset has ever come even close to delivering and so far was only remotely possible with AR headsets (ex: HoloLens and Magic Leap) which feature physically transparent displays but have their own significant limitations in many other areas.
Given that it’s designed to be used indoors, poor low light performance is a big problem.
There’s a latency/acuity tradeoff whereby the more post-processing Apple applies to improve acuity, the worse the latency and more nausea they create. It’s going to require a lot more research into hardware post-processing.
Innovator's dilemma is a great problem to have if you are dominating a profitable industry already. But it's a terrible problem to have if you are barely hitting break even or even losing money. Then you really can't afford to go backwards first to go forwards later.
Because the rest of the experience is so unpolished.
I have a Meta Quest 3 and overall it doesn't exactly feel like they invested tens of billions into that ecosystem. The headset's UI is basically a 2D desktop with taskbar and app launcher covering a small fraction of the field of view, including some buttons that are so small it's tricky to aim at them with the controllers. The Oculus desktop client fails to recognize it via USB and the official remote desktop app is still in Beta while Steam lets me play games or use the desktop remotely with two button presses. To this day I have not managed to just copy files directly onto the device, no USB connection (other than to Steam) works. Only some semi-reliable wifi transfer from a third-party application worked but that required enabling developer mode.
On top of that they decided to ship it with a head strap that never fits well and gets painful within 30 minutes, and then made it unnecessarily complicated to swap. Yes, of course people aren't going to do more on that thing than play a few rounds of Beat Saber, because many simply don't want to jump through hoops like that. I think it's a great device overall but some things are just so...unnecessary.
Apple not focusing on games might be a good thing because it means they can't just rely on games for free sales numbers.
To echo this today I wanted to watch something on my vision pro so I was on the tv app on my phone, saw a movie I wanted to watch, and then after a good amount of time moved over to my vision pro.
Being the scatter brain that I am I forgot what the movie was, unlocked my phone and the movie listing view was there. In my head I was like “damn wish I could share this page over to my vision pro like I do for my ipad”
And that’s exactly what I did with Airdrop. The already existing way to share anything between apple devices. I would not be surprised if universal clipboard works as well.
Entertainment maybe, but definitely no work- like it or not, outside few tech bubbles this is how world sees VR and its not changing anytime soon. Still, to sporty outdoorsy people this is kids toy (that shouldn't ever be on kid head), reality is and will be always better and healthier.
Also I'm pretty sure those VR games that are ran on a computer connected to a headset could display on any headset, Apple or Oculus. Cursory search reveals people have already been getting SteamVR to work on the VisionPro.
Running stuff directly on the headsets is neat, but there's no headset on the market with enough power to match what you can have when plugging them into a computer.
On the Apple Vision Pro?
All the news about it not being possible on the AVP was largely a bunch of hyperbole, misunderstandings, and misinformation.
Apple, Meta, Microsoft like how things are right now. These pushes are much-hyped, but they're made less out of real passion for the promise and more desperation to avoid being left behind.
They can only just now move towards MR with the Quest 3 and really it'll need another generation to be MR native.
They have a good relationship with developers and focused on what their current hardware is capable of, which is running one VR app. They spent the last 8 years on that use case and I think that was the right choice given the hardware realities at the time.
> The hardware needed to track eyes and hands in VR has been around for over a decade, and it’s Apple unique ability to bring everything together in a magical way that makes this UI superpower the most important achievement of the entire Vision Pro product, without a shadow of doubt.
So they had all the pieces, but only Apple put it together and realized that you'd need a VR equivalent of point-and-click? If that's actually true, it's sad.
Its very difficult to change a mindset or culture in big companies. Existing VR companies were too invested in using a controller. Similarly back in the early smartphone days all the big companies thought that smartphones must have physical keyboard.
If everything is designed for your controller, the eye interface may not work well due to lack of software optimization.
Which means it’s just an expensive battery hogging extra weight you don’t need.
Apple has a stronger combination of hardware design, software implementation skills, and UX expertise, than any company in the world.
Not only do they have two cameras per eye, and all the hardware for wide angle out-of-view hand tracking, they had to consider:
Privacy: the user’s gaze is never delivered to your process when your native UI reacts to their gaze. Building this infrastructure to be performant, bug free and secure is a lot of work. Not to mention making it completely transparent for developers to use
Design: they reconsidered every single iOS control in the context of gaze and pinch, and invented whole new UI paradigms that work really well with the existing SDK. You can insert 3D models into a SwiftUI scroll view, and scroll them, and it just works (they even fade at the cut off point)
Accessibility: there is a great deal of thought put into alternative navigation methods for users who cannot maintain consistent gaze
In addition to this they clearly thought about how to maintain “gazeable” targets in the UI. When you drag a window closer or farther it scales up and down maintaining exactly the same visual size, trying to ensure nothing gets too small or large to gaze at effectively
There are so many thousands of design and engineering decisions that went into making gaze and pinch based navigation work so simply, so I can understand how it hasn’t been done this effectively until now
This entire time, they could have built a real OS, solidifying their first mover advantage.
If some kind of killer AR app shows up on the Vision Pro, could it be put on the Quest? Let’s just assume it doesn’t need a level of processing power that the Quest can’t deliver. Would the software vendor just have to implement the entire interface from scratch or with Unity or something? Are there enough platform components on the Quest to be able to do the job?
I don’t know the answer. But I did see a number of developers mentioning online over the last year just how incredibly easy it was to get started with the Vision Pro compared to the quest. If you have a Mac you sign up for the Developer program for $99 and you get an IDE, compiler, simulator, performance monitoring, full UI library plus documentation. It’s early days for some of that stuff, but all the batteries are included. From what they said it was far far easier to get to “hello world” than on Meta’s platform.
And an entirely new interaction model that hasn’t been seen before. Using looking at something to replace a mouse isn’t new but taking that combined with using a pinch gesture to “click“ and some of the other things they’ve come up with is a unique combination that seems to work quite well. Thought there is certainly room for improvement.
Just take FreeBSD and add your own UI on top.
https://www.engadget.com/meta-dissolves-ar-vr-os-team-204708...
I'm not sure what you mean precisely. Apple doesn't seem to have done more than windows with persistent positions. This isn't nothing, but it's also not something that has tremendous value for a headset that you only wear 30 or 45 minutes at a time.
And they have little to no management of these floating windows. I'm really not holding my breath for Apple to come up with breakthrough windows management given what they've done for the past decade.
If you don't think in term of potential and promises, but of actual value to the user right now, I'd understand why Meta hasn't the gimmick.
Is this a big lead for Apple ? Perhaps, the world mapping could be something difficult to reproduce. Or Meta could be at roughly the same point but decided it not to go there.
Take a look at this Reddit post for example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/VisionPro/comments/1ba5hbd/the_most...
The user is pointing out that that the real fridge behind them is reflected by the surface of the virtual object in front of them. And consider on top of that, the fridge is not visible to the headset at that moment. It is captured in the 3d spatial model that was created of the room. None of this is a pre-rendered or rigged or specifically engineered scenario. It's just what the operating system does by default. So one app that is totally unknown to another app can introduce reflections into the objects it displays. This is just so far beyond what can happen in the Quest platform by any means at all. And it can only happen because the 3d spatial modeling is integrated deeply into the native rendering stack - not just layered on the surface of each app.
The most fascinating thing to me is how we've gone from Apple being the pragmatic and real world product focused company, moving slower but making sure what they ship has undeniable practical value, and not promising much beyond ("we don't talk about future products and roadmap").
Compared to the "wow look at that technical prowess, not much useful right now, but such potential !" that we're getting with this device. I don't see it completely fall flat, but it feels it's on the same course as the Apple Watch or the HomePod, to be the biggest in the niche category it defines (whatever it ends up be), and a smaller presence in the general space ("smart eyewear ?") with better fitted and more practical devices taking 70% of the market.
The clunkier XReal probably keeping chugging along, being to the AVP what the Xiaomi or Huawei smart bands are to the Apple Watch. And Meta probably being the Samsung shooting at the target from 5 different angles.
I keep seeing people trying to shove this into the narrative of "Apple coming late but doing it better and solving real problems". But it doesn't fit that narrative well. Apple here is early to something else that just happens to look like the thing that people are viewing as the predecessor, and it's utility is highly questionable and full of all kinds of weird gaps. In a telling kind of way, they are actually in part leaning on the aspects they are not trying to sell (Here, look at these immersive experiences! But shhh don't call it VR) - to paper over the fact that the core of what they are really trying to build is just not ready yet.
Meta doesn't want to pass any of the camera feed to an app for privacy reasons so they don't make it available but its a legal issue not a technical one. They can (and should) do this for the browser model viewer.
Apple enforces a single material model so they can inject the lighting data in a uniform way. Its a bit of a nuclear option to have a fixed shader pipeline. But I digress...
Anyway, its not as out of reach as you claim.
Reflections of the real environment on virtual objects do not imply a global scene graph, or the ability of apps to reflect one another. It just means that each app gets fed the environment map that mostly had to be generated anyway because of SLAM. Neat but not some kind of radical form of IPC.
Current day Apple and its management launches products with weird twists ("send your pulse to your loved ones", "this method of input will stay in history alongside the mouse"), to then cut it down to only the features people really care about, shut it out from competiting OSes, still get the competition to execute better on that limited set of features, and get sued and forced to remove their most advanced feature after months of media humiliation.
That's why people get back to the first iPhone 17 years ago when they want to predict a bright future for the AVP. I still want to see it push the field forward, but odds are not in its favor IMHO.
The problem with the Apple approach is that there are no apps and games, and there probably won't be many given it's a 3500$ device with few users that Apple exerts its tyrannical grip over (or if there will be, they will be ports of Unity/Unreal, PC or Android VR apps, not using any of the special features that the Apple OS may have).
The codebase is dense, hard to compile, using outdated dependencies, and doesn't play nice with anything else. Documentation is sparse, often incorrect, and severely lacking in anything like a new user guide. Everything assumes you work for Pixar already and know the ins and outs of their pipeline.
3D is much, much, much more complicated than 2D, especially if you're trying to interchange between arbitrary applications that may have divergent needs.
Start with this little thought experiment.
What do you mean by 3d object?
Do you mean a set of polygons, like in a traditional triangle mesh? A volume, like voxels? A set of 3d surfaces?
Do you need to model interior details, or only the exterior envelope? Do you need to be able to split or explode it at some arbitrary level of detail? Do we need to encode sharp edges or creases in some way?
etc, etc, etc
This is before you have touched materials, texturing, lighting, any of that.
Like in HTML with divs? So if you have a virtual lamp you want to copy, all the various elements that make up the lamp are in a VR equivalent object markup as <div id=‘lamp’ />. If you want to copy specific elements you can, but you’d have specific actions, e.g copy color etc.
Maybe I’m missing something though and it’s more complex.
3D is not like tabular data. There isn’t some default resting state it naturally wants to exist in. It’s all edge cases and special logic. Also, it’s mind bogglingly vast amounts of raw data. Even a simple scene can contains hundreds of thousands of surfaces/polygons/spline patches/voxels/whatever representation.
A VR environment is essentially running a high end 3d game engine at all times.
I don't think the intention is to copy an object with the baked in lighting at the time of making a copy. I can imagine you just want to copy the object and the behavior how it reacts to whatever environment it's placed in.
In 2D apps and games, you can often get away with incredibly simplistic calculations. Rarely much other than a translation. Many times 1D with naively obvious solutions. With 3D, you rapidly need to move to 4D matrices than can handle arbitrary scale, translate, rotate, perspective, clip volumes.
Nearly every 3D app anywhere has to handle the model, to world, to camera, to clip space path, which involves a lot of complex math well beyond most 2D apps. Usually, 3 different matrix mults with 4x4 matrices.
v_world = M⋅v_model
v_camera = V⋅M⋅v_model
v_clip = P⋅V⋅M⋅v_model
v_clip = [[P00,...,P30],[...],[...],[P30,...,P33]] ⋅ [V00...V33] ⋅
[M00...M33] ⋅ [m00...m33]
Edited: dumb math error
Granted, an iPad is better than an app launcher, but so far I don’t think the software is really “killer” in any specific way.
Most of the in depth reviews I’ve seen mostly praise the screen resolution and the movie experience.
That is what always bugged me about the pivot to “meta”. They never had to find product market fit to succeed. They were never hungry. They could just throw money until something clicked… but money alone doesn’t make a revolutionary product. You need somebody hungry enough to see the world in a different way and then execute the fuck out of it.
Dunno how this relates to apple though. They have equal amounts of cash to throw at problems until they are “solved”. Perhaps the “operating system” is a solved problem already to some extent and maybe there isn’t anything truly new?
Said that out loud to a group of techies and they laughed so hard one of them fell out of their seat.
Apple put the iPad on your face. And that's pretty much it.
The few VP users that haven't returned the device don't use any of the "spatial" features like controlling the UI by pointing in space, since it's so inaccurate that it gives Swype a run for its money.
So they want to build a new kind of device and a new kind of experience, and they seriously think they can do that by just plugging together ready-made parts built by others? No wonder this is going nowhere.
It's not quite green field on the software side, albeit mostly. Clearly they already have experiencing re-platforming a whole operating system multiple times. The underpinnings of macOS power everything from desktops to smartphones to watches to tablets already all with diverging user interfaces. They had a solid first-party foundation to build the interface they want; Facebook is ultimately a third-party to Android and is having to solve the same Android hardware integration problems as everyone else.
For sure. That’s exactly how it’s played out in iOS vs Android. No developer makes anything for the higher priced, small market iOS, right?
What makes it particularly interesting is that the VisionOS app store so far seems to have had quite an anemic reception from developers. Barely any novel non-toy apps have been released for it, with 8 months since devs got access last year and 2 months in the open dev ecosystem. It's possible the tsunami is just around the corner but it would have to be said that this seems to be diverging heavily at this point from the launch of the original iPhone app store. It was always going to be a question since the user base is miniscule compared to every other headset and iOS devs mostly have negligible experience in developing full scale VR / AR applications which is actually a very steep learning curve. So the barriers are high and the incentive relatively small.
If Apple fails to attract devs to its store it will create a huge problem for them that they are pretty unused to having. I wonder how they will approach a situation like that, since their culture is not used to dealing with that as a problem these days.
There's a reason that iPadOS launched multi-window mode of arbitrary curved corner sizes with the same curved handle bar on the curved corner, several iPadOS iterations back.
Doing that ensured that VisionOS could launch opting all iPad apps in: most any iPad app respecting the ability to run in iPadOS's "stage manager" mode with multiple windows, works beautifully OOTB on VisionOS.
In fact, any iPad app run on Vision OS, if you "pull" the app close to you iPad sized, you can touch it as if an iPad screen, and your fingers and touch work as if touching an iPad.
The only apps that don't work as if native are those doing something special with multi-touch or touch gestures, but most apps "just work". It's pretty wild.
Press keeps comparing Vision Pro to MacOS. No, the 2D pass-through mode is a room sized iPad stage manager, infinite iPads.
When designing a concept the core difference is always whether your design respects the user or whether it does not and tries to make them do things, spend more time on the platform, spend more money on the platform, etc.
I get that the thesis is that this version is the devkit etc, but viable consumer product status (read: enough adoption for the device to be profitable) seems very far away
He mentions a few short term use cases for the current hardware.
For example: Productivity on the go (A laptop with the headset for multiple virtual displays) and Live Sports.
> Apple Immersive on Vision Pro is a transformative experience in terms of video quality and its ability to deliver a real sense of presence. Watching a game in high-resolution VR has the potential to be legitimately better than a regular 4K TV broadcast by enabling hardcore fans to feel much closer to the action
Except almost universally, people talk about the screen display being “not great” for extended use as a screen replacement with dramatically lower effective resolution and blurring…
That's not what the reviews I have read had to say.
> The Vision Pro can produce a virtual external display for any modern Mac... The virtual display feels responsive and works with connected keyboard or mouse peripherals. The text is highly readable.
I don’t have any complaints about how the virtual display itself works—it’s great.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/03/i-worked-exclusively...
If you go to a sports event you are mostly buying the experience of being there, the energy of the crowd, the cheering all that stuff. The actual experience of seeing what's happening is not really better is it? That's why the stadiums have screens in them.
Replicating that experience at home is more like getting people around to watch a game together.
"legitimately better than a regular 4K TV broadcast by enabling hardcore fans to feel much closer to the action" sounds like it offers something new.
People who are sports enthusiasts have a proven willingness to drop thousands of dollars on large screen televisions, streaming services like NFL Red Zone, or thousand dollar Superbowl tickets, so the potential for sales is there.
Because that's not remotely true.
In addition, Apple already has it's shareplay tech that allows networked users to watch shared video, listen to shared audio, or video game together.
The technology to do this has been around for a while to has anyone tries. I'd certainly be curious to give it a go. I imagine there are some technical problems too, like if your team scores and you jump in the air and your view point stays still.
This did get me thinking if any sport might be better viewed in VR, and maybe games like pool, snooker, chess. Where you see the whole thing from one vantage point, and the scale is such that the 3d of it all would be meaningful.
> The NextVR acquisition is what led to the incredible Apple Immersive video format, which enables capture of 3D video in 180 degrees in 8K resolution at 90 frames per second, an absolute juggernaut format with 8 times the number of pixels of a regular 4K video. The best way to think of the new Apple Immersive video format is kind of like a new IMAX-3D, but the real magic is the fact that it’s projected inside an imaginary 180-degree sphere (horizontally and vertically) that takes over your entire field of view.
Vision Pro is the first VR headset that enables playback of 180-degree 3D video at what feels to the eyes like 4K quality.
"IMAX-3D" sounds much more compelling than watching a flat image on a television.
When you watch sports they have multiple cameras all over the place. Fixed cameras with long lenses, cameras that zip over the pitch, cameras on blimps, slow mo cameras and so on.
These cameras are so much better for enjoying sport that they put giant screens in the stadium so you can see what happened after a goal is scored.
That experience is never going to work in a VR system (beyond VR as a way to have a big screen available) because if you kept shifting the position and focus you'll make everyone very motion sick.
Why assume the viewer doesn't have a choice of viewpoint locations they can decide to switch between?
But prudish Apple will surely block that from happening. I don't really get why. It's a valid request and one where the technology really shines. I use similar content on the quest 3 and it's great but it would be so much better on something like the vision pro.
It's very obviously better to wait a little longer for a future version.
In its first week, Apple had sold 270,000 iPhones domestically.[47] Apple sold the one millionth iPhone 74 days after the release.[48] Apple reported in January 2008 that four million were sold.
It's a type of gadget that hasn't become widely adopted yet and the usecases and killer features are almost non existent compared to the iPhones phonecalls + web browsing, music, videos, notes and many others.
Really hard to gauge what success means here, but if we say that in a year it will sell 500.000 units, that's 1/8 of the original iPhone, seems ok, or maybe not?
Brunswick Corporation has a market cap of about 6 billion.
The first Apple Mac was $7500 in today’s dollars.
Armchairs are way over-indexing on price.
My impression is that it's going to fall in price in the next iterations though i agree with you right now it's not even targeted for the masses.
You're making a plenty convincing argument- why misclassify the device? It's a full computer.
If anything, the Vision Pro feels to me more like the original Mac: an impressive technological leap forward, with lots of interesting ideas about computing and UI paradigms, but also prohibitively expensive, and still underpowered relative to its lofty ambitions.
Notably, the Mac didn't really end well for Apple. Eventually we got the iMac and OS X, but in between was a decade in which Apple nearly went bankrupt. And I'm not really convinced the Vision Pro is as innovative or compelling as the original Mac was to begin with.
That's going to depend on what things you cared about. The original iPhone was heavily criticized for no copy/paste, no 3g service, no MMS, no physical keyboard, its absurd at the time $700+ price tag, carrier exclusivity, lack of subsidized pricing model and number of other things. Plenty of commentators thought Apple had widely missed the mark and had just launched a multi-million dollar folly that was sure to sink them any day now.
Citation needed. The 1st gen iPhone sold 6 million units over two years. The Nokia N95 (not a super mainstream device, but in a similarish price category) sold 10M. Other Nokia phones of the time period sold 100+ million devices. BlackBerry, LG, and Sony/Ericcson was in the tens of millions per device model.
Let’s not forget:
1. The iPhone didn’t support 3G, which essentially all other phones of a similar price point had
2. Was only available for AT&T customers in the US (then still known as Cingular Wireless)
3. Cost significantly more ($500-600 w/ two year contract) than the average consumer paid for phones (almost always under $150 with contract, but usually “free”) at the time.
4. No App Store
5. No cut and paste
6. No removable battery
7. No physical keyboard (a positive for me, but was a deal breaker for so many back then)
That’s not to say the original iPhone wasn’t amazing in many ways, but let’s also remember the past accurately.
Way more, especially since the original iPhone was only available in the US for the first 5 months. It was available across Europe, North America, South America, China, and Australia at minimum.
> I don't think it launched in Asia or most of Europe.
The N95 was heavily across Europe, that was the primary market for it in fact.
That said, there is sufficient evidence to support my claim made in my original post.
And yet people buy v1. It really depends on how much your time is worth. I bought v1 and I expect to sell it for $1000 or so when v2 comes out. $3000 to use this product for 12-18 months is totally worth it to me.
So, not “obvious”. At least to people with different priorities.
iPhone 1.0 was incredible. There was nothing like it. iPad 1.0 (and following) has been lackluster. AVP is impressive, but lacking.
The iPhone changed the world of tech in an instant. There were aspects lacking (slow internet, no copy paste, no third-party apps), but saying it sucked is rewriting history. The things you take for granted about phones came from that.
As someone who’s worn mine to watch movies on multiple flights, the problem is two fold.
1. The device is ridiculously hard to get into “travel mode” on a plane. Especially if the device was powered off previously and you have to enter a passcode. Each time the “tracking was lost” notification is shown it forces you to start over with your passcode from the beginning. Those who believe in better security than a four digit passcode are brutalized. Then just getting control center open and selecting travel mode (needing like five pinch operations) can be insult to injury. I can’t imagine going through that in economy in tightly packed seats. After going through that experience twice, I now insure it’s ready to go on the ground before boarding, but that’s also a hassle.
2. Wearing the device for the length of a movie is still a struggle. I have a ton of time on other VR headsets (which I also can’t wear comfortably for 2hrs), so this isn’t just a “getting used to it” thing. Unlike the previous problem, this one isn’t really solvable without different hardware.
That said, once the movie starts, it’s the best movie experience on a plane ever for the first 20-30min.
Too much to ask for the average user, but the problem can be mitigated by the individual.
AR has tremendous productivity applications if the device is small and wearable enough. Imagine being up in your attic running cables and seeing a projection of the floor plan of your house so you can see where the different rooms in your house are. Or driving a car, except all the blind spots disappear and are filled in with vehicle-mounted camera feeds, with unobtrusive overlays for navigation or to highlight potential safety hazards. Imagine assembling some IKEA furniture except instead of puzzling through the instruction book, you have an app that can recognize all the pieces using machine vision and simply show you what to do. Imagine never forgetting a name or a face, because every time you see even a distant acquaintance, your glasses can run facial recognition and make their name pop up by their face in real life. Imagine noticing a weird rash on your arm, but as soon as you look at it, your glasses immediately diagnose it as a potential MRSA infection and pop up a notification allowing you to call an urgent care clinic that’s open right this second.
This could work if they weren't wearing a VR helmet themselves.
This isn't really an application of 3D glasses, it's a "diagnose my rash" smartphone app. The 3D adds nothing. Your other examples similarly lean more heavily on the "always-on camera with problematic network connection" aspect, than 3D.
Or the quest pro for that matter, even though it flopped.
Apple is enamored with vertical integration which gives them control on a whole other level compared to their competitors; feels like history repeating.
What's different with AVP compared to previous products is that it starts off even better thanks to Apple's own custom chips. There's also the amazing network effects of their ever-growing ecosystem.
Competitors don't have all this, so they will struggle to compete on the high-end. The intention of Apple is clearly indicated by the price of AVP, they want the profits at the top, let the rest fight over the scraps at the bottom with crummy privacy-invasive software and poor integration/interoperability.
It's a way of development seen almost nowhere else.
Or I'm giving them too much credit ... but I don't think so. I think it's evident they seeded hard parts throughout the rest to learn at massive scale.
So OS is probably not as important as you think.
It's an incredible amount of goodwill to burn from a company with so little to spare, and I'm surprised it hasn't come up yet in this thread or in the blogpost. Meta has fundamental trustability issues.
You reminded me of the negative aspects of the Meta/Facebook corporate mass, and they should clean up their act in privacy, etc. for VR in the same way they have basically purchased good will in the AI community for releasing LLM model weights.
Apologies for going off topic, but Apple similarly really needs to trade a little profit for buying themselves a better “look” because they are looking a little tarnished also.
You always needed an Oculus account and they didn't brick anything. You did have to migrate from an Oculus to meta account but a Facebook account was never required on a quest 1 (or 3). Is a meta account really that different from an Oculus account?
The quest 1 has been deprecated yes but not bricked.
If your issue is with the device requiring connection with an external account, Vision Pro requires an AppleID which will tie it to way more of your digital things than a Facebook login.
>However, a key question remains: how will Apple ensure user privacy as its ad ambitions expose the iOS ecosystem to a sector of the media landscape with a chequered record when it comes to a cornerstone of its brand promise?
>Earlier this year, it unveiled a tool it will use to police user privacy in the guise of Privacy Manifests (see video above), a measure that many interpreted as Apple’s attempt to (finally) stamp out illicit user-tracking, a.k.a. fingerprinting.
Apple has a vested interest in user privacy and talks about it constantly. Facebook has an interest in selling every piece of information they have about you to the highest bidder and has talked about how stupid users are to give them personal information.
They are not the same.
Shareholder profit.
> and talks about it constantly.
Must be true then. Definitely not marketing.
> Facebook has an interest in selling every piece of information they have about you to the highest bidder
Nothing you've said suggests any different of Apple.
This is a tired trope. They have a clear interest in user privacy, as evidenced by their actions. You're either just trolling or being intentionally ignorant to the state of the market if you're claiming their only focus is "shareholder profit". Apple isn't Boeing.
>Must be true then. Definitely not marketing.
I mean, there are countless examples. From the default encryption in messages, to the ability to double encrypt icloud backups, to a literal lockdown mode in IOS to protect against nation state actors.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/105120
>Nothing you've said suggests any different of Apple.
You've provided absolutely nothing of substance beyond a link where Apple literally states they have hard requirements around user privacy for any advertising partners.
I'm done engaging in the conversation unless you've got something of substance to provide. The low effort one liners don't really have a place on HN.
> The low effort one liners don't really have a place on HN.
Maybe you just didn't think about them long enough.
All of their devices don't work if they don't constantly phone home to Apple. For the devices to be anywhere near useful, you need an apple id which requires KYC payment methods attached for them or a KYC phone number.
Sort of, but misleading…
> Apple has access to location logs via maps and location services
There are published policies about how this data gets aggregated+anonymized and then used. Care is taken to ensure data is not linked to individuals.
> The contents of your photos, iMessage contents, the history of every app usage, etc as the default settings set for most things via iCloud backup
Most people want these things backed up. Apple doesn’t just dive through data. Anything that even approaches the description of dealing with user data is carefully vetted. A big difference between Apple and other large tech companies is the internal boundaries for access to any data. It’s strict and limited by design. Apple has fought back against law enforcement for access to personal data or technology to allow governments to carte blanche access devices.
> They were almost going to deploy on device scanning that you couldn't opt out of with the few photos that don't end up on iCloud.
You are referencing the CSAM scanning for known child pornography based on international databases that was tuned for highly unlikely false-positive rates with a small group of reviewers to further reduce any chance of false-positives? Yeah, total travesty… wouldn’t want to do anything about THAT problem. (/s)
One of Apple’s biggest selling points is privacy.
Been using the AVP every day for about 3 hours and its truly stunning for a version 1 device. I can’t imagine what version 5 will be like.
I’ve also used the oculus but returned it.
Sorta like how I might have a Nintendo account (or whatever they have now) for games on a Switch. It's just about my gaming activity on that one platform, and that's it.
Tying a headset to a Meta/Facebook account is just too much: I don't want my Oculus activity tied to my social media.
I agree that the Apple situation is better, but I wouldn't want my Vision Pro activity tied to iPhone, Mac, Apple TV, etc. activity.
And I get it from the "building an integrated ecosystem" perspective, and don't really begrudge them their desire to make something like that, but I'm just generally tired of being a part of some company's ecosystem.
its a dubious claim at best, and if it were true would require asking the elephant sized question in the room - why collect my data if you arent going to use/sell it anyway? is collecting ny data just a fun internal project at Apple?
With Facebook its an easy answer - hobbies, intererests and habbits to use for targeted advertising.
That logic doesn't quite work for Apple given they arent showing ads on your OS, only in the app store.
It's pretty obvious Apple's revenue focus is on hardware and services, not on ads.
Apple's advertising business is estimated to be closing in on $10Bn yearly, while their browser pre-load deal with Google brings them in even more than that, and data-sharing agreements are assumed to be part of the deal.
The fallacy that Apple can be trusted with your data because it makes more money elsewhere is incredibly naive and unilateral.
The ads are still only in the App store, where you need to specifically go and look for... apps. And you'll get ads for... apps.
You're not getting personalised ads for incontinence products because Apple doesn't know nor care that you have frequently visited a doctor specialising in said issues. Your phone does and Siri will suggest you the exact place as a destination if you start up maps in your CarPlay view.
Google and FB _will_ serve you said ads and with eery accuracy and speed. (I've visited a niche product store on my desktop browser, opened Instagram 5 minutes later and received ads for that exact niche)
You're making a massive assumption there. Unless you can back that up it is what it is - fud.
You'll be fully aware that as part of Google's anti-trust case Apple was only willing to enter into data sharing with Google if they provided data to Apple, which they refused to do.
So again, we're still in a position of the only place Apple is focused on ads is the app store, so I'll ask again. What data are they collecting about you, and who is it being sold to?
Wow I’ll bite, proof by contradiction. There isn’t a single credible article claiming apple sells their customers information
Also if you opt-in for apple's advanced data encryption[0] they can't even get that because your data is fully e2e encrypted and the key is only stored on your phone. Which is probably why FBI had to sue Apple to get data on Bernardino terries and then worked around by hacking into their devices. Show me another big tech company that does this.
The Bernardino case was a stunt to get people believing this lie. All the other cases in which Apple complies are not made publi, though.
Corporations are not your friend.
The AVP does not have this history, and as far as I know, Apple hasn't retroactively required an Apple account on hardware sold without the requirement. (I could be wrong here, and Apple certainly is not a blameless tech company.)
Like the parent comment, I agree that this blog post completely skirts the issues most important to me. Like the parent comment, I agree that the platform is the distinction, but for different reasons. If I owned an Oculus, I would consider it to have been bricked.
This is not a fair comparison. They're motivated differently.
Furthermore, the "anti-account" viewpoint is making a privacy issue out of a pinch or friction point. Accounts are required for both devices. If you bought a device which allowed you to buy apps, the experience would be horrible without an account. If most people are willing and it's a better experience, it makes sense to force everyone into the same rails to reduce implementation cost. If it increases revenue, there's yet another reason to do it. It's ridiculous to be in an ideological minority and expect a company to bend to that when it's not in their best interest.
While I prefer Apple products because <yada yada>, Meta and Apple are doing the same thing here. The only difference is that Apple has higher current trustworthiness. This is also the reason they can release a $3500 headset.
It’s not bricked and hasn’t deleted my software, I’m curious what exactly you’re referring to with that.
At least the Meta Quest for example has a lot of content and VR games. The Vision Pro doesn't seem to have much use apart from it curiosity, because such system hasn't been fully built out. It seems like a device that isn't really ready for prime time for a couple of years yet.
There is zero chance Valve would release HL:Alyx without full steam support on the device.
That being said, I get what you're saying - that a killer game could have helped the value proposition. They clearly didn't design it for that though, even based on how much lower their refresh rate is for hand tracking.
It feels like a consumption device like the iPad, with some productivity mixed in.
I own an AVP and this isn't something that can be done with it, to the best of my knowledge. Please explain how this is possible with the existing OS and apps.
Possible with the current apps? None of them support a standard partial copy of 3D objects but they do allow copy pasting full objects between apps afaik. E.g I can drag a USDZ file from a message into keynote
There's some hard decisions around forcing everyone into their custom material that Apple made so that they can handle the rendering more deeply....but is that really a core OS thing? Seems like it doesn't need a new kernel for that.
The Oclulus platform is more like a classic video game console; there are system APIs, but they are designed to be used by single-tasking applications.
And for the user, the Oculus system UI is really an app launcher /task switcher.
It’s not better or worse, just a very different design philosophy.
I really do not think 3D widgets would require an entirely new OS. The main app switcher would need a revamp and they would need to re-purpose or build out some new app life-cycle callbacks to handle widget focus and interaction but it all seems very doable and not much harder than what they've already done.
case in point - the whole ipad and "what is a computer" campaign. it is hilarious when a half-baked mouse support is celebrated in a tablet. despite using similar hardware, apple refuses to treat their tablets up to their true potential.
despite working on an RTOS for avp, there is no signs that the headset stack will be exploitable by professionals, like it used to for macs. for the coming future it will remain to be a good software demo built on top of nice displays.
Apple know full well that this is not a mass market product, they have made no attempt to make it even remotely affordable to most people. But they also know that every aspect of the hardware will improve over the next decade, and as it does they will have ironed out many of the problems with how we use AR/VR and will be ready for it, based on the real life experiences of actual owners, rather than years of in-house testing.
The screen will get bigger (I hear FoV is pretty poor at the moment), the CPU/power/thermal performance will improve, battery density goes up, cameras and sensors get better and cheaper and many parts will get smaller/lighter. And in that time they will learn by doing, making it better/cheaper/lighter and working on the software and interaction model.
Hopefully at the same time it will really spur on the rest of the industry and we will see more competition and experimentation.
I can't see myself buying something like this for the next 10 years at least. But something like the VPro that is better, smaller and lighter and doesn't cost the earth could be quite tempting for late adopters like me.
[0] A random example: https://www.amazon.com/Vision-Driving-Around-Sunglasses-Pola...
They spent a ton of company resources, weight and power making the wrong form factor emulate the right form factor, and are shipping with zero killer apps.
You can’t even let your friends play with it without getting it re-fit to their head at the Apple Store, which basically kills social/word of mouth marketing. It certainly isn’t a fashion item / status symbol to be seen in public like all their other stuff.
Maybe the “real” product is sitting in the wings and will be ready to ship in a few years, but the current form factor seems like a non-starter to me.
That's ok. That's exactly why they released the 'pro' first.
Ten years ago was pre oculus rift. We weren't saying anything about VR headsets.
Five years ago was pre valve index. We didn't have CPUs in a headset. Nor a battery. Cameras were only used for tracking. The things we were saying would improve is "screen door effect" and "tracking", both of which have.
It's been 30 years of massive improvements to all of the rest of computers, and VR has only shrunk a couple inches. There's not much else we can do to make it smaller.
the photo of it sitting in a display case gives a decent sense of scale, I think.
http://briteliteimmersive.com/blog/remembering-nasas-view-vr
There’s an insane amount of tech in the Vision Pro. Eyesight probably occupies a big chunk. Then there are more sensors than they need. Also the CPU and 100% processing is happening literally strapped to your face.
This is like having two 5k displays powered by a mobile device*.
* 2 x 5k = 28 million pixels, compared to Vision Pro’s 23 million pixels.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/13/23871859/us-army-microsof... [2] https://support.google.com/glass-enterprise/customer/answer/...
I had a friend that worked on the team for a couple years when it first started. The use case of a headsup display for directions while driving was a great experience.
It wasn’t mine, so maybe there was more to it that I didn’t get from my brief interaction, but it didn’t leave me wanting more.
These days I don't even want that, but that's almost certainly of a combination of getting older and over reacting to how pervasive tech and displays have become.
See, for example:
The Rift DK1 is almost exactly 11 years old, released 3/29/13.
The list on wikipedia [1] doesn't include it, I guess because it was a "development kit", and I just naively assumed the "Oculus Rift" was the DK1 not the CV1.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_virtual_reality_headse...
Edit: Went ahead and edited the wikipedia page so the next person won't make the same mistake.
Rift DK1 was released in ~2013, and lots of gamers bought it throughout 2014. We got the first "consumer release" for the original Rift in 2016. I think its more than fair to say 10 years - we were absolutely talking a lot about Rift DK1 in 2014.
> Five years ago was pre valve index
Valve's first consumer VR headset was the HTC vive, released in 2016:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Vive
"The first-generation Vive was announced in 2015, as part of a collaboration with video game studio and distributor Valve Corporation, and implementing its VR software and hardware platform SteamVR; the first-generation consumer model was released in April 2016."
edited: grammar. still feel like I've failed to produce readable english, but I'm giving up
I’ve been in AR since 2010
The AVP is leaps and bounds ahead of where we were collectively technically back then
But I don’t see us appreciably closer to the goal of ubiquitous persistent headworn see through visual computing
It’s a social expectations and data problem it’s not a “technical” problem
It’s probably gonna be decades before we see any regularized mainstream adoption, because the form factor is such a different thing that we’re not even close to make it a simple transition for the least savvy consumer
In the past, once Apple started pouring R&D money into a specific product type, the entire industry around it tends to advance very quickly. I’m optimistic about the Vision Pro, and I actually think the n+2 Meta release will be much better off for it.
Most other manufacturers seem to take the approach of getting as many features on the side of the box and then compete on price. They cost engineer the crap out of everything and it ends up being somewhat disappointing.
I often maintain that so much technology is 80% of the way to being amazing, but is stymied by commercial concerns that cause companies to cut corners and cheap out, or they hobble their own product to create barriers to interoperability.
While Apple still have to strike the right balance between between features and cost, and also like to make their own walled gardens, they are able to go for the higher price points, and also integrate really well between a wide swathe of products. They are prepared to let specific products be less competative in general (e.g Homepod), because they know that they integrate well into their overall ecosystem.
I’m imagining a typical business school 2-axis chart where one axis is “willingness to take and commit to risks vs unwillingness/noncommittal” and the other axis is “acts independently vs. reacts to commercial/competitive pressures”. I guess what I want to understand is why is Apple kind of all alone on that plot, where the rest of the industry are clustered together far away from them? What are the business processes that lead to their position? Can a company follow a playbook and change their culture and have similar results? Are there other examples?
A lot of our industry are so extremely risk averse, have tunnel vision trying to copy each others’ feature checkboxes, rush things to market to try to make money before they are fully baked, and then give up when they aren’t instant successes. Everyone seems to follow this playbook.
Most people don’t want to think about how to do something or care about optimizing it when they can get it done and not think further about it. But companies seems to want to put a lot of barriers into what I want to get done, like popups, complicated screens, ugly interfaces. For the majority of user workflows, Apple offers a simple, unobstrusive way to do them. Starlink routers are almost the same in that regard (the mobile app could use some work, and perhaps add a desktop interface)
My advice (as a user) is for to simplify the usual workflow to the point you only ask the few (0,1-3) indispensable questions, and then get out of the way. Further options can be buried inside Preferences and Settings. And then you perfect the apperance, ease of use, and general enjoyment of using the application/device.
In the end you need courage both to make it pleasant to use and to give it a big price.
It’s details like that, which set Apple apart.
The MacBook team had this whole presentation planned for him, a usual dog and pony show about better specs and batteries and whatnot. Instead he just put an iPhone and a MacBook on the table, “woke” them both up, and said “why can’t this (the MacBook) do that (the iPhone)?” End of meeting.
No other company has all these competencies at the same level.
That takes a very wide set of skills, to follow the series of discovered problems to be solved wherever they lead.
Other companies look at what parts are available, define a product from that, design have different teams build the different parts, each maximizing specs and reducing cost.
For the vast majority of already well defined products, the second path is the right one.
So that path is very familiar to every level of management at every corporation, and doing something completely different from the ground up isn’t easy or natural in that context.
For Apple, the other holistic discovery path is their mission.
Even “big” differences like being super vertical are a second level strategy for Apple, in service of being able to more easily follow problems to product definitions.
But even for Apple, that path is very risky. They have had a few half baked lemons in products that didn’t get as much discovery and attention as they needed.
Not that I'm bitter and jaded, as an engineer, or anything.
If another brand launched first at same price points they simply will not get the traction Apple does.
Even with $3,500 price Apple likely needs sales hundreds of thousands of units to break even , no other manufacturers cannot pull it off
I love my Apple Watch (on my second one now) and I didn't like wearing watches. Except the Pebble that I bought (I think that I got the first generation Pebble colour, but it's been a while). After that product, things went sideways for Pebble for a lot of reasons. But the initial products were great and the build quality was good (not great, but good). The same applies to the first few generations of the Palm Pilot (and to a lesser degree, the Treo), although I think that the best PalmOS device built was the Clié NX70.
With respect to Apple's break even…I suspect that the research they did is going to produce benefits across all of Apple's product lines for the better part of the next decade (part of it already has, with the Apple Watch Double Tap hand gesture, although that is movement detection not camera-based).
They feel the need because unlike Apple others cannot wait years to release a product or upgrade to a successful one and still sell enough. Everyone else have limited brand recall, if they don't move fast a competitor will and they loose relevance.
The point is nobody else can sustainably build to standards the way Apple can, because Apple can take its time enter a industry late and still win big.
When the tech advanced, and use cases evolved, and users had become accustomed to the limitations of the apple watch style of smartwatch - which regarding battery life STILL HOLD TRUE... once all that was the case, Pebble had to deal with the "and now what?" and they couldn't.
This is a good summary of Windows Mixed Reality headsets, or Kinect
You need to get Devs interested too and that won't work if only the top 1% of the western world can afford it.
This is why secrecy is a huge part of their culture: it allows them to spend years doing R&D work on multiple prototypes until they land on something they think is better than what is already out there.
If they can’t make it work due to the laws of physics (e.g. Apple AirPower) or indecision (e.g. Apple Car), they can shut it down without much fanfare and move on to the next secret R&D project.
No, it is the vast amount of risk they are willing to take. Microsoft/alphabet have vast amounts of money too, but no appetite for risk.
Apple is willing to dump tens of billions and years into R&D for physical products, fail, and then try again. Microsoft half asses it, and then pulls back instead of plowing through (see them shutting down Microsoft retail stores and windows phone). But they have that Excel and Windows B2B gravy train they can ride for the foreseeable future.
As far as I can see its all the same thin, flat device with a screen, just different sizes.
But I do know they seem to result in net incomes that others would seemingly find envious, and yet the others are not able to replicate, so the empirical evidence doesn’t make it seem so easy.
AirPods/pro/max? They've taken major presence a space owned by Sony, Samsung and Bose.
Apple Watch Ultra?
Though it's thin and flat, The iPhone X was a huge leap in specs, contrary to the entire market analyst sentiment that people wanted cheaper phones. Apple made a big bet that people would want the opposite: more expensive phones, and they were right.
Airpods are just bluetooth headphones. Did Apple R&D invent bluetooth, or even bluetooth headphones?
Apple watch was not even the first smart watch to market. They did not invent the watch, and they did not invent the smart watch.
You must be pretty blinkard to think that Apple invented all these things instead of licensing existing patents and repackaging them, which is what they do best.
On the M series of chips, "Tweaked it" is a heavy lift. You are vastly underplaying the amount of Apple's design work that went into the M series of chips. It's led to massive performance gains against the competition.
Airpods are "just" bluetooth headphones, but happen to be the ones that have the most market share by far. It's about design and quality.
The Apple Watch also is the most widely adopted smart watch, by far. Because of how it was designed and manufactured.
The facts are that Apple has taken major risks repeatedly with their design and product decisions, and reaps the rewards with higher margins and market share than the competition. This isn't blinkard, this is just reality.
Shutting down their bad products was a good move, even if they should've made good products in the first place.
Other companies trying to compete with Apple in any space will automatically have this disadvantage that they are seen as the inferior choice because Apple have repeatedly positioned themselves as the most premium player in the market, and so thats just what people expect now.
OS: Windows is a add-riddled and always ignoring your preferences and getting in the way of your work.
Tablet: Android tablet are slow (or soon to be) and not much applications designed for them
Laptop: Windows and never a good mix of great components, perfomance, and weight.
Phone: Only a few do not add uninstallable junk, and these days, they all try to copy the iPhone which is not something I want is I’m trying to move away from the iPhone.
Speaker System: If I want a homepod alternative, I will not be looking to get inside another closed ecosystem. And I’d want lifetime support (airplay has been reversed-engineered). The last time I used Sonos, it wanted me to use its music player or something.
Most of their peers pursue maximum volume in an attempt to dominate a market and drown all competition, inebitably at much lower margins. It's the continuation of the VC launch-or-bust rocketship model most of them were born from.
The difference then means that Apple can try making something really unique and compelling and call it a profitable success based on much much smaller sales volume. And if it does happen to launch like a rocketship (as the iPod, iPhone, and iPad each did) all the better.
But their peers set a much higher mark for sales volume when thinking about what's a success or failure. If a product is only lightly taken up, even if nominally profitable at their margins, it's more like a distraction or clue rather than a success in itself. So they scavenge the project and move on to an alternative market or a parallel product idea.
This all sets Apple up to make slow, well-considered bets on quality and design coherency instead of strictly trying to race to market and outmaneuver everyone for volume.
The only thing Apple have done which elevated themselves above their peers is have marketing which positioned them higher in the market.
Remember those Black and White ads of Steve Jobs next to Ghandi, Malcolm X, and Charlie Chaplin? They are paying off now in spades.
You may not like their products, and you may think their customers are idiots hypnotized by villianous marketers or something, but that's kind of the point of it all: by targetting high margins and precisely volume instead of low margins and maximum volume, they really don't need to care what you think. And that lets them approach products differently.
Thats quite a stretch to assume that opinion from my comment?
I actually love Macbook Pros. IMO they are the best Laptop ever built. However in the global market of laptops they are not patrticularly successful. The entiety of the MacOS ecosystem (of which Macbook Pros are a small percentage) barely breaks 20% of the market share.
Are their products more reliable, more fully featured, and objectivley better than their competitiors? No they are not. The reason they are regarded as a more premium option in the market is not because they make less product with more profit margin, its because they have had an incredibly clever marketing department for the last 20 years meticulously curating their brand presence and public perception into being the most premium tech company which produces the best products.
Market share is the goal, making money is the goal. Market share helps, but it isn't the same thing. MacBooks do pretty well.
This is what happened with Xerox, IBM, Microsoft, and it will happen to Apple too.
I think if they went back to that they’ve lost a serious bit of their DNA.
You mentioned Mac only having a 20% market share. Who has the bigger one?
It's true that trying to enter every market and own a huge market share in it can lead to lower risk of having to stay ahead of every innovation (as we can see with Google and its inability to productize AI properly) but since Apple's turnaround its execution has been top notch, and that was 20 years ago. With products like the Vision Pro Apple is explicitly trying to avoid losing the innovation race that Xerox, IBM, and Microsoft did.
I'd love to be not successful making a luxury product that sells at commodity volume.
This is your personal opinion. My personal opinion, is very much the opposite.
> The reason they are regarded as a more premium option in the market is not because they make less product with more profit margin, its because they have had an incredibly clever marketing department for the last 20 years meticulously curating their brand presence and public perception into being the most premium tech company which produces the best products.
I've heard this same boring claim now for about 20 years. It was wrong as a broad statement twenty years ago, and such a statement I would hazard is still wrong now.
I've had a twenty year career in IT. Starting with PC repair and working for a PC OEM, however the vast majority of my career has been spent in fields involving Linux. (Linux Administrator/Systems Engineering/DevOPS through to executive leadership). I know how computers work, I know how the hardware works, I know the relative value of parts that go into things, yes I can, always have, and still will build machines including using on a regular basis all major operating systems in place today and despite all of this, I still remain an Apple customer and its not because im some dumbo non technical individual tricked by apples fancy marketing voodoo.
It's because for those twenty years Apple has consistently conducted themselves in a way with me personally that for the vast majority of cases, has served me best as a user and as their customer. As opposed to some third party who is paying them to exploit me through their operating system or some mass of adware shipped with their operating system, not just this years profit margins, not just for as long as im in the store and to which afterwards im left alone once ive paid them with a "fuck you, got mine."
Just a few of the events of the past twenty years that have kept me as an apple customer:
* 2006ish era macbook. HDD dies at random just outside of warranty. No local apple stores at the time. Local authorised repairer spends two weeks dicking me around on a fix, nothing. I push it to Apple who was not even local at the time. A week later I have a BRAND NEW macbook, not just a drive, outside of warranty, complete with brand new warranty, an additional year tacked on top and an apology for the service I had received. (We now have apple stores so this would not occur again I imagine.)
* 2014ish iPhone. Much like the macbook I start having issues outside of warranty, it is unable to be debugged in store. Dude wanders away, comes back. "Have you got a backup?", "Yes?", "We'll just give you a refurb, newer model, with warranty, are you happy with that?" "lol, yes I am."
* 2012 15" MacBook pro retina battery replacement - Battery dies outside of warranty in around 2017 and im informed no stock currently exists in the country, and that i'll be waiting months if I wanted a replacement. I am immediately informed that if I do not want to wait, I can instead have a significantly more powerful, and higher specced refurb model, complete with brand new warranty in place of waiting the month for a replacement. I took the replacement. Again, this machine was OUTSIDE of the warranty window. That one retina MBP purchase due to this replacement saw my laptop needs covered for a decade.
This is only touching on a tiny amount of the circumstances that have led to me remaining to continue investigating the purchase of products from Apple. Not everyone will have had these interactions, or come away from Apple positively, and perhaps one day, I also will not and my opinions will change. But at this point, from the day I became a customer through now, I have received a better long term support experience as a customer from Apple, then I have from any other organisation on the planet.
> This is your personal opinion. My personal opinion, is very much the opposite.
Yeah, the GP's personal opinion seems very much the opposite (like yours) as well. Quote:
"I actually love Macbook Pros. IMO they are the best Laptop ever built."
Not sure what caused the dissonance. Seems like trying to prove they're not an Apple fanboy or sth.
I also don't think most customers are old enough to remember those ads.
It's hard to call anything selling 200M+ units/year low volume.
They didn't need those numbers for the iPhone to be worth their original R&D effort, but winning those numbers is even more advantageous for them because of their core philosophy around volume and margins.
Meanwhile, Microsoft/Google/etc are playing a whole different game. When they succeed, they also saturate a market, but that's the only time they call it a success and so they approach the whole product design process differently.
Other companies are also really bad at product. Google can't convey a coherent product strategy to save their lives. Great at technology (and building chat apps lol), terrible at product.
First, we cannot ignore Apple Fanboys (and I am not using that in a negative sense). They have a large base of users who will jump at nearly anything they put out.
However they also have a track record of doing things, both big and small, and pushing the industry to go a certain way. Dropping CD drives is a great example of this, this was an inevitability with more and more distribution through the internet. This would be a risk for a manufacture to try with a random computer because consumers may just ignore it. Apple has the power to say, well you want a Mac? here are your couple options and we are doing this anyways.
Sometimes this fails, see all USB-C Laptops.
But I think it also often comes from thinking about the entire experience. Take them removing the head phone jack (the debate on whether or not they actually needed to do that aside), at the same time we got the AirPods.
Or the iPhone wasn't just simply, without a physical keyboard. It emphasized the advantages of this throughout the entire OS.
But regardless of all the above, I think the simple fact that they just happen to generally sell a lot of devices. Enough that it can normalize a decision for consumers and then other manufactures can follow without risk.
It's comparable to why 'Google Video Search' lost out to youtube way back in the day. The google engineer nerds couldn't understand why no one liked their product: it had all these options for uploading video with the best quality and all these formats, while youtube had worse quality and few options. They missed the point and didn't understand the users, and were caught up in the tech rather than what was actually valuable to the users (basically: dead simple to 'just upload a video' - quality doesn't matter as much as that).
Kinda like how Mark Z. has been talking about how the Oculus has similar resolution. It's not the tech specs that make the product - those are necessary but not sufficient. If the product is supposed to be AR: then it needs to actually be AR. And that means. e.g., that details like virtual shadows on real surfaces MUST be included, and must actually work properly. If it's not, then it's only kinda-AR. That's the kind of long tail that Apple understands, and other companies don't. The tech must fit the users, and the experience must be complete.
Microsoft decided to mostly abandon the project, move/fire most of the team and give up rather than keep spending resources on a product that had an incredible potential... What would happen if Microsoft released a headset like Hololens 2 capable of running Windows apps for consumers at a similar price to AVP? They have Windows Mixed Reality, an almost infinite software catalogue, and the capabilities to do it... buy they simply don't (think about the Surface).
1. Apple focus on customer story for every product. They may get it wrong sometimes but every product is sold with “this is how it will impact your life for the better”.
2. Apple understand brand and fashion. Unlike other companies, they don’t typically rush out the gate with a million variants to try and capture every part of the market. They don’t let it cheapen their brand and they avoid brand fatigue.
3. They stick with things for longer . Other companies tend to throw products at the wall early and hope they stick. Apple comes in later and then doesn’t relent for a long time compared to competitors.
4. They try and not focus on just specs. Other brands focus on features, and do a really bad job at telling you why you need it.
If I could focus on specs, I wouldn't need spectacles!
It's not the money. They did it with the iMac when they were headed for the ground, and with the iPod when they were in a better position but still without infinite funding. Reality is actually quite simple: they spot technology advances, and integrate them into a neat, well-designed package that people actually want to buy.
The first iPod was a fancy shell around an IBM 1.8'' hard drive. There were MP3 players before but they were very bulky, or could store only a handful of files. They saw the hard drive coming, did the math, and went all in.
Same thing with the iPhone: there were smart phones before, but they spotted the capacitive digitizer that was orders of magnitude more accurate than the competition, and boom, multitouch.
Same thing with the AirPods: the killer feature being their fancy Bluetooth chip, which made the experience much better than the competition that was established for a decade at that point.
It is quite interesting that they do it over and over, going as far as saying what they do in interviews, and some people really don't see it for what it is.
> Are they the only ones who can create products?
They are not. They just have a vision of what they want to do, and once they start they put the effort needed (sometimes killing advanced designs before release). Then, they iterate relentlessly generation after generation. They play the long game, and often introduce their first generations at higher price points and keep improving and driving their price points down even if it is not an initial resounding success. Any company can do it, if they take design seriously and optimise for long term strategic goals rather than short-term economics.
> Competitors work for ages and ages fighting each other, refining v1, v2, v2.1, v2.2, v2.25, and then suddenly Apple comes out with something v8-ish and the whole industry scrambles.
If you look closely, when Apple comes in, it's because they have found a differentiating factor that they think will make the difference. They always have a compelling message about why you should choose their product above the competition. And it's never "same product, but cheaper".
But they do have a history of disrupting markets by leveraging superior UX. Mainstreaming the GUI, the click wheel, the all-glass multitouch phone, etc, etc.
Consider Google. A couple years ago, a reporter documented the nearly (iirc) 20 attempts Google has made at a messenger. Meanwhile, Apple made one and ground away at it until it became great.
Google is a company that -- and this is true -- dropped trou and put apps on my phone called "Google Meet" and "Google Meet (Original)." And don't forget Duo. See also having "Google Pay" and "Google Wallet."
With a side of Android is kinda meh and look at pics of various Google execs at industry events. There's a solid chance there's an iphone in their hands.
Apple does not have this level of product or branding confusion.
So you don't like Apple, fine. But using Google as a poster child of consistent product marketing is a fool's hill to die on.
With Google, it's endemic to their products.
More importantly: it's not confusing because no one really cares or needs to care. New folks use the Apple Music subscription, old folks that know the difference use either.
On the other hand, with Apple Music, there's a different subscription that also lets you upload your music to the cloud and scans them for matches, but what you get back out of it is DRMed downloads. Which don't work outside of the Apple ecosystem, and stop working even on it if you cancel your Apple Music subscription.
On top of that, the way matching works is different for the two services. iTunes Match actually analyzes the raw data of the track to do the exact match, while Apple Music seems to prefer metadata. Which means that, with the latter, you'll often get a different variant of the song, in cases where multiple versions exist.
My point is that bring your own library of pre-ripped music into a subscription service for syncing is rare these days unless you're over a certain age or are an audiophile (at which point there are better alternatives like Roon). If you're going to do rare things, then there will always be nuances to understanding the tradeoffs Apple took to support you.
However the c-levels at those companies are happy to chase $$$, and will closely copy whichever hardware and software is deemed the best in the market at the time. Some also do this because they see the product as a threat to their core business.
There will also be various cheerleaders who exalt that apple’s ideas are trivially obvious and were always the pre-destined pathway for the category. Seemingly ignoring the long floundering that occurred before Apple’s entry.
Because they don't just treat things as hardware, but as a complete ecosystem. Sure, they price things at a point where they can afford to make a quality product, but it's more than that... There are times when things aren't perfect, but overall everything works together and is very high quality. When I've tried in the past to buy non-Apple gear, things tend to be clunky, incomplete, and put a high burden on me as a user, even in cases where the specs might be better than Apple gear.
In my experience, at other companies, product development is run on a spreadsheet by MBA PMs. Apple doesn’t operate that way.
Jobs doubled down on the combination of hardware and software designed and implemented under one roof. That bet paid off past anyone’s expectations.
So Apple now is far ahead of everyone else, when it comes to creating products deeply integrating hardware and software and design.
Apple has invested in developing the full stack for their products. Not only do they have the full stack of components for the products but the entire toolchain to develop those products. This gives them a very strong foundation for pretty much any product they want to pursue.
The AppleTV and HomePod both use older A-series SoCs and run iOS with a custom shell on top. They get all of the iOS media and peripheral handling capability "for free". Both projects can focus on TV or speaker features since the base OS is largely a solved problem for them. If they need some special consideration from somewhere in SWE they just file a Radar. They don't just get binary blob dumps of firmware from outside vendors and have to beg for bug fixes and hope their contract is big enough to get some consideration.
The Vision Pro leverages their ARM SoCs, base OS, and all the motion coprocessors that have been in their phones and watches for a decade. Novel improvements from the Vision Pro's development will just feed back to those components and make it into the next phone, watch, or whatever.
Most other companies don't actually own their whole product stack. Even Microsoft is at the mercy of their suppliers with the Surface line. They get what Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD have to offer. Smartphone manufacturers are grabbing Qualcomm and Samsung SoCs which are collections of Cortex cores then slap Android on top hoping that Google's latest version is better than the previous version.
It's hard to really make leapfrog products when you're shipping the same shit as your competitors and trying to compete on price.
Apple tends to jump on the bandwagon late but then turns thing mainstream. That worked well for ultrabooks (e.g. sony vaio, then MacBook air, nowadays every laptop) or earbuds.
The AR/VR or visionsomething^TM case is a bit different in that apple actually has to implement a new market. Thus far they don't seem to be trying that hard.
Apple Vision Pro is a different beast because AR/VR don’t have product-market fit yet besides a few game genres that Apple doesn’t care about.
Apple is good at improving existing product categories less so at finding product-market fit that usually outsources to others.
From a management perspective, how do they handle the people side of that - keeping good people on the team and keeping them motivated to do something extraordinary?
People don't like spending time on unsuccessful projects and don't want their names associated with them, and don't want to work extra hard on something that won't come to fruition.
Maybe Apple management has enough internal reputation that employees are willing to take that risk (but even Apple management has flops - the car seeming to be a recent example). But that doesn't feel like a sufficient explanation to me.
Getting people to see that in forseight when they aren't seeing results, they won't for years, and it's all uncertain that it all won't be a waste of time, and it's frustrating and they have other, more certain offers - that's difficult leadership and management, and I wonder how Apple does it.
Having even a few people saying they are already doing that on the Vision Pro seems significant.
Now if apple puts out an Apple Vision SE or non-pro or whatever at $1,999 it will be seen as an absolute steal.
I’m having a hard time imagining that level of planned obsolescence for VR displays though. If anything, I’d expect the quest 4 (or 5, or whatever generation matches Apple specs) to last longer.
Of course, it’s a moot point for me and the large percentage of the population that will never strap Facebook-controlled eye trackers to their head.
I also have a Galaxy Edge from the same year as the iPhone X. The Samsung is completely unusable. Every tap takes seconds for anything to respond.
If you do a lot of gaming, for example, macOS is in many ways worse than Linux even.
I need to run Windows in some form for various industry specific needs that a VM or emulation simply cannot meet at the moment. I don't like it, but that isn't going to change the state of things.
It's a delight to be able to choose what and where you work with, but it's not the reality a lot of us have to deal with.
If you’re a PC user looking to switch to Mac, or you’re looking for a machine and don’t care about which operating system it has, then it’s less useful.
The point is, for now the AVP is the only iPhone-tier (Pro Ultra Whatever) VR headset. Meta's crap (I have all of them) is analogous to the mid tier budget phones, in this metaphor. (Even the fantastically expensive Quest Pro is just like... an insult, even though it does have eye tracking which is now absolute minimum table stakes (and Quest 3 doesn't have it))
The current price it too high to go mainstream, yes, for sure. But let's see the next. AVP 3Gs could fuckin' destabilize the fuck out of this whole nascent ecosystem.
Until now, VR headsets were used almost exclusively for gaming, even if they were capable of other things.
The AVP was made to be a general use device in a way that other headsets just aren’t.
This is like iPhone vs. flip phones in 2006 as far as I can tell.
Yes, your flip phone can play music, take pictures, use the internet, etc. just like an iPhone. But, you would be a fool think the devices are in the same league. Apple just sort of defined a genre of product that didn't exist.
And Apple put an absolute ridiculous amount of money into designing and building that thing and they’re trying to recoup some of that. But by version two or three a lot more of it will have already been recouped and it won’t be as necessary to keep the prices high.
The first color televisions, cell phones, refrigerators, computers, and microwave ovens were not exactly cheap either.
The price will come down.
As far as the market is concerned: the Quest is a gaming platform that can do computer stuff if needed. The AVP is a computer that can do gaming stuff.
I really feel like too many people are ignoring this. If anyone understands how to play the long game with a new product it is Apple. I mean the Apple TV was a "Hobby" for many years.
Has Apple ever put out a "Pro" version of a product before the "normal" version?
I think it also helps the clear sharing of technology between this and other products. From using the M2 tech, to iOS and (I assume) built with much of the AR tech they have been showing off for the last several years on iPhone.
I honestly kinda wonder how much of ARKit was directly made from work on the Vision Pro?
This version of Vision Pro was never going to be a massive product, I expect they knew they would get returns (and they hoped to mitigate that with the in store demos but that only does so much). But it is setting the ground work for a long term investment.
Yes they introduced the MacBook Pro before the MacBook.
I do realize that the name change came with a switch from PowerPC to Intel.
The Mac (Pro) came before the iMac/Mini etc too
The pro moniker is just branding but they usually start with the pro line for more expensive hardware.
Even with the iPhone, the current pro line is a continuation of the main line iPhone that evolved via the X.
The Lisa before the (original) Mac
HomePod is another one.
A devkit prepared for lock down. It's the old formula: let devs make the platform great, then pull a Sherlock or increase the platform fees. Count me out.
iOS non-game apps aren't exactly innovative. It's Gmail. It's YouTube. It's social media photo and video scrolls. It's been more than a decade, and the most innovative thing I can find on top downloads and top grossing, Duolingo, is also kind of a game, like if you remove the game part of it it's kind of not much, is it? All the innovations in Google Maps are kind of tied up in backend technologies that aren't specific to the phone at all, indeed predated it.
Once they figured out touchscreen keyboard and accelerated web browsing sort of everything else fell into place. Then the retina display was introduced, and software improved the camera. I don't know what roles 3rd party devs played in all of this, but those list of innovations happened years ago.
They don't Sherlock games.
Even then, is Apple going to approve a game with guns on the AVP? Time will tell. Beatsaber is an innovative game but it leaned on the basic premise of people doing something illegal, uploading non licensed maps and tracks.
Hacker News commenters don't know much about making games - even when they work for huge game studios! - and they don't know much about VR - even when they work at companies making VR headsets!
Hugo must certainly be aware of the Varjo XR3, which is actually the most comparable device to the AVP and even more expensive, but there were developers at Apple on the AVP team who never heard of it, and many more Oculus developers.
At the end of the day this is a love letter to halo product positioning coupled with relentless vendor lock-in applied to helpless consumers. I agree with you that the locked down nature of the product makes it as DoA for developers as the Apple Watch was. People forget that the first apps for iPhones were delivered via jailbreaks made by hackers, who had unlimited access, and that plus Steam ultimately teed up what limited things you can do in iOS apps today, not brilliant strategy.
For a recent example, during the pandemic mental health journaling apps became popular, and now Apple has their own that has 10x the capability by sticking fingers in all your sensitive location, photo, health data that those 3rd party apps could never dream of.
(Yes, it was near useless. The original Mac had 128k of RAM, which allowed for only the smallest of applications. It wasn't until the Mac 512k came out that people could do real work on these machines.)
The next rev of Vision products from Apple, or maybe the rev after that, will just be leaps and bounds beyond what anyone else is doing in the space. No new paradigm of computing truly begins until Apple starts it.
It’s going to be interesting to see what it really shines at as more developers make different kinds of apps.
And yet -- as Steve demonstrated -- it fit in an envelope.
THIS is Apple launching a new product line (and trust me I'm not a fan boi).
And shortly after (2-3 years?) the MBAs were powerful cheap and barely powered up their fans.
Mind you the MBA was maybe Steve's last obsession. What is Tim's thinking these days?
Still it all seems very Apple like...
A good measure of an Apple product is if you can pitch a version of it to your grandma or dad who can’t open PDF file. If something only appeals to tech enthusiasts it is not a good Apple product (except the professional line products intended to be used for serious work by professionals which the vision pro isn’t)
Now, I guess, it makes reality disappear?
I have a Quest and have used other VR systems, the Vision Pro felt like a huge leap forward compared to those.
I walked away from the demo tempted. Not by what is available today, but by what I want to be available and what I want to create with it.
https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology--media-a...
Even though the SSD was much tinier than the hard drive and the processor in the machine was slow and under clocked to be able to manage heat, in combination with the SSD it was fast compiling code and ran smoother than a normal MacBook Pro.
The flipside is I think the hard drive was a 4200 RPM model and performed absolutely abysmally.
But if you didn’t need much computing power, say you’re a writer, it was extremely small and lightweight and easy to carry. It’s not surprising it changed the industry.
I thought it was pretty good - but nowhere near ideal of course.
But discovered I could dispense with both of Apple's "Light Seal Cushions" and simply line the light seal with some 1/8 adhesive foam. It took a little experimenting to avoid hard pressure points, and then make it comfortable.
It is now very comfortable with the following benefits:
1. The field of view is noticeably wider. Yay! The immersion improvement feels cognitively significant.
2. I realized that greater peripheral vision downward is more important than upward. Being more aware of down makes us feel safer and is also where are our hands and keyboards live.
So I arranged the padding to wear the head set slightly lower, allocating all the increased vertical FOV downward.
3. The combination of being 1/4 inch or so closer to the face, and firmer padding, reduced the feeling of weight on the front of my head.
Warning - literally. I get an occasional popup warning that my eyes are too close to the lenses. The danger being if I were to fall I could potentially hit my eyes. I stay seated most the time, but occasionally walk through rooms, so it is worth being careful.
I use my Vision Pro for 10 hours a day on many days, comfortably. I had to switch to the two-strap support to do this. But I have ordered an adapter that allows the original behind the heat cushion strap to be used with a second cushion strap over the head. I anticipate that working even better, given how much surface area weight will be distributed across. (Also turning a knob is easier for adjustments than messing with velcro.)
Also, got some thicker (in width) lighter foam, to add some more light seal around the edges.
This feels like a real upgrade, a year or so before Apple will release a bump.
Can you comfortable code all day in that? If you don't mind my asking, is it purely novelty or is it genuinely better than coding on a 5k monitor?
In the recent update it now lets you mouse off your Mac and onto vision apps just like iPad hands over. It made me switch my desk setup to have the desk attached to my chair so I can have 360 range of screens. The resolution is stupidly high.
I’ve attempted a coding workflow in all of the quests and it just wasn’t possible. It’s awesome in vision
Do those semi-realistic virtual avatars work for non-FaceTime apps like Zoom?
No the personas aren’t right. They just creep people out. They need more work, or some basic editablity. It generally nails your eyes perfectly at the expense of everything else.
It takes time to absorb all the possibilities
Yes, on comfort for 10 hours. I have even worked 12 hours, then watched a long 3D movie (Blade Runner 2049, Dune I, etc.) without hesitation.
I cannot imagine going back to only physical screens. I have a 98" monitor with two 55" monitors in portrait angled towards me on either side (heights all match), all wall mounted. Truly wonderful! But this has replaced that for me.
I have even considered beheading a MacBook Pro.
I love the following:
• Never needing to put on or take off reading glasses to see far, or within inches.
• I can have my main Mac "screen" whatever size I want, typically large. Also that I can lean into it when focusing on a patch of code, and it always looks perfect.
• Having multiple Vision safari screens, or utilities, surrounding me. With the look and pinch interface being very nice for navigating.
• Being able to tune out 180 degrees of my space with a natural scene so I am completely undistracted. Wish I could go 360 degrees, and still leave keyboard visible. (Either by having an unobstructed low circle, or having the keyboard "punch through" like hands do.
• Flexible screen position lets me sit with great posture all the time. I tend to pull right up to my desk, push my keyboard far out and lean forward on my elbows a bit. Have the screen large but close enough that I can lean in to focus on something.
• Two environments in one! I will put project organization and context notes on huge screens behind me on a wall. Personal mission control. In thoughtful moments I get out of my chair, walk around the room and see the large screens from anywhere, walk right up to it, make small edits with pinch and zoom.
• The incredible ergonomics of being able to code comfortably in bed, on a couch, recliner, etc. with good ergonomics, due to the screens being flexibly placed. Being able to code in many places keeps my brain fresh.
• I use a holster for the battery. Geeky, but after dropping it as I walked away from my desk 100 times I realized I need that. That elminated inhibitions about moving, and feelings of being chained down.
• I haven't been in flow so consistently for so many hours for a long time. For me the Mac interface expansion/isolation chamber IS what Vision is for.
Issues:
• As noted, wish the keyboard and my drinks would "punch through" 360 degree scenes, or there was an optional lower circle of punch rough.
• Keyboard and trackpad pointer are fussy when switching between Mac and Vision screens.
• Wish I could have more Mac screens, and drag Mac windows out to their own screens. Also pull in iPad and iPhone screens. And push windows/app-states back out to those machines too. Or two other people's devices.
• Wish the Mac screen operated with look and pinch. I do this a few times every day when in flow.
• Wish I could disconnect/reconnect my MacBook Pro screen. The headless MacBook Pro for Vision would be absolutely great. But having the option to use it as a laptop too would be great. Maybe remove my MacBook screen, but set it up so I can clip my iPad Pro to it too?
• Need a Vision Spaces interface for setting up work then moving to a different context, but being able to come back to those screens. Being able to set up a space that is location sensitive, so always available in that room, seat, whatever.
Can you expand on this? Does it basically have built in vision correction? This actually sounds like a 'killer' feature if you don't need to mess with glasses.
But more importantly, your eyes are always focusing at a consistent 1ish meter in front of you. That's why you don't have to switch vision correction ever when using the Vision Pro (or any VR display).
problems can come from increased heat within the vr device, but also because every lighty our eye receives comes in at the same angle, and thus the eye never needs to adjust to different distances, as it would have to do in a real environment. while it appears / looks the same as in reality it really isnt. thats also the reason you only need one correction.
What are these 98" monitors? Is this a TV or some kind of signage display? That truly is a huge setup.
SAMSUNG 98-Inch Class Neo QLED 4K QN90A
SAMSUNG 55-Inch Class Neo QLED 4K QN95B x 2
In my opinion, desk space taken up by displays is criminal!
Also like to get out of my chair, pace the room, still see my work on a big screen as I think about it. Move to think
And this setup encourages more collaboration
Even a 40 inch 4k TV on a wall works great with a desk spaced suitably
Oculus quests have had this feature for a while now so I guess it'll come to AVP too. It only supports a handful of models but that's no big deal for Apple users as they mostly will use Apple keyboards anyway.
Btw it’ll be a few years before they update the Vision Pro
The displays are really, really good.
It is obscured though by the softened out of focus presentation, maybe that blurring makes the difference unnoticeable.
I had some major issues with the Vision Pro, but pixel density was not one of them.
• The pinching focus remains on the control you just looked at for a fraction of a second as your eyes zoom off it.
That would be killer.
In retrospect, it would have been vintage Apple to have realized this was an important detail and resolved it already.
Also widely spreading fingers within a moment of looking at a control could act as "hovering" with a mouse pointer. Add some kind of glow to the control as an intuitive indicator that it is staying in pinch focus. So you can lock in, still look around, and pinch if you decide to - or just relax the hand to abort.
This ability to lock on last gaze, and pinch/abort, would dramatically free the eyes to continue roaming naturally.
I'm not convinced this would solve it. What if I really do want to select a different button quickly? Certainly, when I use traditional computers I hate mouse latency. You could add additional pinch controls like you said, but I think it would all continue to be finicky.
I think the problem is that eye tracking is bad, at least as a primary input mechanism.
If I were Apple, I would focus more on hand gestures. The Vision Pro lets you move application windows around with your hands (although you need to initially select them with your eyes), and this always felt much more natural to me than. I can imagine a system where you use your hands to manipulate a cursor in space, possibly even a 3D cursor.
These minimum gaze times could be quite small. When we move our eyes, they move fast. I am guessing in the order of 10-30 ms. Just under our perception of what we are actually doing.
I find myself deciding and starting to pinch, but moving my eyes away at the same time. That is a small window where carry-over gaze would reliably do-what-I-mean without undercutting a follow up gaze and pinch
The original Apple Lisa, which cost $9,995 in 1983, would cost approximately $27,905 in today's dollars, adjusting for inflation over the period up to 2023.
So the VisionPro seems downright cheap.
Im betting Apple will release similar smart glasses like Meta's in the next year or two.
I can't remember if it was here or somewhere else I saw the point made that the current Vision Pro is the worst one Apple will ever make. All future Vision* products will likely be technically improved from the current model. So if the Vision Pro is good right now it really can only be refined and get better.
This device is magical. Yes it's too heavy, yes there are not enough apps, yes sharing it with other people is a hassle. Every one of those issues will be solved in the next 2 generations.
When the screen is 50% better and it weighs 50% less, 20% of knowledge workers will be tuned in daily. Technology isnt a zero sum game, but I genuinely believe the impact will be bigger than AI. AI changes the way you work, Apple Vision will change the way you live, which will change the things you consume, which will impact the work that needs to be done to serve you. Empires will rise and fall. Travel to beaches will go up, travel to tier 3 towns and cities with minor attractions could get obliterated. Most TVs will disappear. My grand children will be able to experience memories with me long after I'm dead. After this, looking at my smartphone seems so analog. Anyway, I could go on for hours
Lastly, on the topic of pricing, there is a great book titled Positioning by Al Reiss that highlights the rational behind Apple's strategy on pricing. They are a second mover in this space, they needed to come out of the gate as the absolute gold standard of this technology and position it as the best money can buy. They delivered on both the tech and pricing. Long after the price comes down, they'll still own that position of being the best money can buy. When you own the position, it takes a lot to lose it. It will be almost impossible for Meta to take that from them now. Big mistake on Meta's part.
> Apple isn't a big enterprise player as far as (except for development)
They never really went after the tech companies themselves. The way Macs dominate certain development fields is a result of their popularity with consumers that drove companies to adopt the tech to attract talent. Me and many colleagues 5 years ago weren't interested in web startups using a Windows dev environment. Not saying there's merit to that, but my main point is that Apple focused on the end user(which happened to be a burgeoning web dev class during the last 15 years) rather than enterprise.
I think it's further evidenced by how relatively slow Apple has been to deploy some management tools that are more common in Windows-land. Anecodtally it feels like 3rd parties filled the gap on that side for Apple for quite a while. MDM, other IT tools, repair networks, and more recently self-repair kits were all much slower to deploy than how Microsoft (think Dell) went after their corporate customers.
iPad are the best versions of "tablets", if we see tablets as a frozen in time "large iphone" version of the concept. Android tablets perfectly fit the category and Samsung is the only distant competion (yet Samsung has Dex, which is increasingly showing its teeth)
But they're way behind in term of tablets as touch enabled computers. Chromebooks have seen more adoption as schools and orgs couldn't justify iPad's price, the top of the line is above what the iPad has to offer, and the Surface Pro took the spot of the North Star of the category, to use the article's metaphor.
So yes, I'd agree with parent, Apple could have made the "what is a computer?" marketing campaign a reality, but didn't have the courage to canibalize their mac line.
"640K software is all the memory anybody would ever need on a computer."
I don't see how anyone can say this with a straight face. VR/AR just isn't there and won't be there for a lot longer than people think. Everyone always acts like we're -so close- but then we just aren't. Hololens and Oculus are over a decade old, and honestly when I first demo'd both ages ago, they were incredible (especially Hololens.) If I put on a headset now, sure it's better but it's still stuck on that same idea and seems to fundamentally misunderstand how humans interact. Apple's newest product is no different. I think the future of wearable devices looks a lot more like the Meta Ray-bans with some sort of small HUD than a full computer strapped to your face that you can't wear anywhere (without being socially ostracized or robbed).
We also know that people are perfectly willing to wear something on their face to be able to see better, and willing to carry something around in their pockets to be more connected -- glasses and phones.
So I think the only real barrier is technical feasibility: can you make it small enough, light enough, power efficient enough, and, of course, affordable enough?
AVP and Oculus clearly aren't there yet. Relative to smartphones, I think we're at the "Palm III" or maybe "Palm V" level of things. I personally have no idea if a path forward to the "iPhone 3S/iPhone 4" level even really exists for VR headsets.
But if it does and we get there, I think there's no doubt that these headsets (probably just goggles at that point) will take over the world, like phones have.
I just don't agree, because VR's input system is fundamentally flawed. The Verge actually did a good video on this, the input of VR is just wonky. It makes you want to rip your headset off and just use your laptop/tablet (and I'm aware they can act as companions, but at that point...why do you need the headset?). I just don't see how that's going to change anytime soon. There also -are- physical limitations, for one, it's exhausting to wear for extended periods. You have absolutely no peripheral vision, and how is that going to be solved? Even if you made it light, unless it's as light as a pair of glasses, it's not going to be something I want to put on for several -hours- a day. You can't walk away from it; you have to physically remove it.
The best move imo, for VR/AR is as a "background" tech, it can physically remove us from our devices and shouldn't be a new fully fledged computer I'm putting on my face. You also have to understand that generations after Millennials are steadily enjoying -less- "in your face" things, and I think that's the right. I think the future is going to look a lot more like "Her" and a lot less like "Ready Player One," at least on the mass market.
This can change in 30-50 years, but right now? It's just a gimmick and junk drawer tech. Unless there is some crazy jump in the tech in the near future (I doubt given Hololens and Oculus and now Apple have only marginally improved it over a full decade,) I don't see it as anything that is going to penetrate my life.
Except it isn't, because the density just isn't there. The PPD is incredibly low, which is why you have to make things "huge" to compensate. And while huge screens are great for watching movies, it's not great for a lot of other things. It's not comfortable to move your head back & forth just to read a line of text.
In a hypothetical future where these microled displays have 3-5x the density they do today then this starts becoming competitive with today's multi-monitor setups. Except those will also have had improvements to them as well. And even then, the number of people with multi-monitor setups is also pretty small. That's not a smartphone-level revolution or impact.
Every time I see an intent by companies to increment my time spent with a computer, to watch their ads, buy another thing I don't need ... I know that I should be doing the exact opposite.
This isn't to say that VR won't improve and find some useful niches, but the idea that it could have anywhere near the global impact of smart phones seems wildly optimistic to me.
I wish you were right. But, man, look around. People are immersed in their mobile devices. No one gives a shit about their surroundings anymore.
For some reason this illogical phrasing that totally excludes the value proposition has become the standard phrasing for arguing why VR/AR won't succeed. It makes no sense. You haven't expressed any part of the value proposition of the product, only a negative aspect of it, so why are you assessing it's value based on that? I could assess the value of a car as "a metal box you are trapped inside of for hours on end" or a phone as a "fragile object that requires constant charging" and decide these products will just never make it.
Of course people don't want goggles strapped to their face. But we already know they will do it, given a value proposition because humans do exactly that : they wear glasses and sunglasses and hats quite happily, sometimes all day long.
I also have been telling people that VR is magical and that while both current hardware and the current software has issues it will get better and that this stuff is going to have a big impact on humanity... only, I've been telling people this for just shy of a decade now ;P. I don't see the Apple Vision Pro as either the product that made any of this magical nor is it the product that made any of this viable... it is just yet another incrementally-improved product in a category that has been on the verge of getting it right for, well, forever.
Somewhat ironically, I have no interest in showing people my AVP, I use it for hours everyday but showing it to people feels weird in the same way showing your neighbor your workstation and monitors feels weird. (Part of that is, of course, that I’m not going to give them my laptop to run Mac virtual display, which means they won’t fully “get” it anyhow.)
In contrast the quest devices are practically begging to be shown off but lie in disuse a majority of the time, especially if you don’t have time for gaming.
It's worth doing a vision pro demo in an Apple store if you can. I'm not planning to buy one in its current state, but it was immediately obvious that this was entirely new territory. It moved a piece of technology from fiction to reality in my mind. The eye tracking is hard to believe without having experienced it.
I'm not ready to say that this device will be responsible for such a large technology shift as the previous person, but I think it will play an large, perhaps pivotal role on our way to the next thing.
Disclaimer: I know a lot of people compare this to a device that I can surmise was meant to do a lot of similar things made by Meta; I have not tried this and may be attributing first-mover credit to Apple for things that Meta may have done similarly well. My comment is made from the perspective of somebody who has never experienced eye tracking in any capacity before.
As it improves, I don't question that it has a future, and some people like it so much they're working on it and writing apps now. The question is how many years from now before a larger mass of people are using it?
The OP talks about the Internet, but the Internet started some time between the 1969 first ARPAnet transmission and 1974 paper on the Internet protocol. Out to 1993 most people were not consciously using the Internet, it was a rather niche thing. With the release of the Netscape web browser in 1994, the inclusion of IP networking capability in Windows 1995 etc., this began to change.
One could say this about AI as well. Up until 2019, Norvig and Russell's CS textbook "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" had only a ten page sub-chapter on neural networks. The now recognized as groundbreaking 2012 ImageNet competition victory by Krizhevsky, Sutskever and Hinton, was greeted with skepticism and disinterest on this forum ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4611830 ). The ideas for connectionist AI were there starting with McCulloch and Pitts 1943 paper, so that's a lot of development where things still weren't really happening until around 2012 or even 2019.
Some people can see the potential in things decades in advance, but they can take time to move into the mainstream, and it is difficult to determine how long that can take.
Other companies had MP3 players for a few years first. The iPod exploded.
You listed some good examples yourself. Windows 3 was nice but it was 95 that really made it big. The Internet existed but it was Netscape that made it takeoff, followed by AOL.
There’s always an invisible threshold. You can make something in a category but until it passes that threshold it doesn’t really change the world. It could be price, speed, ease of use, some new piece of technology, or a combination of all those factors.
Existing VR headsets obviously sell well enough that an industry exists, but it’s nowhere near ubiquitous. It hasn’t hit that threshold (assuming it exists for VR). Apple clearly has set their own bar, much higher than others, hoping that they’ve hit that magical point or at least gotten close enough to it. Today that cost a lot of money like the original Mac.
Going from the quest one to the two to the three has increased sales but I’m not sure it’s done anything to really approach that magic inflection point. Who knows how long it would have taken to get there. Maybe the quest four or five would, maybe the eight. We still don’t know where that line is.
But Apple is really pushing and that makes it interesting to watch if nothing else.
I don't believe that for a second. Even 50% lighter and it's still going to be more uncomfortable than not wearing one. All so you can have a blurrier screen?
If/when it gets to the weight/comfort of normal glasses then sure. But that's at least a decade away. Probably more.
I'm not so sure about that.
Even after 36 years of wearing glasses (current ones weight barely 20 gram), they still bother me, and I fiddle with them constantly.
AI does a whole lot more than that. I imagine that the vast majority of content people consume will at some point be created by AI perhaps with some marginal human input. Probably before your VR vision becomes a reality.
I am perhaps missing your point, but if people will be able to experience incredible VR worlds, couldn't people happily spend their time sitting in tiny windowless rooms rather than physically travelling to a beach?
A beach seems like the former, and cities and minor attractions seem like the latter.
I see statements like this about AI too. How can something be bigger than the technology it is built on? The AVP is a computer. AI is a computer accessed through the internet... any computing device that accesses another computing device is further extending the "impact of computers and the internet." I don't get it. Maybe I'm too caught up on the semantics.
Element Symbol Percent mass Percent atoms Oxygen O 65.0 24.0 Carbon C 18.5 12.0 Hydrogen H 9.5 62.0 Nitrogen N 3.2 1.1
Edit: but point taken, we could go down the rabbit hole forever. Definitely not as cut and dry as I was making it out to be
The immersiveness for entertainment is neat, but this seems like a relatively minor use case in the grand scheme of things. And with gesture based controls, gaming is pretty much a non-starter.
Do you really envision a future of families hanging out together on the couch, each member with their own VR goggles…? Halfway through my return period, I realized that I much preferred reality.
FWIW, I love my Quest for the occasional gaming romp, but little else.
This feels like a comment from Blackberry or MS making fun of the first iPhone.
As the article mentions, this is an intentional thing they've done to cover up the remaining vestiges of the screen door effect. The better the screens get, the less and less they'll have any reason to do it.
With the questionable state of Moore's law, and the battery powered nature of the device, it might be awhile before tech catches up. Faster components would use more energy. We need to balance performance with battery capacity, and I expect the product that really catches on will have more of both.
I predict it will go the way of 3D TVs. Most people don't want to walk around with half a kilogram of computers inside goggles strapped to their faces.
[1] https://candrewlee14.github.io/blog/2024-03-07_apple-vision-...
I got the prescription lens inserts that Apple had suggested, and when I first put on the device I thought that either my eye doctor had gotten my prescription wrong, or something was defective with my device.
The blur is distracting -- and looking further away makes it more obvious, as the objects in the background move around a lot more when turning your head vs items really close to your eyes.
He also says you can read your screens through passthrough, but I've found that not really to be the case, at least for devices like the iPhone or Apple watch. I've had to take my Vision Pro off many times not only to read a phone notification, but also for anything that requires Face-ID (which doesn't work well when the Vision Pro is covering your face, which feels like an Apple ecosystem fail).
I'm still enjoying it, and I bought it knowing it was a V1 product, but it also shows how far have to go, even with a ton of engineering put into a product.
I've noticed that I can almost read things if I hold my phone a little farther away, but I wouldn't call it usable by any stretch. I've considered getting contacts for the first time just to test all of this, but I'm extremely turned off by the upkeep of them (to say nothing of the idea of touching my eyeball to put them in).
VR is interesting all because all manufactures (that I know of) have a fixed focal distance for the screens. This is why you need inserts in the first place, even though the lenses are right in front of your eyes. For example, on the valve index this is set to ~6ft, so if you can see up to 6ft perfectly, you do not need inserts.
Moving your phone around doesn't change this number, its a relationship between the lenses and the screens
I can read screens "fine" while wearing it (fine as in, I can read them, I wouldn't want to do it for an extended amount of time).
At some point don't we need to accept the laws of physics and biology? That is, The VisionPro covers a significant part of your face, much more than a pair of glasses. Face-ID already has the challenge of needing to recognize you in tons of different conditions (lighting, pale/tan skin color, wildly different hairstyles, facial hair, etc.), while for security reasons nearly never letting someone else impersonate you. Is it really possible to get that level of forgiveness with accuracy if Face-ID only gets to consider the bottom half of your face?
(1) Quest is a game console
Quest is clearly a gaming device. It boot straight into the store. The re-opens the store at every opportunity. This means, trying to use it for non-gaming means you're constantly reminded your on a VR game console. It'd be like trying to use a PS5 for work. I kind of get why they did it but I hate it. I'm happy my iPhone does not boot into the store and does not go back to the store every time I go to the home screen.
(2) Quest doesn't care about productivity
This is kind of the same as 1 but, ... I actually try to use my Rift-S with my desktop for certain activities almost daily. I press the right controller's system button, close the home tab, close the library tab, close the store tab, open the desktop. Then I interact with the a few desktop apps. I copy or move files and I run certain apps that I've written that work reasonably well with point and click controls
But, I tried accessing my desktop on a Quest via the various link (wired and wireless) and it crashed 1 of 3 times. This is clearly a niche feature to Meta. Meta expects you're just playing games from their store.
--
You can certainly argue Meta didn't get those things wrong but for me, they are wrong. The more productivity I can do on a Quest the more useful it is it me any many others. There are more phones than game consoles. IMO they should make the device be general purpose, not sell a "pro" version for productivity. Phone game sales far out shadow game console game sales. They don't need to design the Quest around a game console experience.
That said, forcing your hands to be full of controllers also sucks but at least you can play a game. I don't have a solution but it needs to get solved for these things to be seamless enough to wear and useful enough to want to.
And I would call myself an enthusiast.
For work purposes, the privacy factor is a huge benefit -- nobody in the room can peek at your "screen"
Though ideally we probably want some sort of “force gloves” that allow us to feel the weight of and manipulate objects in a virtual world using. We need way higher resolution on inputs than we have today, though, which currently amounts to an x/y/z and some button presses.
It seems crazy that after investing so much in the 'hard part', the VR hardware and software itself, they'd drop the ball on what seems mundane - basic design of UI controls.
It's like the Windows setting system. I'm using Win11/WSL, and while it works, the Windows settings are a mixture of Win95/Aero/3rd Party Plugins (Nvidia)/Win11 and some things that just look like Win3.1.
Googling to change DNS settings:
Step 1: Open the Control Panel. ...
Step 2: Open Network and Sharing Center. ...
Step 3: Choose the connection. ...
Step 4: Change adapter settings. ...
Step 5: Choose Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) ...
Step 6: Click on Properties. ...
Settings
Network and Internet
Choose either your wifi or Ethernet
Click Edit next to DNS Server Assignment
To be honest, in a lot of cases when you need “Advanced $ Settings” it still kicks you into the old Control Panel-style pop-up windows, but at least it’s almost all in one place now.
We don’t come up with totally new ways to interact with our computers often. And Facebook has never stood out for their UI brilliance.
The earlier versions were much easier to use and the later ones can become quite a nightmare to setup navigating the oculus/meta/facebook account silliness then ultimately it all feels a lot jankier than very early versions of the software both in Rift and Quest respectively.
Think if Zuck believes in this going forwards it would be wise to focus on removing some of this platform bureaucracy friction, took me 15-20 minutes to get my Quest up and running and logged in after not using it for 18 months.
There's a ton of half-baked old ideas in the UI, it's extremely confusing. Even basic stuff like trying to add my dad as a friend is super hard to do.
Literally every person I've helped set it up has also had to do a full manual restore (holding down hardware buttons to reset from a boot menu) because they app fails to connect during initial setup or there's some bug with adding payment.
Someone really needs to go into that team and rip lots of stuff out.
Their touch controllers and basic UI navigation are good though.
And your eyes are both covered so there isn't a good way to non-verbally communicate waning interest levels...I suppose a solution is to simply care less if I hurt my friend's feelings but I'd also like a way to spend time with friends without feeling trapped.
At least in an f2f or video call meeting that I'm bored of, I can zone out or look at my phone or tap on my laptop, or do anything but stare at the slides. With eye tracking, the headset knows (and presumably everyone else could know as well) when you're tuned out.
The eye tracking thing also kind of weirds me out from a privacy standpoint. It's already bad enough that web pages track how long you engage with different portions of content. Now they know what parts of images I stare at, and can algorithmically feed me content based solely on my gaze alone. Does that prospect not weird anyone else out? Or are most normal users like "plug me into AR TikTok, but with gaze mechanics now!"
I hadn’t considered those antisocial patterns that the technology is foisting on users, but I suppose one can also juts directly communicate verbally. Could work in low context cultures but not so well in high context cultures.
> The eye tracking thing also kind of weirds me out from a privacy standpoint.
Indeed. While I am less worried about Apple “going after me in a direct targeted nefarious way”, I don’t appreciate more levers for technology to disintermediate my manipulate my behavior, emotions, or interactions.
I vaguely remember there being some stuff from Apple about this when it launched - the apps don't have a lot of access to that raw tracking data
Had a quick google... the doc here has more details https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/Apple_Vision_Pro_Privacy_...
I don’t get it. Why not just tell them? What do you do if someone hands you a controller for a tv game equivalent?
I'm not the GP, but as they said you have all your other body language for communication. In VR-world, you have your eye direction and hands - not even your full eyes, with all the muscles around them that may communicate more than anything else on your body. I suppose you could flip them off. :)
It's an interesting point about how VR avatars, for all their 'presence', are very limited. VR video chat seems much better.
Those aren't your only two options. There are almost infinite ways to communicate.
Facial expression - eyes (the muscles around them), mouth (smile, blank, frown, etc) - posture, legs, arms, etc etc etc. You can look disinterested, you can look like it's the best thing ever, or any other human emotion.
Also, I've played Catan in VR and felt like I couldn't leave "like that". I had to finish the game and shake hands with the strangers I played with before leaving the game, it just felt like I was really there and it would have been rude to leave the game like that.
I did freak out the first time I joined a cinema room (can't remember the name of the game) as when I looked on my left side I saw people staring at me in the cinema room (which made me yell and it made everyone laugh, indicating to me that even my mic was on!)
That's exactly what I think. And that's exactly why I bought it.
I have:
* Oculus Rift 1 * HTC Vive * Quest 2
None of those made me want to write apps for them. They have nice games and I spent quality time with them, but just playing. I tried watching videos and it was ok, but it was still better to do that on my TV. I tried actually working with them, and the resolution was not enough.
The Vision Pro? It's the opposite. Games, such as they are, are underwhelming. It doesn't even have many '3d' experiences, windows are mostly flat (for now). And guess what? It excel at all the tasks the others fail at, because it's an iPad with a different form factor. If you can work from an iPad, you can work from the Vision Pro. Even watching videos is a better experience due to the passthrough, as you can still interact with people around you(if you so choose) – you can passthrough with the Quest, but you have to choose between your content and the world.
So now I'm spending my time learning how to work with it. It has incredible potential. It is not the mass market device yet, but the next one should be transformative.
Sorry I can't and why the heck should I. I can get vastly superior work computer for 10% of the price (of goggles) that has none of the apple nor general tablet hard and massive limits. Huge constant time saving on work effectivity.
I could do some work with samsung ultra series (mouse, keyboard and massive screen cinnectivity via single usbc out if box), but even that is massively subpar.
Maybe we just do vastly different things, but all folks I know fall into my category, IT or not.
But this is missing the point that, while it can do work things reasonably well, that's not its primary use case. All of the marketing focuses on content consumption - movies, reading, reliving photos and videos, facetime - and other things typically already done on an iPhone or iPad. For those use cases, it's pretty much perfect, with the text clarity being leagues ahead of any other production device, maybe except some enterprise-targeted Varjo headsets.
tl;dw -- reviewers are understandably focusing on the technical specs, but ignoring the much more simple metric: conceptually, does the device fool the mind into accepting what it sees as "real"? And the answer for the Vision Pro is yes. It will get lighter, better, cheaper, but even now, it's important to realize that the AVP can transport you to another realistic reality in a way no other device has managed. I've only done the in-store demo, but I understand what the video is saying, and it resonates for me.
If that is the future of content, sign me up.
Edit: there's a time limit on edits? Okay, I'm replying to that comment with the correct URL, and adding it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krpbAMJlLTc
They also massively strengthened the glass. (I don’t have a case on my iPhone. I drop it constantly, most recently on a double-black ski run while I was trying to get it to be a GoPro.)
> give them glass on the backside too so you can’t get lucky landing on that side
Fair enough, just noticed mine is cracked there. Not bothering me so will leave as is.
And they are anticipating a future where the weight is significantly lower and people are wearing them for many hours a day. And so they wanted a corollary for AirPod transparency mode i.e. being able to interact with people without taking device off.
Here are my takeaways FWIW:
1. The only body position I find comfortable and compatible with prolonged use is laying down on a couch with my head elevated on the arm. This automatically relieves all pressure on the top and back of my head from the device, and transfers it to my face.
By finding just the right head position/angle, looking up and away, I can create a balance of downward forces distributed across my forehead/nose/cheekbones. If done just right, that 600 grams (1.3 lbs.) of VP hardware then has an effective surface area of about 8 square inches of skin interface with the foam of the light shield cushion.
Note: the VP with knitted strap weighs 600 grams; without the strap it weighs 550 grams (1.2 lbs.)
Lying down while using VP, strap weight is irrelevant since it does not exert force on your head.
Do this experiment: get bags of coffee beans/nuts/raisins/frozen peas/corn, or a steak or bacon or ground beef, whatever weighs a total of around 1.2 pounds, then lie down and put it over your upper face.
Close your eyes and think about how it feels. Remember the VP interface with your skin will be soft foam — NOT product packaging.
Consider that when using VP, your attention will NOT be on how it feels but rather on whatever it is you're doing/watching.
2. For use in the supine position as detailed above, the knitted strap is far more comfortable and easy to use compared to the two-strap alternative that comes with VP.
You don't even have to tighten the strap when you're lying down, since the seal against your face is provided courtesy of gravity.
Makes me think of the blurring effect of phosphors on a CRT.
But even that is a massive technological achievement when you look at raw numbers in the article - those 4K displays in Vision Pro are already 3386 PPI.
To this very day, I still dont have a VR headset. I am actually a tad behind with the latest ones, if I am honest about it.
There is a VR place in our City which I take my children to (and myself) for some fun for an hour. I do enjoy it. We play together on those Zombie or Archery games.
One of the main reasons I am tempted to get VR is to got the extra mile for some games or.. more specifically.. simulations.
I want to give my kids a slight head start to things like driving. With a decent simulator, steering wheel and VR, will be educational for them. I would need to build (or perhaps just buy) a new PC.
Is all this worth it for a driving simulator experience?
Interesting to see the future of VR and AR. I think these techs will merge in one way or another, ending up being small like a pair of glasses. I do think this tech as it evolves will eventually replace monitors. Things like this will be replaced, like giant mainframes are nothing compared to modern phones.
If you are from a developed country with decent wages and think of yourself as a tech enthusiast you should just go buy it as a professional investment to learn about the tech. Even if you don't want the gaming it is easily good enough to give you insight into the the broader tech (working in VR, social experiences, etc) and it's a pretty good standalone WebXR viewer which very easy to pick up.
(I have the same logic that anybody who buys a Vision Pro for development is insane not to also pick up a Quest at 1/7th the price so that they can at least have a full perspective on where VR is at)
Yes, without sounding like a big shot, can affort to splash this type of money. However, just because I can does not mean I should. I have a family and spending money needs discussion with the Mrs (as she does to me)
Also, it is finding a place to put it in the home especially with a toddler.
I have to prioritise, as there are other things in tech to be enthusiastic about. There are atleast 4 other things as well as wanting to dive into VR. Thing is, the other things I have access now.
This teleportation/telepresence is the thing that struck me the most. I'd love to pop into a friend's living room for a beer without worrying about them living in another country.
The way a large number of young people do this is just by seeing their friends in voice chat on discord and then joining on their phone.
On a related note, we're probably also less than a decade away from telepresence via a humanoid robot at an affordable price.
I think that sums it up pretty well. More companies should launch products like that!
The iPhone was form over function, no keyboard, no apps, and too expensive. You can't even use a stylus with it! It doesn't do anything that my phone and ipod don't already do better.
The iPad was absolutely roasted for just being a giant expensive iPhone with a dumb name, it doesn't even have its own apps. It doesn't do anything that my iPhone can't already do.
The iMac was underpowered and overpriced, didn't even have a floppy drive, didn't have real connectors just something called USB that no one had ever heard of, it wasn't compatible with 99% of the software on the market. It doesn't do anything that my PC doesn't already do.
We see all these products as unmitigated hits now, but at the time they launched, it was still very much up for debate.
From here they hardware will get cheaper, the bugs can be worked out, and everything will become more refined.
VR as a category is niche. Apple will expand the public consciousness of it, but at $3,500 AVP is also niche.
There's nothing wrong with that. If it takes a decade for the tech to be good enough so be it--I'll be glad people were innovating and experimenting in the interim to get it right, and that the folks willing to sign up as beta testers helped push progress forward.
People get mad about this stuff--you don't have to buy it! I still haven't and probably won't until it feels more ready.
And being there it was hella interesting to see it develop. Most tech isn't born right for the masses. And without the pioneers it likely won't get there.
If I am in VR field, and wasn't very tight on the money (which I assume the author isn't), I probably will keep a Vision Pro with me even if it's a literal peace of junk just so I can play with it occasionally for my curiosity.
I wonder what's the difference between me and him.
To make it clear, this is not a loaded question but a genuine one. His decision is objectively more reasonable than mine (keeping unneeded junk around), but I just can't get it.
I would really prefer a device that is lighter, cooler, with longer battery life, more CPU available to the displays that matter, and probably cheaper by having less stuff.
I don't think the fake eyes make any part of the experience less creepy in social interactions. Instead that energy could have been used to, for instance, illuminate 850hz IR light so the user would have superhuman night vision. Being in a dark place and not being able to read a menu is much more immersion breaking than having to tell someone "yes I see you" and in fact you have this conversation with everyone regardless of the fake eyes.
You can't possibly extrapolate the movie watching retention rate from Oculus Go to Apple Vision Pro. That's like saying most people won't use ipod based on the data we collected from our walkman.
> It has its daily and weekly use cases
What do you do with it?
Daily use case: portable Macbook monitor weekly use case: watching shows or a movie. I have to pause due to dry eyes, not due to the heaviness. After the first 2 days of using it, it's not actually that heavy afterward, but it is noticeable if you pay attention.
shareplay over facetime is wonderful. i have watched a few big movies with my buddies in this way
I watch a show / movie with my girlfriend a couple times a week. A nice TV is still better for that obviously.
But I watch stuff on my own every single day. Personal media consumption for me is probably 8x my group-based consumption. I would wager most people these days have similar habits.
I do think my situation fits current society more though. Families under one roof consuming media only through the shared TV is less and less how the (at least Western) world operates.
You are also kind of... ignoring the fact that the walkman was very successful. Ridiculously so, in fact. Such that, people did predict ipod like things would be a success because of it. There was a whole line of successful portable music devices leading up to the ipod.
I do have to say, for me it does add up to one huge missing element for Vision Pro: why Apple didn't ship some kind of co-presence features on day 1 is totally baffling to me. I think it likely stems from the fact they clearly missed their mark with Personas and presumably they didn't want to then introduce cartoon style avatars like Meta did. They've decided to die on the hill of realistic avatars and they are actually dying there. It means people hate Personas, they don't have co-presence which is damaging the media viewing and preventing a lot of the AR and professional use cases from developing where co-presence is also a must, sometimes the primary feature.
It's fascinating to me because Apple pitched so hard at their headset not being socially isolating, but they ultimately created the most socially isolating headset of all.
Something I observed in the late 90's/early 2000's with my experiments of outputting video from a PC to a TV is - something that looks really rough even at the same resolution on a PC looks significantly better on a TV. The reason being twofold:
1. TV pixels on a CRT are usually diagonally arranged, instead of side-by-side, which helps to hide jaggies.
2. The phosphorous illumination on the glass itself isn't super sharp on a CRT like it is on more modern displays.
The result being - something a little fuzzier makes for a better viewing experience. You can perceive individual pixels (and resulting artifacts) less.
Can anybody relate?
PS: I bought a VR headset to check my bias and I don't use it because it's just uncomfortable to wear.
The tech is interesting but I am still waiting for the software to show me something that doesn't feel like a gimmick.
As long as those apps come, it could be great
which headsets are you referring to? surely not the ones in the article since they have very good passthrough
Despite that, VR is pretty much just a cool toy. Yes there are cool and interesting experiences in VR, but there are also a lot of limitations, not all of which are technological. I think VR will stay around for a while, but I don't see it moving past the "cool toy" stage anytime soon.
AVPro is the best thing to happen to Q3 because the Q3 is ready for prime time at a price point people want and, despite metas reputation, with an open enough platform to support general computing. If you aren’t a gamer or aren’t consuming 3d content, yeah VR isn’t for you. But otherwise, yeah it’s a pretty cool experience for the price.
Once in a while I want to get into VR, but understanding all the options and etc makes my head spin and I quit on it, go back to other hobbies. Much of the discussion online, news stories (with any detail) and etc is all very "already knows the VR lay of the land / knee deep in it". It makes it difficult to understand / get the lay of the land. I'm almost burnt out just thinking about looking into it again.
Now if Apple provided a more affordable route in in the future, I know my consistent user experence with Apple would make that choice potentially a lot easier.
Apples current approach to VR doesn't seem like it's going to help the gaming situation much either, since they opted to rely entirely on hand tracking which is much less accurate and capable than the standard-ish controllers used on every other VR platform. Releasing a game on Apple Vision opens up more potential buyers, but comes at the cost of having to accommodate a very limited lowest common denominator input method.
But younger people won’t have the same attachment. Young people already use mobile phones for things we would never do outside of a desktop. There is no question that the range of experiences you can have in AR/VR.
Last winter I had limited opportunities to excercise, so I tried FitXR and it turned out to be insanely engaging. Reality can't give that level of engagement and multisensory feedback. I did boxing and HIIT daily, and while I don't like to sweat like crazy in my living room, that was extremely positive experience that helped me get through the winter.
It’s engaging and challenging in a way little else I can do at home is, and it’s pretty good for getting some movement and cardio in to boot. The days I play it’s almost always for an hour and if it weren’t for physical exhaustion I could go longer (once when live-streaming my play to and audio chatting with a family member, I played for closer to two hours straight thanks to having something to distract me from my tiredness).
Contractors demo:
Even now, I'd love a solution to easily put up and teardown a monitor on my dinner table so I can get rid of my desk.
They are soulless, passionless, sterile companies with only the goal of market dominance and investor growth. VR is never going to flourish here though I'm sure that won't stop the iSheep lapping it up and buying what marketing tells them to, like the Apple watch.
Even then, it's not something I can do indefinitely. I've played GT7 on a friend's PSVR2, and sometimes elevation changes in particular tend to mess up the brain for a moment. It's somewhat disconcerting. Also, as someone who wears glasses, there's just no way to make the headset fit entirely correctly, and it tends to slip over time and the view becomes blurry.
Outside of that... control schemes are the major issue for me. You can't just blindly walk around in your room without falling over things, so movement is highly unnatural in VR unless you're in a cockpit. And the various attempts at making the player manipulate something with those hand controllers are just embarrassingly bad. I think this is one of the reason why so many VR games feel like toys you play with once before discarding them as a failed experiment.
The only other killer app are pinball simulations. It's surprising how much depth perception can make it so much clearer what the ball is doing, and the downsides of VR don't matter because you're stationary and only need two buttons.
I like racing sims, so I was interested in VR in the early days, but after experiencing it, I decided for now that I just don't want the associated hassle.
And, if anything, Half Life Alyx remains the killer _gaming_ app (and it probably isn’t either if I’m being honest).
For me the only apps that kept any of my interest are rhythm games like Beat Saber or Pistol Whip.
to me, this is the entire point of VR. you want to virtually see something other than what your eyes can see in reality. a situation where you want to be fully immersed into this other space. i totally buy into that.
the confusion of use to me is the AR aspect of it. that's where the limitations take center stage. the limited FOV can't be ignored in AR. my brain buys into the suspension of disbelief for VR, but for AR my brain knows it's my real world, just limited.
The disconnection is also my big issue with VR.
However, as an AR platform, whether it's pass-through or some future passive system, I can see a time when I might get one. I can imagine a significantly better version of the VisionPro that replaces my laptop as my "big" computing device.
I think the form factor is the feature. In the same way that my tablet doesn't do anything my laptop can't do, but it's form factor makes it useable in different scenarios. I know people who exclusively use iPad Pros as their all-purpose "big" computing device, never touching a laptop.
Before it becomes widespread I can see it being adopted in specialist situations, many of the same things that the Microsoft AR hardware was never good enough for. Hololens was amazing to experience, but no where near amazing enough to actually be that useful. Passthrough AR like the VisionPro might actually manage it.
I don't think it will become something everyone has, but it will fill a slot in the mix of technology for some people, along with smart-watches, phones, tablets, laptops and desktops. Each appeals to different people.
Now, whether the technology ever quite gets there is the big question for me. I think a lot has to improve in the hardware if they can ever make it something I would want to use on a daily basis.
I work fully remote and Zoom/Meet works fine for meetings. But I kinda dread things like team happy hour and find you have to keep them structured like a meeting to work with group video calls.
Visuals aren't even the key factor here. It's audio. I find the obstacle to casual socializing is not being able to directionally focus audio so overlapping conversations are possible.
FWIW Apple's fundamental concept is to address that very problem - to not disconnect your eyes from your surroundings; they work very hard so that you can see your surroundings and that others can see your eyes, and so that their apps tend into integrate your surroundings.
(The article talks about it, and the author thinks they are shortchanging VR.)
> Can anybody relate?
The way I personally relate is the old, seemingly fundamental human instinct I have that shows up especially when new tech is incompatible with my existing life. It forces change if I adopt it, which I don't appreciate, and worse I might be compelled to change if it becomes a normal part of life - if it's necessary competitively or to sufficiently fit into society (e.g., smartphones).
So it's the old story: First I laugh at it (we seem past that for VR); second I say it conflicts with the orthodoxy (my established life, in this case); and third, someday, I'll say I knew it all along. :)
I'm kinda in the second stage, and maybe you are too? As a technologist - that is, as someone whose job is to evaluate and adapt new technologies - I can't afford to indulge that 3-step cycle or I will be giving people advice based on those instincts (1. 'that's ridiculous/vaporware/useless, don't worry about it', 2. 'it's not compatible/applicable for your business', 3. 'it's what everyone is doing!') and fail to be ahead of the curve. Plus, those instincts limit me as a person. So I've needed to learn to recognize that cycle and not act on it, but to evaluate new tech on its own merits.
That turns out to be hard even after lots of practice - it's hard to ignore all the instinct and the constant signals from everyone else, and think for yourself. We're social animals. So it's hard to imagine the killer, high value apps until they are out there, until everyone else signals their value. But some that stand out as possibilities to me:
- AR: Data and metadata on things in the world around me. It seems especially good for work with physical objects: Showing me their specs, diagrams of how they should look, alternate perspectives. Imagine working on your car with AR.
- 3-D VR work rooms: A room with all of your electronic documents, videos, applications, etc. for a project. Also you can have virtual objects - the live control panel from the router, copies of the physical object you are designing, etc. The room can be as large as you want. It seems especially great for teams, where people can bring in documents and objects to share and work on together with everyone else. This seems so much better than current collaboration.
- Presence at things like sporting events: Seats right on the sideline or even views from the field itself: Watch Messi's dribbling and goal form the goalie's perspective. Watch the pitch from the batter's perspective (or the referee's, for those controversial calls). Also for theater, etc.
- 3-D, immersive films and games, of course. Art seems to have great potential, but will need some time to develop, as artists learn the nuances of the medium (and as only games get funding).
I have personally wanted VR for flight sims. It is jarring to have a screen full of instruments or looking out the window, but difficult to do both without a crazy physical setup that I do not want in my office. VR solves this by simply moving your head, the same as pilots do in real life.
The killer app is what I have when I get lucid inside a dream. To only cover vision is missing so much. I can remember being in a war in a plane and getting shot down in a dream. The decent felt unbelievable. That is the killer app for me. That had nothing to do with vision.
The UI was also a bit clumsy. I noticed bugs and even the apple employee was stunned how I got a window 'stuck' in a place. It became unresponsive.
Having said that, the 3d spatial videos were spectacular. I did feel like I was almost there. The 3d movies were also amazing and had fairly good colors. Overall it wouldn't replace an OLED tv, but it was impressive.
When I took it off, I was thankful of how clear I can see with my eyes. Everything seemed like '8k'. I guess the Vision Pro is fun, but it was a bit uncomfortable and not really AR imo
Hmm so basically they say Apple massively overengineered it and doesn't expect to sell it to more than 3 people at that price, which is right.
But Occulus has been owned by Facebook for a long time now, what stopped them?
They could at least have an aspirational "research" device that they sold for 5000, in addition to the semi-affordable (minus privacy concerns) stuff.
But when Facebook bought them, they could have afforded to do the same thing as apple. Make a very expensive "here's the future, now queue up in an orderly manner and wait while we make it affordable" Rift Mega-Giga-Something model.
More likely they will reduce the weight by release a non-pro version without features that most people don't really need (like the external screen).
On the other hand, I think the author is overly pessimistic in thinking that no VR headset will be able to replace his dual 6k monitors. In the long term, aren't we headed for VR with the equivalent of a retina display?
Presumably he has a specific type of film in mind here.
If the Vision Pro can soon replicate that experience they will print (even more) money and could lock the big film studios down forever pretty much.
That is the killer use case. Everything else seems like fluff.
You can always choose a lower fidelity co-presence, but again if you are doing that why are you wearing the heavy goggles? Just get a discord server and watch on there. I think there are very real technical challenges to combining all of the important aspects, but it is also the category of experience I am most excited by.
They aren't used that much because it's a silly gimmick and nothing more. People don't roleplay nearly as much in actual VR experiences. Real life isn't Ready Player One, and real people may say they want this, but then they try it and never do it again.
It was neat to socialize with strangers in VR during covid lockdowns. It was instantly less neat when I could socialize with my real friends again. I don't have any friends from that period, and I was hanging out with VR strangers for tens of hours a weekend. There's just too many real, physical drawbacks to doing anything in VR that means unless you specifically crave the experience that ONLY VR can provide, like a driving simulator game, you don't really do it.
I've gone clubbing in VR. It's just not that special.
All the talk about AVP is full of people who seem to have zero understanding of what has existed for almost a decade in the VR space, don't seem very familiar with VR, and haven't tried to get friends and family to try VR. They all think Ready Player One, or The Matrix is right around the corner. Reality isn't magic.
For reference, VR is literally a game changer for Sim Racing, and even there most people don't care about it. Even then, it's only brought out occasionally, or for specific reasons. Headsets just suck, blocking your eyes with some form of screen will always suck for a social species like humans.
So why isn't it happening with Vision Pro? Because Apple hasn't shipped proper co-presence features. Vision Pro lacks a proper Avatar system like every other platform has, so they can't have apps like this, ergo they are left entirely with trying to convince people that solo experiences are a valid value proposition, all the while attempting to sell their headset as non-isolating.
Also, there's an IMAX app that actually simulates being in an IMAX theater. It's silly, but having the seats and railing and being able to look to the side and see the dim IMAX sign glowing on the wall goes a very, very long way. But for now there's not much you can do inside of it. I really,
The only thing that's really missing is the sound. The built-in speakers sound fantastic, but lack that low-end, guttural rumble that you can only get in a theater or with a very fancy home theater setup (which I don't have because I have a family, with a partner who's very noise-sensitive, and a house that's just not big enough to watch movies in without waking up my kid — I'd just never get to use it).
I haven't actually tried watching it hooked up to my homepods, which I'd guess would help. But yeah, the visual experience is remarkable. They can get there if they keep putting effort into it.
Visually? It looks far better than an IMAX screen. It's an order of magnitude better compared to watching 3D movies in a movie theater with '3d glasses'.
All it is missing is sound. It's no slouch, but you don't have a subwoofer :)
The people who can afford thousands of dollars on VR gear that will be obsolete in three years generally spend their days in nice environments.
If you want VR to catch on, make it dirt cheap, so that people in crummy circumstances can use it to escape from reality.
What makes Vision Pro truly interesting to me is that we can replace our laptop screen with a view containing a larger display and multiple ancillary displays.
I have not heard any such complaints.
Sure, I heard some complaining that the FOV should be wider, but not being able to work because of it? Not a peep.
The resolution is incredible, you can't see any pixels at all. There's zero screen door effect.
If the concern is with the Mac Virtual Display, then it's understandable. There seems to be some compression going on and it doesn't look as crisp.
Native apps though? They are perfect
> eschewing gamers
They are not doing that. It's the companies not porting games over (the ones that don't have issues with the lack of controllers). It may be simply a matter of time, as just porting games and keeping existing assets will make them look terrible with the higher resolution of the Vision Pro.
My sense is that the Vision Pro is certainly, at least, the best "travel monitor" ever built - and it's at a price point and comfort point where that is very hard to use to justify a purchase. That said, future work can improve both substantially.
If I try to imagine myself living the same workflow on Apple Vision Pro, I get hung up on the cost. $3,500 is a big ask for a VR iPad with a lot of the same pitfalls as the tablet.
I'm not even sure if AVP can side load apps or watch movies over SFTP, but I don't think it matters at this point: the global mindshare is sold on Apple being the leader now, and personally I don't think it's the hardware driving the difference. Strangely, I think it came down to "look n feel" for a lot of it.
> the global mindshare is sold on Apple being the leader now
Besides Casey Neistat and Mark Gurman, I'm really not hearing much from the "global mindshare" anymore. The Quest didn't really get any fanfare either, but it did move units and get market penetration from the start. Apple is on a slow roll right now, and until they get Half Life: Alyx or MSFS2020-tier system sellers, I'm not sure the in-group will even consider them on-par with PCVR. Given Apple's audience, I half expect their biggest VR competitor to be Sony's PSVR2.
it's nice for browsing the web, but you have to deal with ads inside their chromium fork.
for working with it as a monitor for work though. it's usable but the resolution is not there yet.
No way I'm going to buy a piece of equipment Zuck can brick at any minute...
Apple seems to have a bit better reputation in this regard, but I'm still not sure I'd risk getting a device...
Instead of a battery pack on your waist, you just plug in your iPhone. It can provide charge and a nice bit of compute as well.
You could be able to plug the iPhone into the battery pack though.
Call me a Luddite, but I am increasingly disdainful of all the New Shiny stuff, and see society trending toward lower-tech, traditional pursuits.
One day they’ll be right, but it seems like a pretty risky bet, always
Yes the VR experience was pretty dang sick, but to be real… the pass though is not as good your own vision. Is it ground breaking? Yes. But it’s v1.0, details are fuzzy, the color palette was meh, and we’ve still yet to invent an instrument with the dynamic contrast of the human eye.
I tell you what was quite fascinating: the audio. Nearly every clip they shot they must have used a head dummy spatial microphone and hired industry best to master the audio tracks. My eyes weren’t fooled, but my ears were (other than a roll off under 142hz or so); mainly due to the phase and eq shifting and their use of multiple sources along the head band.
I’d really like to see far more focus on the audio side.
And as far as actual use cases? They need to go after live sports. Otherwise it’ll stay a gadget of the technophile.
The vision pro seems to miss the mark in some many areas and seems like it's ahead of it's time, which is odd for Apple and the Quest 3 seems to beat it in a lot of areas.
In some ways I am surprised Apple released it and didn't keep working on it in the lab, but in others, I think they wanted to get it out in users hands and see how they use it and what devs start to build with it, they also wanted to normalise the idea of such devices, so when something more functional is out there, people will be happier to use it.
I was a day 1 purchaser who bought it fully expecting the device to just be an early access "dev kit" and have been shocked at how well it's fit into my day-to-day uses for a huge variety of things.
Some of the things I like to do with it:
1. Gaming with friends: I play Baldur's Gate 3 with a group of 4 every week and can very comfortably relax on my recliner while running a discord window and stream BG3 from Geforce Now with an app called Nexus+ just using a ps5 controller. It's a very seamless experience and one of the highlights of my week.
2. Reading comic books: I thing this is one of the most underrated things to do with the Vision Pro. Being able to adjust the size of comic panels to an enormous size helps me appreciate the linework and detail put into every page.
3. Software development/photo + video editing: I use my MacBook Pro + screen mirroring to get a larger screen in an immersive environment that I personally find less distracting to get into a focused state of mind for writing code or creative endeavors like photo + video editing.
4. Entertainment: Watching movies, tv shows, and 180 SBS videos like SliceofLifeVR's content has been awesome and incredibly immersive. I much prefer the Vision Pro to my TV for solo viewing. Obviously, this falls short when looking to share the experience with others, but a lot of my viewing is alone, so it's fine for me.
Things that haven't really worked very well that I wanted to like:
1. Reading books + taking notes: I read a lot for book clubs I host and envisioned this being a great way to have a lot of available space to spread out notes and things during book clubs on discord and just find it to not be particularly enjoyable compared to reading a physical book or kindle.
2. VisionOS Native productivity: I've spent a decent amount of time editing spreadsheets and writing documentation with the VisionOS Native Microsoft Office Suite + PDF readers but find that there's a lot of minor things that add up to make it a less usable product for productivity outside of the context of screen mirroring. I'm going to keep trying to figure out a workflow that works better for me, but just haven't yet.
For context, I'm in my late 20's and live alone currently, so there are a lot of people for whom this device doesn't make as much sense for—I'm solely describing my personal uses for it as a member of the likely target audience.
Overall, I'm extremely pleased that it can do a lot of things that I find fulfilling and entertaining with little to no resistance. I can confidently say that for the tasks I listed above, it's my favorite way of doing them by a pretty large margin.
Additionally, I use the Solo Knit Band (M) for all of my usage with no modifications and find it comfortable for around 5-6 hours with no breaks in wearing it. I fully recognize that this isn't the normal experience for many consumers, and I likely will upgrade to some type of Halo band when a company like BoboVR release an AVP product line, but out of the box, the comfort is more than enough for me to use for extended periods of time with no mods.
Since buying it on release day, I've used it probably 2-4 hours most days with some days of 10-12 hours and some days of no usage and it's become an integrated part of my lifestyle. If anyone has any questions for me, I'd be happy to answer about my experience with it.
I thought the Vision Pro didn't support SBS video? And that that was the reason why the people who like to bring up porn in every conversation about VR said it would fail.
I anticipate within 3-6 months, other major offerings will have been ported over and have relative feature parity with their counterparts but with the benefit of the increased resolution and no screen door effect.
Things I like:
1) It really is an upgrade vs. working on just my 16" MBP screen. I'm in the minority that actually finds the knit headband pretty comfortable, and can fairly easily go 3-4 hours with it on before it starts to bother me. I do wish there was the option to break specific OSX apps out into their own window or at least have multiple screens, but when I can put most of my work in a web browser or app that the AVP supports, it works extremely well. At worst, it's still more eyeball real estate than just the MBP screen itself.
2) ALVR/Moonlight actually work pretty well, if you have the WiFi infrastructure to support it. It works properly on my Unifi setup but it struggled a bit on a friend's wifi. But it's really cool to play PCVR games using such a high resolution display, as well as playing 2D games on a screen that appears far larger than even my 65" TV
3) 3D movies are insanely good on it. I've always wanted to really love 3D movies, but the downsides for both active and passive 3D really kept them from being a resounding hit with me. Not the case on the AVP. No compromise on brightness or FPS makes it a much nicer experience. 2D movies and TV are also quite nice, with the only real downside being the audio - it's reasonably good, and I can enjoy movies on it no problem, but it also doesn't match proper home theater audio. On the whole, though, I think it's the best personal movie watching experience you can get for 3.5k. A projector that even approaches the visual quality/relative screen size of the AVP is $5k+. Obviously, though, a real home theater setup can be enjoyed with more people. The individual nature can also be a strength, though - if you want to watch something without disturbing your partner, you don't have to have a TV on in the bedroom.
4) I feel significantly less disconnected from the world when using it than I have my other VR/AR headsets. I can function with it on moving around my house, etc.
Things I dislike:
1) I would love it if it was lighter and I could wear it all day, but it's not a huge deal for me.
2) The OS is miles ahead of my Quest Pro, but it still feels unpolished at times. When everything works it's perfect - but there are still some bugs. Until 1.1 released, something was going on with Safari that could bring the whole thing to it's knees until you rebooted it. Not sure if it was a memory leak or if it was something else, but if I had a web browser open for an extended period of time, it would eventually bring the whole system to it's knees. This is fixed, but I still have some (more rare) issues with apps going nonresponsive and not being closable via the usual X, etc., requiring a force quit. I'm sure this will all get fixed in time, but it's not the same level of polish I've grown accustomed to with Apple software.
3) I'd really like some way to sync audio to external sources. You can do some hackery with a Siri shortcut, but I'd love to be able to sit down on my couch, put on a movie, and watch it while making use of my sound system vs. being forced to go with the AVP speakers or bluetooth headphones.
All in all, I like it quite a bit. I don't know that I would recommend it, with the pricing being what it is - I think if you're a good fit for it, you already are interested in it or will be interested in it when you hear about it in general.
Think of it this way. Most people think it's rude to talk to each other indoors with sunglasses on. That's the slimmest form factor you're going to get, and it still steps on the toes of human connection.
All it takes is to get to that point with AR. So it's more a critique of the state of AR's present usefulness rather than an innate, immovable reflection on society.
At least with google glass it was trivial to see where the eyes were pointed.
I do not feel that this loss makes it rude to have an outside conversation wearing sunglasses in a sunny environment.
So, I still think that AR will find its way in. I'm not saying it won't reduce the socialization experience further. It'll just be perceived as semi-necessary, understandable, and life will move on.
Having AR glasses on is totally different.
Children used to be told "don't sit so close to the TV" and now we're strapping monitors to our heads.
The main difference is that there might be any number of equally-or-more-valid reasons to have AR/MR glasses on than "it's too bright".
Like, "I'm on call for blahblah" or "I'm watching the baby monitor" or... whatever, a million possibilities.
So yes, AR glasses detract, but no, it's not different.
Also, lots of wearers consider that social interaction complexifier a feature, not a bug. Which is why you see a lot of cops wear sunglasses all the time, even with no sun. For a deep, heart-to-heart conversation with somebody important? Sure, take them off. For anything else...
That's not a problem with sunglasses because it's inherently impossible for you to be doing something else.
The issue that people have with AR glasses (and to some extent, people wearing sunglasses unnecessarily) is that AR glass wearers are thinking more about themselves than the perspective of other person. And then to defend AR glasses saying "I could be doing something important but actually I'm paying attention" is like doubling down on that lack of awareness.
I'm not opposed to AR glassses. I'm just explaining why they are a bit of a faux pas and the people who think they are OK are also the reason why they are not OK.
I feel like if you went up to someone and asked “how can we improve this social interaction?” Literally nobody would suggest strapping a screen to your face anywhere in the list of improvements.
Here’s some other technology improvements:
What would make your TV experience better?
* make it bigger * allow it to use the internet to watch infinite shows * make it cheaper * make the colors brighter
What would make your analog home-phone experience better? * make it portable * make it smaller * allow me to save contacts within it * allow me to take other notes * now that I have this little thing in my pocket anyways, make it do more stuff
Then when we think of the problems that lead to AR being the solution, it’s almost entirely related to business problems. Surgery, manufacturing, carpentry, construction… all would benefit from a HUD that tells you what to put where. Those are real benefits.
But anything that people would do in a social situation? Almost never will the answer to a human interaction problem to be “attach a screen to your face”. In that scenario, all of the solutions are really in search of a problem.
I already do this but more manually. For example, I don't try to remember everyone's birthday. Instead, I put their birthday's in my calendar, get a notification when it's close, and use this information to enrich our relationship.
It seems reasonable to believe this could be extended much further if the barrier to recording and recalling the information was reduced.
Perhaps. It might be a generation or two before the "that's ... creepy" vibes fade. Reminds me a bit of that scene in minority report after the eye swap and the protagonist passes by a billboard and the avatar asks him about how the pants he purchased worked out.
I do something similar to the calendar thing too. I reach out a few days ahead of time so it doesn't seem like I'm just doing it reflexively like an unfeeling robot because facebook prompted me to do so day of.
I think you're on to something. Glass was an expensive flop from the word "go" but the second generation did live on in these specialized sectors.
I suspect that - at least for this decade - AR is still going to be the specialized/industry tech and that VR is going to be the consumer oriented tech.
Wearing an AR device is like telling you something more important than our conversation might come up and I need to be able to quickly shift my focus from you to it.
Maybe it's my age (early 40s) but it's common for our friend/family group to shame each other (in a half-kidding-half-not way) when somebody gets into their phone too much during a social event. "If you're going to be here, be here" is a mantra we tease each other with. We hold each other accountable enough to where when my elementary-age son picks out a movie for us to watch, if one of the adults in the room starts scrolling on their phone he'll pause the movie and ask them if they're going to pay attention or not.
I can see a future where people use AR, there's a setting that indicates "full focus" vs "distracted", and people will ask others to stay in "full focus" mode when talking. This would minimize the number of notifications the user receives in an effort to lend focus to the conversation.
It'll be the same general expectation as what you're describing, but with a step towards concession and acceptance of the tech.
There will also probably be an in-between period where people who remain glued to their phone try to take the morale high ground against those who are using AR goggles by saying they're giving more focus to the conversation :)
Of course, some people will feel like these changes reduce the humanity of the interaction because you're letting the device do too much of the work and others will disagree and say that the tech is just helping automate and improve a task they were already performing. Both camps will have fair points.
These sorts of behaviors which augment the conversation seem distinct from concepts like "be shown new text messages while mid-conversation" which I do think should be able to be silenced and conveyed as being silenced.
I did make good use of Google Lens when traveling to France last year. I found myself engaging with the world by looking through my phone's camera frequently as it made understanding restaurant menus much easier.
iOS and Android both have Focus Mode:
https://blog.google/products/android/android-focus-mode/
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/set-up-a-focus-iphd62...
I guess I don't use this feature when having a conversation with another person because it would require me to get out my phone and change modes when the conversation begins. That's too much of a barrier. In some settings, though, like when going to watch a movie in public, there's a dedicated window where people are expected to shift their phones to a socially acceptable mode. I do respond accordingly in those situations.
With AR, it would seem this process could be automated through facial recognition / voice detection. If there was a setting that said, "Don't notify me of text messages when the system detects I am conversing with another person. Do this automatically" then it seems quite practical to have that enabled. It also seems reasonable that it would be implemented because the concept of "disable notifications temporarily" already exists on phones.
This was something jobs was adept at navigating around along with Jonny Ive.
Tim Cook is a product idiot. Or maybe more to the point he is adept at making factories and has run out of products for them to manufacture. So what’s more important to him his giving the factory more to do vs designing the right product.
I think this statement is too strong. I see too many people every day in elevators, in lines, all sorts of different places that are on their phone and specifically avoiding eye contact with other human beings. That suggests that the term “vast majority” is probably too strong.
People want human connections less and less, especially with strangers, service providers, “NPCs” as some would lovingly call them. I think good AR will accelerate this, not fail due to a shrinking taboo.
Putting your phone down for a few hours to stare at the trees, or the water, or the clouds passing by, and maybe chatting up a couple nearby people doing the same, that is now the epitome of disconnected blissful ignorance.
> I don’t buy this. So many people walking around absolutely glued to their smartphones.
I think it is right-ish, and just needs refinement:
Where people have to have human interactions when they're out in the world, the vast majority of them want them to be real in-person.
If I choose to interact with someone, or accept their attempt at interaction, I don't want a device between me and them. I often don't choose that, but this doesn't minimise my preference for non-tech-filtered integration if interaction does happen.
If I'm out on a trail run or trek I'm perfectly happy to exchange pleasantries with others out and about, I'm quite happy to give directions or similar assistance to a tourist while meandering locally (if asked politely, otherwise you will get sent well out of your way), but far less so if they are not looking me in the face.¹
> especially with strangers, service providers, “NPCs”, …
…, bloody survey people, charity muggers, those who think that because they believe [deity] loves me I'm somehow beholden to care, local press outside the station when I get off a train delayed by a significant incident, …
--
[1] caveat: I'm away that some people are very uncomfortable with direct eye contact, that is quite different from not entirely paying attention because of a bit of tech.
If they're a couple, why would they feel the need to always talk? You don't need to always be talking to enjoy just doing your own thing in each other's presence. Even prior to the proliferation of smartphones this was pretty normal in my experience, you spend most of your time having the ability to talk to the people you like, at some point you run out of things to say and are comfortable enough with each other to just do your own thing while in each other's company. It says nothing about their connection with each other.
Also, when shared experience hits the next version (or the one after that, or..) and I can watch Liverpool beat Man Utd with my brother on a different continent (with whatever lag being compensated for) I'll get more of a shared experience than I could have today.
This is a version-1 product. It's only going to get better - I have one of the original iPhones, and compared to the '15 Pro I have now, it's pitiful. Apple are generally a long-term game company, and they're not going to let this just drop.
So sure, in company down at the pub, I won't be wearing goggles like this. Funnily enough I don't think that's the target market, making your argument a bit of a strawman one. Apple (I expect) will focus is attention on where it can make a difference. And (again, I expect) it will.
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/meta-launches-expanded...
Is this true? Most of the time when I'm out and about I'm going from point a to point b and I'm not really interested in talking to anyone I dont already know. If I'm already at a specific place to do a specific thing... I'm not going to have a vr headset on and I'm not really interested in interacting with people I dont already know.
Nobody finds it rude to talk to each other with actual glasses on. If AR had similar utility and minimal impact on seeing each others eyes, then the same would be true. Sunglasses prevent people from tracking where people are looking which is why they come off as rude.
> That's the slimmest form factor you're going to get, and it still steps on the toes of human connection.
The minimalist form factor for AR is contact lenses not glasses. Several companies are working on them though it's a long way from a consumer product.
You may not have realized it, but the glasses on tip of nose thing where people lean forward to look at you is because reading glasses make things blurry at conversation distance. Basically this: https://levinsoneyeclinic.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/shu...
However, sometimes people don't bother and they really can't see you very clearly. But, you can still track the body language from where they eyes are looking so it's fine, that's the difference clear lenses make.
That is extremely unlikely to ever be possible. A chip that size that did both high-bandwidth radio AND wireless charging (since you're not gonna have wires dangling from your eyes) AND high refresh rate display would fundamentally have to get extremely hot, with anything resembling current electronics.
You'd have to invent an entirely different transistor to do something like this.
That's not immersive 3D, but the useful bit of AR would be things like putting peoples names above them at a party as if you where in an MMO. Countdown timers over cooking pots, a map or just an arrow when walking somewhere etc.
I'm not saying VR will become as normalised as smartphones, mind you, just that it's a possible outcome. That said, VR / AR as we know it now has been a thing for a while now and it hasn't taken off as much.
My guess would be that once AR allows easy sharing, e.g. showing others a funny AR cat video, it will quickly become socially accepted to wear frequently.
Hard disagree. Except for brief interactions like ordering a coffee, I don’t think it is at all socially common for people to keep headphones on when they talk with others. Maybe it varies by culture, or social circle.
With younger people earbuds seem more like a fashion statement (you also don't take off ear rings to talk to people) and the noise cancelling/transparency will actually do the opposite: filter out background noise so that you can be heard more clearly.
Similarly taking out a Nokia used to signal that you will not be paying attention for a while. Nowadays it might instead be you taking a nice photo, showing off something to others etc.
VR headsets are definitely not at this point yet, but I am not so sure they never will be.
If I go and meet with someone in person, I generally do it because I want to see them up close, face to face. If we are both wearing VR headsets that hide our faces, the whole premise goes out the window.
Eventually, VR headsets might overcome this problem by accurately portraying the other person's face in some way, but we are nowhere there yet.
The people with the worst behaviour are pushing the norm.
For example, I would love and could easily justify the 12.9 inch iPad but the logistics of traveling with it make no sense for me.
I could justify the benefits of traveling everywhere with my high powered gaming pc but logistically it makes no sense.
These devices are still largely impractical for long term use, and particularly outside use. They won't be until the hardware catches up with what we are working on with the software and it is an almost invisible technology except for a mostly standard looking pair of glasses.
People already walk around with their phone almost attached to their face, it isn't hard to imagine wanting an AR headset.
…really? I have prescription glasses/sunglasses and I often don’t bother switching them during a quick excursion- such as daycare pickup/drop off. It’s never crossed my mind that I could be perceived as rude. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that anyone with such opinions do not have the level prescription that are required for driving and just general consent use. And for anyone thinking transition lenses would be the solution- those do not work in vehicles with UV blocking windows.
If you're having a quick interaction like popping in and out of a building to pick up / drop off someone or something, sure. But otherwise, it's quite universally rude.
Those were just viral memes of people using it like that for fun.
What do you think of how the Vision Pro addresses this problem?
Do you enjoy talking to a colleague while they still have their headphones on, even if you know they have this setting on?
One, it's not the actual user's eyes, it's just a bad rendition of some eyes - without any of the extremely subtle facial expressions that happen with the skin around the eyes, and without any amount of certainty from the other that they are correctly reflecting exactly what you're looking at. We are extremely good at noticing exactly which direction another human is looking in, and when theire gaze shifts, so even minor inaccuracies or lag are jarring.
Much worse, the screen they used is so bad that the eyes are barely visible in almost any amount of lighting.
Either way, even if this "solution" actually worked, the visor still covers far too much of the face to be able to get a normal expression.
So... sniff sniff what's that smell? The market working is it then?
Both Vitamix blenders and recumbent bicycles have less market share than desktop Linux. Is that because recumbent bike makers just really have no idea how people want to ride bicycles, or...
yeah
No. That's a gross generalization. You have all sorts of people using Linux, including leading UX experts.
What you don't have is a single governing body pulling everyone in the same direction, so efforts get diluted(even when prioritized).
They understand, but they don't care. The 5% want to have a system that is designed for themselves and not the other 95%.
> quite clearly huge numbers of people DO want TVs and smartphones
This really ventures into the space of addictive behaviors. Do meth addicts really want meth, or are they using for some other reason? Can we assume that they DO want the meth and that's the primary driver simply because they keep using it?
It identifies that rudeness comes from lack of attention and that communicating attention can change within a cultural context.
People living in the 1920’s would say we are all crackheads.
We’re already deep into the process of merging modern technology into every aspect of our lives, and in some cases it’s been bad. In some cases it’s been a necessary evolution to survive in a modern society. In some cases, it’s been good.
On the one hand, I worry that face helmets will further erode human connection, and people will live in a lower resolution reality than what is possible with direct human contact. On the other hand, the current reality is that more and more people are looking down into a slab of glass instead of up/out at the world around them.
It could be that the ultimate version of AVP (some kind of glasses that are barely more noticeable than AirPods) is what gets people to look up/out again.
The “bad thing” is arguably already here, and it’s just a question of whether future tech will make it worse, or do a better job of merging the real world with the digital world, enabling people to participate in both instead of disappearing into their pocket computer.
Apple is IMO the only company that seems capable of simultaneously tackling the form factor, outside-viewer perception factor (AirPods are fully socialized, as you mention), inside-viewer perception factor (AirPods on transparency really do feel 99.9% fully "transparent")
Would the new generation be get used to it? Probably. But that does not mean it is healthy. We have gotten used to a lot of things that are objectively bad for us.
Also VR isn’t what companies, Apple at least, care about. It’s a stepping stone to AR which is why the AVP does a “fake AR” of sorts as its primary mode of operation. You have to walk before you run which is also why Apple pushed VR/ARKit so hard even before they had a device to really take full advantage of it (as in a device that’s not just holding an iPad up and pointing it at table, all of 5 people care about that).
The Overton window will shift if people get true utility out of VR/AR in the same way it’s shifted on everything else. Right now there just isn’t anything compelling enough to force that shift but I think it will happen quickly when there is.
And before “I find X compelling”, ok, that’s great for you, for the vast majority of people the tech and/or use-cases are not there yet.
I couldn't care less about AR. I want VR and only VR.
I don't want digital overlays of the world around me at all. That's completely useless and will be filled with ads and noise. I want to live and breathe in imaginative fantasy worlds and escape the real world completely.
I want to be a character in interactive movies. Have realistic D&D sessions with friends where the real world disappears completely. To create entire planets and universes and populate them with stories and adventures.
I don't want labels on cooking ingredients, advertisements for Taco Bell while I walk around, or email notifications popping up during conversations. AR might have industrial use cases, but the real world implications are annoying.
But maybe there will be a few years of bliss, like the early internet. Or maybe that bliss has already happened.
I don't think this is true. There was a massive appetite for the iPhone for decades leading up to its release, and there was no question that mobile was going to have a giant role in the future of computing. If you look back, most nay-sayers didn't doubt the value or utility of pocket-computers, but rather just that Apple specifically would be out-competed by established vendors.
Whereas VR equivalent of a phone call with eye and face tracking and eventually full body tracking is much closer to an in-person interaction.
The full title, which of course wouldn't fit:
Vision Pro is an over-engineered “devkit” // Hardware bleeds genius & audacity but software story is disheartening // What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right // Why Meta could finally have its Android moment
I think my edit is the best summary.
I have 1000 hours on SteamVR, but coming back is a chore. And my face is red after every session.
Porn is what got VHS to succeed over Beta. Porn is what got CC payments working online. Porn drives a lot of Twitch and other platforms.
Apple won't allow porn on its platform, but someone will.
> Porn is what got VHS to succeed over Beta.
Is just not true. For one, porn absolutely existed on Beta. But more broadly, by the time the content available on each format mattered, VHS had already won the format war.
That's because both Beta and VHS were primarily developed and marketed as a way to record TV to watch later. Tapes were way too expensive to make selling pre-recorded tapes viable when both systems launched. Pre-recorded tapes eventually did become popular, especially in the rental market. But that only happened well after VHS clearly won the format war, mostly due to VHS's longer recording time.
For more details, Technology Connections has a long rant about this misconception in this video: https://youtu.be/hGVVAQVdEOs?si=X-FYCRAzowXOdqBb&t=931
It's not that immersive because you either get a video that you can't interact with where you get to play the part of dead fish wearing a camera rig, or it's absolutely insanely bad 3D models that will only ever get deeper into the uncanny valley. The videos are also terrible quality because making VR porn is expensive, and if you prefer somewhat amateur content, you are completely out of luck, because couples moonlighting porn aren't buying those camera rigs.
I have shown VR porn to many people. They go "woah". I tell them they can have a similar experience literally on their phone with a normal $30 phone holder "headset", none of them buy the headset. None of them even try it ever again.
Very very few whales are optimizing their porn experience. The vast majority of human beings simply scroll through pornhub for 12 minutes and watch half of two videos and then continue their lives.
"Immersiveness" is not a strict benefit for everything.
I found this part somewhat funny or perhaps disingenuous:
> "I admit Vision Pro is the ultimate tech toy, but since I’m not an active developer I can’t justify the $4,049.78 price tag (512GB model + California sales tax) simply for keeping up with the VR market, so I returned my Vision Pro for a full refund inside the 14-day return window."
Mr Barra has held VP positions at companies like Google, Xiaomi and Meta since 2008. He's obviously a multimillionaire just from stock awards. Surely he can afford a $4k toy...
Overall though I think the issue is common across consumer tech. The space is extremely saturated. People have so little time left it’s crazy. Devices monopolize people’s attention. I wonder if we’ll figure out a way to move past this, as a species, and get back to more meaningful interactions.
The point being that he’s applying a bunch higher bar than someone with his interests and net worth would otherwise apply.
I need to call myself also 'rich' (because of values i hold but can't liquify and i earn enough that i could buy more expensive toys without thinking too much about it) but this doesn't mean my mindset changed.
I have to remind myself that i can afford certain things or i'm wasting too much thought about prices of products.
This probably shows a more realistic, less material and proper upbringing of Mr Barra than 'not being able to afford it'
I'm the same with a smartwatch. I'd like one, but if I got one it would need to be cellular so I can leave my phone at home most of the time. But I just can't justify the cost for the utility I would get.
In some way, this is probably one of the reasons I'm in the situation that I can buy these things, because of all the other things I have not bought in the past.
It sort of makes sense; the calorie counting feature on my Garmin has actually been really helpful in me losing weight, and I think the insurance companies feel like nearly anything to help people lose weight is probably going to save them money in the long run.
For example, I would really like a real pinball machine, but a nice refurbished one or brand new one cost anywhere between $3,000 and $10,000. If I wanted, I could save up for a bit and buy one, but it's really hard for me to tell myself that $5,000 for a toy is "worth it", so I never have.
The most extravagant toy that I've purchased in the last few years with the MiSTer, and even that was a little hard to justify.
people who will, instead of directly using their subsidized subsidized clipper card benefits, will load their clipper card with credit cards for the 2% cash back, and then manually submit an expense, creating an operational burden for their company finance team so that they personally can read the benefits of... $25 a year in cash back
people who will take UberPool/Lyft Line to save 4-5 dollars for their commute home at the expense of an extra 20/30 minutes instead of either a) just taking public transit or b) taking a regular uber
people who will buy take out containers and bring them to work to take company-provided catered food so that they can save $20 a day
people who will use credit cards to buy gift cards at grocery stores for 5% cash back (obviously if you buy a $1000 gift card for $50 cash back, that's great but you run the risk of either losing the card/and thus losing cash/losing the credit card purchase/price matching benefits/etc etc)
all in all I think regardless of income/net worth sometimes it's not about the money. they can afford it. but it just feels good to save a little bit of money relative to your net worth way more than the actual financial impact
In this situation I’d either keep it and use it infrequently (or maybe it’d grow on me), or perhaps sell it.