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Having tried the VP out for a week, I categorically disagree that VR is going to have remotely this level of impact on humanity. Having to wear something on your head to compute is fatiguing and isolating. You can’t bring your existing peripherals and audio equipment unless they’re proprietary and wireless. Passthrough video is nauseating and blurry even at the highest refresh rates. The paradigm is also intrinsically inaccessible to the blind and disabled.

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.

100% agree. Until this tech has the same form factor as a pair of glasses and no wires it will be stuck in the realms of gaming and porn. Not a small market, perhaps, but hardly a seismic shift in life on Earth.

> I categorically disagree that VR is going to have remotely this level of impact on humanity.

This feels like a comment from Blackberry or MS making fun of the first iPhone.

Having actually tried the thing, and having used VR for several years before that, I’d like to think that my opinion is not just a simple knee-jerk response.

We should revisit this comment 10 years later :)

Did you own prior VR headsets? If so, what is different about this one?

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.

I agree. It's obvious this technology has a big future, the question is, outside of the current $3500+ niche marker, when? The Oculus Rift was created in 2011, id Software was demoing it at E3 2012, and in 2016 consumer versions of HTC Vive and Oculus Rift launched, as did Microsoft HoloLens and Google Daydream.

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.

Lots of companies had made “smart phones“ before the iPhone came along. The iPhone is what blew the market open.

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 bought an HTC vive 7+ years ago and have middling opinions on its viability long-term as a major game platform. VR is fun and novel, but once the novelty wears off it can be tedious.

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.

Other headsets are like a DC film and the Vision Pro is like a marvel film before endgame. The differences (that matter in GP’s context) are qualitative rather than quantitative, and a big distinction is the shift from VR gaming, which most incumbents and current VR fans won’t “get” nearly as fast as the public will (once things get going).

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.

> this is going to have as big of an impact on humanity as the computer or the internet

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).

One way to look at VR headsets is that it's a better computer display -- as large and immersive as you want, without physical limitation. People prefer retina displays and will pay for multi-monitor setups, so we know people value this.

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.

> One way to look at VR headsets is that it's a better computer display -- as large and immersive as you want, without physical limitation.

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.

> One way to look at VR headsets is that it's a better computer display -- as large and immersive as you want, without physical limitation. People prefer retina displays and will pay for multi-monitor setups, so we know people value this.

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.

Totally agree. Best thing about working a life-long career with computers is that you can get away from them quite easily, leave your phone at home, turn off your monitor.

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.

As long as Apple keeps it locked down like an iPad, I don’t see much of a future for the device replacing general purpose computers in the workforce.

Businesses are not their target market, never has been. They dominated the mobile phone market with their iPhone, and the iPad is still a gold standard product for tablets compared to the dozens of shoddy Android versions out there (coming from someone who leans more Android than Apple with their tech). I can see GP's point regardless of the rollout. Before the VR app stores become such critical masses, Apple will have plenty of time to delight users and capture market share. They have tons of cash and great execution.

> the iPad is still a gold standard product for tablets compared to the dozens of shoddy Android versions out there

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.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/20/apples-enterprise-evolutio... (2018)

I think both are right in different ways. Apple isn't a big enterprise player as far as (except for development), I give all my employees macs to do their daily work on. You don't walk into a bank and see iMacs sitting there usually. So from the desktop computer side, they are not that deep into enterprise. HOWEVER, iPhones, yes. Tons of companies issue iPhones as their company phone. Walk into a store, its getting more and more common that the cashier is using an iPad hooked up to some sort of payment processing device. That is where Apple has their business adoption. Or I take my kids to the trampoline park and the clerk hands me an iPad to fill out the waiver. Their enterprise isn't really that deep in desktops, but it for damn sure is in portable device (iPhone and iPad).

I think it's important to add color to this 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.

+1 if the iPad were less locked down it would already be cannibalizing laptop sales more significantly.

And that's why Apple doesn't do it. They want you to buy both a MacBook and an iPad.

For each family memeber too! There's something incredibly sinister about how Apple operates that people just accept. All those dark patterns and control is just so icky I don't understand how anyone aware of this can submit to this. Just from sheer self-respect.

That's why I don't buy Apple

50% of all our employees choose Mac over PCs. When you wear an Apple Vision Pro and look at your Macbook, it transfers the screen to Apple Vision and allows you to duplicate and extend. No other PC will have this level of integration.

Oh, what's that called? Virtual monitor? Dude just go to Quest store or Google Play store and see how many apps exist out there.

>No other PC will have this level of integration.

"640K software is all the memory anybody would ever need on a computer."

> When the screen is 50% better and it weighs 50% less, 20% of knowledge workers will be tuned in daily.

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.

> If/when it gets to the weight/comfort of normal glasses then sure.

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.

I spent nearly 40 years of my life glasses-free. Now I need to wear glasses to read a computer display without eye strain. I'd go back to glasses-free in a heartbeat, if I could.

If they can't fix the ever so slight blurryness for everyone it will continue to be a niche product simply because only a small niche wants to accept such a thing. Or only a small niche of people has eyes that can deal with it. Btw I consider my Meta Quest 3 to be a terrible product in almost every way, from hardware to software, from blurryness, from weight, from app availability, from PC compatability, from having to buy extra cables, weight, the strap, passthrough, from even the simplest interactions like clicking on a button... everything was bad.

> the ever so slight blurryness for everyone

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.

Increasing resolution increases computational complexity. This is especially true with the 100hz refresh rate of the display. Current Vision Pro resolution is higher than 4k. Imagine trying to build a 8k 100hz PC. You couldn't even use Display Port or HDMI to transport video data because those channels don't provide enough data.

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'm not talking about blurryness on the Vision Pro, I mean blurryness in general. I found the Meta Quest 3 to be very blurry

That's the same root cause: display density.

> this is going to have as big of an impact on humanity as the computer or the internet did

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.

By this logic, a computer is just a bunch of transistors. And transistors are just fancy electric circuits.

and a human is this ...

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

yes, you’re making my point. The companies that excel at this technology are the same ones that are dominating the general computing space.

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

If you look at it as purely additive, then sure. If you look at it like this, the era or the horse drawn carriage ended with the motor car, it doesn't get to claim any of the car's influence, despite being a precursor, then no.

VR is the most extreme case of a product that a subset of technophiles absolutely love and that the rest of the population is decidedly meh on. I think that you are vastly overestimating the amount of people who want to spend a large portion of their daily life with large googles strapped to their head isolating them from the people and things in their immediate environment.

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 think that you are vastly overestimating the amount of people who want to spend a large portion of their daily life with large googles strapped to their head

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.

It seems fairly obvious to me that no amount of improvement of the technology will make people accept that barrier. Even if every technical hurdle is solved I still firmly believe most people would rather not have a thing on their head and be isolated from their friends and family.

> I think that you are vastly overestimating the amount of people who want to spend a large portion of their daily life with large googles strapped to their head isolating them from the people and things in their immediate environment.

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.

I experienced AR for the first time with the Vision Pro, and I came away with the same impressions; it’s not quite ready for mainstream but “magical” really is apt. I was a big skeptic on AR/VR in general before, but the demo for Vision Pro convinced me. I wrote about it here.[1]

[1] https://candrewlee14.github.io/blog/2024-03-07_apple-vision-...

> AI changes the way you work

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.

> this is going to have as big of an impact on humanity as the computer or the internet did and every engineer or aspiring entrepreneur should pay it attention

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.

You have lived in your bubble for too long. Just talk to people around you -- could include other software engineers or tech enthusiasts -- and I'm sure most people don't think about the product the same way you feel. I'll put it sinply: most people DON'T want to put this thing on their face. Not Oculus Quest. Not Apple Vision Pro.

> Travel to beaches will go up

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?

I think there might end up being a greater division between "IRL places you really need to be IRL to enjoy" and "IRL places that are good enough in VR."

A beach seems like the former, and cities and minor attractions seem like the latter.