Apple Vision Pro Customer Interest Dying Down at Some Retail Stores | Hacker News Reader

Apple Vision Pro Customer Interest Dying Down at Some Retail Stores

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42 pointstosh111 comments

I’m not sure if this tracks for others, but Vision Pro has felt like the most forgettable revolutionary new product Apple has released. With, say, the Watch, it was obvious how I could envision using it in my daily life to improve fitness and as a companion to my phone. The VP? No such use-case comes to mind. I guess, perhaps, the narrow situation where I’m on a plane and want to shut out the world. My iPad and noise-canceling AirPods already do that pretty effectively though.

The iPhone brought computing to our pockets, the iPad brought it to the living room, and the Watch brought it to the gym. The Vision Pro introduces no new usage of computing like its predecessor.

Ask someone from the 80s what they would use a smartphone for, and they would have no idea.

People always try to make this argument but it can't really be denied that it's a slightly different situation having a handheld utility you can pull out vs being 'strapped in' and disconnected from the world for hours at a time.

I'm sure there will be some valid usecases that come up, but the difference here is they've entered an established market which was already about as far as it was going to go. Using more premium screens, lenses, finishes and throwing more power at it doesn't change the overall concept of how it works, and why it's not been more widely adopted.

Augmented reality is more likely to be the one that takes off. If you lose that 'disconnect' feeling and package it in a pair of normal looking glasses and it'll become mainstream, the tech's just not there yet to do it in an affordable package.

Show them the practically unlimited camera roll and say you can call people from anywhere and they'd think you were a wizard.

Well yeah, smartphones lose most of their functionality without the existence of the internet. Just like current AR headsets don't make much sense without a proper "metaverse" for them to link to. Like virtual persistent objects that everyone with the headset can see and interact with, like street signs, notes, etc.

I doubt this will ever exist unless some undiscovered tech makes it seamless though. You can convince the average person to carry a small brick around if it has enough functionality, but not to carry it on their face. Even regular glasses are so annoying to wear that lots of people opt for lenses.

> Well yeah, smartphones lose most of their functionality without the existence of the internet

Well no, pocket computers - which is what smartphones are - don't need an internet to be useful. Here's what they can do for you without an internet connection:

   - phone
   - SMS
   - mapping and navigation
   - media player
   - photo and video cameras
   - electronic book reader
   - calculator
   - torch
   - basic computing applications
   - sensor platform for audio/acceleration/gyro/barometric/temperature measurements
   - portable monitor for borescope
   - ODB scanner for cars etc.
   - ...and thousands of similar applications

> mapping and navigation

Where are you getting the maps if they're not being streamed on the fly? OSM in vector form takes up 2TB.

> media player

Of what media? The three included music tracks that came with it?

> basic computing applications

Installed from... CD-ROMs?

> sensor platform for audio/acceleration/gyro/barometric/temperature measurements

Used by the average person exactly once, when they go "neat" and never look at it again.

Sure there's a lot of functionality left, but those of us that had early smartphones as kids but were poor enough to not have internet plans on them will tell you that you run into problems quickly. Assuming there is an internet link somewhere where you can download things every so often it's doable, but if an internet does not conceptually exist yet you're basically left at the Motorola SMS and snake game stage.

> Where are you getting the maps if they're not being streamed on the fly? OSM in vector form takes up 2TB.

Upload them to the phone off-line from whatever source you happen to have. This can be anything from your internet-connected device at home to wifi at home to a DVD to wifi at the library to a computer at the library to a USB device to...

> Of what media? The three included music tracks that came with it?

Same as above.

> Installed from... CD-ROMs?

Well, it is getting repetitive but yes, as well as the other options shown above

> sensor platform for audio/acceleration/gyro/barometric/temperature measurements

Audio as a self-starting recorder, acceleration as a theft alarm, barometric as an altimeter, etc.

You seem to confuse the absence of an internet connection on the device with the total absence of the internet. The one does not imply the other, it is perfectly possible to have what is in essence a disconnected PDA which you occasionally sync to the 'net or to whatever other source you want. All you're losing out on is live communications through the 'net but SMS works for much of what you'd want to use that for. You can compose and read email on the thing, just not receive and send it while on the move - sync it to some other device and voila, you're back in the times of PDAs. Those were quite useful and far less distracting than the current crop of smartphones.

my dude there were people figuring this out in 1930, let alone 80s era stuff that could potentially have access to DAT tapes and shit.

Yes, by the early 80s there was preplanned route navigation available on transparency (have AAA print it for you in advance), by the mid 80s it was cassette tape, cdrom systems were available by the late 80s.

https://ndrive.com/brief-history-gps-car-navigation/

Calendar, address book, calculator. Maybe slightly later dictionary. Access to something like BBS would not be stretch.

Actually smartphone really is 80s idea. Internet is actually only real new thing in it.

Lol. So people in the 80s wouldn't find useful a pocket-sized device that you can watch TV on, listen to the radio, listen to music, take photos? The only thing 80s people wouldn't understand is creating content on the Internet. But even digital text content has an 80s equivalent: teletext.

Oh, and don't forget the 80s pocket computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_computer

Well exactly. Creating smartphone in 80s with vision of smartphone from 2020 would not work, because that technology was not there. It would be big, heavy, expensive, mostly without software and basically without connectivity.

Look at AR/VR today - big, heavy, expensive and without use-case which would be interesting to masses.

But let's move 20~50 years into future - AR/VR can look like ordinary glasses and cost like cheap smartphone today and you are controlling it by your mind. That's something what would have lot of interesting use cases.

Someone from the 80s wouldn't even have had a beeper to know when someone was trying to contact them, and would need to have a bunch of quarters on hand to use at pay phones.

You're jumping 2-3 generations back to defend as-yet-undefined use cases for $3500 bauble.

Envisioned in 1968 proposed in 1972: Alan Kay 'demo's Dynabook[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r36NNGzNvjo

They would have a much better idea what to do with VR goggles though, because serious research into that area had already been happening since the 60s (and then had it's first massive consumer hype in the mid-90s).

Also Star Trek NG had both communicators and handheld tablet devices with touch screens. Not a great leap from there to modern smartphones.

Basically put an iPhone in a Google Cardboard VR

Dont forget the cost. An apple watch was an impluse purchase. iPad is a strech but still affordable. Vision pro is an active choice

I think there might be a level of hindsight being used here - I distinctly remember when the Watch came out that very few people actually thought it’d be useful, and other similar criticisms that are being used against the Vision Pro now.

(not that I stand one way or the other w.r.t the Vision Pro, just that the Apple Watch was definitely not seen as anything much when it first came out)

And not only that, but many smart Watches were significantly more stylish imho, whereas the Apple Watch has always had more of a plebeian / for-the-masses design.

Honestly, though, I think a lot of Apple's dominance with the watch is just because of their dominance with the phone. I'm sure plenty of iPhone users would have chosen a different watch seller if they could have done so while still having a seamless experience.

> the most forgettable revolutionary new product Apple has released.

Ironically, being in tech, I myself am not an early adopter. I only joined Facebook once everyone was already on it, switched to iPhone once the majority of people I knew had one, same with MacOS, same with the iPod, same with the iPad, same with the Apple Watch (actually got my first one as a gift, and returned it because I didn't think I'd use it, but bought it a year later and it hasn't left my wrist in 5+ years). And I'm still waiting to buy an EV until after I hear people stop complaining about issues owning them.

Were all of those Apple products an overnight success with hype continuing 6 months after release? Or did they take a while to catch on, thanks to people like me who wait until the product isn't in "early adopter" mode?

I think the iPad and the watch were the most successful immediately but even then they had considerable redesigns.

Interesting I feel like those uses are all not that revolutionary but they were wildly successful. Just different sized touch screens. You could argue the vision pro is just a different monitor, but even if that is all the pro is it could be wildly successful.

It is not just a monitor though. The fact that it tracks your movements makes it fundamentally different, it’s an entirely different kind of viewing experience, which might yet found a killer app.

It can have a different input and appears to display things in three dimensions, and maybe someone will come up with a killer app. Currently though I just connect my macbook to it and use that as the input, I think that'll be enough once Apple slims the pro down a little.

There maybe some interesting new ways to display text, I'm surprised there aren't already more three dimensional visual apps created. The gucci thing is cool and some of the 3d aspects aren't that well done.

For displaying flat content it is indeed just a kind of monitor simulator, but that is hardly the point of VR. When looking at spatial content it is fundamentally different from a monitor, you can move your head to see the object from different angles, that is a game changer. But the use cases outside gaming and simulation are not obvious. CAD and certain visualisations is all I can think of.

It would be nice to move about my home with computing interfaces arbitrarily affixed to "dumb" objects. Sure, the computer generally comes to me as needed, but as a pacer, I think better when I can move around, attaching different thinking modalities to different physical spaces. If those physical spaces also shared their context, that would be pretty great.

It would be great to ditch the phone, ditch the watch, ditch the laptop, ditch the tv, for mutable device that's whatever I want it to be wherever I am.

The big downside is that I don't want a big sweaty device attached to my head, fogging up my vision.

None of that is really spatial in the way that you're describing, but it's incredibly spatial from a user perspective.

I find the "fitness first" approach when talking about the Apple Watch a bit strange. Fitness seems like a cult for some. for me, it was the complete opposite: I love the Watch as a companion for my Phone, and as a speakerphone. But I had to turn all fitness notification stuff off the day I bought it. It was too obnoxious and had a feel of patrnoisation. I really dont want my gadgets telling me I am supposed to stand up, or whatever it thinks I should do. Fascinating to read that there are actually people that want that sort of noise.

It's not revolutionary, but evolutionary. The whole thing started with the Sword of Damocles in late 1960s.

> The Vision Pro introduces no new usage of computing like its predecessor.

Precisely.

I remember the watch being kind of unpopular, and most people didn't really know what is it for and how to use it. Now it is really popular.

Apple TV also really didn't find much of a success, really.

That being said... the watch was not as big of an investment, so they could iterate relatively quickly and make new versions. Apple Vision Pro is really expensive.

Total non sequitor, but the Apple TV + Home hub combo is really great. I love the privacy-by-design aspects, and that it works as a LAN device properly: totally unaffected when the network cuts out (which is frequently in my area).

The privacy invasion of literally every other tv-device / tv that isn't a DIY device is a total nightmare. I just want to sit down and watch a program without all my data going to 1000 different companies interested in profiling me. Have you seen what eg Samsung is doing with their TVs?? Or Roku? It's really nuts.

If you're already in the Apple walled garden, it's also really nice having good tv controls baked into your phone/watch/earbuds, seamless casting / display mirroring. I'm totally aware that you can get all of these setups without Apple hardware. But the integrated experience works really seamlessly.

Exactly this. The Apple Watch got some pushback initially too. I don't think it's over yet.

I think the Vision Pro was released a bit too early, though. The current-gen just isn't quite good enough, unlike the very first gen Apple Watch (which I owned).

The problem is that they prioritized the wrong things and made the headset too heavy. If they release a gen 2 that is maybe 50% the weight, and likely drops the front screen to get there (maybe reducing price), they'd have a much more usable product.

I have a suspicion the design team didn’t engage with any competitors headsets in a meaningful way and just assumed they knew better. Because wear a heavy headset for 15 minutes then swap to a lighter one and the relief is palpable.

Glass and aluminum is just the wrong choice for something pressing on your face, but they just really wanted an excuse to play with curved glass in a design.

I sort of remember the opposite. I remember that there was some initial pushback to wearables, but once Apple watch entered the scene it was quickly adopted - and in fact helped to establish smart watches in general as niche product.

It was not the ubiquitous success of the previous consumer products, I think, but it quickly gained traction.

I don't think that VR glasses are going down the same route.

Watches (both traditional and GPS for runners, hikers, bikers) and fitness trackers (Nike, Fitbit) were very popular prior to the Apple Watch. AR and VR are still unproven markets besides some games. Skepticism over Vision Pro is more reasonable than Watch. Iterating Watch was about improving implementation and delivering the features that we knew people wanted. Iterating Vision Pro is about creating a market that doesn’t exist yet.

edit: typo

So we can agree that this thing is just a dev kit waiting for a killer app and falsely marketed by Apple to consumers?

Who's the market for this? Professionals and Consumers may need an iPhone, Macbook, a super luxury display, but VR Glasses? Neither as a professional nor as a consumer can i think of a reason to use this. No killer app so far besides video games. The biggest pain point for me is that i don't want to be immersed in a virtual world - even when the killer app finally sees the day of light.

> No killer app so far besides video games.

Even that's questionable from a business perspective, most companies which took a stab at VR gaming have already given up, except for Meta, who are still losing billions every quarter to keep Reality Labs limping along. If gaming is consumer VRs killer app, and not even that is sustainable after a decade, what hope does anything else have?

Valve is making tons of money with the Index. It used to be at the top of Steam charts for a really long time, literally outselling most AAA games. Today it's still in the list [1], albeit a bit lower. But still impressive, considering it costs 20-30x of the average game on that list. And it used to be much more expensive back when it was at the top.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/search/?l=english&filter=tops...

> But still impressive, considering it costs 20-30x of the average game on that list.

The Steam top sellers list is ordered by revenue, not units sold, so each Index they sell is worth 20-30x of a game sale in the rankings.

Hence why Counter Strike 2 is the #2 "top seller" despite ostensibly being free - it's counting revenue.

> And it used to be much more expensive back when it was at the top.

The price actually hasn't moved at all, the full Index kit still costs the same $999 it launched at in 2019. The cheaper SKU on the charts is just the headset without the controllers or base stations, which they only started offering relatively recently, but you still need to have controllers and base stations to use it. The headset alone being as high as it is implies that most of the people still buying Index hardware are existing Index/Vive owners who want to renew or upgrade their existing Lighthouse setup, and few are investing in a complete brand new Index setup today.

That doesn't change anything? If you can sell something for 30x the price of a game while only selling 1/20th of the units, you still beat all big studios in terms of revenue. And the index was literally in the top 10 for, like, several years, with everything included at ~$1k.

My dream is to have VR goggles that I can wear outside so that I can do my wfh job while going for a walk at the beach.

However, I think it is unlikely to actually be possible to do so productively even with Vision Pro. And I’m not about to drop three and a half k units of money or however much exactly the Vision Pro costs, unless I could know for a fact that it would work for that.

How would that even work? Are you looking at your surroundings or your work? It sounds like a nightmare version of people staring down at their phones while shuffling down the street.

Floating windows overlaid over surroundings

Just bring a book.

Also my personal feeling is that Apple is not exactly in this type of gaming. A games on phones and tablets yes, but those playing other experiences are already in other ecosystems be it one of the consoles or PC in general...

The market is CEOs who casually leave it unused on display in their offices.

I said it before and I’ll say it again. The killer app is home decoration.

Repaint your wall in a snap. Change the look of your rugs, your pictures, your wall art. Have fancy place mats for dinner, all for the cost of downloading some new skin virtually.

If you and your spouse cannot decide on a paint color, good news, you no longer have to! Customize it to each user and you both see exactly what you like.

If you rent and live in a white wall apartment, can’t put holes in walls for pictures, etc, then good news. Just decorate things virtually.

Prices will need to come down for VR headsets, and the headsets themselves will need to be wearable for 14 hours a day. So there is still a long way ahead as far as hardware capabilities go. However this software could be created today.

Why stop at home decoration? Don't like the way you look? Just change the picture looking back at you in the mirror. Don't like the the new haircut your spouse got? Hair length is just one of many adjustable parameters! Want to eat steak every day? Just have the headset render your lunch slop as a ribeye!

> Want to eat steak every day? Just have the headset render your lunch slop as a ribeye!

Big Tech: We hear ya! Our new food AR system is always on. Every meal you eat we will prompt you for what appearance to give your food. Different tiers have different micro transaction prices. Of course there is also a free tier. The free tier will render all food as potatoes. Rendering as meat will start at $5/meal. And there is no limit on how fancy we can make the rendering. Nor how much we will charge you for those fancy renderings. Can’t afford it? Enjoy seeing nothing but potatoes for every meal.

but I can just take a selfie / mirror selfie, and edit it on my phone or laptop. don't need to wear expensive-as-hell VR headsets that give me vertigo, and I can do all of the same things effectively in real time, anyway. non-starter of an idea IMO

> wearable for 14 hours

Totally agree that this is the main thing. There are some promising AR glasses, but when you want to work and not just have a HUD, something like the Vision would be better...if it could be comfortable for long stretches. Maybe the Vision is, I think more people would need to try it to know

Those are all tasks you do...what, once every ten years? Hardly a reason to pay $3000+ for a device

The OP seems to be saying that you'd wear this on your face for most of the day so you could 'see' the decorations nearly all the time.

I don't want this exact thing, but I do want something similar. A device where I can wander anywhere around my property with keyboard slung on my shoulder and just plop down and work, with as many monitors as I want, no mouse required.

I'd like a lighter, more breathable version of this.

The current tech isn’t there yet but it could be fantastic for travel when it becomes feasible.

I don't think of it as a single killer app but almost all my clients do is inspect and measure different things in places then managers click on a point on a map related to their measurement to compile reports. They certainly want multiple reports viewable in space in front of them pointing to where in the map they connect to.

When I think of the AVP as an expensive, overqualified dev kit for prototyping those types of cases it makes a perfect sense to me. Now when something wearable for normal people comes around those types of apps will already exist.

It's a longshot but if it were also ruggedized I think it would greatly improve the data collection part too. Not too difficult to think of indoor data collection and form completion an AVP could aid.

How most of the marketing hasnt emphasized games is refreshing. I've played a lot of VR games and very few feel like toys in the way I like video games to feel. I agree that I don't really look for full world immersion but I use my AVP all the time beyond a dev kit just for a big screen while working on the weekend in my living room etc. Really only use immersive environments partially to put a background behind my work screen.

In the linked source article (archive: https://archive.ph/zbhlo) Mark Gurman says:

> And a killer app hasn’t emerged that would compel me to pick it up. It’s far easier to just use my laptop as a laptop and watch video on either my computer or big-screen TV.

Apart from gaming (or perhaps niche exercise) there's been no killer app for found for VR/AR in the past 20+ years - Magic Leap has spent $Billions since 2010. It doesn't really matter how well Apple polish the interface and improve size and battery if there's no reason to use it.

I used to work in AR - and the pattern with users is nearly always the same: initial amazement at how cool it is but then eventual indifference.

If there were ever a time for a VR/AR consumer killer app to emerge, that time is now. And it hasn't. And it won't.

Humans have so many apps and services to entertain us, with a lot of compute power in our pockets, that the leap to wearing spaceman goggles for entertainment's sake is just not going to be a leap massive numbers of people are willing to take.

>>And it won't.

The issues isn't necessarily software applications, it's hardware and form factor and controls. Noone has come remotely close to cracking that nut, but once they do, the utility seems obvious and inevitable to me. That utility being - I can sit on a plane, have multiple high-resolution virtual monitors open at once, seamlessly interact with my content, in a comfortable form factor.

Apple vision pro is: -Too heavy, uncomfortable (form factor needs to be a pair of reading glasses at most). -Video see-through (imaging method should be optical see-through for eye/brain comfort) -resolution of 44PPD is sufficient for imaging text on a virtual monitor, but Video see-through method makes that irrelevant)

I just don’t understand why you would want or need one except for gaming.

And there are already a lot of more comfortable and familiar input devices for gaming.

Classic solution looking for a problem.

Apple deliberately eschews gaming, which can be annoying (as I am five years or more, behind PCs, if I'm lucky).

I have a friend who has a Quest 3, and he absolutely loves it. He uses it for AR gaming, and it works great for that.

I'm assuming that we'll eventually see this descend into the mortal realm, as far as pricing goes, and then we'll find out if it's got legs. As far as I'm concerned, these are just developer prototypes, at present.

In the areas where Apple chooses not to compete they are easily beaten. A cheap VR headset is better for gaming. Basic image editing is more responsive and has better UX design in things like snapchat compared to ios photos. Ios text editing is arcane and painful. These are just the basics.

Multiple monitors when travelling would be my use case.

Me too, it is a handy too for digital nomads

Maybe but you can just buy an usb c ips portable display get most of the way there. Much cheaper.

I thought the joke was that people wanted it so they could watch porn on a crowded airplane.

Which, I dunno, ewwww.

Ironically, porn doesn’t work well on it.

And it's unusable for gaming because it lacks a controller.

I see no use case right now that would justify me buying one, apart from simple curiosity.

However I'm not assigning the device to the list of failed Apple projects just yet. It took time for the watch to find it's place, and it's doing really well. Hell, lots of people wrote off the iPhone when it was first released.

I can't see the VP being such a block buster, but I can imagine it finding it's niche over time. Killer apps can come from the users. And we're only at the first iteration so far, which is already a technical wonder regardless of if you can think of a use for it or not.

Unsurprising outcome.

I got a chance to try one at a former coworker’s house. It’s an impressive piece of tech; the immersive video was amazing, felt orders of magnitude more impactful than the SD->HD leap. I also found the eye tracking and gesture based UI to be extremely intuitive.

If I were flying for work every week, this would be a killer product. Working from the plane or hotel with multiple high quality displays would be infinitely better than a laptop screen.

But alas. I do not travel that often for work these days, so this would end up largely as a novelty. Hard sell for $3500 even if it’s an amazing piece of hardware.

I tried it. I was impressed by the demos for soccer and baseball. But the soccer was a short clip of MLS, so I doubt I could use it to watch premier league or champions league. For baseball, I can’t even watch my local team that plays in a stadium funded by taxpayer dollars on regular tv, so I’m not convinced I would be able to watch from this headset.

Beyond that, everything was a slightly interesting tech demo in a headset that weighed too much. I was impressed by the design and how quickly they got lenses that matched my prescription.

VR already delivered most of the wow factor I think the demo was going for. It would be a lot more impressive if this were delivered in standard glasses. For now, it’s really cool but too expensive and impractical.

This seems more expected than surprising. At $3500 there is a very limited market willing to spend that and that market likely exhausted quickly. I wouldn't expect typical adoption curves for a product that expensive with limited value.

I think we're seeing similar adoption challenges with EVs currently. With current value props, a lot of consumers interested in current EVs have already purchased them and adoption rates are slowing. It's going to take a value leap (through better features and/or lower price) to jump start adoption again.

The same holds true for the Vision Pro, which I think most people knew -- it's too expensive and doesn't do enough. Assuming v2 does more for less money, it will jumpstart demand again.

Also lot of the limited market already has one or more older devices. So any new device must be able to do same and more and better. Which is very tall order...

The problem with VR is gaming in VR is not popular enough to reduce the manufacturing of them to the degree they are affordable for their true killer application: 3D design and architecture. But that's too niche or too expense to the penny counters for that application use to bring the expense of the hardware down - so they are trying to exploit the game community, or the daily productivity community, or anyone but the actual professions that will use it for the most benefit: 3D design and architecture.

It's a bit hard to imagine Apple of 10 or 20 years ago releasing a product like this without a clearer idea of how people would actually fit it into their daily lives. A lot of their successes have been about reducing friction, and while this is convenient relative to other VR products as far as I can tell, there still doesn't seem to be anything that VR is easier for than non-VR alternatives so far.

I'm not entirely convinced Apple even wants it to succeed. It's a stepping stone to augmented reality and a true 'forget you are wearing it' type of glasses product that can just naturally complement your surroundings.

I don't think anyone truely thinks people are going to all go to work, strap on a headset and be disconnected from their surroundings all day, that's never going to be a thing. Popping on a pair of glasses however is a much more approachable and user friendy experience, we're just not there yet.

There have been smart glasses made by Snapchat and Facebook, those didn't take off either.

Glasses are not visually subtle in the way smartwatches and phones are. It's one thing for everybody to be carrying the same iPhone, but people won't wear identical one-design-fits-all glasses when out and about.

I'm not sure I'd call those smart. They're basic little camera specs. We both know thats not what we mean when we discuss usable AR.

For glasses, people will care more about how it looks than what it does. The fashion barrier is something that designers have not put enough thought into and unsurprisingly, they haven't taken off.

It’s because there’s a bean counter at the top. It’s obvious this tech was all made for a glasses form factor that’s still at least 10 years away because the gamble that they’d figure it out didn’t pay off.

A visionary at the top just wouldn’t launch until the product was right, but a bean counter is counting how many beans have been spent and wants a return on the decade of dev time so rushed it out into a headset form factor instead.

VR/AR needs to be collaborative to achieve a breakthrough. Being able to interact with digital objects in 3D space that other people can also interact with will change how we work together.

Just consider code review: You can literally walk through the code together, take a look at different parts of the system and discuss how to improve things.

Your blind coworker will love the sudden destruction of accessibility. Without the 3d code review, he might have been a constructive team member. With the new tech, you can send him home and let him think about the fact that he is now useless.

Blind developers are extremely rare, accommodating them is not going to affect the adoption of the vision pro, or really anything.

People with your attitude are a reason why the number of blind devs is low and will get even lower in the future.

Not at all. I am all for accommodating blind developers, and blind people in general. I even used to work as a narrator of audio textbooks for blind people and worked on side project apps to help the blind, so I am quite passionate about this.

But I also know that no blind developer would want their sighted fellow developers to miss out on something useful on their behalf, especially not in some kind of preemptive gesture of sympathy.

Its not about missing out. When all your coworkers switch to the new shiny thing which is not accessible, the reality of the situation is that you are now no longer a useful coworker, at least when it comes to that particular activity. True, you can try to find another corner of the tech activities world to regain usefulness, but the truth is, if enough shiny tech is established, at one point you are no longer able to cooperate with the rest of the bunch. No pity or sympathy talk necessary. Its just reality. If accessibility is ignored long enough, the digital divide gets bigger, thats just a fact. Talking about sympathy and all that jazz is really missing the harsh reality of the matter.

That is a flawed argument. Alternative solutions have to be found for people who are physically handicapped. That is nothing new and AR/VR doesn't change that.

Speaking from experience, the argument is everything else but flawed. Because the reality is, new tech gets rolled out, and then there is the expectation that alternatives should be implemented for people with handicaps. However, that step either never happens, or comes to late.

This is still not sound reasoning. Otherwise we would not allow ourselves to have bikes because there are people without legs. The actual problem is not that new technology empowers able-bodied people, but that the existence of that technology can create false expectations of what all people should be able to do with that technology.

The option to do code reviews in a 3D environment does not automatically mean that older technologies can't be used for the same task. And it does not imply that blind people will get fired if 3D code reviews become popular.

I think the VP is more of a don't get left behind thing than a real product intended to sell. Keep R&D slightly engaged, build a better mouse trap in the apple way, and if some AR/VR solution does catch on, at least they aren't far behind the market.

Yes. Apple is covering bets. Also it seems there are no new product categories in the pipeline short term. By releasing Vision Pro they show they can still innovate (even if it has no market impact). It helps retain and attract talent.

Seems that even Apple is unable to make people get excited about VR helmets. These devices have been tried over and over again since late 60s and nobody except few highly specialised users wants them.

To be fair they did get a lot of people very excited for a bit, but not enough to fork out a small fortune for something that is merely cool.

I wish AVP had seamless language translation app. It could be worthwhile if two people who do not speak each other’s language could just put these on and communicate.

What would this add compared to a phone with headphones? The only thing i can think of is to fake lip sync to the translation, but seems more weird than useful, cool as it is.

Of course it is, Apple don’t want hordes of people buying this yet because they haven’t worked out what it is yet. This is the most beta product Apple have ever launched. They’ve developed a very impressive piece of technology and, for once, rather than launching a fully polished product where they tell us what it’s for, they’ve put it out to “see what we do with it”.

The concern here isn’t that Vision Pro is a dud, the concern is that they loose interest in it before we all work out what it’s good for.

This is the best cope so far!

Had to google “cope”. Let’s try to keep HN a bit more civil.

Not really, this is the sentiment amongst most of the less click bait driven tech media.

Great tech, does it have a place? Maybe but Apple might not be patient enough to find its place in the world.

Given their ability to loose interest quickly it doesn’t seem like that unreasonable a take - unless you want it to fail.

>Had to google “cope”. Let’s try to keep HN a bit more civil.

Civil? What do you mean?

Coping mechanism: an adaptation to environmental stress that is based on conscious or unconscious choice and that enhances control over behavior or gives psychological comfort.

This is a completely civil concept.

In this case the environmental stress is the fact that the Vision Pro is failing. The coping mechanism (or in short: "cope") is proclaiming that this is fine, because Apple is actually just beta-testing the Vision Pro, and it was never supposed to gain wider adoption, so all is according to the plan.

Seems to me like a good description of how Apple lost its vision. (I'll go get my coat...)

Might have addressed the total addressable market already - how many people are going to pay $3K+ for a gaming device you have to wear?

Apple should have continued with the car product - Huawei, Xiaomi have proved that phone manufacturers can make cars - they both released new products in this sector in 2024 and together already sold 100,000's of them.

EV is a much bigger global market than VisionPro. Tim Cook following Zuckerberg down the AR / VR rabbit hole might be seen one day as a massive strategic error.

The Vision Pro isn't a gaming device especially without controllers.

I dislike how some apple enthusiasts here are trying to rewrite history.

No, Apple did no bringt us the Smartphone. They also did not bring us the Smartwatch.

All of this existed prior to Apple. What Apple did is polish existing ideas up, doing incredibly good marketing, and making stuff that was not sexy but simply worked (think blackberry) into a status symbol.

Typically Apple did correctly identify which existing technologies would sell if polished up.

For the Vision Pro they completely misjudged. The first 3D hype started in 1922, and every 10 years or so VR and AR came up again, and EACH AND EVERY product failed and the hype died off again. It was always the same: "Wow, impressive technology" followed by "Hm, I actually prefer to be part of my environment" or "Actually I like 2D more". Every single time.

And it will by the same for this hype cycle.

It was simply bad judgment of Apple to notice that this technology did not fail due to it not being polished enough, but simply for people not wanting it.

Even those of you who aren't old and have not lived through four of those AR/VR hype cycles should remember Google Glass. Apple managers should have remembered, too.

A couple of years ago many of my developer friends used to be in the VR/AR business. With the exception of one, all have quit that sector, because whatever they created, in the end nobody wanted it. Not even the niches that would have been useful to humanity, like medical applications.

It's dead, Jim.

Yes. Apple strength is improving successful product categories, not finding product-market fit

I never understood why Apple decided to follow the hype created by Meta on this one.

Everyone was afraid that VR/AR might become the next big platform, and they'd be a half decade behind on development and patents.

Every other company's investment in headsets was a hedge during ZIRP. The downside was basically what has happened. Landfill the headsets and park the patents. The upside would have been, being at the front of the next computing platform. The headsets were lottery tickets.

Vision Pro should be at least twice as lightweight, cost half as much, have double the battery life, and twice the graphical performance. The technology is not there yet. Achieving these may require 1nm, photonics, graphene batteries, metalenses, and other advanced stuff, which could be feasible in 3-5 years. A little bit too early. But hey, everyone should start somewhere, and by that time there will be a dosen killer apps, good chance to success in the long term.

Drop the front facing display, drop the glass, swap aluminum for plastic and you’d be shocked how light it would be compared to the one today. It’s only so heavy for weird design team hubris.

Heaviest part of the quest is the battery, AVP already externalized that.

I will repeat my mantra comment here in HN: you should launch this kind of products with AAA content. That is the business playbook.

My oculus are sleeping (hibernating?) a long dream. The last time someone at home thought about them were when they downloaded a VR game in the PS5 to only discover that you need their Sony headset.

AAA content that you have to pay for, on top of the $3500 base price is not going to work. People are already tiring of streaming prices going up every 6 months, on top of grocery, rent and mortgage costs.

While you are describing that the chance of success is even lower because it is a really expensive luxury product, that does not contradict the idea that you should launch it with AAA content. The playbook is the same. You can fail but trying it without the playbook is an unforced business error.

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