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Comment by teeray | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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

> 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Basically put an iPhone in a Google Cardboard VR

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

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