The Vision Pro is a flop
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But, some engineers got to work on some new green field tech which is pretty cool. All to often at work I'm presented with interesting problems that I have to solve with hacks / least amount of resources. I envy those that know how to convince a company to take swings.
All that said, I really didn't like the tone of this article. Yes, I agree that "big tech" has caused a lot of harm in society. But it's not that hard to separate that from many good things it has done, and this article felt so cynical like it just wanted to piss in everyone's soup.
We should celebrate it when big companies take real risks, even if they swing and miss. What would the author of this article prefer, more stock buybacks?
You can argue that any of these technologies existed before and they “followed”, but that’s a pretty distorted view when apple made the market - they didn’t take market share from others.
They didn't invent the tablet, they made it popular.
They didn't invent the laptop, they made it a status symbol.
They didn't invent mobile apps, they made them ubiquitous.
They don't invent much, but they improve it through industry-leading design (usually) and market it and willingly lock you into it.
> They don't invent much
They probably invent at the same rate as others investing in R&D.
> and willingly lock you into it.
They vertically integrate. Their customers obviously like this and aren’t bothered that it isn’t open. It’s not a bad thing, unless you consider the behaviour bad from all companies.
The experience you get is probably better than any existing VR headset but I struggle to see myself valuing it at more than $500. The FOV and resolution still both suck and the headset is super bulky. I would rather use a phone or laptop/tablet to co some content since it’s much more pixel dense. If they can make a slimmer, lighter version with much higher pixel density it might be worth getting one but the tech is nowhere near there yet.
It’s much easier to tear down something than it is to create something. It also garners a lot more clicks for someone whose primary contribution in life is pontification on the internet belittling the achievements of people who actually -do- something and -create- and take risks. Those people still do, after all, have to eat so thank god for advertising platforms and breathless naysayers.
Or possibly forever if nobody is trying (and often failing) to advance the state of the art.
The issue with Vision Pro IMO is that it costs so much and includes price boosting features like the creepy eye see through that are interesting in a prototype release like this but can be cut to reduce cost weight and other factors. If it had cost 1/2 as much it would have sold more than twice as much, and while it might not become the next iPhone, it would have a much more established user and developer base to build on over the next 5 years as they iterate. Then I think by 2030 we would have both the social understanding of where headsets and AR fit and Apple will have had the chance to iterate designs, software, supply chain, materials, etc and we would have a practical device for a much larger addressable market. But even so, the die has been cast and things will improve.
All that said, the point isn’t this - it’s that the tech critic authors are the worst type of people - the people who make their living nit picking great achievements in the goal of tearing them down and regarding investment and purchase for no other reason than “engagement.” Their points are only right from the narrow view of some people, cherry picked and mixed together, into a giant breathless fallacy. It’s lazy and slimy.
But it’s also fair to say (imo) that AVP has made massive leaps. Are we now taking for granted the major leaps in nailing the interaction model (look and finger-tap), and delivering display tech that makes watching movies on it unlike any other movie experience just 85 days after release?
Yes, it needs to be lighter. Yes it needs more software/apps/content to fit greater use cases. Yes it needs to be less expensive to broaden its appeal, etc. Apple has a decent track record of patiently iterating YoY, polishing products to their mature, stable design state (thus giving rise to a new cycle of complaints about stagnation and not being bold and innovative).
Psvr2 can do look, and it is largely best used as a rendering optimization, not as input detection. For controls, haptic is so important that the most emersive game is driving, but only if you have a good steering setup. Indeed, driving doesn't even need vr to be emersive with a good steering setup.
I guess so, considering the first time I used that feature was in 2020 on the Oculus Quest 1.
There's a wide consensus that this kind of tech is going to have a negative effect on society and how humans interact with each other, but there's also this myth that this is inevitable and that we just have to accept it.
But it's not reality: there's no reason for it to be inevitable, and it's just that the most wealthy companies are pushing it hard, because they see it as a big money maker.
Also, even if people did this isn't a argument either: people do buy Fentanyl, and that's not a good justification for inventing it.
Worse than that, even people who bought it aren't actually using it. No wonder why Meta's VR division operational losses are higher than their turnover…
But there is “no market” in the sense that it's just a heavily subsidized product (except the subsidies come from private companies and not from the public sector) and if it wasn't driven by this multi billion yearly subsidies, the product would not even exist.
Like, real people.
Big swings in tech almost always fail when we push tech fantasies but don't understand humans.
And my fear is they actually set the industry back several years, because people start to believe a concept isn't desired by the populace, when really it was just the execution.
For example, thank goodness Elon came along and rescued the image of the electric car by grasping we humans want good-looking fast cars.
The strange EV designs out of Detroit always killed me.
Yet, it was hard for Tesla to overcome the impression left by those past failures.
I hope the industry doesn't abandon headsets because of the execution mistakes we're seeing now.
What I loved about Jobs is he understood humans so well.
I miss that about him.
His big swings felt natural once in your hand.
Tech CEOs are often taking big swings, but we tech people can be so nerdy sometimes that we struggle to understand how to make products look fashionable and feel natural to use.
That was Jobs magic sauce. Apple struggles with that now.
MP3 players we're clunky until Jobs added the scroll wheel.
Just a stunningly natural solution.
In comparison, the vision pro is clearly too bulky to be practical.
I was excited for the vision pro. But when I tried it, I was shocked at how front heavy it is.
I think it's a solid product for certain niche uses.
But we need a Jobs or Elon, to identify the heart of what humans really need out of a headset.
Zuckerberg is this generation's Bill Gates. Smart. Successful. But mentally and emotionally disconnected from the rest of humanity.
The successful headset innovator needs to shed the 'ready player one' fantasy that we humans want to live in a digital universe or to consume large amounts of entertainment this way.
In my opinion (just my opinion), for the foreseeable future, any non-productivity use of headsets will wear off as novelty.
We will power through the isolation and awkwardness of headsets for the right productivity tools.
But so far it seems that too much energy is going to entertainment and social concepts.
Edit: I see replacing the mouse, in mouse heavy productive activities, as the main use case for headsets.
Drawing, diagramming, navigating visualizations, reviewing large project timelines.
And then you take it off.
And then, incremental improvements to increase wearing time without eye strain, etc.
I do like the vision pro concept of immersive video and pictures to capture memories. That's definitely a nice-to-have feature.
He”s a good marketer, but not a good ideas person or leader.
Look at the cyber truck, hyperloop, twitter and his crazy and damaging rants on twitter.
All the history is captured on Wikipedia including such bits as Musk funding $6.5m of Tesla’s initial $7.5m series A round.
Musk also oversaw Roadster product design.
Wish there was something like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_vote_of_no_conf... in company culture, as in you can only express "I'm against that" , if you suggest some other similar bold endeavor. Not this "let's milk bettsy to death and then loose the farm" mindset that uses bold leaps as ammonition.
Nah, we don't want any of that.
For example, if we really are concerned with climate change do we really want companies spending small fortunes to either fail or build an expensive product that takes a ton of resources to create? If we really are worried about health concerns related to excessive screen use, do we really want companies trying to strap screens on your face? If we're really concerned with inflation, is it beneficial for a company to spend this much money and resources to try to build a very expensive product that could very well become more of a novelty than anything else?
Beyond that, energy consumption just can't grow indefinitely without having a negative impact on carbon, if that's your primary concern. Not only would the entire energy infrastructure have to be carbon neutral, everything we use that energy for would have to be carbon neutral as well.
Let's say that is even possible, if all that matters is the carbon cycle are we totally fine with cutting down every forest on the planet as long as we find a different way to sequester carbon?
I'm well aware that scenario takes it to am extreme, but we have to play it out that far to see if the core principle is right. We need to use less energy and consume fewer resources, we can't get around that fact by moving around carbon in computer models and mathematical equations.
In this case, I'm torn on the idea of us needing companied to take shots like Vision Pro when I also personally think we as a society need to be consuming less and using fewer natural resources overall. I see others run into the same thing when someone, for a very specific individual example, uses petroleum based products to glue their hands to a street in protest of climate change.
I do wish more consumers would be hesitant to buy new products when they know little about how they're made or how they work. Ironically the more government we throw at preventing problems the more likely consumers are to skip past being skeptical and blindly trust that the big, regulated company must be doing what's best for us.
I think this is only really true for themselves, but even then short-term vs long-term biases affect decision making. Even when people know what the overall best choice is, they often just make the choice that makes them happy in the now. They will also tend to discount ill effects to others if those people are unseen and unheard.
> usually dependent on people being informed enough to know what they opting into
This is not a small qualifier.
I can't think of a decent example of governments effectively avoiding a problem beforehand, curious if you have any for comparison though. I'm used to seeing governments either blindly ignorant of problems before they happen, or unwilling to act until something breaks and it becomes a talking point for elections.
> This is not a small qualifier.
We're in total agreement there. It shouldn't be a needed qualifier at all, but our education system is junk and we have collectively leaned into trusting experts rather than informed consent.
This would be hard because it would be counterfactual. Like if a rule/policy was put into place to prevent/avoid BAD_THING and then BAD_THING did not happen. It's not really news or remembered. In fact, the opposite can happen. The fact that BAD_THING is not happening becomes a reason for dismantling the original rule/policy because since there is no BAD-THING, we obviously don't need this rule. I think of recent moves in some states to re-enable child labor as a good example of this thinking.
Airline safety is another. Government intervened with rules that made planes really really safe. But since air travel became so safe (as a direct consequence of these rules), then operators/builders started chipping away at them (or circumventing them, or straight-up ignoring them) because they aren't needed because air travel is so safe.
So its tough to cite and example, because I'd need to point at something that didn't happen because of a rule, and that's hard to do.
Apple's miscalculation here was overestimating the market's price tolerance for a category whose prosumers have already explored for 1/3 Apple's price point.
If this had been 5 years ago at half the price, they'd own the category.
For the past decade Apple’s product lineup has pretty much remained the same (faster, lighter, etc), while they invested heavily in spatial computing (flop) and autonomous vehicles (scrapped). All while totally neglecting the industry they pioneered (Siri) and should have been perfecting. Instead, OpenAI came along and ate their lunch and Apple was caught completely flat-footed. And now they’re way behind.
It’s shocking to me how bad the above bets and non-investments have played out for Apple. Tim Cook needs to ride off into the sunset. It’s been a good ride. He ran the business well. They need an innovative CEO at the helm that can make better bets.
My point is that it seems pretty clear that the future is in the space that OpenAI is right now. And that isn’t a bet that Apple was investing in very heavily.
That's also probably why most AI research published by Apple is about on-device inference. It's expensive to run inference servers at scale. Apple is a hardware company, so it makes sense they want to focus on what you can do on a local device (or more accurately, how they can sell you a new piece of hardware).
It's just that nobody has built one yet, I'm surprised because it's a very suitable application. But I think the cost is much higher than the current scripted models, which means there must be a payment model attached. Right now all the major voice assistants are free and I have a feeling they're all waiting to see who makes the first paid LLM-based product, and how the market reacts.
The former is really straightforward to implement with an LLM — it’s basically what an LLM is.
The latter is a whole different story.
The open problem here is making it on-device, and privacy preserving. Though I’m optimistic about this, as Apple has bought up a huge number of AI startups in the last couple of years, so they are probably onto something.
You just prompt it with "If I'm asking you to call someone, please output only "<CALL>" and the name of the person". Then capture that keyword.
It works fine like that.
My layperson’s prediction for the next big thing is cheaper and cheaper techs. I believe that there will be a race to the bottom. Both hardware and software will become commodity. Even all these new AI technologies will become commodities. The true Cyberpunk take is that technology is boring and commonplace.
So the Apple Watch, for example, could be everything you need to carry around because the voice assistant can literally do everything you can possible think of (besides consume social media and YouTube content).
An all knowing ever listening assistant strapped to your wrist, completely connected to all of your accounts financial, medical, social media, monitoring your vitals, measuring your acceleration, deceleration, steps, altitude, and gps position, bundling it up, and then selling it to whoever wants it for pennies on the dollar.
The good news is that it’s a software solution, not hardware. Open source can only win in software. So it has a chance.
Open source, self-hosted, all-knowing assistant connected to the Internet, that doesn’t leak data to companies, and that filters out all their ads, messaging, and CTA’s.
Tech-savvy people will be able to have one of these pretty soon even if big tech wins the broader market.
That’s a nice thought, but IBM would probably just buy it then kill it.
This is precisely why Linux has overwhelmingly won the server market for at least a decade, but it is still a bit player in consumer devices (except Android, which is barely open source and is controlled by a huge corporation selling our data).
Perhaps open source doesn't devalue consumers in a way that they are a thing to be won - not even in aggregate.
The network devices in my home are open source, as is most of the OS. With my customers it's a mix - but where there is open source, it pretty much just works.
Meanwhile, any complaining is typically due to the ongoing poor treatment by Microsoft, Intuit, et al.
You can win a market, that doesn't mean you're winning the participants. You could at best be winning them over, which is a positive for anyone.
> The network devices in my home are open source, as is most of the OS.
The software on those devices is open source, or in other words, the companies selling your devices are using OSS to power them (or you yourself installed software mostly created for this purpose by similar companies).
That seems like the sticking point with LLM’s as they exist now.
Lots of amazing hardware is still way too expensive to make it into ordinary consumer hands, or hasn't even been invented yet.
What's keeping the future bleak is a low business appetite for risk. The wringing out of current tech for every last cent will eventually stop when there's no other way to profit but actual R&D. Until then, yeah things will be boring nonsense like AI and ridiculous marketing. We're in the doldrums until some heads start to roll.
Going by the rumors, there should be some interesting announcements at WWDC that may explain where all their effort has been going instead of improving the current version of Siri.
ARM chips maybe? How the hell do you space something like that out? That's like the only thing of consequence that any of these companies have achieved since 2020
You seem to have forgotten the M1 Mac, which was released in 2020. It was followed by the complete overhaul and revitalization of the Mac lineup, all to critical and popular acclaim.
I’d say “way” is a stretch, and the technologies that largely are making it such could be argued were popularized by ggml which was written originally for the M1 platform.
Apple's Silicon Magic Is Over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOlXmv9EiPo
I doubt anyone would be scrambling to get the M4 if that it is just mote of the same.
Though, I do hope that Apple continues to make improvements.
Don't really feel it faster than Intel, TBH. May be better regarding battery, but who cares, definitely not me, working from AC outlet 24/7.
For me the insane battery life/computing power ratio massively outweighs any possible advantages for staying with Intel
silicon (m2) is worth its weight in gold to me for the battery life and functionality.
From a security perspective, I prefer the separation from the x86 architecture if for no other reason than it imposes extra cost for exploit development.
https://www.darkreading.com/application-security/patchless-a...
As always with security, everything is a tradeoff.
There are only so many human hours and minds interested or allocated to exploitation and offensive security. If everyone used the same architecture for everything, the economies of scale on the offensive side (due to state funded actors) would blow everyone else out of the water.
From a software perspective, Windows has an incredible amount of skilled eyes on each patch release, but we still see new exploits. Same for Linux. Likely same for MacOS.
All i'm advocating for is that having separate hardware architectures is good because it raises the barrier to entry, even if it's only the next marginal step.
I am confident that my non-default SSH ports, that only accept connections after a sequence of port knocking, adds a slight bit of security to nothing. For example: xz backdoor.
You could do that for years with an extended battery in ThinkPads (and Dell I think, never used them). More so, you could just bring additional charged batteries with you, in case you really needed.
But yes, it took a little more space and weight than M1.
So M1 didn't allowed people on-call to be able "to throw anything at it for several hours", the tech was already there. The only thing M1 did bring is a small savings in the weight and space for the people who needs a glorified terminal with them.
Hint: ultrabooks were a thing long before M1.
Those ultrabooks were insanely expensive and had like 3 hours of battery life.
> Those ultrabooks were insanely expensive and had like 3 hours of battery life.
Ah, yes M1 for $300 is surely better!
And no, they didn't had 3 hours of the battery life.
I had 4 hours+ just a couple of days ago on a totally not tuned ASUS TM420 with a 3-cell battery.
> Nothing came even remotely close to that before
Except you needed to adapt your whole workflow for it, but as usual this part is ignored.
Sure, today you can do that way more easily because most (read: webdev, lol) things are done, but...
My wild guess is if you are taking a laptop with you, you are likely to use some kind of bag so having a charger around is no big deal, especially if you are in someone's home. And if you are in a social place, you won't stay connected for hours as it is pretty antisocial, you are likely to have to have several phone calls and you will be asked to leave anyway so you usually fix the problem quickly and if not possible you just pay the bill and go back home.
I don't know whether you like that aesthetics of those laptops or whether the price fits in your budget or not, but I kind of feel that getting 3 or 4 hours of battery is price you pay for falling for way too thin flashy white brushed aluminum stuffs. Hardcore roadwarriors like ThinkPad X1 Nano users seem to be reporting 7-10 hours new for their machines.
I'm not saying that I think M-series CPUs are all fad - every datapoints available suggest it's just -fine- , I'm just saying they're probably not like decades ahead of everything else.
And how ignore where this thread started: "on-call".
There is a lot of things in M-series which are good, but it's totally not the price, not the starting model performance [for anything better than being a terminal] and definitely no 'the autonomy breakthrough'.
Apple Macintosh started on Motorola processors. Then they moved to PowerPC processors. Then they moved to Intel processors. And now they've moved to ARM processors. It's happened 4 times in the same product line.
https://jacobbartlett.substack.com/p/through-the-ages-apple-...
I've found Apple Silicon to be incredibly fast. There were issues with the different architectures, but for 99% of people those are solved.
Perhaps but after a spike in 2020-21 their Mac sales are about where they were back in the Intel days.
If you take into account the inflation since ~2017 M1 hasn’t really been that extraordinarily successful and their past couple of quarters were the worst in the last 10 years or so.
The watch is the most recent new product I can think of from Apple and that was 9 years ago.
They sold more AirPods than there are people in the United States.
> Om Malik, who has been writing about tech since tech reporters used to write about calculators, he was even more effusive. “It’s amazing! It’s incredible!” he enthused. “You can feel a vibration in the universe!”
I mean, oof.
Great with the numbers, bad with innovation.
They need a Nadella -- e.g. someone who follows and navigates trends with great skill.
Cook knows he needs to innovate, but he doesn't know how.
I honestly think he follows the rumors moreso than the rumors follow him.
Media: Is Apple going to do a smartwatch?
Cook: Hey guys, we should do a smartwatch.
Media: Is Apple going to do a car?
Cook: Hey, guys. Maybe we should do a car.
Media: Is Apple going to do a headset?
Etc. etc.
The smartwatch worked out. But honestly, I feel that was moreso accidental low-hanging fruit.
Like Ballmer, Cook has done an amazing job maximizing shareholder value by good old financial execution.
But, in an industry like tech, you can only live off of old products for so long.
> Cook: Hey, guys. Maybe we should do a car.
It was Jobs’ idea, not Tim’s.
OpenAI doesn’t work without internet. Siri does. OpenAI can’t do anything on your phone. Siri can. They’re fundamentally different services.
Yes, whatever Apple does with Siri next will be LLM based and will compete with other on-device LLM assistants. But I expect that to be a fairly different market from the cloud-based LLM assistants.
Hell, the next Siri might just forward questions to a third party cloud based LLM assistant for answers to complex questions. Like it does with google now and did with wolfram alpha at one point
Though I expect Apple is also waiting for the quality of LLMl AIs to be good enough. Even ChatGPT 4 isn’t really good enough to be trusted. They’re way too confident when they should be answering “I don’t know” or “I’m unsure but I’m guessing the answer is: …”
Like, what Microsoft is doing is absolutely reckless. It’s insane to integrate an AI assistant that constantly and confidently lies to you into the OS.
But did they buy it? That's the question. When the first iPhone launched people actually bough it instead of just being wowed by it and then walking away.
A lot of commercially failed products were successful on wowing people. Making people buy it so you can be profitable is the real deal. You don't make money wowing tire kickers.
I used to own two generations of Oculus Quest devices and while they wowed me and got me to buy several games that wowed me even more, I eventually sold them because they were gathering dust.
Do you see the problem? If not, I'll go deeper. I rarely used them despite the wow factor since I rarely had the motivation of strapping them to my face and wearing them for too long despite me not having issues sitting playing PC games for hours or being for hours on my phone. Do you see the issues now? It was not a comfort issues, it was a motivation issue. It's just much less friction to stare a screens around you than strapping goggles to your face and wearinng them for long.
Wow factor is not enough, and neither is being cheaper. You need to convince people why they should strap goggles to their face and wear them prolonged.
The gap between woowing people and getting the to use some long therm is huge. While is why apple's VP and the other VR Googles are failing mainstream.
The reality distortion field is dead. Perhaps the memo was missed.
If they expected …that… to sell millions of units straight away, well, as I wrote.
It was plainly a test of both manufacturing and market. To the GP's point, I think it's hard for anyone on the outsjde to judge whether they hit their marks for it or not right now. It certainly wasn't grossly short, as there's no indication that they overshot manufacturing by an order of magnitude or something, but it certainly could have been disappointing. We really can't guess right now.
Good, traditional reporting might be able to surface some insight with real footwork and investigation. Armchair blogspam writing like the article is pointless and is really just clickbait.
If VR is the next big thing, but will take years of niche smaller profit margin products to launch it, established tech companies will struggle to justify the products existence wherein a smaller player could go all in, achieve roughly equivalent results, and be quite content.
> 10 billion
The entire computing environment has evolved dramatically since then, as have the expectations of the once scrappy underdog to the second largest company in the world. At some point, AR / VR will eventually become good enough, and it's good that they are investing in it. It forces Meta to innovate and become better as well.
I personally hope that it will get to the point that i can go anywhere and take my ideal workspace setup with me and lose little to no productivity.
"relentlessly telling customers what they want, regardless of what they might need."
The walled garden doesn't appeal to most people, which is one reason why worldwide Apple has a very small market share. Price is another, and paying more for a device I have far less control over never made sense to me.
>I personally hope that it will get to the point that i can go anywhere and take my ideal workspace setup with me and lose little to no productivity.
My laptop has 3 very portable screens. I don't have to strap anything to my head to be productive. Sure, I'm not going to spread out 3 screens on an airplane, but I'm not typically going to work if I'm on an airplane (YMMV). I'm not sure how you get to be productive living inside a strap-on-bubble even with the passthrough video. It just seems so clumsy. Maybe it will improve, but that's a big maybe and I'm not sure Apple is going to be the one to perfect that experience, especially when their platform is so curated. Where am I going to run my servers and software development stack, on the Vision Pro? No. I still need a laptop to be productive, no matter where I am.
It's a premium product. Iphone has the majority of US (and thus wealthy) customers. It's seen as premium in other wealthy nations as well. Second largest company in the world by market cap means that they clearly operate with more than enough customers who matter to get things done.
I used to be a hardcore linux everything person. Over time I stepped into the walled garden and found I enjoyed not having to constantly think about the interop of everything. It's different for everyone.
> Where am I going to run my servers and software development stack?
Right now you need a laptop. Rapidly approaching a future where devcontainers and remote dev servers will let you dev anywhere you want, where you just choose the interface of choice. You may want a laptop,
I may want to have multiple screens for analyzing data, modifying code, and doing other operationsy things.
The point overall is: Apple is good at shipping products that people want and iterating and improving them. That is undeniable. It does take time to iterate and improve, and Vision will probably get there because this pattern of product is in their DNA.
Take off your HN glasses for a few minutes. I don’t think the vast majority (I’m talking 80-90%+) of people could even tell you “walled garden” means. It doesn’t even start to factor into most people’s buying experiences. In fact, to the average consumer Apple and Google’s policies for the App Store are identical.
Apple could allow sideloading tomorrow and it would not make an appreciable difference in sales worldwide because the people who say they care about it (let alone the subset of that who actually take advantage of it) is vanishing small. I know people on HN will bristle at that but it’s just the truth.
I don’t care what OS you use but I find it hilarious that I have some friends who are staunchly pro-Android/anti-Apple because <insert tired talking point> and then they proceed to use their phones in a way that never exceeds what they could do on iOS.
Price is a much larger factor.
As for your comments on the AVP I agree, at least at its current iteration.
Technologically, we’ve exhausted the low hanging fruit of various scientific and engineering disciplines. Energy, transportation, construction, computing devices, software, medicine, surgery and more - all these things rode enormous waves of potential in the postwar era that have now ebbed.
The iPhone was a low hanging fruit made possible by developments in compute, connectivity, and software.
The next set of fruit is much higher up the tree: see avp, development costs of.
It's not like they're selling at small volumes at first, i.e. to early adopters who love it and will convince their friends to be later adopters. Early adopters are mostly either returning it or saying it's basically shelfware now.
So it’s limited as hell in terms of distribution
That's not a defense of the product, it's a criticism.
https://www.theonion.com/apple-introduces-revolutionary-new-...
"It remains to be seen if the Apple Wheel will catch on in the business world where people use computers for actual work instead of just dicking around" resonates for whenever Apple/Meta claim a VR headset is a productivity/business tool.
"everything is just a few 100 clicks away"... sounds like Apple's regulatory compliance. Might become mandatory if you want to use side-loading/3rd party app stores.
It's more how quickly those units sell. How many get returned. How much activity is happening on the platform.
Apple knows all of those numbers. They also know what the potential improvements are and they probably have a really good idea what improvements would move the needle on the numbers that matter.
If Apple kill the AVP it may well look odd from the outside but they'll be well informed.
Now take in consideration that Nintendo is a fraction of the size of Apple.
400k units is nothing, less than a rounding error for a company the size of Apple. They are not in the business of selling some hundred thousand units of hardware.
After owning a Quest 3 for a while, it's just too isolating and cumbersome an experience. It can't compete with the freedom of my laptop when I want to be in the digital world and it can't compete with legitimate social interaction when I want to be with people.
The biggest place it can compete is games, but outside of a few really solid, and really compelling experiences, most games in VR aren't enough to warrant strapping it to your face.
I can't see VR ever being a thing beyond video games and maybe some forms of other media. People are social creatures. The idea is that people want to sit around staring into goggles rather than interacting with other human beings is the kind of weird stuff that gets baked up by socially underdeveloped Big Tech nerds.
Unless the form factor can be significantly minimized this is not going to be the next iPhone.
Looking forward to this comment ending up in some HN retrospective on the success of Vision Pro 20 years from now like some of those old iPhone takes from the mid 2000s lol.
But we don’t have that amazing thing for AR yet either.
Of course, Apple once made another product that, despite its popularity among medical professionals was ultimately not commercially successful enough to survive: the Newton.
I'm an avid golfer and watcher of Golf on TV. I'm not entirely sure I want to watch The Masters in VR. I really enjoy The Masters but it's still a social event for me on Sat/Sun at a bar and Thurs/Fri it's up on a screen near my work computer.
Admittedly this is because they just do ham-fisted cuts - a full POV throughout a game would be different, but for a lot of the sports I watch it just seems like it's going to make watching the game as a spectator more frustrating.
The company that broadcast NBA games in VR was acquired by Apple.
For most sports, the best seat is at home on your couch watching on your giant tv.
For most sports, the reason to not sit at home watching on your giant TV is to have social interactions with other people at the event.
Ultimately, useful products don't need all this philosophizing that VR always seems to entail. The whole premise of VR goggles is kind of stupid.
Yes and that’s only a subset of the social interactions. Many people prefer to have friends over and enjoy home cooked food and liquor store priced (cf. stadium prices) beverages. Watching the big game on a giant TV with friends is not going to be beaten by clunky headsets any day of the week.
Until they figure out Star Wars hologram style communication VR will forever be in the niche category.
The technology is amazing, with a few caveats, but they shot themselves in the foot with the launch.
They had no 3rd party software at launch. Developers couldn’t get the device ahead of time, at most you could get two short hands on labs if you flew to one of a handful of cities in the world.
Apple didn’t have anything amazing themselves to keep people coming back. Personas are interesting but not enough. Mac Virtual Display is neat but not going to sell 2 million units.
But that’s OK. That’s what third parties are for. But basically no one was there. Between the issue above and knowing how few would sell it didn’t make sense. Apple should have been paying companies to seed the launch with cool/useful apps. Enhanced ports from other systems, wild ideas, anything. Apple’s secrecy probably meant they weren’t going to do this.
Hopefully they show some great stuff at WWDC. Apple has the money to keep it going for quite a while while they fix the price and get some killer apps. But developer sentiment towards Apple in general isn’t good and some cool possibilities for apps would likely require more room data than I think Apple gives apps for privacy reasons.
I do want to see where it goes. The Apple Watch took a while to find its real place, but it was cheaper and had a more obvious initial value proposition.
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Meanwhile, Meta is losing $1B a month on AR/VR. “Why would I want a Vision Pro? A Quest 3 is the same for $3000 less.” isn’t doing them enough favors it seems.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/meta-loses-another-38-billion-...
But it’s just an overcomplicated game launcher. The environment between VR apps isn’t important or memorable in any way. And once you’re in the game it could be any piece of VR hardware. It’s just a commodity. I think the main reason it’s popular is it just doesn’t seem to have much direct competition (stand alone VR headsets).
Apple chose a few differentiators like ultra-high resolution, entirely hands free (no controller) operation, and a ton of processing power relative to a Quest. That means they’re capable of doing things no one else could, if they can find compelling things to do.
I was referring to compelling things that existing devices can’t do well. There don’t seem to be many/any now, let alone at launch.
My normal desktop is 3x 50" TV's I work in front of, which is more or less what my first thought of doing in Vision Pro with their ability to pull in the Mac desktop, but I would want it as multiple displays as well, same as I use my displays today. Only a single desktop seemed unnecessarily limiting, and apparently I'm not alone as someone has even come up with a product (Splitscreen app) to expand on this at least to 2, but it's still hackish and far from ideal.
Maybe this is a Mac limitation, as looking at what sort of Mac I would need to support a Vision Pro indicated I would need M3 Pro to do 2x displays, or a M3 Max for 3x displays. This seemed absurd as I am typing this on a 7-8 year old dell xps driving 3 displays at 4k on an intel gpu, and a brand new M3 needs a top spec Pro or Max to do so?
If I could replicate my 3x desktop experience in Vision Pro, I had honestly considered maybe even trying a MacOS system again (I use Linux for the past 20 years full time), but without at least that, it's all a half-baked tech demo today. Ideally I could even pull in application windows from the desktop apart into Vision Pro space as well, but multiple desktops otherwise would be the barrier to entry.
Here's to hope Collabora/Valve hasn't given up on XR Desktop for Linux VR Desktop integration entirely yet.
Multi-screen Mac use is already an extremely niche market - if the Vision line up had to ride or die on this, it would never have been born.
Like 4 HDMI streams can't go into 'one' cable?
My Samsung TV has a box where all the inputs connect, and then there's one cable the diameter of a spaghetti noodle that carries the video signal AND power to the TV.
> Multi-screen Mac use is already an extremely niche market
Because much as I am all-in on Mac, it's a niche market because multi-monitor support on macOS is largely garbage.
I suspect next generation of this solution will stream each window individually, and let you place Mac windows freely around your environment. Then you don’t need to stream anything from static windows, you mainly just need to stream data from the window you’re interacting with at the moment.
Besides you could use eye tracking to only transmit what's being seen in high quality.
If I had a video or game in every screen then yes, I might need the bandwidth. But most screens are mostly static with only the cursor and my input making any changes.
You can have more ultrawide retina displays going than your neck will let you crane your head at.
Only one display needs be hardware, the others are virtual.
PS. Separately, for real displays, most likely your Intel is doing DisplayLink (and most likely not retina resolution), while the Mac is not compressing the video. The Mac can also support a slew of DisplayLink monitors if you get a DisplayLink driver. Elegato and others use the standard driver to run their monitor accessories like Elegato's teleprompter, but you can also use DisplayLink on lower end Macbooks that only support 2 or 3 uncompressed 4K+ retina screens at once as well as on certain docks that split to multiple DisplayLink screens.
Had a friend show me the Vision Pro and couldn't believe the cost and how similar it was to the Quest 3. I asked him if you can install Steam etc and he's like nah... ok so you paid €4500 to look at a dinosaur tech demo and do a virtual desktop.
It just doesn't make sense why anyone would buy one over the Quest other than to show people in public they can afford a 5k device and have people looking at them
The displays they’re using is in limited supply. And they primarily want to get the headsets into the hand of developers to make apps for them. If some enthusiasts buy them and give them some feedback for OS development that’s also great. The high price makes it more likely that the AVP doesn’t get bought by people that Apple doesn’t have any interest in getting it yet.
You also gotta keep in mind that the AVP has an incredibly powerful processor. That drives a lot of the cost and downsides compared to the quest (a lot of heat from those chips.. metal helps conduct it away). I think the point is to get developers to start thinking primarily about developing professional apps. Apple can’t afford to be stuck with just a casual consumer market. Quest will be too strong there. I’m sure they will launch a “non pro” Apple Vision for this market eventually (I suspect when they can get the same processing power as AVP with less power consumption so they can drop the fan and integrate a battery). But they need the halo-effect of a “pro” product line to drive sales.
The VR market is emerging and new ideas is coming (microled, holographic lens, vergence accomodation conflict solutions...) Douglas Lanman makes a long video on how to pass the visual turing test on AR/VR with tons of ideas https://youtu.be/EJ_-n7Syz0s?si=yc90uRFyOlPIeT3D
Thanks for sharing!
I feel clickbaited.
Currently the image quality of consumer grade 360 cameras are webcam level and having to edit and export 360 content then side loading it to a VR headset is not a very user friendly experience.
The author bolsters his argument by quoting Ming-Chi Kuo's similarly unsubstantiated "800,000 units" claim. Since the 72.5% accurate¹ Kuo can't possibly have guessed wrong, his face-saving explanation is that Apple intended to hit that number but has since had to slash production.
Only, this doesn't agree with Kuo v2023.09, who noted, "Based on some component suppliers’ maximum production capacity estimates, Vision Pro shipments in 2024 will be at most 400,000–600,000 units"². (The Financial Times, The Information, and The Elec all reported on the 400-500K unit limit imposed by the availability of the ultra-high-resolution OLED microdisplays manufactured by Sony.)
Also, Apple was telegraphing fewer than 400,000 units in 2024 way back in July of last year.³
Look, I understand that analysts gonna analyst. But anybody with even a tiny bit of tech history knowledge should understand by now that Apple plays the long game. This is just poorly-researched, long-form, "gotta generate engagement" shitposting.
¹ https://appletrack.com/ming-chi-kuo/ ² https://medium.com/@mingchikuo/apple-vision-pro-shipment-gro... ³ https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/07/03/apple-w...
Notably, the Forbes article mentioning the 400k units "telegraphed" is sourced from a Financial Times article that cites two sources close to Apple and the supplier Luxshare. [1]
Also, an insider was very actively leaking information about Vision Pro and other Apple products at this exact time. [2]
It is believable that actual internal unit estimates would have come out of this source.
The article also pulls in the Humane pin, and Cybertruck which have nothing to do with the Vision Pro.
If the article were presented as something intended to showcase perceived new product failures hey, it is okay to editorialize something like that. What is this author other than some self-presumed analyst themselves?
Instead, it looks like something that may have started that way and then got editorialized into a VP hit piece.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/b6f06bde-17b0-4886-b465-b561212c9...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/28/24115067/apple-leak-lawsu...
The problem with VR is simply that the technology is still not there yet. The Vision Pro is cutting edge technology; but it is still cumbersome. The display might be technically impressive, but it still offers less pixels per degree than a typically monitor at typical distances.
All that the Vision Pro demonstrates is that optics, computers, and display technologies are not yet advanced enough to make VR a mass market viable technology. I see no reason to believe that there is any barrier that means they will never become sufficiently advanced. And once the technology does reach that point, I see no indication that it will not be a success.
Even given the limitations of the technology, VR products that are technologically inferior to the Vision Pro seem to have found a sustainable niche.
Sure there will be smart glasses, but it might be more of a peripheral thing.
If you saw that and thought that was cool- yes it is!
If you saw that and thought “crap that’s way too many calories to burn” - hello from other lazy people.
Unless AR makes it EASIER for me to work and spend yet less energy, then why use it?
But I'm sure the cost of components ate a ton of that, and I'm not sure how much of that would be fixed vs. marginal costs. For something like the custom silicon, I could imagine fixed costs were substantial compared to marginal costs. I'm also not sure how much of this can be amortized across future versions of the Vision Pro, or if a huge amount of the fixed costs will need to be repeated.
Maybe for the amount of silicon fabrication tooling, and the complexity of manufacturing tooling for something so unique, the fixed costs required the sale of 2-3 million units to break even. If so, I could see various parts of the organization feeling pressured to deliver analysis which confirmed the necessary level of demand, especially if executives expressed bullishness on the project.
This is false. The link goes to a Mark Gurman article in Bloomberg that claims Apple at one point had an internal prediction of 3 million, and that it was revised down before it went on sale. That may or may not be accurate reporting, but it’s not close to claiming they publicly predicted 3M sales.
For everything I’ve seen of the Vision Pro it has represented a solution in search of a problem.
If they did, I'm sure that OP or you can find a source for this statement. A rumor published by Bloomberg (or, in a more charitable interpretation, an estimate given on background) is not "publicly stated".
How much do you know that Apple has invested in the R&D of the Vision Pro?
- https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
The difference with self-driving cars is that everyone [1] wants them, and once "done well" they'll take off quickly.
The advantages are just too obvious;
mobility for those too young or too old, or medical unable to drive.
The lack of needing parking right near your origin or destination.
The expensive asset that is tied to single human location, so meaning it spends 98% of time idle.
The road deaths caused by bad driving, drunk driving, stupid driving etc.
Indeed self driving cars have so much upside they are inevitable. Sure the tech is hard, and we're not there yet, but the payoff is too big not to keep working on it.
[1] yeah I get that there's some percentage of people who like driving and will continue to do that. Perdonally I enjoy driving, and I drive stick. We also have people who like riding horses. But that group will make a big noise for a while, but ultimately dwindle into a niche hobby.
>The lack of needing parking right near your origin or destination.
>The expensive asset that is tied to single human location, so meaning it spends 98% of time idle.
>The road deaths caused by bad driving, drunk driving, stupid driving etc.
We can do all these things now for most of the people in the US with expanded public transportation
It works in high-density situations where lots of people get on and off at each stop.
In low density situations the stop time overhead leads to the journey being very slow.
As are fusion reactors that generate more energy than the total that goes in. Or room-temperature super conductors, or AGI, or Quantum computers, or…
Not all technologies that appear possible will be achieved in practice. It’s not inevitable. I would argue it’s not even likely at this point.
Yes, I'm skeptical of fusion, and quantum computing for that matter. Both are hardware problems though while self-driving is software.
History is littered with things that "couldn't be done" and which are part of life today. So im not sure I'd bet on them "never being done". And self-driving seems solvable, I don't see any physics being stretched here.
However history
Is it though? Or is it a hardware problem disguised as a software problem.
The only problem with a public transit system that gives you all of these advantages is the expensive infrastructure and operations required. However compared to everyone waiting for the tech to arrive (which may never happen) and then buying and maintaining a very expensive and bulky machine, building and operating a good public transit system using common funds is actually orders of magnitude cheaper, and far more economical.
personally i can't really see how 3d will enhance the fun of it. there are some obvious applications - i mean, literally just filming stereoscopically. but that just doesn't really seem to add anything exciting beyond the perceived novelty.
then again i never really watched porn in 3d actually.
They'll keep getting bigger, or treading water at best, for another decade chasing needed capabilities before they start benefiting from a tech shrink. Then, a decade after that, we might have some form factors people aren't embarrassed to be seen wearing.
Until then, these 1.5 pound face smashing strap on dorkboxes are not going to be a substantial market.
Meanwhile, there are dozens of reports about Cybertrucks breaking down within literally a handful of miles after the owners taking possession. Given the small number produced, this seems quite high.
So what traits are you comparing? Sales? Quality? excitement?
Yes, you’re also right there are more orders that aren’t shipped.
Where are you getting that the population of cybertrucks is no greater than 4000?
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/19/1245849907/tesla-cybertruck-r...
> That means the 3,878 trucks being recalled are likely many, if not all, of the trucks now on US roads.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/19/business/tesla-cybertruck-rec...
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A couple of sources.
Or like in Australia, "We outsold Camry!" - and then when the media pulled vehicle registration data, well, no, they hadn't. Not even close.
So the number in the recall (3,878) is the population.
Both of them are a product that, IMO, look stupid (highly subjective, I know), make you look stupid, and greatly misunderstand the traditional audience.
Or they’re creating an entirely new audience. Cybertruck is not a replacement for a regular pickup, at all. But perhaps it’s a replacement for an SUV. Vision Pro is not a replacement for an Oculus, but perhaps in a few generations it’ll be something entirely new and worthwhile.
> Cybertruck is not a replacement for a regular pickup
I think that’s actually a key insight. Most f150s are bought by suburban dads, not rural farmers. Tesla has been missing a masculine element, and I think that market has been perfectly identified.
AVP is cool, but it suffers from a lot of the same problems as traditional VR. Im happy we have it as a devkit available to us
Steve Jobs was Walt Disney - Apple didn’t invent products to make money, they made money to invent more products. Now, the bean counters are in charge. I’m an Apple fanboy for 25 years now, and I find their latest products, and the company itself, now completely charmless. Apple Vision was always going to be a flop because nobody gives two shits about how many pixels you can strap to your face; they care about the experience. And Apple Vision gives you precious little content to experience. Jobs would have never shipped this product without the content to make it shine. But he died a lifetime ago in tech…
This feels like a whole lot of revisionism that ignores the state of the first iPhone, which had an entire feature set that amounted to "new UX paradigm, plus basic media apps and web browser".
It’s a computer. Read internet, listen to a podcast, download some apps, edit some photos, etc.
> helmet
The exaggeration tells me this isn’t really something you want to examine.
The comment you were replying to said "without the content _to make it shine_". The implication here is that being able to do the things you can already do, except with a large set of goggles on your head, is not a sufficient selling point for the product. Apple clearly wants to sell the Vision Pro as a new way of computing, not as an entertainment product. Microsoft felt the same way about Windows 95, I'm sure, but that didn't stop them from including content meant to convince people that their new expensive "multimedia PC" was worth the investment.
It's just clear you're not interested in AR/VR so your criticism of AVP carries less weight. Nothing would satisfy you. If you actually held an examined one of those you would know how incredibly tiny it is.
edit: I'm not going to defend what Apple is doing now (I'd describe Tim Cook as the Steve Ballmer of Apple), I'm just saying that Jobs wasn't as perfect as the tinted rear-view mirror may make him seem, he had plenty of misses. iPod HiFi? Wtf?
Of course as great as it may have been (I never used one) most people just wanted something for 50 bucks. I’d be very interested to know how many units they ever sold total.
It only got serious when Apple got into the ARM market with iOS.
I guess the market wasn't ready either. At the time when the first Apple TV was around, many people still had very slow DSL.
As I see it, Apple has created some successful new product lines after Jobs: AirPods are a definite success, Watches are reasonably successful.
Existing product lines were improved. I don't think anybody would want to go back to iPhone 4S. Macs have successfully made another architecture transition, and modern MacBook Pros have corrected course from the trend of thinness above all else.
The real innovation is in energy generation and storage, and medtech like semaglutide and embryo selection.
I think Apple genuinely believed everyone would flood the market for them while they built out the first-party apps. They truly don’t get how much they’ve burned and angered the people they needed to be there. Or maybe now they do, based on the response. I doubt it.
Do you mean with their App Store markups? Or are you thinking of something else?
Once you get used to the immersion it can provide, it makes the entire existing paradigm of hand held, desk or lap-rooted screens as output seem like a compromise that we will look back on like the dial on a rotary telephone.
Vision Pro needs more software, and it needs Apple to lead a move from stationary to room scale experiences.
I don't know that developers being burned from existing App Store policies is why the software is slow to come. Development of apps that effectively work in Apple's "spatial" concept is not easy.
It isn't even clear what truly spatial software aught to be able to do, because there aren't enough examples. Even Apple's first party apps are ~2D windows. You have to look at some of the highlighted games to get an idea for what is actually possible.
Not to sound like an apple fanboy but is it, though? I don't think anyone expected v1 to set the world on fire. They put a normal-for-Apple amount of time into trying to polish it as best they could be I don't think anyone bought a Vision Pro not knowing it was kind of an experiment.
I'm never going to wear some ridiculous pair of ski goggles as a computer. But I'm also aware that some day we're going to have some kind of functioning AR, and it probably started with the ridiculous pair of ski goggles. Faulting Apple for taking their best shot at a v1 of that eventual product is just weird to me. Yeah, most people shouldn't buy it, but isn't this exactly what they should do? Get something out there, see what works and what doesn't, and start iterating?
I suppose we'll find out if Apple thought it was actually a "big flop" if they never make a version 2, but I suspect they're thinking a little more long term than this blog.
The Apple Watch was a failure. The iPad was a failure. AirPods were a failure. The HomePod lineup is a failure. The Apple TV is a failure.
I’m just about positive you can find a whole bunch of think pieces about each of those from not too long after their launches. Because if it doesn’t sell iPhone level numbers it’s obviously a total mistake that they tried.
But the Apple Watch just kept selling better and better. The iPad had a slump after the initial hype, but it’s still selling extremely well all these years later. AirPods have done so terribly there are three different current models. I don’t know if we know numbers about HomePods and the Apple TV but they keep making new versions.
There are so many companies in the world that would kill to run one of Apple’s “failure“ product lines and sell that many units.
It’s really hard to “succeed” when everything you make is compared to the world changing iPhone as a yardstick.
This could be a stumble out of the gate and you could be right about your comment. Or they could give up after a while. But they obviously spent a lot of money on this product, I don’t think they’re going to declare to failure and close up shop after three months.
Cool new thing announced -> not selling well enough -> “total flop” -> multibillion dollar product every year
The Vision Pro product is inline with this philosophy of building a good product with no clear purpose and letting users figure it out. It is going to take years for someone to come up with a good use. Think about how long it took AirPods and Apple play to catch on.
I completely customized the light shield and straps to be very conformable with a wider field of view. Third version was the charm. Apple could have done better.
Games they have are very meh. Pass. Got a Quest for that.
But 3D movies are finally what 3D should be. At least the well done ones. Blade Runner 2049, Dune Part 1, are fantastic. Felt like I hadn’t really seen them before.
Strange to me they only have a few “environments”. Gorgeous, just so few. I use them to focus when working and meditate.
I hope they keep up with it as a developer friendly Mac replacement. It does that well, and with just a few improvements could be significantly better. Devs using it will start building for it, even if just to scratch an itch.