Ask HN: Are you still using your Vision Pro?
I have a couple flights soon and I was thinking about picking one up to ease the cross-country trips.
Are you using yours on flights or for work or not at all?
Are you using yours on flights or for work or not at all?
Am I using it now? Not at all. But I blame a new puppy in the household upending my schedule rather than the Vision Pro. Big fan of the puppy release, though, definitely one of my favorite innovations as of late.
Flying to Japan tomorrow and, although it’d be great for the flight, don’t want to lug it around.
I don’t have a Vision Pro, but it seems like overkill to get one just for a couple flights.
How would you use it after the flights? Would you use it at all? If NY to LA is 6 hours, you’re talking almost $300/hr vs just watching some of the in-flight movies. Not to mention it taking up a significant portion of your carry on bag.
I’m not anti-Vision Pro, I plan to get a future version if it keeps progressing, but it seems like you’re looking for an excuse to get it. This doesn’t seem like a great excuse, but if you want one and can afford it, get it for that reason. You don’t need the flight as an excuse.
I absolutely love it for home cinema though, great surround sound and the 3D movies are a cool benefit. I do have to mention, it would benefit me if the weight were lowered a bit. Also, unless you have it frequently plugged in or are swapping out batteries, you may have to spend a large amount of time charging your Vision Pro.
$300 is a lot more palatable. And it's nice that it's just a display, not a whole system like Quest.
When I was doing a lot of flying some years back I took the Google Daydream product -- a minimalist device that you inserted your phone into, and then used a small wireless controller.
Coupled with decent headphones it was a significantly better experience than the in-flight offerings, of course, but the logistics of it all meant I only bothered with this arrangement a handful of times.
I tried to use it for work too and that did not work out, for me the text was too fuzzy and it became frustrating. Reddit forum made me think I was nuts but recently has been shown to be deliberate to reduce screen door effect.
And there's the rub... a $3,500 novelty for rare trips.
Why not consider one of the other portable VR headsets - they'll do everything you're going to want/need on a long flight but will save you $3,000...
Projecting my laptop screen several feet in front of me reduces eye strain.
Mac Virtual Display would be improved with support for dual screens. I’m also excited for Jump to release a Vision Pro app.
My next MacBook will be a 13" - I just don't need the 16" screen anymore.
It’s not comfortable enough to code with, but it’s the best portable movie theater ever made for sure.
So are the $500 VR headsets, by the way...
Of those I think the quest 2 is the best product, fwiw. But the vision is a dev kit for a totally new platform, and I don’t believe any of the others is a fair comp.
OP will be watching a movie... perhaps the most basic VR experience imaginable. It's not a novelty only the Vision Pro delivers...
The immense amount of work that went into making it a spatial compute platform stands out to me. It's not just something with low latency delivery of video to two eyes and a bunch of head and balance tracking. It's a compute platform that knows where things are in space, and what you're doing in that space as well.
To me, it's a totally different animal than a VR headset. I really, really hope Apple sticks with the platform; in 10 years, the hardware could be COMPLETELY different. It probably should be in a lot of ways.
But, the software and technology built that lets the OS maker, app makers and consumers engage with something that's spatially aware is huge. Huge. And that's a pretty hard thing to build, and will be a difficult moat to cross for new entrants. It seems likely to be the backbone of a major firm eventually.
To my eyes, the Pro demonstrates the (very early) viability of making spatially aware hardware and software, and sketches out the reasons it might be incredibly compelling for a variety of use cases, not just entertainment.
Anyway, I'm not too hung up on hardware here, although I stand by what I said, great entertainment experience, tantalizing work experience. All this work by Apple now could easily be re-pointed at, say, environmental cameras and microphones embedded in an office/living room, and work with projectors, thinner glasses, whatever. To me, the thing is the first viable steps toward a Spatially aware full stack operating system + hardware, and that is unique.
It's VR... and OP will be watching a movie. OP isn't going to be "spatially computing" anything on an airplane. This thread is filled with owners saying they hardly use it after the novelty wore off. We've seen this fever frenzy with other VR platforms - people are amazed, throw down a lot of dough, then after a few weeks/months the device sits on the shelf collecting dust.
To respond to how you imagine me, I have no need to "justify" my purchase; for reference I don't use it that often, and I'm glad I bought it for a peek into the future. You may notice that I said I have a Magic Leap 2 -- significantly more expensive, and used for under 2 hours -- I would not recommend someone even try it out. And I wouldn't even say I regret buying that -- it's useful to see what $8bn of early tech development gets you, and they did some things amazingly well.
Further, I am fully aware of the use cycle of VR goggles, see my above list of devices I've purchased.
These goggles are really not VR, and it's a mistake to think they are without using them. For instance, on a plane, wearing the vision pro, when a stewardess approaches you, the AVP notice a human is entering your field of vision, and blur them in to the scene, regardless of what you're doing.
Is this world changing? No. Is it "VR with passthrough"? Nope. It's a much harder thing, a spatially aware pipeline (one that can recognize humans) interjecting itself into a rendering pipeline. There are a number of these little moments with the AVP that show Apple did the hard, very hard work to build a new OS pipeline. Right now, they're using it for entertainment, and if you're wealthy enough, they're a great purchase for a plane ride. They cost less than a business class upgrade, and they make the flight go away.
Later, I predict if they stick with it, the IP and knowhow they're building here are going to be super valuable.
It's ok to be excited about tech toys. But let's not pretend these things are going to change the world or anything. Nobody is going to walk around with these glued to their face... we already stopped seeing these folks in public.
Kind of odd to be sufficiently motivated to battle someone's first-hand report if that's the case.
Someone's first-hand report that reads like marketing ad-copy? Go ahead and read what was written... a lot of hand-wavy stuff that the rest of this thread says nobody uses it for anyway... "spatial computing"... what a farce.
For watching a movie, Vision Pro is a scam. It is no better than the other options for this task... and the rest is a gimmick.
One does not need to prove themselves a sucker by buying Apple's Juice to understand this device for what it is.
Which is to say, its not based on any objective measure of experience with the device or the technology. But how much expendable income you have compared to others.
That said, it could become absolutely indispensable very quickly if OpenAI builds a quality spatial app. Like, this summer. We'll see.
Downside: uncomfortable, dorky looking, not social - can't watch with friends/family.
I very rarely reach for it at home over the large OLED TV in my home theater.