Apple Reportedly Suspends Work on Vision Pro 2 | Hacker News Reader

Apple Reportedly Suspends Work on Vision Pro 2

macrumors.com

59 pointsthm67 comments

I felt like I was committing heresy when I told my friends that the vision pro was unlikely to succeed or at least succeed culturally. I'm sure it will pick up some niches just like the meta headset.

The reality is, this is a covid product and covid is over. Regardless of price (outside being extremely cheap) I don't see people even dropping $1500 on this thing. I don't have a single person in my life that has used a VR headset for anything more than beatsaber and the occasional movie. They're sweaty, heavy, and they're just isolating to wear for long periods of time, along with various other edge cases like glasses and eye strain.

There's already a pretty big movement to limit screen time and cut down on technology, and focus on fitness. I think that's why the apple watch is doing so well. I could see something like the ray ban meta glasses taking off, especially with an enhanced siri and some AR. But the vision pro and VR in general feels like a form of nerd sniping that the general public literally doesn't care about other than randomly using it at parties.

The Vision Pro was essentially a devkit to send the message that Apple wants devs to think about VR apps.

One major problem with the Vision Pro as a devkit is it's extremely locked down. The only significant AR experiences you can create are those already anticipated by Apple and compatible with their privacy expectations.

IMO this was a huge mistake. This is a completely new form factor, not an established market. You need people doing significant experimentation, and to be able to create compelling new experiences that your in-house staff haven't even dreamed of. It's fine if you have a user-friendly default, but there should be some way to opt into a professional mode that opens up more possibilities for novel experiences.

Google Glass was pretty locked down too iirc. Still was a neat device.

Google Glasses were significantly lighter and cheaper since they had the same form factor as regular glasses people wear, not some heavy Robocop headset tethered to a brick in your pocket.

How Apple imagined that clunky form factor would be appealing to general consumers outside the most avid afluent fans is beyond me. If they wanted it to be a devkit they should have just market it and sold it at a masive discount directly to app developers unlocked with no strictions so they can experiment in finding that "killer app". Unfortunately Apple's way too corporate, proud and stuck up to think liberally like that.

Google didn't hide the fat that Glasses was mostly a devkit for tinkerers and pretend it was a ready-to-market product, and it served that purpose for that niche.

Google Glass was pretty locked down too iirc

And it's gone, too. Gee, I wonder if there's a pattern here.

Hololens 2 was the best experience of all of them, also shut down

The issue is a hardware miniaturization one, I used think whoever creates the first real smart glasses is in an advantageous position, but the likes of Apple and Google can likely roll their own quickly once that time draws near. They already own the software stacks, which is really what you want to own. AR glasses will have dozens of comparable vendors when they break the wall down

Regardless of locked-down-ness, I think Google Glass—and if it had seen continued development, real spectacles with some sort of miniaturised electronics and a HUD on the lenses—would've been so much more useful than any giant, heavy VR headset.

It's locked down as it's the only device with the features it provides. So if you want to use those features, your designing for the one device.

OpenXR says hi.

Um, okay. I have never heard of this, so for others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenXR

After that, again, if only a single device has features that no other device has, what's this "open" going to do for you?

Uh, all established VR headsets support it?

I mean the support is technically in the browser, not the VR headset - but still...

If they don't have the sensors....

I'm not talking about VisionPro supporting OpenXR. I'm talking about OpenXR having the support for the sensors. If it has it, that's impressive since no other headset has the same sensors to the level of the VisionPro

OpenXR supports cameras, IR, LiDAR, and LED sensors - everything that the VisionPro has. Whether or not it supports the specific sensors Apple chose is entirely up to Apple.

Great, where's your OpenXR app that takes advantage of the VisionPro's sensors to make a great example of how amazing OpenXR truly is? No? Where's anyone else's?

Open XR supports sensors like the apple vision pro has. They never said the vision pro supports it.

I don't own one so I can't verify, but the linked Wikipedia article already makes me doubt it can, as safari isn't based on chromium.

I.e YouTube let's you watch immersive 3d 180° videos right in the browser (though very few are available on the platform, as almost nobody got VR headsets). There are also other smaller indie games.

> Um, okay. I have never heard of this

Then maybe you shouldn't make assumptions about what is and isn't possible with VR and AR. OpenXR is literally ground-floor level stuff, if you follow VR in any capacity outside Apple marketing. Apple can cover stuff like this while also supporting unique features; they literally just did it with WebXR.

This makes me laugh. Clearly, you know nothing about me to suggest I know nothing other than Apple's propaganda about VR. But you go ahead and keep making assumptions about people. The connections you miss because you assumed wrong will be on you

They just announced full WebXR support

In that case they should send some free dev kits to developers, because most are not going to be interested in spending $3500 on top of their paid Apple developer license for the privilege of feathering Apple's gilded moat.

AVP is not a general purpose device in the way the iPhone was. The viability of apps for this market is nowhere near proven.

A Dev kit for what? What has anyone dev'd with it?

I haven't seen or heard of a single demo.

Apple had 10 years to conjure up a killer app for the vision pro. They've got nothing.

> I felt like I was committing heresy when I told my friends that the vision pro was unlikely to succeed or at least succeed culturally.

I'm an Apple-hater but I'd like VR to become a thing. I work remotely and could imagine being sent a keyboard, mouse, and company VR headset that transports me to the office.

Immersed + Visor will get pretty close to that

Their focus has been on VR for screen replacement and their app has shared rooms

It's unclear whether you are misusing Vision Pro to mean the entire category of AR/VR headsets, or the specific model Apple launched this year.

> unlikely to succeed or at least succeed culturally

I think by success you mean "be a $10bn business" (a quarter as big as Apple's wearables business today), and for Apple, success might mean something very different.

> The reality is, this is a covid product and covid is over.

What do you mean by this? Certainly you can't mean that Apple mistakenly designed this product for the COVID era, given its history?

Apple acquired Peter Meier's AR company in 2015, and recruited Mike Rockwell from Dolby in the same year to lead the group working on the headset.[^1] In 2017 they recruited the head of AR from NASA's Jet Propulsion lab.[^2]

Apple in fact appears to have delayed the project in 2019[^3] because Jony Ive pushed Rockwell and his team to build a standalone device, not one with compute offloaded to an external processing unit.

This product had been under active development for nearly three years by the time COVID hit (Fletcher Rothkopf appears to have started on the project in January 2016 according to his LinkedIn), so what functionality do you think is linked to COVID? Literally everything shipping in VisionOS is standard ecosystem stuff for Apple.

> Regardless of price (outside being extremely cheap) I don't see people even dropping $1500 on this thing.

You mean this specific device? Or the category in general?

> I don't have a single person in my life that has used a VR headset for anything more than beatsaber and the occasional movie.

Laaaadiesssss annddddd gentleeeeeemennnnnnnn

In the red corner, doing what they do best… Apple Inc.! Hits selected from their homepage's top-level navigation… Macintosh ($bn business)! iPad ($bn business)! iPhone ($bn business)! Watch ($bn business)! AirPods ($bn business)! TV & Home ($bn business)!

And in the blue corner, enabling a hasty generalization about the future of a product category based on usage of present day technology … "everyone cglan knows!" Track record of predicting $bn businesses through word or deed… [TBD]!

> They're sweaty, heavy, and they're just isolating to wear for long periods of time, along with various other edge cases like glasses and eye strain.

Literally none of this is grounds to dismiss an entire product category (especially given that Apple has largely solved the "glasses" edge case).

> There's already a pretty big movement to limit screen time and cut down on technology

I must not have noticed that trend in the quarterly results of any consumer electronics company I track. (I did, however, notice the screenless Humane Pin thing self-destruct.) Do you believe that this trend you have noticed is a) likely to constrain the sales of a $3,500 "Pro" device, b) likely to overall dampen enthusiasm for the category over the course of the next decade, and finally c) any more worthwhile to talk about than the inane claptrap about your friends and family being oracles of a new market?

> I could see something like the ray ban meta glasses taking off, especially with an enhanced siri and some AR.

Wait so you are dismissing the entire category based on your friends not using AR/VR? Christ. Good thing Apple, Meta, Sony, and the other manufacturers shipping millions of a nascent product category can just copy your winning combination of "something like the ray ban meta glasses" with "an enhanced siri" (?) and "some AR" (???). Coming right up!

> But the vision pro and VR in general feels like a form of nerd sniping that the general public literally doesn't care about other than randomly using it at parties.

I have used a lot of AR and VR devices, including Vision Pro. I do not use any devices regularly (more than once per month), but it is completely self-evident that such devices have the potential to be UX breakthroughs of similar ilk to modern smartphone / tablets.

I would be betting on Apple, Meta, and all the other hardware manufacturers here – not your friends.

[^1]: https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/dolby-vp-mike-rockwe...

[^2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-24/apple-hir...

[^3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230509141145/https://www.thein...

Happy to skinny my reply down to simpler words for you, just in case you're genuinely here to join substantive discussion of technical topics, and simply suck at it:

1. Why do you think Vision Pro is a COVID product?

2. Why do you think your friends' usage patterns for legacy AR/VR devices is a useful indicator of the eventual popularity of this product category?

3. Do you have any data to substantiate your claim that people are cutting down on screen time to the detriment of shipping hardware SKUs?

This is an unnecessarily derisive comment.

I know if I like the taste of a new dish without being a great chef. And so can people know if they (and their friends) will buy and use a $3k - or $1.5k - VR headset.

> And so can people know if they (and their friends) will buy and use a $3k - or $1.5k - VR headset.

This is not the claim being made by the parent I responded to. Right out of the gate, OP said:

> I told my friends that the vision pro was unlikely to succeed or at least succeed culturally.

I.e. OP is specifically making a general claim about this product category, based on the usage habits of friends who are all - I would wager - using hokey Oculus/Vive-type hardware, and not Vision Pro.

It's the same rhetoric people were probably saying on alt.hackers in 1995 about paper film vs. digital cameras, and it's specious reasoning.

Agree on the price, they won't be able to hit $1500. That's less than what foldable phones cost, and the BOM on AVP must be a lot higher.

Idk. I own a Meta Quest 3 and this thing is one of the most impressive tech I saw in the last decade. AR on this $500 headset is incredible.

While I’m amazed by the hardware, the thing is totally limited by the software. I mean, the OS is technically pretty good, you are really tricked into thinking the windows are floating in your room and interacting with it is really natural. But you just can’t do shit with it because Meta decided it.

I’m really waiting for something more with the already existing technology, because before I tried it, I didn’t knew it was that advanced and I can see myself be pretty productive with it.

The headline leaves out the most important part: "... to Focus on a Cheaper Model".

Surely, the right move.

I can mostly believe VR headsets will catch on, but not at the price of the current Vision Pro.

There's a chicken and egg dynamic here, for developing compelling content/software to take advantage of the capabilities and the number of people with headsets that can consume that content. That's just not going to unravel with the Vision Pro.

It’s not financially worthwhile for most third party developers to develop apps for a platform with too few users. Not sure how the iPhone originally did it, that seems pretty amazing to me.

But yeah, need a product to drive up adoption so a healthy ecosystem can form around it… so they can capture 30% of it

The iPhone did it by being essentially an iPod Touch that could make calls. Lots of people were already familiar with iPod and iPod Touch, so when it turned into the first programmable phone, it was novel and exciting, and then the gold rush took off when people started making money and it grew from there.

FWIW, the iPod Touch was released after the first iPhone.

Yeah it was "essentially" a mobile phone that people already understood the value of, particularly because of Blackberry, so it was a potentially improved mobile phone given its touchscreen and interface. It was also a much better iPod and a web browser alongside. The iPod touch came much later.

Right. Probably not the original plan, but as people have pointed out, the Vision Pro has landed as essentially a dev kit.

What’s the point of dev kit 2 when there still aren’t a lot of regular users?

(Seems tough though. Even if you can keep all the key parts of the Vision Pro at a $1500-$1600 price - that’s got to be very hard — will that be enough? I guess we’ll find out.)

> Not sure how the iPhone originally did it

It was crystal clear that the iPhone was going to be a huge thing. An AR/VR headset is much less clear. I think it's only slightly clearer than mud at this point. Apple does have a history of trying to force things on the industry that went over like lead balloons. The VisionPro could be the next trashcan MacPro, or it could be the next hotness after building from a slow burn. Apple never released an updated trashcan, but they are looking at the next headset. So that's a signal in and of itself

The first wave of iPhone development was done by solo developers. This seeded the market with apps and created the ecosystem. Then the larger more expensive apps moved in to harvest all those sweet customers.

For Apple to have messed up the pricing right out of the gate suggests they don't have a good idea of what this product is for. The iPad was a hit at $499, it would have failed at $999, where it would compete with Macbooks. AVP is far beyond both, it's an iOS device that costs more than a top-line Macbook.

Apple has only strengthened this perception by launching the AVP with almost no flagship apps that take advantage of VR, going radio silent about AVP almost as soon as they announced it over a year ago, and jumping on the AI bandwagon with the latest iOS.

i think the easy bet for apple is to double down on video content. watching, creating, sharing 3d videos is supposely better than most TVs up there with imax

I'll be the outlier here: if the AVP were $1500, I'd buy it in a heartbeat and use it for most of the day at work. The "work on a big screen floating in front of you" experience is excellent, and I say that comparing it to working on a big screen in Quest 2, which I've done for hours at a time.

In addition, media is super compelling in AVP. I'd watch movies in it, facetime with it, etc. etc.

If the "cheaper model" is $1500 and all they lose is, say, the external screens, I'd grab it up.

Apple will only release a second "Pro" model when they can make significant advancements over the previous one. Likely we will see a Pro then Air (then Pro...) tick tock cycle for a while as the technology develops

The issue with the AVP is not technology, it's the lack of applications for it.

After trying out os2 this makes a lot of sense. Noticeable qol leap in UX and tracking. Not that it feels like avp 2 but you notice the upgrades.

Seems like testing on guinea pigs who bought the expensive dev kit is paying off. Software and slimmer model are a good idea to popularize.

Id like to stick with my current AVP for at least 5 years rather than frothing for an AVP 2 to fomo over.

A little clickbaity; in favor of a Vision 2.

They just have to go with Vision Air, especially if it’s lighter.

As the article notes they were already working on the cheaper model. It makes no mention or shifting resources or increasing efforts toward it.

That only makes sense if the projects are unrelated... separate budget, different engineers, managers, executives, separate marketing teams, even separate suppliers and supply chains. Obviously, they are related.

Oh course there’s going to be shared resources, just like there will be unique resources, and those could very well be redirected elsewhere in the company or let go.

There is no mention of increasing effort for a project that was already known to exist. This is like saying Apple choosing to decommission the Pro line of the iPhone is clickbait because they’re still going to be developing iPhones.

As one of Apple's long form PR https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7al_Gpolb8

outlined, patience for platform building.

I think it's quite important for the industry to have a reference for XR (AR + VR) where the focus is on accurate assessment of the user's immediate physical surroundings and provide for non-fatiguing interactivity, especially after Hololens practically disappeared. I hope Vision Pro lasts much longer than Hololens (didn't miss Ping, but certainly miss 3D touch).

Meta's headsets focus on bringing the user into another world, another important but different reference point.

"Building a platform", patience

Virtual reality is a "flying car" product category peeking its head up every 10 years.

Also, Tim Cook vacillates like Sundar Pichai. Unlike Steve Jobs, they just don't know what to make or what products to invest in. So they dabble here and there, starting and discontinuing products haphazardly without a clear mission except to pump the stock price by any chicanery necessary.

The price would be defendable on a more mature device if developers would be free to develop stuff for it as on a Mac.

For now it was not worth it even though the hardware was nice.

That's a good sign, it means they are committed to moving towards the more affordable market. Something many commentors here (including myself) thought would not be possible

They were already working on the cheaper model, as the article notes.

I know, and going all in on that is a good sign that they are confident in it

But it says nothing about increasing effort or shifting resources toward it.

Sure, I didn't claim it did. It says something significant about their confidence in it.

I read it differently, insofar they don’t believe there is a market for the higher. The Pro’s rollout is pretty much seen as a failure at this point.

Not necessarily a good sign. Non-pro models have fewer features than pro models so this could be a sign that they're being less cutting edge and innovative.

What would be cutting edge would be reducing the price point with the same feature set, though. If they can do it significantly cheaper, while retaining the necessary "Apple profit margin", that would be innovative in itself

Innovation doesn't mean shit if you can't price it so that you grow a consumer base where the revenue pays for R&D.

"... to singularly focus on a cheaper model, The Information reports."

The title is a little misleading.

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