Apple may stop producing Vision Pro by the end of 2024
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
1. Too much startup friction. I share the Apple Vision Pro with someone else who like me also loves it and uses it all the time. But since we both wear glasses, there's a 2x ~10 minute process for recalibrating the eyesight each time we switch. It's an expensive device at $3500 which I'm happy to pay for quality, but to pay that twice, I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Apple goes too far with the greed here not letting us set up separate profiles. Netflix wouldn't get away with that. You not only have to repeat the setup process when switching, you have to share access to your apple user account too.
2. My main interest in a vision headset is I want a new virtual workstation where I can watch movies on a gigantic screen beneath a gigantic translucent terminal where I can do my daily work. There's a nice app called La Terminal that does just that. Sadly it has some serious keyboard latency issues since I don't think they've put as much focus into their support for this platform. I won't tolerate anything less than optimal latency in my work tools. So until I get around to building a terminal app for Vision Pro on my own, there's not a whole lot I'm interested in doing with it aside from watching the occasional movie on the moon. I would also really like for Vision Pro to have an ethernet port because I don't know how to run a wifi network without jitter.
If you haven't tried one of these things, then you really should. I didn't realize when I first put one on that it was a fully synthetic display until I tried reading the 10pt text on my computer monitor. It's really a stunning thing to witness. This Vision Pro is probably the best glimpse we can get today of what the singularity is going to be like in the future. So definitely give it a try at least once.
Like how much should watching stuff be worth to people!? Am I crazy? I don't even dislike movies, but $3500 usd might be what I already spend on all forms of entertainment + 2 years worth of food, and maybe all of my transportation for half a year or more, combined. I'd just kind of hope for something more substantial y'know?
> $3500 usd might be what I already spend on all forms of entertainment + 2 years worth of food
Where do you live? I live in Romania and even my mom who makes around 1000e a month spends like 400e on food, so she spends around 5k euros a year on food
Nevertheless, not only in Romania, but probably in most countries of the European Union, a human can spend for food only between EUR 100 and EUR 150 per month, while still eating very healthy food, with the condition of cooking at home and buying only raw ingredients. Even the industrially-made bread is at least 3 to 4 times more expensive than the bread made at home. For other kinds of food, the price ratio between buying and making at home is even greater.
Try that in Croatia, you'll soon be dead or at least severely malnourished.
2 eggs = .8 euro
250ml milk = .8 euro
300g chicken breast = 2 euro
1 large tomato = .8 euro
150g cheap cold cuts = 1 euro
I'm already at 5.4 euro and that's not even 2000 calories, add butter, olive oil, other vegetables, bread and you easily reach 8-9 euro per day and I bet Romania is at least 20% cheaper than most EU countries
So please englighten us, give me a menu that's 2k calories, has some animal protein in it and costs less than 5 euros
I don't eat out, never eat processed food, cook all myself and have a hard time (germany) hitting 150€ a month, so 5€ a day is totally doable. Don't get me wrong, it's hard to know what you can buy, but Stiftung Warentest is your friend and a book about medical nutrition at university level will make sure you don't buy from advertisement.
- 2 years worth of food
- 6 months worth of transportation
For 3.5k? Either you're Amish (with an HN handle), or you're dril and you need advice from someone who is good at the economy [0].
> someone else who like me also loves it and uses it all the time
Wait, do you almost never use it or do you use it all the time?
(pronouns chosen to make it easy to distinguish two people, with no knowledge of anybody's sex or gender, but since sex and gender shouldn't matter, it shouldn't matter)
Can you elaborate on this? I've not looked at it since it came out. Does this mean that you can look at your computer monitors while using it, or that it's replacing your computer monitors because it has a high enough resolution?
Every other display I've tried has far too low pixel density to be used for serious work, which is rather unfortunate.
for $3500 I don't expect any primary shortcoming, especially for something I'd use professionally. There's a lot of substitute hardware I could buy to get the same experience at that point, so I see no need to compromsise just becasue it's a shiny new toy.
I guess that's more of a "me" problem.
Apple really has one of the worst workflows around user accounts, I have to think it is because of some legacy reasons that means it would be a big project to fix (based on other companies I've worked at that lousy user accounts and couldn't fix)
Here's our experience for what it's worth and why I say misnomer.
I setup an Apple TV in a parent's apartment. It turns out that when they re-arrange the icons, even if they're in their profile, they rearrange the icons on the "default" profile - which is mine.
So I came home to an Apple TV with the apps all moved around.
Digging into it, it seems that while there is the cover of "user profiles" on Apple TV, they simple aren't useful. Logged in apps stay logged in across all profiles. So it's not like a browser profile where you can have two different logins to say Jellyfin or Plex or Youtube or Disney+.
As such, the profiles are indeed a misnomer when compared to what any reasonable user would expect of changing "profiles."
In other words, a sham!
Ref from reddit confirming as much: https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/qeatju/the_way_that_...
Ref from Apple that buries the lede: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/tv/atvb0753b37d/tvos
Here's the salient bit from that apple page:
When each member in a household has an Apple Account, you can create unique user profiles for each person, with Up Next lists, system language preferences, paired AirPods settings, music, Game Center data, and content recommendations personalized for the currently active user.
Note how little profiles actually do. You can't use your own logins to any services, or have a home screen that is yours with your apps. It's still just a one-user device sadly.
> People are going to only read the headline and interpret it as “discontinue”. Like the article says, it just means they have enough inventory until they replace it with something cheaper. [https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/report-apple-may-stop-p...]
I wonder how Apple would go through with this, hopefully with a better form.
Time will tell if a "killer app" is found.
It's a shame as it seems like they maxed out the tech specs, but given the state of the art it still ends up being too low resolution for true MacOS productivity replacement, while also being too heavy & tethered to a short lived battery pack.
Maybe a worse-is-better version that is cheaper/lighter will sell more for entertainment uses.
Where are the grants to devs to buy and develop something good for it? Apple just kind of expected everyone to do that work for free for them. Watching movies on an airplane is not a $3500 use case. Mirroring your desktop to a head mounted display that is too heavy and cumbersome to be a $3500 use case. Putting iPad apps into the air is not a $3500 use case.
Where's the killer app? What even IS a killer app for head mounted displays? They've been around for 30 years now. It has never been an insufficient hardware problem. The original oculus devkits were genuinely terrible, but VR IS a killer app for sim enthusiasts, so they rushed to implement it into everything they could straight away. Euro Truck Simulator was one of the earliest integrations. But that's not an Apple market and never will be.
If someone wants VR/AR to be some stupid ShadowRun heads up display for managing all the info you encounter in the world, that app should be built and iterated on first. How many average people even run an "organize and remember everything" app? What percentage of iPhone users even use the damn calendar?
But they still look kind of off when wearing them in public (slightly bigger than normal sunglasses, cable from one ear and other people can see the light from the screens from the side or back).
And the lack of integration is a pain - the phone has to be unlocked so is subject to random taps and swipes in my pocket.
However, an Apple-built Carplay-style projection into XReal type glasses could work very well - the question being how would you control it?
I think it is not totally necessary to have it be impossible to tell you are wearing the things. Like walking around with earbuds or portable headphone was unusual at some point (even the walkman is less than 50 years old, right). They just have to not look deeply goofy, like current VR-pressganged-into-AR headsets do.
My guess, Apple knows this won't become mainstream/usage for 5+ years.
And as such, they need to bring technology from the future 5-years from now, to today ... and as such, that's why it's so expensive.
They aren't expecting people to pay $3,500 for this device when the killer app exists. But it needs to cost that in order for developers to "develop to where the puck is going" in 5-years time.
It's typical of Apple's hubris, to throw in all these features they think people will want, meanwhile if the headset had no cameras and was just a display strapped to your head for $1000, it likely would have sold a lot better. But they didn't want a VR device for whatever reason.
At the same time you could blame discretionary spending being at some of the lowest levels in a decade.
I can see AVP as being half luxury and half tech-demo/devkit for a more budget friendly device.
I have never seen anyone look at those two examples and think “luxury”. Even the most ardent proponents of Apple products laugh at those prices and think they are absurd. With good reason. Who ever is going to look at computer wheels and think they’re a sign of luxury¹?
¹ Yes yes, someone surely will, just like there’s someone for everything. I’m making a general point.
Now that we are all more social again, the point of a device that shuts you out of the world is a bit... less useful.
For a real attempt, the UI needs to be augmented reality you can wear walking around, and the form factor needs to be a pair of normal glasses. It is certainly possible the tech doesn’t exist yet. But that won’t convince people to buy a silly version.
> meanwhile if the headset had no cameras
I remember when apple got universally panned for putting cameras in laptops. Most people surely wanted the cost savings, while the small number of power users who needed video chat should have no trouble picking up a USB camera for $100 (more like $200 in present-day USD). Of course, what actually happened was that people (and apps!) in the mac world could suddenly assume that everyone else already had a camera set up, even if they weren't technical, and that was the real killer feature. The rest of the industry quietly memory-holed the snide commentary and followed suit.
Volume will drive price down once VR gets Good Enough. Right now it isn't, so I'm glad that Apple is playing to their strengths by taking swings at substantive challenges -- like the fact that VR makes the wearer look like a complete dope -- rather than becoming discount VR vendor #312.
Apple has a history of doing products that seem expensive and weirdly overspecced at the beginning, and then stick with it if they truly believe in it. OTOH, there are also clearly products that Apple killed because they didn't work out. But I believe it's still to early to tell where the Vision line is going.
Damn you just reminded me there was time laptops didn't have cameras. Like phones!
Personal computing did not reach mainstream until smartphones. Even notebooks were too much of commitment for most people. Maybe AR [0] glasses could go in path of smartphones but VR headsets are polar opposites to smartphones.
[0]: Actual augmented reality that is projected on top of real vision - not recorder reality with camera like in case of this product.
People love their electric scooters nowadays, and they’re just worse Segways.
Apples headset is expensive and has no compelling software for most people. It was DOA.
The early problems were it was illegal to use them on sidewalks but also there weren't bike lanes like there are in big cities now.
It was also pretty big & heavy it didn't work for multi-modal like using it for the last mile to/from a train or bus.
So the e-mobility space got won decades later by worse, cheaper products that were smaller & lighter .. being used heavily for food delivery app drivers using them semi-legally in bike lanes. A use case that wasn't imagined in the Segway unveiling.
That doesn't bode well for VR headsets, which also make you look geeky.
The middle class won't want to join a new untested alternate reality if it's full of working class people, and the working class will always want to go where the middle class is at. The only thing to stop them is the price. That's why it costs the same as a piece of designer clothing. Apple has to lock in a critical mass of affluent adopters first, before they can mass monetize the prestige.
Not sure about that. The scooter is a >200year old design and there is a reason it subsist to this day. Segways are huge and not as easy to store/fold. Onewheeler are more elegant design and much more compact but awkward to operate when powered off in places you aren't allowed to use it and you cannot carry loads as easily. In that sense a scooter offer the speed of the segways/onewheelers, with the convenience of being able to push them easily anywhere with minimum effort while staying foldable, easy to hide away once reaching destination yet they can carry stuff.
Scooters are a smaller form factor, but bikes should be the real personal transport winner.
Apple is free to continue selling what they have in inventory.
>Apple will still be able to resume Vision Pro production if sales pick up since the production lines are not yet due to be dismantled.
If the item is still on Apple's website it's not discontinued.
There is a huge difference. My interpretation is that the GP is making the point that with just the headline people will think the product as a whole was discontinued, not just this first version.
That said, Apple marketing has been mostly dead silent since the product announcement 1.5 years ago.
A 2015 MacBook Air was discontinued, but 2024 (or 2023, whatever the last update was) MacBook Airs are not.
It would be crazy to have different product names for fungible products that are at least as good as the previous one.
Apple has been pushing for AR for years and years. I remember seeing demos when presentations were still live in person.
The whole concept of Vision Pro is “spatial computing”. Backtracking to VR would be a huge shift in focus.
Hence why they have the crown to seamless switch between AR and VR.
As to selling the rest of the inventory: of course they are free to sell whatever they want. But this is a device whose only real use is to be a sort of preview/testing ground for developers who want to get ahead on writing VR code. The pricing is ridiculous for a consumer device, and it is too goofy for Apple users to wear to coffee shops. Continuing to sell it without any note that it was pointless would be a massive betrayal to third party Apple devs if they aren’t planning on making a serious product.
Remember the Apple Lisa. Get yours while their prices are low.
Headline: Apple May Stop Producing Vision Pro by the End of 2024
First paragraph: Apple has abruptly reduced production of the Vision Pro headset and could stop making the current version of the device completely by the end of 2024
That's newsworthy all by itself. No clickbait needed.
As an AVP owner the thing is an absolute flop and it's not misleading to say that for the foreseeable future the line has been discontinued.
The first Macintosh was, inflation adjusted, double the price of the Apple Vision Pro, and they shipped about the same number of units in their first years respectively.
People only see it as a flop because Apple is a gargantuan company now compared to then and they expect to see gargantuan sales of new products from Apple now. Apple is playing a different game this time around.
My experience receiving a Vision Pro demo at an Apple store also involved a poor Apple rep having to keep a straight face showing me basic iPad games when I asked about gaming. This thing has some of the most advanced VR headset hardware and their best gaming demo was some iPad games where you tap and hold to jump over mountains.
Beat Saber did pretty well but then Apple made a headset that can't even play Beat Saber.
The only way to get around that in gaming is to have 1st/2nd party developers (like Nintendo/Sony tend to do), but making games has never been in Apple’s culture. Movies/TV shows are a bit closer to their DNA, and they’ve started producing those with mixed results - games would be a much taller order.
It's much too late in this stage of the industry to just look attractive for exclusives; the industry standardized (compared to a PS1 disc vs a N64 cartridge) and no one's throwing enough money to carry that plan long enough to pay off Like Microsoft kind of did. Not even FAANGs. But it's never too late to just make good games and foster series your platform is known for, like Nintendo.
But then again, Meta just shuttered that studio despite a hit game series from them, so who knows what's going on anymore?
It is always a symbiotic relationship, what is missing, is that Apple doesn't play their part of exclusives like Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft do (and SEGA in the past).
that cycle came back last year when they used AAA games to showcase the power of the iPhone 15 and for devs, talk more about their porting toolkit. The last cycle was showcasing the M1 chip and Apple Arcade.
Yet these came after they actively fought against Vulkan support (and now they are using some form of MoltenVK to help with their porting tech) and hard blocked several cloud gaming platforms. Things that could have made their job a lot easier (and maybe cheaper).
so I suppose in 2-3 years we'll see Beat Saber working when they get serious with VR.
Other than that their only attempt was the failed Pippin, so yet another reason to hate games, other than those on iDevices, bringing money home.
It's not hard to see how this product could continue to be streamlined and made more accessible in the future.
edit: typos, clarity
> being to able to interface with it by simply gesturing with your hands
eg: Theremoose - the Theremin Controlled Computer Mouse https://www.instructables.com/Theremoose-the-Theremin-Contro...
In the disability domain voice operations have a history.
* Was it?
* Remember when the mouse was a niche invention at PARC?
Statement: "You know perfectly well that you can't use any computer without touching a controller of some kind."
Fact: touchless controls exist.
Speculation: They may become commonplace.
Crude, but it's technically possible.
"The Xbox Kinect: Your Body is the Controller"
"The iPad was mocked" is irrelevant. Many or most products are mocked by some people, even iPhone. Regardless of mocking, iPad was an immediate success. Vision Pro is not. I fully admit that the price of Vision Pro is the biggest problem. But you can't pretend that the first iteration of Vision Pro is just like the first iteration of iPad.
Now, sure, you can say the Vision Pro was not as big a success as the iPad even if you account for that difference in markets, scale, price ranges, etc. But that doesn't mean it's a total failure either, or that there is no future for the product.
Most people who have a Vision Pro, seem to like it. It's unsurprising that it's not flying off the shelves because at the moment it's little else than an expensive toy, and once the novelty wears off it's not like there is that much to do with it at the moment, it's also seemingly uncomfortable to wear for prolonged periods of time. But like I said, it's not hard to see how it could be getting better with future iterations.
So even if there is no perfect correlation between the shortcomings of the first iPad and the larger shortcomings of the first Vision Pro, there is a correlation.
I don't see it.
These are diverse markets, but far from the general market. I think VR/AR will end up the same.
What do you mean by the general market?
iPad has more unit sales than Mac. It's a massive market. The last time Apple reported unit sales, back in 2018, iPad was selling over 43 million units per year.
not being able to see how this is different is very disingenuous. when the ipad was released, nobody had a device like that. apple's headset was not the first. even those the came before did not gain a lot of traction. so apple is not blazing new trails here that people just don't understand yet. this is an accepted as niche product line for certain personalities.
They are now, and that's exactly the point. And people don't look ridiculous now because they became adopted, but even the first versions of mobile phones made people look ridiculous.
Have some perspective, try to think beyond a lapse of more than two years back and forwards.
I cannot see this with a VR headset. It's a very geeky limited market, no matter the price point. But ESPECIALLY at Apple's price point.
Even their “misses” have just been devices that were too niche or bad value propositions for the average consumer, rather than being technically immature (thinking of HomePod here). It’s rare for Apple to launch a device that’s just far too early to be useful even to its target audience.
Pretty much anyone who had used an iPhone or iPod touch was like, "Oh hell yeah, big iPhone."
Pointing out that the device sucks to actually use in important physical and social ways is the opposite.
VR headsets are at their 6th or 7th iteration in the last decade.
They laughed at the iPad.
However they also laughed at the Newton.
Which is a huge downside for something that users are literally forced to stare at.
Would be nice if it was better, I don’t see it as a “huge downside” as you do though.
That said, almost everything Apple does is personal computing. Maybe AR is just a bad fit until it can fit into the form factor of sunglasses. (And not be shit.)
They should've had a $2-3bn budget for content on top of production. Instead they just seemed to release it then walk away hoping everyone else would figure out the point of the product and make stuff for free. It failed.
I'm dreaming I know....
We've had 10-15 years of companies trying to make VR (and AR more recently) happen. I just don't think it's ever going to happen.
People are led astray by books like Snow Crash but there are fundamental issues with both VR and AR. Latency is a huge one for both. AR fundamnetally has an issue producing true blacks.
Additionally at such a price, and with the current developer feelings regarding store practices impose by Apple.
Naturally it turned out to be such a niche product, unstainable to keep going.
Personally, I have 0 interest in glasses, but a lot in quality, privacy respecting VR. Just not $3500 of it.
I would have been interested in a $3500 headset if that M1 chip had run macOS, so I could ditch my laptop on trips and take my office with me.
I believe I am decent earner, but 3500$ is not justifiable from the benefit I get from it. _and I wanted to buy it really bad_
If you ARE carrying around a mouse and keyboard and AVP, that seems like a lot more clunk and silliness than just using a damn laptop. What are you doing that actually benefits from gluing the screen to your face?
I want to be explicit: I love VR and have been hugely into it since the very first oculus dev kits, but other than flight/driving simulators and gun games which all hugely hugely benefit from the physical immersion VR provides, there is nothing worth doing in VR. Not that many games actually benefit from a physical presence. Almost nobody playing FIFA or CoD actually wants to do it in VR. The (really fun and quite well made) CoD ripoffs and other shooters in VR are nearly empty, because so few people are willing to stand up while playing. The Wii made this clear 18 years ago FFS.
I'm still waiting for a single use case that isn't sim driving, sim flying, or shooting, or beat saber. Billions invested into producing something, and still there is nothing.
For a start you get multiple very large virtual screens that are a lot bigger than the screen in a notebook. This to me is an interesting use case.
Actual VR/AR desktop mirroring is a thing that exists now. It's a niche of a niche of a niche because it's not a good experience. It's interesting for the five minutes until it becomes unbearable.
Consider that many simracers, the niche that VR is the absolute best for, do not regularly use VR, because it's just too much fuss to put a damn set of goggles on, even when you are already sat in a purpose built simracing rig!
Yes, either external or the ones built into my MBP
> If you ARE carrying around a mouse and keyboard and AVP, that seems like a lot more clunk and silliness than just using a damn laptop. What are you doing that actually benefits from gluing the screen to your face?
I was hoping to use it as a companion (replacement was always "maybe in the future") initially so I was going to carry the AVP+MBP if things had worked out. Not always, but if I was going to be somewhere for an extended period of time (vacation/visiting friends or family/etc) then I would take both and have the "same setup" that I have at my desk at home (AVP+MBP). This was going to be an alternative to my 3-4 monitors (I have the same desk setup in 2 locations and duplicating everything was expensive and annoying). Unfortunately the MVD was too blurry and VR is too limiting (but mosting the MVD issues) so I returned my headset but that's what I was hoping to accomplish and how I was going to use it all.
I don't want to spend 8 hours a day in some corporation's world, even more than we already are. The incentives are not aligned.
The personal computer revolution (that Apple helped kickstart) was amazing. People could actually run the software locally, instead of a mainframe. People bought apps to run on their computer and videos to run on their own VCR. I feel like the Web started taking things backwards, empowering "the remote server" again, like a mainframe.
Now, we have Netflix, YouTube etc. and the broadband internet hurdle has been surmounted for many. We are fighting the wrong battles with "net neutrality". The real battle should be whether we can host the software on machines of our choice, or not.
Evidently there is a market for those who want to run their own software and those who don’t care.
Apple caters to the latter. Meta seems to be taking the more open route.
Luckily pretty much all major VR platforms use OpenXR, so we have a better start than in the past.
But when it comes to everything else, it is the opposite, in my opinion.
Apple sells you the hardware and you install apps locally. It’s not open source, but at least it runs locally. And Apple cares about your privacy.
Facebook is the opposite, it is ad-supported, it will never give you their backend source code or let you run your own social network. They only promote “React” front end framework and other ancillary things. They will try to take your data by hook or by crook (surreptitiously recording your camera and audio as well). Their “Metaverse” play would have to recouo the tens of billions spent on development.
But yeah when it comes to AI, you guys lucked out. Zuck’s image has improved since the first 15 years of “dumbf%[#s” giving him their data. He now surfs in a suit and looks much cooler. But remember — it’s people like Linus Torvalds, Tim Berners-Lee, and all the “BDFL”s of all the languages you use (like Guido Vom Rossum for Python and the Zend guys behind PHP) who really create most of the wealth for the world. If not for open source, you’d be spending more and more of your life in some corporation’s world.
Just ask yourself, when the following technologies enter your home or your body, would you rather all be hooked up to a corporation like the Borg, or at least have your own installation where you have a say:
TeslaBot in your house
Neuralink in your brain
Microsoft Recall recording
Hours in “the Metaverse”
Security cameras everywhere
When facing the temptation. Microsoft has already done it. Facebook has already done it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism
But it can go far beyond that. How difficult would it be for TeslaBot to get all the info to impersonate you? All your mannerisms, voice recordings, your heartbeat rhythms, gait, everything?
Through their cloud service.
AR will be the 'future' for a very, very long time I think. Maybe there will be a Metaverse chatroom where all the worker bees can bounce around and have a happy hour on Friday or something
https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/n...
Granted, it’s relative: “… the new generation of smart glasses have sold more in a few months than the old ones did in two years.”
But it doesn’t sound like they’re discouraged.
If the product was a hit, we'd just know about it. We'd see it around, people would talk about it. It wouldn't require an ambiguous comment from the CEO.
Apple has repeatedly said that AR is where they want to be and glasses are what they want to do (directly and via leaks) but the tech wasn't there yet. "There yet" can mean "we can't figure out how to get the cost down to something reasonable". The AVP was clearly a "Let's fake it till we make it" product with faux-AR (or maybe it's still just "AR" but faux-"glasses"?) with the end goal of removing the ski visor for just glasses.
It’s not like customers (aside from those who already have the hardware) are beating down anyone’s door asking for the Vision Pro.
This is very handwavy, but if Apple does intend to pursue the glasses form factor it would probably benefit them to do the very make the very un-apple move of articulating how investments into developing for Vision Pro will extend into glasses.
I doubt they will come out and say that specifically but they pushed ARKit and VRKit for year prior to the AVP.
I think I'll end up getting a MQ3 eventually or maybe the next version at launch but I'm just not really drawn to VR. After the first few months of my MQ2 I lost interest and it's just collecting dust.
I assume they could not yet make glasses happen in a way that fit their expectations or at a reasonable price point.
Even the Vision Pro is a device with big trade-offs (external battery, crazy expensive).
By giving it all the bells and whistles they get to find out about more things and keep it at such a price range that it avoids being viewed as a colossal consumer level failure (instead if it's known by the general public at all it's as a weird but impressive premium level failure)
Instead of an Orion puck for processing - it's your iPhone
Instead of the bracelet for extra precision - it's a future Apple Watch prototype.
They just won't do what Meta did - show off prototype hardware that they know they won't release in its current form and are working towards making viable for mass production.
Now Meta is out here demoing very impressive glasses - which was the goal Apple had but couldn’t make work - so I’m curious if Meta is likely the more exciting place to work for this tech.
But I think they did this more to break into a new territory than to sell units. Of course, they didn't market it that way but that was probably their intention.
Next they're gonna come up with a cheaper device, hopefully below 2000 dollars with most of the things that made the vision pro interesting.
I'm happy to concede that AVP is probably great for watching movies on an airplane, but that's hardly comparable to the iPhone level of "world-changing".
I remember there was a lot of initial excitement on HN about the possibilities of using it as virtual monitors for work or as a more immersive way to watch movies. Is it good for these applications long term, after the novelty wears off?
Edit: Or perhaps the software has improved and it's even better now that it was at launch?
Using it as a virtual monitor is tiring. It’s too damned heavy. The FOV is too small. The resolution isn’t terrible but it’s not great either (compared with a physical screen.) I get exhausted after an hour of using it, an 8 hour work day is just too much.
I used to use it to watch YouTube or movies but at some point it just becomes a chore to go get it and put it on when the TV is already there and doesn’t cause fatigue after 20 minutes.
With that said, I haven't used it for non-hobbyist productive things because the weight and (more importantly) the really bad head strap design makes it awful for use in a sitting-up position for long. I feel like that comfort factor what drags it down most. The passthrough quality and UX stability is 100% there already to be fine wearing it for several hours at a time, including while doing unrelated tasks, if only it was actually comfortable enough for that.
For constrast, see the designs that companies like BOBOVR make for other headsets like the Quest 3 - https://www.bobovr.com/products/bobovr-m3-pro - which look bulky and silly but are perfectly comfortable for long high-activity VR sessions because of the fundamentally better design, even though they add extra battery weight to the headset itself.
For me, the killer function has been doing display mirroring with my Mac and leveraging the environments like Mt Hood or the Moon as a way to get into a focused flow. I love the idea of windowing in a virtual space, but the there is the same feeling of limitation that I get with this device as I get with my iPad. I've used it to capture some VR photos and videos of family, survey the house to identify the source of a water leak, used it for a couple workouts, to play some Xbox games in bed without waking my wife.
Weight only seems to be an issue for me at the 3h mark or so, but at that point I am taking a break. My eyes don't seem to be effected so far and the only visual quality issues have been either due to pancake lense physics or fogging up when the device is cold. App quality has been okish for the most part. I periodically check the app store for something new, but so far nothing that feels incredible. I'll probably buy a MetaQuest Pro after this just to see what that is like
I'm ultimately waiting for the ultrawide enhancement they teased earlier this year and hoping they add a few more environments.
same feeling of limitation that I get with this device as I get with my iPad
Lessons:
(a) never launch new plaforms without jailbreaks
(b) never disable jailbreaks until the best use cases found by hackers have been sherlocked into platform's core functions
(c) never derive $NEW_THING from $PREMATURELY_FROZEN_THING
spouse works night shift 3 days a week and ill develop on it and/or watch something.
our work has a cloud based ide for web stuff and ill commonly use AVP and virtual display on my personal mac for that and its better than my 2 monitor setup.
its for big nerds for sure and i am that. really is the best value for the best possible screen. i got it to have fun developing for novel xr hardware and watch great movies on the best screen. my advice is not to get one unless youre in that intersection of interests.
personally find it exciting i might be developing on discontinued hardware. always read and heard about hardware thats come and gos but dorks keep building stuff for it. i assumed everything is too well planned and managed these days for me to take part in something like that.
Vision Pro - solution looking for a problem, in development for ≈8 years.
It really makes you think how clueless Apple has become post-Jobs ...
*4 years if we acknowledge it was an existing category and Apple just improved on competition
[copy-pasted from my Mastodon]
While I don't think the Vision Pro is a good fit for Apple (most of their products are portable, while the Vision Pro is unlikely to have much uptake outside of the home and office), it is hard to gauge whether it would be adopted without actually bringing it to the market.
And while Apple has millions to burn, they better find something else other than doing iPhones.
I'm guessing Apple and Sony would have invested in improving the process if it had hit expectations.
Likely closer to half of that. Dont forget they're still launching it in other countries this year, so they've clearly got ample stock left over.
Early adopters didn't use iPhones, they used HP iPaqs and Dell Axim PDAs running Windows Mobile. iPhones obsoleted them by simplifying the UI so anybody aged 8-80 could use it.
If an Apple product seems like it's for 'early adopters', it's already failed.
Yes. I threw my phone away 2.5 years ago (after my 3yo daughter kept saying "no phone dadda") and it has made my life significantly better. Like living in the 1990's again.
In a land of the distracted, the phoneless man is king.
That being said, I think the AVP is very cool technology, and will have important applications in the years ahead. (Just not mass market for a long time, if ever)
Almost everyone I know (and people here on HN) thought this would be niche at $3500. But that doesn't mean people don't want to be plugged into screens. They totally are plugged into screens - just not Vision Pro.
I've seen a backlash in recent years. Most notably amongst techies, ironically, but more recently in the general public. People are waking up.
It's getting closer to that, but not quite there yet. There's Bigscreen Beyond out already, and the Immersed Visor is coming up, and they're a lot closer to that than Quest 3 or Apple Vision Pro to glasses (but also either less powerful and/or more expensive).
https://mixed-news.com/en/immersed-visor-next-gen-xr-headset...
I've yet to find someone who thought a $3500 headset would be a smash hit.
It was constant and everywhere. Tens of posters who have apparently zero connection to the company Apple other than "They released the iPhone" as if they've never had a high profile flop, as if they've never had only okay sales of a product, as if they've never tried to change the world and failed miserably, as if Apple never misses.
Because of a single damn product release. One time. At the crux of a phase change in the personal digital device world.
Just, utterly divorced from reality. I feel like these posters are half of my company's management team.
What I really mean by that though, is that I want to make my screen time more meaningful. I don’t want to mindlessly scroll, like I often find myself doing, or like I see others doing in places like grocery store lines or on the subway.
The Apple Vision Pro is a very expensive, specialized device. When I use it, it's mostly to watch movies, TV shows, or other immersive content, but it’s still mainly just for entertainment. But I can't just sit in it and disassociate the same way I might my phone--I don't feel that it's built that way.
As for getting no traction, yeah that's correct. It's too expensive. I still love mine.
Apple and Facebook are the polar opposite of that. They look at a product segment and think "How we do sell this to X million people?" Turns out that regular people that buy iPhones and Macbooks, might not be as interested in VR.
Next iphone are going to cost more and more, such a failure must have cost them a lot of money.
well i can't think of a single killer app for this or any VR headset for me.
at $3.5k there is pressure to position this as a leap forward in solutions to non existent problems.
watching films on a flight or using a virtual desktop don't excite most people.
For a headset the size of a pair of glasses?
* A well-designed HUD that can seamlessly integrate 95%+ of the "utility functions" (as opposed to entertainment functions) from my phone into my field of vision. Calls, messages, navigation, calendar, notes. I never want to look at my phone unless I'm bored.
* One of those "speed reader" [0] apps that will flicker a message at 600WPM at me. This should probably interface with all long-form text.
* Subtitles/translations for the people I talk to.
* An "offline dating" app that only allows you to swipe people you see
I firmly belive AR is the future of personal computing, but the hardware needs to gain an order of magnitude in capabilities.
[0] https://www.spreeder.com/app.php, but smarter (word groups, adjust displaytime for word complexity)
This is why it always frustrating to read any negative news on companies like Apple or Tesla. They have some annoyingly sycophantic fanbase that always wants to downplay and misdirect any bad news.
If Microsoft made some AR glasses that sat unsold and they suspended production, no one would show up to say "actually, it is not being discontinued, nothing to see here". Nor should they.
But those are not white-knighted by a fanbase that always feel like they need to protect the multi-billion dollar company from negativity.
Using myself as an example, there are companies I like. I happen to like Nintendo for example. I still call a failed product a failure (e.g.: Wii U), and sometimes I even dislike their successful products (I always hated N64 for that retarded controller).
Why Apple "fanbase" abandon all critical thinking is baffling.
No one thought a $3500 device was going to be mainstream when we see people complaining about phones being above $1k.
The fact that the first one came out with the "Pro" name made this even more clear.
Headlines like this make it seem like it "failed" in some way that is only because we are putting expectations on this to match other Apple products but this is just like the other "Hobby" projects that apple used to classify products like the Apple TV.
The market for AR/VR is incredibly early (if it manages to take off at all) and the technology just isnt there yet. But while we wait for the hardware to catch up why not start working on an idealized vision of what it could work like with its own caveats. I would much rather this than the xreal's and similar headsets way over promising (borderline lying in their marketing) and severely under delivering.
i believe apple can make a compelling mixed reality headset but they need compelling apps and very few are going to develop if the platform is over $2000 in my opinion
Misleading FUD from Macrumors trying to get clicks.
Apple Watch is a status symbol in the same way Airpods and iPhones are. You're paying partially to be seen wearing them. The same is not true for Vision Pro or any headset. You'll just look like a Alamy stock image that comes up in an image search for 'technology'.
Anecdotally, when I go to a restaurant, the server is often wearing an Apple Watch.
I cannot extrapolate what that would look like for AVP...
Never had sound on, have disabled more and more notifications, steadily fewer and fewer complications until I finally just use the the silly Snoopy watch face instead.
What I do love it for is all the health tracking, and that I have about a decade of data on myself now. Really just activity level and resting heart rate primarily.
I'm at the point that I'd be similar (or, maybe more?) for a display-less slim Apple Fitness Band loaded with all the sensors of the Apple Watch.. and then go back to my analog wristwatch.
Apple certainly hasn’t helped themselves here by burning so much developer goodwill over the last few years. They may be marketing it as a “Pro” device currently but one of the biggest selling points seems to be immersive video, and Netflix and YouTube both saying no to developing an app for it is not a good look.
On the indie side, in just the last few days I’ve seen multiple Mastodon posts from developers regretting building a visionOS app [0] or considering preventing running their existing iPad apps on visionOS. [1][2]
[0] https://mastodon.social/@harshil/113350016890131979
It needs very high-res video streams which basically no internet provider/CDN can offer at scale. 40Mbps+ HEVC just isn't scalable. So the only content is whatever can be downloaded to the device itself. A few games? A cool screensaver experience? It's all cool, but mostly novelty tech.
You can stream even a 1080p movie to it and it will look fine, because it is playing in "physical" space, not filling your view completely. It is like watching a floating television or movie screen.
Nobody can stream 2x 4K to my Apple VR headset. I can barely get a single 4K stream to my TV!
Not for bandwidth reasons, but for latency reasons. A 20ms delay (RTT) between your head moving and the camera moving is a one-way ticket to hurl city.
If you did not mean that, please reread my original comment again.
But by RTT, I mean the additional latency induced by going to a central server over the internet and back. You've also got latency from input->sensor, sensor->packet, [packet-flight-time], frame-gen-time, [response-packet-flight-time], response-packet->decoded-video, and signal->display-update.
You simply should not put the video feed any further away from your headset than a computer on your desk. Even then, a wired connection gives much better results, because the experience is consistently timed.
Building an iPhone app? Pretty much required.
Building an iPad app? Almost free when you're building an iPhone app (depending on your tolerance for UI/UX)
Building a Watch app? It's a popular device but is it worth the investment? Most people say no.
Building for a brand new platform where we have to live with Apple's rules? No thanks.
Why develop for a platform that has almost zero users? Why buy an expensive device that has almost zero apps?
So, for a ~$5000 in hardware costs and unknown amount of dev time you get 10-50 dollars in return.
You don't need any feeling of resentment to run an easy ROI calculation
I don’t harbor any particular resentment towards the App Store; in fact I am fine giving Apple 15% of my proceeds (I make way less than $1M a year) to handle content delivery, refund requests, minor advertisement, etc.
I bought a Vision Pro on release, and have a number of ideas/prototypes for it.
After a few weeks of hacking, there are two simple reasons why I didn’t pursue development of them any further:
- the APIs are still really early stage (eg nothing around windowing, I’d like to build some pro photo editing apps that’d require advanced windowing functionality)
- even if I were to work around the API shortcomings, take the time to develop a full app, and then release it - then how many sales will I get at most? Maybe a thousand? Compared to the iPhone/iPad/Mac, that’s nothing.
So I figured waiting a year or two for the APIs to get better and more people to have access to the hardware made sense.
Also, I went from considering making AVP exclusive apps to making apps that work on Mac/iPad, and maybe have some bonus features on the AVP - I think that’s a better way to go about it (nothing released like that yet, still in development).
All that said, there’s something magical about the AVP’s high quality screens for photography. Seeing your photos in space right in front of you is definitely one step above looking at them on a phone/tablet/laptop screen (and one step below looking at large high quality prints of them, but that requires a different kind of effort).
Regardless, thanks for the kind words! (and for those wondering, the link is https://heliographe.net :)
Not only, in general, over the last year or so, Apple has used every opportunity to antagonise and frustrate developers.
A business wouldn't care about the Vision Pro because there are but 10 people who still own one. The device is limited, extremely expensive and the software platform questionable at best - why did Apple needed to reinvent *Reality APIs instead of joining an existing industry is beyond me.
There are indie devs who still use the vision pro for engagement - flashy posts on the socials etc, but that's not enough to make a dent. Also, for many of them, this is their first encounter with AR/VR where Apple present's their achievements as novel while there are already existing ecosystems from other vendors.
iPhone suits simple use cases, chat, video, audio, remote controls, utilities, simple games, and with controllers medium complexity games
iPad will do any phone or laptop app, plus high complexity games with a controller
Watch will do data displays, notifications, very small remote controls
Headset? AR, VR, cinema. But right now, that means "Occulus games, first party virtual display, and the kind of static AR content that's theoretically possible on an iPhone but very few actually use*", and AVP is 7 times the price of Meta's headset.
There's useful stuff if can do in specific niches, but I can't tell if e.g. "surgeons use AVP to assist during surgery" is a fluffy headline or a demonstration of value-add, and even if it's useful in this case it remains hard to figure out what this translates to in a mass consumer market.
https://9to5mac.com/2024/10/16/the-vision-pro-is-being-used-...
* some amazon listings let you see the product; IKEA used to have an app for that, then got rid of it, no idea if it came back
A this point in history Apple has the largest market cap and has not failed. Sure, it will fail eventually but it hasn't yet.