They Paid $3,500 for Apple's Vision Pro. A Year Later, It Still Hurts
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I don't think that was intentional, but it is. You're not the first person I've heard that has used it to accommodate a physical disability like that.
In fact, I used mine that way as well. I was also in a car, and lost my glasses in the process. My prescription had expired, and my face was swollen so much that even a week later I wasn't able to get an accurate eye exam. It's been two months, and I still haven't gotten my glasses worked out completely; I'm using a pair now with only one lens because one was defective.
I was able to comfortably wear the Vision Pro before I was able to get an accurate vision prescription, which I believe is because of the customized light seal. I used it for both work and play for a couple of weeks, until I was able to get new glasses that are adequate for screens.
This isn't a problem unique to the Apple Vision Pro. There's still relatively little to do with an Oculus, PSVR2, and many other headsets.
Honestly, my favorite part about my PSVR2 is the ability to cut off most everything other than what I'm doing just then.But it's kind of a lot of work for that feature.
I demoed it to a lot of my friends and everyone was very impressed but no one ever asked to go back. When I realized this knew there was a problem and that when I started doubting the adoption of VR.
Once Meta/Facebook bought occulus, I full checked out and never bought another VR head set ever again.
I still managed to make a VR version of one of my games before fully quitting. I don’t know what it would take for me to care about VR again.
Then when Facebook took them over they finally had the chance to buy first class custom made components instead of going for scraps from the mobile industry. I don't like Facebook/meta either but their cash was desperately needed.
I also really appreciated the gift of the Rift consumer version, they were under no obligation to do that.
Apple considers developers so far below them nobody is willing to touch it with a pole.
To Apple’s credit, nearly every iPad app works on it unless the developer specifically opts out.
I don’t think the issue is how Apple treats developers, it’s simply a matter of market share. Making apps for Vision Pro won’t be profitable until there are a lot more users.
There are some adjacent niche uses, as well. High-res fractal viewing, for example.
But as to productivity... I tried using various virtual desktop software, but the image quality is just not good enough to match what I'm used to with my 4K displays. Even 4K per eye is not good enough for that, since any usable virtual display won't fill the entire visible space.
If visionOS is to succeed, that's how it will do it. visionOS and iOS/iPadOS will continue to be developed in parallel, with new UX conventions slowly making their way to the traditional devices. Over time, apps built using Apple's platform will "just work" in visionOS as well.
In fact, while I hadn't thought about it until now, that's probably exactly why they're doing a visual refresh of iOS 19. Reporting seems to emphasize the "visionOS style" widgets, and it's apparent to me at least that that's going to lead to deeper and more complete integration between the platforms.
I don't think Apple is done with Spatial Computing. I wish the Vision Pro had done a bit better, especially its native software ecosystem, but I don't think it has been a failure at all. There were likely lots of reasons they launched it: to test the market's readiness for the product, to introduce new UX conventions, to get direct user feedback, to allow developers onto the platform, etc. They didn't have to make money on the Vision Pro (though, I think they did).
People here are always saying how hard it is to build a hardware startup; how just _shipping the product_ is a milestone that most of them never reach. Hardware is hard. I see the Vision Pro as Apple applying Agile to hardware. They shipped an MVP. It's not a "VR headset", it's a "Spatial Computing device". That lets them see how people actually use it, refine, and iterate.
The only reason you don't see this approach more often is that most companies have neither the capital nor the risk tolerance to do it. Apple spent $30B on R&D in FY2023.
Reminds me of the VR storyline in HBO's Silicon Valley.
My household grabbed an Oculus Quest 2 in late 2020. We used it for maybe 6 months tops and since then it has gathered dust. The games are either too expensive for a short experience or exhaustively immersive to the point they require too much activation and sustained energy. The library at the time was also very small so I would be curious to charge up the headset and see what has changed.
I think our headset was around $500 USD... Fortunately the Quest 2 experience taught us that $3500 USD for the Vision Pro was _absolutely_ not going to be worth the cost.
Also, if the people who say it hurts would get a third-party strap, I bet they would feel better. I use a halo strap on my Quest 3 and it makes it way more comfortable.
Honestly, at this point, if Jobs were still there we'd probably have no VR headset, but a TV with appleTV built in that also magically provides Atmos surround without any extra hardware and magically "just works" to find any and all content you'd want to watch from any service. The resurrected Apple used to be good at finding what people didn't even know they wanted. Now it's a zombie walking around hoping people see the value in what they make.
C'est la vie. I'm still wanting Apple to return to routers. The Airport Extreme was a great product for a Mac-centric household.
I love having apps for streaming services on my TV - but I hate smart TVs. I hate them because their UX is always slow and clunky, they have more bloat installed than a contract smartphone in 2010, and they run a custom, closed OS that will stop getting updates three months after it's released.
Well, that's not true. They'll push and update a year or so later that puts ads on your homescreen that you can't remove.
I won't pay $1,400 for a new 60" Samsung QLED smart TV, but I'd spend $3k on a TV with the same specs and no smart features. I'd just do what I do now, and plug an Android TV box into it.
I've used AppleTV a bit, both their app and the hardware device. I honestly prefer the Android TV boxes I have, but it's more than adequate. More importantly, it's fast and flexible enough to support multiple providers in one app.
If Apple were to build a TV with AppleTV built-in, with the same specs as the Samsung, I'd probably buy it at $3k. I'd definitely buy it at $2k. I'd consider it at $4k or above, depending on whether Apple improves and expands AppleTV.
It is indeed one of the niches that VR is great for. There are many others like gaming. But porn definitely is one too.
I'm not a big consumer of porn - not a value judgement, just context. Still, I've made it a point to go out to the big sites every couple of months just to see where the industry as a whole is with streaming VR content.
The company behind most of the VR-specific sites also appears to be behind DeoVR. It's finally getting to the point that it may be practical for a company to stream VR content smoothly at a resolution that's acceptable for things like "virtual coworking".
As for porn, if that's what you want the AVP isn't the right product for you. You want image quality and software support. Right now, that would probably be the Quest 3. There are others out there with better image quality (Pimax, Bigscreen, etc.) but streaming sites are built around Meta's platform first and foremost.
The single band is almost perfect if your light seal is fit well. The weight is distributed against your forehead and cheekbones, and you barely feel it. It feels more like wearing ski goggles than a VR headset.
The problem is that "if" is carrying a lot of weight there. If your light seal isn't quite right for you, it puts too much pressure against your face. If your sinuses are shaped wrong, or your nose is broken in just the wrong way, tightening the strap enough to press it against your face is uncomfortable.
The second strap is inferior in how comfortable and usable it can be, but is much more consistently usable by people regardless of anatomy and fitment. It takes longer to don and doff, and it isn't as "aesthetic", but the top strap pulls the weight up off your cheekbones and puts some of it on the crown of your head.
Overall, I'd suggest trying the single strap. It's super convenient and can work well. If it doesn't work for you, try the dual strap. If that's better, invest in a good third-party solution that strikes the right balance of comfort, security, and portability for you.
It's a $3500 VR headset, so a niche bit of kit from the jump. Nobody's made this work in a meaningful way, and the initial reviews of the Vision Pro made it clear this was no different (though there were kinds words about Apple's implementation of this level of tech).
Another commenter notes that it's beautiful, does what it does well, but there's little to do with it. That's utterly true. Maybe in a few years, that'll be different, but I think the real problem is that Apple brought it to market before the rest of the market was ready to jump forward. It's too expensive for the level of mass adoption that would jumpstart a VR software ecosystem (ie, in the same way the iPhone catalyzed phone apps).
My current iPad is an 11" 3rd-gen iPad Pro. I bought it in January 2019. I got Apple's keyboard case for it - I don't recall the exact name of that one, but it's the one that has a trackpad and holds the device magnetically. I've carried that thing with me everywhere I've gone for the past 5 1/2 years. The keyboard case is beginning to delaminate on the edges now, but I expect it'll last me another year or two before I upgrade, and even then I'll pass this one down to a family member.
My Vision Pro, on the other hand... I carry it in a dedicated case that's about the size of a shoebox. To use it, I have to remove it from the case, remove the battery from its compartment, plug it in, put it on, wait for it to boot up, log in via eye scan, and only then get the home screen. But wait! I still don't have internet access unless I'm somewhere I've connected to WiFi before. Now I have to connect to my iPhone or iPad to get online.
The point I'm trying to make is simple: they are very different devices, and serve very different niches. I see almost no overlap.
I'd be far more apt to get rid of my iPhone than my iPad. The only reasons I have a phone at all these days are because I use it to fly a couple of drones and that Apple seems to assume that you have an iPhone for much of their ecosystem. I can't set up my kid's Apple Watch from an iPad or Vision Pro.
The movie watching is nice and I often watch movies on my meta quest. It's comfortable to watch for hours. But the quest was 400$ not 3500$. It needs much less justification.
Also I game a lot in VR. It's so fantastic. Even old games gain a totally new dimension such as half life 2, gta san Andreas. This is not even possible with the vision pro despite being more than 7 times as expensive.
They do have a sizable part of the mobile gaming market though it's not what serious gamers are looking for. But we're not a massive group either compared to the consumer that just wants to shoot a chicken at pigs once in a while.
My kids love our Quest 3. It’s a great system for gaming. They’ve clocked hundreds of hours playing Beat Saber and Gorilla Tag.
If Apple can lower the price significantly and make it more comfortable I think there is potential for this to be a successful product.
You can get a cheap, light, and usable headset these days for <$100. It's called the Quest 2.
You can get a high end, light headset. It's the Bigscreen Beyond 2, and it's ~$1,300.
As for high end and cheap, there's the Pimax Crystal Light. It's $600 (~$890 with required subscription), very high resolution (2880x2880 per eye, 35 PPD). I can't find the weight on their site but I own a Pimax Crystal. It's bulky and heavy - which I know quite well, as I stream multiple hours in VR very frequently.
I'm not into VR stuff and it still seems like an extremely niche thing. I have friends who are into VR but they have spent way too much money into it considering a driving chair, steering wheel, pedals, high spec PC, etc.
I'm sure android phones could be paired to it now and you'd swipe using the phone against a keyboard displayed on the headset. It just seems like it should be much nicer to read things without crocking your neck.
Why? Its users would still be called "glassholes" just like before. Nobody likes looking stupid in public, and wearing AR ski/diving goggles in public makes you look like a complete tool.
Then there's the issue with privacy. People wouldn't want to be constantly filmed/scanned in public by other people's AR goggles. It would be like wherever you go people having their smartphones pointed at you.
Apple VP is a niche solution looking for a niche problem. It's no iPhone moment.
GG won't/didn't fail due to the perception of "this person is filming me without my consent", that is a strawman meant to create more headlines than the less-sexy "it just doesn't have much purpose and is too expensive." Exactly like with VisionPro.
We're already under 1080p surveillance 90 percent of our waking lives out of the house. A person wearing glasses with a UI layer and a camera walking down the street likely isn't saving that picture, footage, to their home server to then send me a citation over. But the commercial businesses, police, DOT etc sure are, and are all subpoena-able by courts. Less so with a guy wearing glasses.
But ignoring that, you're right -- one of those two things is certainly worse than the other, but they're both still bad.
Who's "we"? This is not the case where I live. I live in an EU country with very strict laws for privacy and restrictions on video surveillance. You aren't allowed to film random people on the street without their consent, except with some exceptions.
AR glasses would require retooling of such laws, not to mention gaining the public's trust as "send all public images to some megacorp's severs without their consent" is not a popular public opinion here. In Germany for example Google street view was not allowed for a long time also because privacy laws and public outrage(justified and not).
I also dislike your defetist line of thinking "well, we're under 24/7 surveillance anyway, so we might as well allow Apple and Google to spy on us in public now while we're at it". How about NO, how about they can fuck right off.
Though I think long term enough into the future, it's inevitable that governments, even within EU, will allow these corpos to have this surveillance as long as the data is processed and hosted in the EU, and the EU gov gets front door access to the data to spy on its citizens to prevent us from voting right wing candidates.
Case in point; if you can legally provide dash cam footage in ANY type of court case civil or criminal in your locale, then I can promise you that my comment rings true in your country. I can assure you that there are street cams supported by tax dollars, and private businesses with private insurance whom use these to protect their liability.
it is not evil to use cameras; it is a circumstance of the way we have decided things should be in most "western" countries.
Don't take my comment so personally. I am simply saying "hey, this piece of tech failed due to perceived X, whilst most of the civilized world sits in front of a work laptop that for all intents and purposes could be doing exactly the same."
It was a thing - https://www.google.com/search?q=google+glass+user+punched
However the world has changed in 11 years.
Not entirely, but it was a much bigger issue than you seem to be giving it credit for. I remember walking into a coffee shop in Little Rock, AR - not exactly a tech hotspot - and seeing stickers on the door explicitly banning Google Glass.
People were really concerned and upset about it. Come to think of it, the release and nonchalant reception of Meta RayBans says a lot about how our culture has changed. That product basically takes all the stuff that was seen as problematic about Google Glass and shoves it into a pair of normal-ish-looking glasses.
But to your example, doesn't the coffee shop have a totally legal camera up providing CCTV recording/surveillance that is literally hidden away on purpose? and same with dash cams outside parked in parking spots, red light cameras, DOT cameras etc.... All of these we have come to understand serve a legitimate purpose, and you'll basically never find anyone who questions them.
The populace (me included) who absorb media at any rate had this idea in their head that people with cameras on their faces are potentially weirdos, because "FANG bad". But those same people (again, me included) will go to disneyworld and register their face/thumbprint :D
Of course, but that wasn't what I was pointing out. I was trying to say that the attitude for wearable recording devices has changed a great deal. Google Glass was extremely obvious; RayBan Metas usually go completely unnoticed.
I doubt anyone had ever brought Google Glass into that coffee shop - and as you pointed out, recording was already taking place anyhow. My point is that society has gone from a place where a bulky, obvious camera on a pair of glasses caused a small-scale societal panic to a place where people walk around with cameras and microphones intended to record the public and no one seems to care enough to even bring it up.
That's a huge shift in only a decade.
> The populace (me included) who absorb media at any rate had this idea in their head that people with cameras on their faces are potentially weirdos, because "FANG bad".
I thought so, too - but it turns out the populace only cares about virtue signaling about it. If the device isn't obvious, there's no pushback even when the people know without a doubt that it's present.
>Apple is a company that doesn’t have the most resources of everybody in the world, and the way we’ve succeeded is by choosing what horses to ride really carefully – technically. We try to look for these technical vectors that have a future, and that are headed up, and, you know, different pieces of technology kind of go in cycles. They have their springs and summers, and autumns, and then they, you know, go to the graveyard of technology. And, so we try to pick the things that are in their springs.
And, if you choose wisely, you can save yourself an enormous amount of work vs. trying to do everything. And you can really put energy into making those new emerging technologies be great on your platform, rather then just okay because you’re spreading yourself too thin.
I dont think Vision Pro is wrong, but it is definitely 5 years too early. Just like Apple's self driving cars. Clearly when you have more resource than what you know what to do with it. This is what happens.
It's fair to say that the "new" has worn off the Vision Pro for me many months ago. That's a relative statement, though; when I first got it I used it every day. Now I use it 2-3x weekly at home for the entire day. It's nice to be able to wait in the vehicle while one of my kids is at an activity and have a virtual monitor that fills my field of vision.
My argument was that it would increase my productivity while away from my actual desk; while I don't travel much for work, my family is fairly non-traditional. Neither of us have in-person jobs. We homeschool our kids. We're constantly traveling, either for my wife's side hustles or our kids interests.
One of the best things about it is using it while traveling. A couple of weeks ago we bought a used livestock trailer that was six hours away. The whole family loaded up in the truck, my wife drove, and I spent the next six hours in VR. I got more done than a typical day, it allowed more flexibility in our lives, and - believe it or not - I was actually a part of the conversations in the car the entire time.
To my knowledge there is no other device on the market that can let me seamlessly work on a huge virtual monitor while traveling at 75 MPH down the interstate, while simultaneously allowing me to hold a conversation with my wife about the things around us. Everything else aside, it's pretty incredible to be able to go from reading logs to looking at the pretty entry gates for a ranch we're driving by, by moving my eyes a few degrees to the right.
Even if the only use case for it were as a monitor for my Macs, it has more than paid for itself. My 512GB VP was $4,700 with upgrades, prescription inserts, AppleCare+, etc. Add a decent carrying case (not the Apple one), Apple keyboard and trackpad - call it $5,000 total. How is that any different from someone buying an Apple Pro Display XDR?
Obviously, the monitor has much higher resolution, and features targeted at "creative" professionals. I get it, I've been a professional(-ish) photographer for decades. It's also only 32", and I'm a software engineer. I need screen space. I don't need color fidelity, or dynamic range. As long as the resolution is high enough for me to be able to read small text well, I don't care about that either. The Vision Pro's resolution is better than my eyes' ability to see small text.
No, I have no regrets around the Vision Pro. I still think Apple's "Spatial Computing" will eventually take off, but I'm satisfied with the purchase even if it ends up being abandoned and never receives another update.
Nags:
* It's absolutely too heavy. I'm really not sure how this got out of the door given how sensitive Apple is to the dimensions and tactility of their products. I'm guessing they were insistent on material choice and EyeSight over all else. I think that was the wrong bet.
* The Vision App ecosystem is a dumpster fire. I recall developers complaining about Apple's developer relations, I can't imagine this will change course any time soon.
* The displays are outrageously high quality, but the foveated rendering becomes really obvious when you use features like the Mac Virtual Display. I can't use it as an external display for more than an hour or so.
* Speaking of which; it's annoying to put on/take off. I find myself hesitating to use it for that reason. And this is mostly down to the weight.
Pros:
* The displays/speakers/airpods integration make this the single best individual media consumption device on the planet. Yeah, a bigscreen beyond or similar are great options too, but I can slap the VP on in bed (nullifying the weight problem) and toss on something from either a streaming service or my SMB share.
* And because it's portable, it's the perfect device for airplanes.
TL:DR; VP is too heavy, but there are some great things about it, and the faults don't really matter to Apple because they knew this would be a low-volume product.
They REALLY do need to shore up developer relations before launching the next face computer, but that's unlikely as they are the most prideful company I can think of.