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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

I often think that Zuck spent so much on metaverse in order to to bait Apple to spend enormously on an experimental product and OS which now they are forced to maintain

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I used to have an Apple Vision Pro; it was a genuinely great piece of tech. IMO if Apple went somewhere like wearable glasses with it, it'd be a hit.

Apple Vison Regular will come one day, and might actually be worth it.

If I can _actually_ replace my monitors with a headset, I’m in.

Vision Pro could do it but was way too heavy to use 8 hours a day

the steam frame is reported to be 200-400 grams lighter than the vision pro (not sure why the vision pro weights are reported as variable... the strap maybe).

I hope apple actually considers the usecase of using the glasses instead of 1 or more monitors with more priority.

Part of the problem with Apple Vision Pro was the sales strategy. They labeled it "Pro" but if you went into an Apple store they only let you play some simple games and watch some movies with it. The main feature I was interested in, desktop extension, they wouldn't let you test. I even explicitly asked and they said no. They wanted a guided experience thing which just turned me off from buying it.

they had to be 'pro' because of that pricetag. I'm a VR guy and an Apple guy and even I wouldn't move for that price. They need to come up with a way to halve that price. Remove the front screen, it's cute but not required. Maybe a version that doesn't have all the onboard compute, one that needs to be slaved to a mac generally, if they can make it work with an ipad for compute (or iphone?) all the better.

It's great, yet you "used to have it" :)

Yes, I bought it to make apps when it first came out, but I immediately picked up a new Shopify client and couldn't justify the time/investment. I had to choose between dunking $5k on it to maybe develop apps when my work schedule opened up, or return it and get the money back.

Yeah if they double down and keep investing in the tech improvements required, I genuinely think Apple AR can become the next big hardware form. Nothing will beat the iPhone but this could easily stand beside their laptops as a major accessory.

VisionPro was/is a dev platform, priced to ensure it wasn't yet a mainstream device.

99% of "apps" for it were confused garbage, totally misunderstanding what it's for or how to use it.

The percentage of apps that "get it" is rising. Not sure if the disillusioned left, or if more are figuring it out.

Either way, when Apple releases something consumer facing, or for consumers' faces, this means there's a prayer of being more than a deluge of Oculus content.

Or at least I'd like to imagine that's what they're doing. :-)

if Apple went somewhere like wearable glasses with it, it'd be a hit

It would be a PR disaster, most people outside the SV bubble just find smart glasses what they really are: creepy.

Even more so because Meta is going to roll out face recognition and going to live-annotate people you encounter in the streets. Luckily that shit is not allowed in the EU.

A few things:

- A lot of people found smart watches to be nerdy, something that only geeks would wear, until Apple made the Apple Watch. Along the same lines, everyone (on tech-oriented social media) thought the AirPods looked stupid and dorky when they were first announced, but now they're ubiquitous.

- People find smart glasses from Meta (and previously, Google) creepy, but – and it's anathema to say this around certain parts of HN – like it or not, people do generally trust Apple with their data in a way that they don't with those other companies.

- It seems like you're assuming Apple's glasses would include outward-facing cameras in the first place. Do we know that? The ideal device for me would just include the downward-facing IR cameras for gesture detection. Presumably only people under NDA can say for sure right now.

> Luckily that shit is not allowed in the EU.

What's not allowed? Facial recognition, street annotation, AI? Does it make a difference if it's local, on-device AI?

People have found surveillance cameras horrible since forever. No matter how many years pass and how popular they are, they never became cool

I'm not sure that's true anymore, or at least I'd suggest it depends on the type of surveillance camera you're talking about. Flock cameras, traffic cameras, the big ugly gray things stuck on the side of a building that you'd avoid if you were playing Splinter Cell? Sure, not popular. But everyone and their grandma has a Ring doorbell or a Nest camera inside or outside of their home now.

Further, it's still not obvious to me that an Apple glasses product would be a surveillance camera in the first place.

I cannot think of anyne who said "oh good, they have a camera in this place"

If it were lighter with a better FOV I’d buy it at the current price. Apple isn’t doing metaverse, they’re doing computer with a 3D monitor and I don’t think it’s a bad move to have the ecosystem in place as the tech improves and makes a mass market product more viable.

Not really, their Meta glasses are very successful in the market and Zuck wants to own the new platform to extract their 30% instead of missing that opportunity on mobile and being beholden to Apple and Google.

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