Anyone else worried that Vision Pro will simply be a large iPad and not macOS like, ie closed app store and not geared towards productivity? The fact that to run VSCode you need to mirror your own Mac simply boggles the mind, it's like Apple wants to cut off the potential of the device at the knees simply to continue selling services.
You can do VSCode Remote in a browser on an iPad so I'm not too worried.
I think the bigger factor is that Apple is trying to push this as more of a workplace productivity machine than the iPad, so third party developers will hopefully be more amenable to porting those types of apps than they were to iPadOS.
> You can do VSCode Remote in a browser on an iPad
I'm sorry but that's exactly the problem, I want the app natively (well, as native as you can get with Electron), executing code that I have on my file system. I don't want to execute remotely through a browser.
How is it "pretty specific?" Any developer is running code locally (unless you work for Google or some company where they have remote codespaces). Why should I not want a headset that instead serves as a replacement for a laptop?
You can want whatever you want. It’s not a failure of apple that they don’t serve your specific need, however. They just built a product for different people.
Sure, that's fine. At the same time I can still call it a shame that they would have to do such artificial limiting. I'll more likely pick up the Android or Windows version of such a device without restrictions on what kinds of software I can run on my own hardware.
If they really want to make it a work machine, there is too many things that needs to go from iPadOS when using keyboard. For instance, customizable shortcut is an obvious thing that is missing on the iPadOS.
> not geared towards productivity? The fact that to run VSCode
Productivity !== coding. Coding is a subset of productivity, but most jobs do not require coding.
I get that you want this to be something else, but a lot of people are incredibly productive on iPads today, and adding the ability to mirror your MacBooks screen means that this platform absolutely has a future in productivity.
HN has a lot of this attitude — “I can’t code directly on it so this is a toy” — and it’s always a laugh for me. There’s … other people? Who want to do other things?
That's great for those people but yes, for devs, it's not a real replacement for a MacBook, even though it literally has the same chip inside. It's a shame.
And very importantly: In most enterprises, most MacBook users are either graphics people or devs. Because they're the only communities that really have a legit reason to want them (especially the devs because iOS development just needs a mac).
Most others just have to put up with Windows whether they like it or not (working in IT for a company with 120.000 PCs and 600 Macs). And yes most companies are like us.
"The same chip inside" doesn't mean that much though. This one pushes a LOT more pixels at really high framerates, has to handle realtime input from a ton of cameras and do live algorithms on their data etc. I think the whole realtime usecase on a more open OS like the Mac? Very hard to make that work.
So I see where they're coming from, sure. But productivity wise, iOS apps are not great. Needing a Mac to connect to isn't either considering the price of each.
Of course it isn't, they want you to buy a MacBook alongside, that's my entire point. They are artificially restricting one device in order to make you buy their other devices. It's the same story as the iPad, it also has the same chip as the Mac but they restrict apps like IDEs so people instead have to buy two devices. If it were a Surface-like product instead, with full macOS, I'd have bought an iPad in a heartbeat.
>Of course it isn't, they want you to buy a MacBook alongside, that's my entire point.
Hardware company entices consumers to buy more hardware. Film at 11.
>If it were a Surface-like product instead, with full macOS, I'd have bought an iPad in a heartbeat.
Ah yes. The Surface, the device that showcases the appeal of running an OS designed for mouse/keyboard input with a thin veneer of touch support spackled on top. It's amazing Apple isn't sprinting to release a product along those lines.
> Hardware company entices consumers to buy more hardware. Film at 11.
Sure, they can do whatever they want, of course. Similarly, I can also call it a shame.
> The Surface, the device that showcases the appeal of running an OS designed for mouse/keyboard input with a thin veneer of touch support spackled on top. It's amazing Apple isn't sprinting to release a product along those lines.
You're right, it works great as a portable computer that I can run anything I want on. I'm sure Apple could make an even better version if, I don't know, they created a keyboard attachment for one of their devices and made that device's OS more mouse and keyboard friendly, while still retaining the ability to run whatever software the user wants. Ah, one can dream.
Even if it could run VS Code directly, VS Code would be at a disadvantage to other editors because native visionOS apps appear to use entirely vector UI and text to ensure sharpness and readability in a wider variety of conditions, which I don't see third party UI frameworks of any sort being able to hook into easily.
I don't think web apps like VSCode will be at a disadvantage. If they're doing "normal" web rendering and not rolling their own canvas renderer like Google Docs then it should just work fine.
Well this is pretty clear to me, it's definitely running only iOS apps natively, I don't see why they would open the app store for it as it's a huge goldmine for them.
Apple still thinks people can use an iPad for all their work though my experience at work is very different (and I managed a large fleet of mobiles)
Indeed, and it's a shame. I am looking forward to whatever is available on the Windows and Android side in the future, at least there I can run whatever software I want.
Why worry ? It's already guaranteed to be the case. Apps will not have direct access to the cameras, meaning that the Vision Pro is destined to keep being a toy fully steered by Apple. You also cannot access any depth information, or anything that would make it useful as a general 3D computing device. You can't access eye tracking, so say good bye to foveated rendering. And since you can't have foveated rendering, well you're now rendering 2x 4k images on a relatively underpowered device.
Foveated rendering is supported by default. Most apps will rely on the OS's renderer and not their own so they don't have to do anything with eye tracking to have it enabled.
EDIT: See cma's comment below which adds more info: apps that use their own render still support foveated rendering too.
If they try to hide it by restricting access to reading the foveation texture, you can be sure anti privacy apps like Immersive Facebook will try tricks like recovering it from GPU timestamp queries (render two transparent triangles covering the screen in separate draw calls, find which took the longest, subdivide and repeat).
Exactly. If you want to do anything without going through Apple's benediction, you're shit out of luck. It's one more episode in the war on general computing, except somehow it's okay when Apple restricts what you can do with your three thousand five hundred dollar ski goggles.
To me it seems like less of a war on general computing and more like Apple is hoping to prevent mixed reality or "spatial computing" from becoming an extension on the privacy disaster that smartphones became.
This seems prudent, because as personal as smartphones are, a headset like the Vision Pro dials that up tenfold. Considering what third parties have done with just the information surfaced in mobile operating systems, or heck even the web, I shudder to think of what they'd do with gaze data and a high fidelity color 3D map of your surroundings.
If there's a way to accomplish this without opening headset users into being easily socially engineered into figuratively selling the farm, sure.
In this particular case I think perhaps a better approach would be to allow apps to bypass App Store restrictions so long as their source code is public and binaries match that code. This would naturally deter those with shady intentions, allow FOSS projects to thrive, allow both manual and automated third party vetting of apps, and help users better know what they're getting into.
Yeah. To state the obvious: Apps will no longer run full screen; they will run as a 2D window in a 3D space. When Apple allows it the user will be able to ask the app to go full 3D (well, hopefully).
All of this is: Apple taking further control of the experience.
>Vision Pro is destined to keep being a toy fully steered by Apple.
I trust Apple a lot more than I trust the "let's figure out how to fingerprint users based on how they scroll and other metrics and use it to sell ads" crowd.
Yes, yes, we know some Apple users are unable to see past the "you can't be trusted" that Apple keeps violently stabbing in your brain, you'll live in a company town with company stores and company credits and you'll be happy about it. Now can the adults use their devices?
The Vision Pro does not provide foveated rendering if you do not go through the Apple renderer. There's some extremely vague wording regarding Metal supporting it, without any API documentation out.
>Yes, yes, we know some Apple users are unable to see past the "you can't be trusted" that Apple keeps violently stabbing in your brain, you'll live in a company town with company stores and company credits and you'll be happy about it.
Apple isn't telling me that I can't be trusted. Apple is telling me that it's a stupid idea to trust third-party developers with unfettered access to my data, and they're not even a little bit wrong. This has been happening at least since the "Foursquare is uploading and storing every user's contacts" fiasco well over a decade ago.
> Now can the adults use their devices?
Of course. Feel free to bring to market your wonderful headset that allows VC-funded startups to create a never-ending torrent of privacy hellscape diarrhea apps you can enjoy until they implode.
>The Vision Pro does not provide foveated rendering if you do not go through the Apple renderer. There's some extremely vague wording regarding Metal supporting it, without any API documentation out.
That's because the API has yet to be released to developers. Perhaps you can wait until it is to get your mouth all frothy, sunshine.
> Of course. Feel free to bring to market your wonderful headset that allows VC-funded startups to create a never-ending torrent of privacy hellscape diarrhea apps you can enjoy until they implode.
You do realise you're describing 99% of the iOS app store here right?
In fact, while the Android app store is curated in an even worse manner, I find that Android does offer a lot more high-quality ad-free open source software on platforms like F-Droid. Because the iOS developer subscription makes it hard for FOSS developers to do their work for free so things become more monetised.
> we know some Apple users are unable to see past the "you can't be trusted" that Apple keeps violently stabbing in your brain
It's third party devs doing that, not Apple. They've proven themselves unworthy of trust more times than can be counted. Where there is room for abuse, abuse will happen. We might be numb to it, but it happens all the time on desktop operating systems. Examples include Adobe putting files in corners of the system it has no business touching, practically every modern AAA game installing rootkits and scanning our filesystems, and until just a few years ago Dropbox installing a kernel extension on macOS.
The only devs that deserve any trust are FOSS devs but there isn't good FOSS software for every use case.
Every single headset in the world that has cameras. The HoloLens, anything that uses OpenXR and OpenVR (so, pretty much 100% of the current PCVR market), hell even the Quest has a Passthrough API.
The Vision Pro is pretty much the only one that doesn't, because Apple thinks of their users as children.
A passthrough API, but you absolutely do not get access to the headset cameras on any of those devices. Apple is very much in line with the standard here, you can make passthrough apps, but you cannot actually get the real data from the cameras.
It's the same concern I heard before the 1st Ipad announce: we want a MacOs on a tablet! No you don't. Coz MacOs apps knows nothing about the touch screen interface. And they know nothing about VR also, so nothing is changed here.
Do you realize that they all run the same kernel and OS underneath that's then restricted via feature flags? macOS can absolutely understand touch since it's all the same. This is also why their Continuity feature works so well, or why iOS apps can run natively on macOS.
