Coming from a senior Oculus lead, the most interesting thing about this write up for me, is what it lacks: it says almost nothing about the software stack / operating system. Still 100% talking about hardware at the bottom and end user applications at the other end. But there is no discussion of the platform which to me is actually the highest value proposition Apple is bringing here.
In short: Apple has made a fully realized spatial operating system, while Meta has made an app launcher for immersive Unity/Unreal apps for vanilla Android. You can get away with an app launcher when all you want to support is fully immersive apps that don't talk to each other. But that fails completely if you are trying to build a true operating system.
Think about what has to exist, to say, intelligently copy and paste parts of a 3D object made by one application into a 3D object made by another, the same way you would copy a flat image from photoshop into a Word document. The operating system has to truly understand 3D concepts internally. Meta is building these features but it is stuck in a really weird space trying to wedge them in between Android underneath and Unity/Unreal at the application layer. Apple has had the advantage of green field engineering it exactly how they want it to be from the ground up.
For me personally, it's definitely the platform. Requiring a Meta / Facebook account for already-purchased Oculuses, retroactively bricking devices and deleting software which was bought before that requirement, has put Oculus firmly in the "hardware I will never consider in my life" camp.
It's an incredible amount of goodwill to burn from a company with so little to spare, and I'm surprised it hasn't come up yet in this thread or in the blogpost. Meta has fundamental trustability issues.
That isn’t really what the parent is talking about at all…
If your issue is with the device requiring connection with an external account, Vision Pro requires an AppleID which will tie it to way more of your digital things than a Facebook login.
The Oculus was bought by Facebook from a startup and the Facebook/Meta account requirement was imposed later. This history is a reason I would not buy an Oculus.
The AVP does not have this history, and as far as I know, Apple hasn't retroactively required an Apple account on hardware sold without the requirement. (I could be wrong here, and Apple certainly is not a blameless tech company.)
Like the parent comment, I agree that this blog post completely skirts the issues most important to me. Like the parent comment, I agree that the platform is the distinction, but for different reasons. If I owned an Oculus, I would consider it to have been bricked.
Apple’s business model isn’t selling your personal information. In fact they go out of their way to protect your personal info. Requiring an AppleID is significantly less concerning than requiring a Facebook account.
how exactly do you know this and why come on here and state it as a fact?
its a dubious claim at best, and if it were true would require asking the elephant sized question in the room - why collect my data if you arent going to use/sell it anyway? is collecting ny data just a fun internal project at Apple?
Apple's advertising business is estimated to be closing in on $10Bn yearly, while their browser pre-load deal with Google brings them in even more than that, and data-sharing agreements are assumed to be part of the deal.
The fallacy that Apple can be trusted with your data because it makes more money elsewhere is incredibly naive and unilateral.
Just to put this in perspective, Apple's yearly revenue is closing around 400B. 10B is in the "other" category in the revenue chart.
The ads are still only in the App store, where you need to specifically go and look for... apps. And you'll get ads for... apps.
You're not getting personalised ads for incontinence products because Apple doesn't know nor care that you have frequently visited a doctor specialising in said issues. Your phone does and Siri will suggest you the exact place as a destination if you start up maps in your CarPlay view.
Google and FB _will_ serve you said ads and with eery accuracy and speed. (I've visited a niche product store on my desktop browser, opened Instagram 5 minutes later and received ads for that exact niche)
> data-sharing agreements are assumed to be part of the deal
You're making a massive assumption there. Unless you can back that up it is what it is - fud.
You'll be fully aware that as part of Google's anti-trust case Apple was only willing to enter into data sharing with Google if they provided data to Apple, which they refused to do.
So again, we're still in a position of the only place Apple is focused on ads is the app store, so I'll ask again. What data are they collecting about you, and who is it being sold to?
I'd personally just like to see things even more separate. I wouldn't want what I do on my VR headset tied to anything else.
Sorta like how I might have a Nintendo account (or whatever they have now) for games on a Switch. It's just about my gaming activity on that one platform, and that's it.
Tying a headset to a Meta/Facebook account is just too much: I don't want my Oculus activity tied to my social media.
I agree that the Apple situation is better, but I wouldn't want my Vision Pro activity tied to iPhone, Mac, Apple TV, etc. activity.
And I get it from the "building an integrated ecosystem" perspective, and don't really begrudge them their desire to make something like that, but I'm just generally tired of being a part of some company's ecosystem.
How about not requiring accounts for all these different gadgets at all. What's wrong with being able to run whatever software you want on your VR headset or gaming tablet.
>In the meantime, Apple continues to work with ad tech vendors it trusts — or rather, those with stated policies it approves of — particularly when it comes to a cornerstone of the iPhone maker’s brand: user privacy.
>However, a key question remains: how will Apple ensure user privacy as its ad ambitions expose the iOS ecosystem to a sector of the media landscape with a chequered record when it comes to a cornerstone of its brand promise?
>Earlier this year, it unveiled a tool it will use to police user privacy in the guise of Privacy Manifests (see video above), a measure that many interpreted as Apple’s attempt to (finally) stamp out illicit user-tracking, a.k.a. fingerprinting.
Apple has a vested interest in user privacy and talks about it constantly. Facebook has an interest in selling every piece of information they have about you to the highest bidder and has talked about how stupid users are to give them personal information.
Apple's "privacy" is really privacy from people that are not Apple. Apple has access to location logs via maps and location services, the contents of your photos, iMessage contents, the history of every app usage, etc as the default settings set for most things via iCloud backup, which the vast majority of users leave on. They were almost going to deploy on device scanning that you couldn't opt out of with the few photos that don't end up on iCloud.
All of their devices don't work if they don't constantly phone home to Apple. For the devices to be anywhere near useful, you need an apple id which requires KYC payment methods attached for them or a KYC phone number.
> Apple's "privacy" is really privacy from people that are not Apple.
Sort of, but misleading…
> Apple has access to location logs via maps and location services
There are published policies about how this data gets aggregated+anonymized and then used. Care is taken to ensure data is not linked to individuals.
> The contents of your photos, iMessage contents, the history of every app usage, etc as the default settings set for most things via iCloud backup
Most people want these things backed up. Apple doesn’t just dive through data. Anything that even approaches the description of dealing with user data is carefully vetted. A big difference between Apple and other large tech companies is the internal boundaries for access to any data. It’s strict and limited by design. Apple has fought back against law enforcement for access to personal data or technology to allow governments to carte blanche access devices.
> They were almost going to deploy on device scanning that you couldn't opt out of with the few photos that don't end up on iCloud.
You are referencing the CSAM scanning for known child pornography based on international databases that was tuned for highly unlikely false-positive rates with a small group of reviewers to further reduce any chance of false-positives? Yeah, total travesty… wouldn’t want to do anything about THAT problem. (/s)
You're both right. Apple believes (as do many) that one way to achieve great shareholder profit is to differentiate yourself and perhaps get some pricing power is by truly prioritizing consumer privacy. They're both true.
This is a tired trope. They have a clear interest in user privacy, as evidenced by their actions. You're either just trolling or being intentionally ignorant to the state of the market if you're claiming their only focus is "shareholder profit". Apple isn't Boeing.
>Must be true then. Definitely not marketing.
I mean, there are countless examples. From the default encryption in messages, to the ability to double encrypt icloud backups, to a literal lockdown mode in IOS to protect against nation state actors.
>Nothing you've said suggests any different of Apple.
You've provided absolutely nothing of substance beyond a link where Apple literally states they have hard requirements around user privacy for any advertising partners.
I'm done engaging in the conversation unless you've got something of substance to provide. The low effort one liners don't really have a place on HN.
If you pay attention to the marketing, Google, and Samsung, and Qualcomm, and Sony, and Microsoft make most if not all the same claims. I haven't seen one that operates in a way that can prove it. All have some level of custom silicon involved. All could provide hardware documentation, source code, and installable or transparent keying. Barring the legal agreements between them, of course. I commend Apple for their amazing effort to uniquely ID each individual sensor and storage device in the world and tie it permanently to phone's unique ID, but again, it would be nice if the details of how that worked were published such that folks like Louis Rossmann could repair folks broken phones and laptops.
> The low effort one liners don't really have a place on HN.
Maybe you just didn't think about them long enough.
Selling points, not actual privacy. The fact that you have to identify yourself (and link that identity to your hardware serial number) to install apps on your own device is the opposite of privacy.
PRISM is just NSA's management systems for sending lawful (kinda) information requests for specific accounts under FISA act to the companies. If data is not leaving your device (e.g not synced into iCloud) then they can't get it.
Also if you opt-in for apple's advanced data encryption[0] they can't even get that because your data is fully e2e encrypted and the key is only stored on your phone. Which is probably why FBI had to sue Apple to get data on Bernardino terries and then worked around by hacking into their devices. Show me another big tech company that does this.
Thanks for your comment. I love just a few things on my Quest 2, and several times a week I take ten minute breaks for ping pong, something meditative, tai chi, etc.
You reminded me of the negative aspects of the Meta/Facebook corporate mass, and they should clean up their act in privacy, etc. for VR in the same way they have basically purchased good will in the AI community for releasing LLM model weights.
Apologies for going off topic, but Apple similarly really needs to trade a little profit for buying themselves a better “look” because they are looking a little tarnished also.
100% this. I paid the increasingly common "privacy and control premium" for a Valve Index (which I'm very happy with) to avoid the entanglements of borrowing a headset from Meta for a large, up front, non-refundable fee.
Valve makes great unlocked hardware. I don't see the same argument working with Apple, however. Can't even upgrade an SSD in a recent mac not to mention individually cryptographically signed components like cameras and touch pads which can't be replaced without a visit to an Apple-certified repair person. Renting hardware indeed.
You're comparing a $300 product from a company that profits on analyzing their customers to a $3500 product from a hardware company.
This is not a fair comparison. They're motivated differently.
Furthermore, the "anti-account" viewpoint is making a privacy issue out of a pinch or friction point. Accounts are required for both devices. If you bought a device which allowed you to buy apps, the experience would be horrible without an account. If most people are willing and it's a better experience, it makes sense to force everyone into the same rails to reduce implementation cost. If it increases revenue, there's yet another reason to do it. It's ridiculous to be in an ideological minority and expect a company to bend to that when it's not in their best interest.
While I prefer Apple products because <yada yada>, Meta and Apple are doing the same thing here. The only difference is that Apple has higher current trustworthiness. This is also the reason they can release a $3500 headset.
Why isn't that a fair comparison? If that's an important factor in their purchase decision that's completely fair. You can compare whatever you want when you're evaluating subjective criteria for a purchase decision - and the socioeconomic rationale behind the motivations leading to the decisions the companies made is interesting but not relevant to the comparison at decision point.
I’ve had a Quest 1 for years, it always required an Oculus account, and since rebranding as Meta it now requires a Meta account, which my Oculus account was converted into.
It’s not bricked and hasn’t deleted my software, I’m curious what exactly you’re referring to with that.
> Requiring a Meta / Facebook account for already-purchased Oculuses, retroactively bricking devices and deleting software which was bought before that requirement
You always needed an Oculus account and they didn't brick anything. You did have to migrate from an Oculus to meta account but a Facebook account was never required on a quest 1 (or 3). Is a meta account really that different from an Oculus account?
The quest 1 has been deprecated yes but not bricked.
This has been my main complaint with Oculus all the way since the Rift days. At that point I assumed it was forthcoming within a few years yet here we are 8 years later and somehow it's not all that different. I don't understand how Oculus/Meta isn't drastically ahead at this point on software.
Actually, MSFT made the same blunder when it came to HoloLens. Well .. they did start to build some of the core spatial context (and had a fabulous headstart). But somewhere along the way, they yielded to Unity/Unreal. This was mind boggling to me as giving away the keys to the platform to another party was literally the founding story of Microsoft (with IBM having made the blunder). I wonder if engineering leadership recalls history when making such strategic goofs.
Layman's take: All of them are afraid of making the system that fulfills the promise nominally, but that lacks some key component or is on hardware that doesn't get adopted, only to have a competitor swoop in, clone that system with the necessary fixes, and essentially do what Apple did with MP3 players and smartphones. They're all trying to establish market dominance BEFORE giving us a reason to use the devices (bass ackwards) - and are even happy to see the market collapse, if it meant that, simply, no one cracked that particular nut.
Apple, Meta, Microsoft like how things are right now. These pushes are much-hyped, but they're made less out of real passion for the promise and more desperation to avoid being left behind.
What’s more insulting after the announcement of the vaporware known as “infinite office” is meta’s total lack of attention on their PC software. The work related features of Quest are near non-existent if it weren’t for 3rd parties
I totally agree. While Apple has a north star with this device (or looks like it does), Meta's endeavors always seemed like diversification. Meta seems to be looking for the north star. Apple just pointed it out, so now everyone is going to head that way.
Well it's easy to understand why. How could they build an MR ecosystem when their latest device is just barely MR?
They can only just now move towards MR with the Quest 3 and really it'll need another generation to be MR native.
They have a good relationship with developers and focused on what their current hardware is capable of, which is running one VR app. They spent the last 8 years on that use case and I think that was the right choice given the hardware realities at the time.
> VR games, which are the only real reason to own a VR headset
Because the rest of the experience is so unpolished.
I have a Meta Quest 3 and overall it doesn't exactly feel like they invested tens of billions into that ecosystem. The headset's UI is basically a 2D desktop with taskbar and app launcher covering a small fraction of the field of view, including some buttons that are so small it's tricky to aim at them with the controllers. The Oculus desktop client fails to recognize it via USB and the official remote desktop app is still in Beta while Steam lets me play games or use the desktop remotely with two button presses. To this day I have not managed to just copy files directly onto the device, no USB connection (other than to Steam) works. Only some semi-reliable wifi transfer from a third-party application worked but that required enabling developer mode.
On top of that they decided to ship it with a head strap that never fits well and gets painful within 30 minutes, and then made it unnecessarily complicated to swap. Yes, of course people aren't going to do more on that thing than play a few rounds of Beat Saber, because many simply don't want to jump through hoops like that. I think it's a great device overall but some things are just so...unnecessary.
Apple not focusing on games might be a good thing because it means they can't just rely on games for free sales numbers.
> To this day I have not managed to just copy files directly onto the device, no USB connection (other than to Steam) works. Only some semi-reliable wifi transfer from a third-party application worked but that required enabling developer mode.
To echo this today I wanted to watch something on my vision pro so I was on the tv app on my phone, saw a movie I wanted to watch, and then after a good amount of time moved over to my vision pro.
Being the scatter brain that I am I forgot what the movie was, unlocked my phone and the movie listing view was there. In my head I was like “damn wish I could share this page over to my vision pro like I do for my ipad”
And that’s exactly what I did with Airdrop. The already existing way to share anything between apple devices. I would not be surprised if universal clipboard works as well.
You fail to realize that having such headset 8h a day is not the holy grail for most people, I'd never work in such way. Horrible for your eyes and overall health in many ways we already know and many that will be discovered after this betatesting runs for decade+.
Entertainment maybe, but definitely no work- like it or not, outside few tech bubbles this is how world sees VR and its not changing anytime soon. Still, to sporty outdoorsy people this is kids toy (that shouldn't ever be on kid head), reality is and will be always better and healthier.
There's a real chicken-and-egg recursion there: VR headsets are only good for VR games because the only thing made for VR headsets is VR games because VR headsets are only good for VR games because...
It’s not chicken and egg, it’s simply the reality about the hardware. Even Apple, with all their resources and a $3500 price tag, could only make a mediocre passthrough on a very heavy headset. The hardware isn’t ready for AR yet.
Games are where it’s at for the foreseeable future. Games don’t need passthrough and they don’t need especially high resolution.
Look at how much of the vision pro is about giving people a connection to the real world while they are using the device. Games don’t need that, people want to be immersed while they are playing a game.
> Even Apple, with all their resources and a $3500 price tag, could only make a mediocre passthrough on a very heavy headset. The hardware isn’t ready for AR yet.
Hugo disagrees:
> thanks to a high-fidelity passthrough (“mixed reality”) experience with very low latency, excellent distortion correction (much better than Quest 3), and sufficiently high resolution that allows you to even see your phone/computer screen through the passthrough cameras (i.e. without taking your headset off).
Even though there are major gaps left to be filled in future versions of the Vision Pro hardware (which I’ll get into later), this level of connection with the real world — or “presence” as VR folks like to call it — is something that no other VR headset has ever come even close to delivering and so far was only remotely possible with AR headsets (ex: HoloLens and Magic Leap) which feature physically transparent displays but have their own significant limitations in many other areas.
I admit I don’t own one of these things but reviewers seem to be unanimous that the passthrough on the Vision Pro is both the best of any headset on the market, yet also very mediocre compared to seeing things through your own eyes, especially in low light.
Given that it’s designed to be used indoors, poor low light performance is a big problem.
There’s a latency/acuity tradeoff whereby the more post-processing Apple applies to improve acuity, the worse the latency and more nausea they create. It’s going to require a lot more research into hardware post-processing.
Seems like the best passthrough was a fairly easy goal to achieve since nobody else was even really trying. Heck, the Quest applies quality degrading filters to passthrough video (add noise, remove chroma) to discourage using it.
They probably mean the quest 3 which has RGB cams unlike the prior quests 1 and 2. I also disagree it would have been artificially muddled to discourage usage. If that were the case they'd not have presented it so proudly. It's just the kind of cam setup that $500 buys (in fact it probably is a bit subsidised)
That's probably a fair argument at the pace of innovation pre-AVP. Depending on how quickly they iterate in this (and as the article says, push developers), they may be a self-fulfilling prophecy to significantly reduce the time until this market exists.
I hope that seeing where the Newton could’ve gone gives them the confidence to continue with the AVP. A few iterations could really show a great product both in terms of quality and practicality.
I had a Newton and loved it, and eventually tried a few Palm devices but nothing ever quite hit like the Newton for me, a real shame they dropped it imo.
effectively though, they've created their own mini-innovator's dilemma. They can't do anything to alienate those users but they might have to if they want to stay competitive in the long run.
Innovator's dilemma is a great problem to have if you are dominating a profitable industry already. But it's a terrible problem to have if you are barely hitting break even or even losing money. Then you really can't afford to go backwards first to go forwards later.
Are we gonna ignore the fact that VR pornography exists?
Also I'm pretty sure those VR games that are ran on a computer connected to a headset could display on any headset, Apple or Oculus. Cursory search reveals people have already been getting SteamVR to work on the VisionPro.
Running stuff directly on the headsets is neat, but there's no headset on the market with enough power to match what you can have when plugging them into a computer.
I'm not saying they should (in fact I think the Valve approach is better), but Apple does seem to be strongly against porn. Why wouldn't or shouldn't they censor generic utilities? If it's keeping users safe in apps, wouldn't it be keeping users even safer in a browser or other content browsing app?
You’re suggesting Apple would block porn all together on their platform. You can go to any XXX site right now, find VR videos, and play them in your mobile browser. Through on a Cardboard or even a crappy Polaroid “VR” phone case and you’re set. There’s no way Apple would say “well, on the Vision Pro, we will actively block adult websites”.
VR porn is largely just WebXR on webpages or SBS VR 180 videos. WebXR has been available on the Vision Pro since day 1 if you enabled it in the Safari advanced options and there are now multiple video apps that can handle SBS VR 180 playback.
All the news about it not being possible on the AVP was largely a bunch of hyperbole, misunderstandings, and misinformation.
To me the interesting bit is that an even a VR executive a decade plus into working in the field doesn’t find this device compelling enough to own it.
I get that the thesis is that this version is the devkit etc, but viable consumer product status (read: enough adoption for the device to be profitable) seems very far away
> viable consumer product status (read: enough adoption for the device to be profitable) seems very far away
He mentions a few short term use cases for the current hardware.
For example: Productivity on the go (A laptop with the headset for multiple virtual displays) and Live Sports.
> Apple Immersive on Vision Pro is a transformative experience in terms of video quality and its ability to deliver a real sense of presence. Watching a game in high-resolution VR has the potential to be legitimately better than a regular 4K TV broadcast by enabling hardcore fans to feel much closer to the action
I've heard the sport idea thrown around a few times, but I'm not sure I buy it.
If you go to a sports event you are mostly buying the experience of being there, the energy of the crowd, the cheering all that stuff. The actual experience of seeing what's happening is not really better is it? That's why the stadiums have screens in them.
Replicating that experience at home is more like getting people around to watch a game together.
"legitimately better than a regular 4K TV broadcast by enabling hardcore fans to feel much closer to the action" sounds like it offers something new.
People who are sports enthusiasts have a proven willingness to drop thousands of dollars on large screen televisions, streaming services like NFL Red Zone, or thousand dollar Superbowl tickets, so the potential for sales is there.
My argument is that the experience of seeing sport from a specific seat is inferior to watching it multi camera with huge zoom lenses. The thing that draws you to the stadium is the sense of being in a crowds.
The technology to do this has been around for a while to has anyone tries. I'd certainly be curious to give it a go. I imagine there are some technical problems too, like if your team scores and you jump in the air and your view point stays still.
This did get me thinking if any sport might be better viewed in VR, and maybe games like pool, snooker, chess. Where you see the whole thing from one vantage point, and the scale is such that the 3d of it all would be meaningful.
The argument in favor of the tech Apple is using in this essay sounds pretty compelling.
> The NextVR acquisition is what led to the incredible Apple Immersive video format, which enables capture of 3D video in 180 degrees in 8K resolution at 90 frames per second, an absolute juggernaut format with 8 times the number of pixels of a regular 4K video. The best way to think of the new Apple Immersive video format is kind of like a new IMAX-3D, but the real magic is the fact that it’s projected inside an imaginary 180-degree sphere (horizontally and vertically) that takes over your entire field of view.
Vision Pro is the first VR headset that enables playback of 180-degree 3D video at what feels to the eyes like 4K quality.
"IMAX-3D" sounds much more compelling than watching a flat image on a television.
That's definitely impressive tech, and I'm sure the experience inside a headset is pretty incredible. What I'm saying is that it is not a good match for live sport.
When you watch sports they have multiple cameras all over the place. Fixed cameras with long lenses, cameras that zip over the pitch, cameras on blimps, slow mo cameras and so on.
These cameras are so much better for enjoying sport that they put giant screens in the stadium so you can see what happened after a goal is scored.
That experience is never going to work in a VR system (beyond VR as a way to have a big screen available) because if you kept shifting the position and focus you'll make everyone very motion sick.
I can certainly see a usecase for that and it's not sports (though I guess you could call it that lol).
But prudish Apple will surely block that from happening. I don't really get why. It's a valid request and one where the technology really shines. I use similar content on the quest 3 and it's great but it would be so much better on something like the vision pro.
> For example: Productivity on the go (A laptop with the headset for multiple virtual displays) and Live Sports.
Except almost universally, people talk about the screen display being “not great” for extended use as a screen replacement with dramatically lower effective resolution and blurring…
> people talk about the screen display being “not great”
That's not what the reviews I have read had to say.
> The Vision Pro can produce a virtual external display for any modern Mac...
The virtual display feels responsive and works with connected keyboard or mouse peripherals. The text is highly readable.
I don’t have any complaints about how the virtual display itself works—it’s great.
Not sure I agree. When I first saw the 1st gen iPhone I was so impressed with it, I went out and got one a few days later. This is before the App Store. Yes compared to today it might “suck” compared to the latest version, but the first iPhone was super compelling by itself at the time and started selling very well
Yeah I used my iPhone 1 for 4 years until I moved to the phone 4 (a year after it was released because I couldn't afford it new). It was a great device, only let down by its ridiculously slow data connection.
Citation needed. The 1st gen iPhone sold 6 million units over two years. The Nokia N95 (not a super mainstream device, but in a similarish price category) sold 10M. Other Nokia phones of the time period sold 100+ million devices. BlackBerry, LG, and Sony/Ericcson was in the tens of millions per device model.
Let’s not forget:
1. The iPhone didn’t support 3G, which essentially all other phones of a similar price point had
2. Was only available for AT&T customers in the US (then still known as Cingular Wireless)
3. Cost significantly more ($500-600 w/ two year contract) than the average consumer paid for phones (almost always under $150 with contract, but usually “free”) at the time.
4. No App Store
5. No cut and paste
6. No removable battery
7. No physical keyboard (a positive for me, but was a deal breaker for so many back then)
That’s not to say the original iPhone wasn’t amazing in many ways, but let’s also remember the past accurately.
> How many countries was the Nokia N95 available in VS. the 2G iPhone?
Way more, especially since the original iPhone was only available in the US for the first 5 months. It was available across Europe, North America, South America, China, and Australia at minimum.
> I don't think it launched in Asia or most of Europe.
The N95 was heavily across Europe, that was the primary market for it in fact.
Sure do. But it’s also a quite a bit more expensive phone too, which helps level the playing field some. Either way, there will never be a perfect apples to apples comparison.
That said, there is sufficient evidence to support my claim made in my original post.
Is the claim that sales numbers are the only way to measure success? And since the 2g iphone didn't measure up in that department it doesn't qualify as a success?
If you have a counter claim, especially one you can back up with as much facts as I did, please do so. Otherwise, please either stop straw manning or find some other place to do so.
The iPod, iPad and Apple Watch are all products from Apple where the first version didn't take off. I'd say they did just fine and the iPhone is largely an outlier in Apple's history of new products. Even the initial iMac suffered relative to its later revisions.
> It's the crappy version 1. Just like iphone and ipad v1. They sucked.
iPhone 1.0 was incredible. There was nothing like it. iPad 1.0 (and following) has been lackluster. AVP is impressive, but lacking.
The iPhone changed the world of tech in an instant. There were aspects lacking (slow internet, no copy paste, no third-party apps), but saying it sucked is rewriting history. The things you take for granted about phones came from that.
iPhone 1 was way more successful than Vision Pro, and it didn't suck relative to what was on the market at the time. At launch, Steve Jobs famously said it was 5 years ahead of the competition, and contemporary commentators generally agreed.
In its first week, Apple had sold 270,000 iPhones domestically.[47] Apple sold the one millionth iPhone 74 days after the release.[48] Apple reported in January 2008 that four million were sold.
Also, the iPhone cost $500 at launch. At the time, that was expensive for a smartphone, but even adjusting for inflation it was nowhere near Vision Pro-level expensive. (It would also be a relatively cheap phone in today's market.)
If anything, the Vision Pro feels to me more like the original Mac: an impressive technological leap forward, with lots of interesting ideas about computing and UI paradigms, but also prohibitively expensive, and still underpowered relative to its lofty ambitions.
Notably, the Mac didn't really end well for Apple. Eventually we got the iMac and OS X, but in between was a decade in which Apple nearly went bankrupt. And I'm not really convinced the Vision Pro is as innovative or compelling as the original Mac was to begin with.
>and it didn't suck relative to what was on the market at the time.
That's going to depend on what things you cared about. The original iPhone was heavily criticized for no copy/paste, no 3g service, no MMS, no physical keyboard, its absurd at the time $700+ price tag, carrier exclusivity, lack of subsidized pricing model and number of other things. Plenty of commentators thought Apple had widely missed the mark and had just launched a multi-million dollar folly that was sure to sink them any day now.
Phones have more mass appeal which I think attributes to the larger initial numbers. It doesn't change that the original iPhone was not great in a lot of ways. I had one - 2.5g was slow, the screen was small, and it was missing basic features. But it catalyzed what the future was going to look like.
Interesting. Macrumors reports 200.000 sold vision pro's a few month's ago. So maybe 300.000 today?
It's a type of gadget that hasn't become widely adopted yet and the usecases and killer features are almost non existent compared to the iPhones phonecalls + web browsing, music, videos, notes and many others.
Really hard to gauge what success means here, but if we say that in a year it will sell 500.000 units, that's 1/8 of the original iPhone, seems ok, or maybe not?
Idk, people spend absurd amounts of money on various hobbies and other pursuits that I bet a much larger % of the population can afford a Vision Pro than you might think. We don't really question when someone buys an ATV or boat that they use only a few times a year and easily costs as much as a Vision Pro.
Not comparable. I paid $7k for an upright piano (which is a rookie number not worth bragging about) which is my biggest purchase other than a car so far, plus ongoing $90 weekly lessons, but I won't ever regret because it is a very meaningful and valuable investment -- the piano easily lasts a decade, I practice every day and am happy about what it brings. People who blow $100k on a Steinway think the same. Vision Pro? Not a chance, even as a one-time purchase. Maybe after I have a big house and earn $1m in annual income and have too much money to waste.
I know people that make not much more than median income and easily blown thousands a year on hunting trips. Think of how many people spend a ton of money on a truck that they only use for normal commuting. People easily spend thousands a year on hobbies and the APV easily fits into that.
And yet people buy v1. It really depends on how much your time is worth. I bought v1 and I expect to sell it for $1000 or so when v2 comes out. $3000 to use this product for 12-18 months is totally worth it to me.
So, not “obvious”. At least to people with different priorities.
I think there are more than enough higher income people who would pay 5k just for a thing to watch a movie in private, with much better immersion than any alternative, on a plane.
> watch a movie in private, with much better immersion than any alternative, on a plane.
As someone who’s worn mine to watch movies on multiple flights, the problem is two fold.
1. The device is ridiculously hard to get into “travel mode” on a plane. Especially if the device was powered off previously and you have to enter a passcode. Each time the “tracking was lost” notification is shown it forces you to start over with your passcode from the beginning. Those who believe in better security than a four digit passcode are brutalized. Then just getting control center open and selecting travel mode (needing like five pinch operations) can be insult to injury. I can’t imagine going through that in economy in tightly packed seats. After going through that experience twice, I now insure it’s ready to go on the ground before boarding, but that’s also a hassle.
2. Wearing the device for the length of a movie is still a struggle. I have a ton of time on other VR headsets (which I also can’t wear comfortably for 2hrs), so this isn’t just a “getting used to it” thing. Unlike the previous problem, this one isn’t really solvable without different hardware.
That said, once the movie starts, it’s the best movie experience on a plane ever for the first 20-30min.
I’m one of the rare people who doesn’t have an issue with wearing vr headsets for great lengths, but I suspect that’s because I strengthen my neck for jiujitsu and that bleeds over into endurance with headsets.
Too much to ask for the average user, but the problem can be mitigated by the individual.
Apple is enamored with vertical integration which gives them control on a whole other level compared to their competitors; feels like history repeating.
What's different with AVP compared to previous products is that it starts off even better thanks to Apple's own custom chips. There's also the amazing network effects of their ever-growing ecosystem.
Competitors don't have all this, so they will struggle to compete on the high-end. The intention of Apple is clearly indicated by the price of AVP, they want the profits at the top, let the rest fight over the scraps at the bottom with crummy privacy-invasive software and poor integration/interoperability.
It also 'starts off better' because they refined its components throughout the rest of their ecosystem over the last half decade (or more?). If you look at a variety of unprovoked UI changes in iOS and tvOS, or hardware changes in iDevices, they now look like field tests at scale for learning, before bringing together these new, now proven, things.
It's a way of development seen almost nowhere else.
Or I'm giving them too much credit ... but I don't think so. I think it's evident they seeded hard parts throughout the rest to learn at massive scale.
I like that Apple is focusing on 3d widgets as an app primitive but is it really that hard to put that into Oculus/Android? Android actually does have widgets. What about the OS precludes it from what Apple has done?
There's some hard decisions around forcing everyone into their custom material that Apple made so that they can handle the rendering more deeply....but is that really a core OS thing? Seems like it doesn't need a new kernel for that.
It’s not so much difficulty as system architecture. Oculus just doesn’t have an OS layer, at least not in the sense of a platform that helps applications share resources and interact with each other.
The Oclulus platform is more like a classic video game console; there are system APIs, but they are designed to be used by single-tasking applications.
And for the user, the Oculus system UI is really an app launcher /task switcher.
It’s not better or worse, just a very different design philosophy.
Huh? I'm very confused as to what you mean. It's a customized version of Android. All the Android multi-tasking and app pause and resume life-cycle stuff should still be in there. Most of their ecosystem is heavy duty games that use all the device's resources (kicking out other apps from the working set), but it's definitely a multi-tasking OS.
I really do not think 3D widgets would require an entirely new OS. The main app switcher would need a revamp and they would need to re-purpose or build out some new app life-cycle callbacks to handle widget focus and interaction but it all seems very doable and not much harder than what they've already done.
Too me it sounds like what's being described is just a 3d desktop. But, in the walled garden world we live in most people just call the os/desktop combo the "OS" when it comes to android/ios.
Damn. Like I never thought of it that way. You need that OS layer. That should be metas core competency if they want to win. Games are something that runs on top of other people’s platform. I thought Zuckerberg did all this to stop being a layer on top of somebody else’s stack but all they did was the exact same thing with Oculus.
That is what always bugged me about the pivot to “meta”. They never had to find product market fit to succeed. They were never hungry. They could just throw money until something clicked… but money alone doesn’t make a revolutionary product. You need somebody hungry enough to see the world in a different way and then execute the fuck out of it.
Dunno how this relates to apple though. They have equal amounts of cash to throw at problems until they are “solved”. Perhaps the “operating system” is a solved problem already to some extent and maybe there isn’t anything truly new?
I get what you are saying, but that is why the Vision Pro is still an over engineered dev kit for a half baked OS.
At least the Meta Quest for example has a lot of content and VR games. The Vision Pro doesn't seem to have much use apart from it curiosity, because such system hasn't been fully built out. It seems like a device that isn't really ready for prime time for a couple of years yet.
Thinking about it. If apple had dropped their vision pro with something like you can play Half Life Alyx on it like they did with Death Stranding with the M2chip/M3? they might have had a larger buyer pool.
They would have needed controllers and actually cared enough to support steam on it.
There is zero chance Valve would release HL:Alyx without full steam support on the device.
That being said, I get what you're saying - that a killer game could have helped the value proposition. They clearly didn't design it for that though, even based on how much lower their refresh rate is for hand tracking.
It feels like a consumption device like the iPad, with some productivity mixed in.
The irony is I can use steam link with an ipad. On top of that I can use it as a second monitor for when I am on the go among some other productivity. From what I saw with the vision pro, nothing compelled me in that department. And I have to agree with you, not having some sort of controller interface was an additional no go as well.
This was my immediate takeway from using Quest 3 as well. Zuck has stated forever that he wants a platform, yet when it comes time to do the hard work, we just end up with an Android distro running a React app.
I was saying the same thing back during the first five years of the iPhone. There were so many ostensibly serious people who thought that BlackBerry or Nokia would have an “iPhone killer” just around the corner, and it’s like… do you chumps have any idea how difficult it is to build an operating system?
He talks about how "Gaze & pinch is an incredible UI superpower and major industry ah-ha moment" but... if that's really the case, then it's quite an indictment of the VR industry:
> The hardware needed to track eyes and hands in VR has been around for over a decade, and it’s Apple unique ability to bring everything together in a magical way that makes this UI superpower the most important achievement of the entire Vision Pro product, without a shadow of doubt.
So they had all the pieces, but only Apple put it together and realized that you'd need a VR equivalent of point-and-click? If that's actually true, it's sad.
It's almost exactly the same kind of conceptual transition that Apple made happen with keyboardless smartphones, too, which adds an extra sort of funny element to it.
Putting it together is not as simple as it seems. I think it was an immense engineering and design effort from Apple to get it to the point where it feels effortless and obvious
Not only do they have two cameras per eye, and all the hardware for wide angle out-of-view hand tracking, they had to consider:
Privacy: the user’s gaze is never delivered to your process when your native UI reacts to their gaze. Building this infrastructure to be performant, bug free and secure is a lot of work. Not to mention making it completely transparent for developers to use
Design: they reconsidered every single iOS control in the context of gaze and pinch, and invented whole new UI paradigms that work really well with the existing SDK. You can insert 3D models into a SwiftUI scroll view, and scroll them, and it just works (they even fade at the cut off point)
Accessibility: there is a great deal of thought put into alternative navigation methods for users who cannot maintain consistent gaze
In addition to this they clearly thought about how to maintain “gazeable” targets in the UI. When you drag a window closer or farther it scales up and down maintaining exactly the same visual size, trying to ensure nothing gets too small or large to gaze at effectively
There are so many thousands of design and engineering decisions that went into making gaze and pinch based navigation work so simply, so I can understand how it hasn’t been done this effectively until now
> So they had all the pieces, but only Apple put it together
Its very difficult to change a mindset or culture in big companies. Existing VR companies were too invested in using a controller. Similarly back in the early smartphone days all the big companies thought that smartphones must have physical keyboard.
Sometimes you really have to decide to take the risk and ship without a standard controller before you can see if the new model will work. The iPhone was famously derided for a lack of stylus. Video game consoles for years have tried to incorporate motion controls in some form or another and realistically only the Wii succeeded in any measure because they ditched the classic controller instead of trying to shoehorn it in. Many times it doesn't work, but if you give developers and users an "easy escape hatch" to go back to what they're already comfortable with, so many of them will default to that no matter how much better your new option might be.
The problem is that by doing that they’ve limited their device’s usefulness severely.
If some kind of killer AR app shows up on the Vision Pro, could it be put on the Quest? Let’s just assume it doesn’t need a level of processing power that the Quest can’t deliver. Would the software vendor just have to implement the entire interface from scratch or with Unity or something? Are there enough platform components on the Quest to be able to do the job?
I don’t know the answer. But I did see a number of developers mentioning online over the last year just how incredibly easy it was to get started with the Vision Pro compared to the quest. If you have a Mac you sign up for the Developer program for $99 and you get an IDE, compiler, simulator, performance monitoring, full UI library plus documentation. It’s early days for some of that stuff, but all the batteries are included. From what they said it was far far easier to get to “hello world” than on Meta’s platform.
Apple leveraged their existing OSX OS stack, for Meta this would mean either heavily forking android OR starting their own OS. Both would take 5+ years to get meaningful traction. Remember google fuchsia, the code-repo was public in 2016, intial release was 2021, and it's still not anywhere near where it'd need to be for a VR headset.
I think that kind of under sells it. Yes Apple had all sorts of existing technology they could leverage. But they still built a completely new spatial UI paradigm for it.
And an entirely new interaction model that hasn’t been seen before. Using looking at something to replace a mouse isn’t new but taking that combined with using a pinch gesture to “click“ and some of the other things they’ve come up with is a unique combination that seems to work quite well. Thought there is certainly room for improvement.
I own one of each, and develop for the Vision Pro through my job, it's the very same story it's always been. Apple hasn't 'invented' much here, but the magic is in how it's assembled, even in its current state, using apps in a 3d space feels better than anything the quest has ever done. Even simple things like 'touching' a panel just feels more natural on the vision pro than the same experience on the quest, mostly because the quest does things like forcing the ghost hand to stop at the surface of the window, instead of continuing to track your hand through it and just using the intersection as the touch point. It's a small difference in the interaction that makes a world of difference in usability, which Apple is very good at.
To be fair, you probably don't have to build your own kernel like fuchsia. You can almost certainly start with a bare bones freebsd or Linux kernel or what ever. You're still making a custom gfx layer and lots of user land but you're get a lot for free too.
That operating system (a hard fork of Google Fuschia) was really designed for low-power AR wearables and made almost no considerations to supporting VR (or like, any existing software, which was one of the major drawbacks). Too many systems designed from scratch with no compatibility with traditional OS APIs. I don't think it would have been viable even with 5+ more years.
> Apple has made a fully realized spatial operating system
I'm not sure what you mean precisely. Apple doesn't seem to have done more than windows with persistent positions. This isn't nothing, but it's also not something that has tremendous value for a headset that you only wear 30 or 45 minutes at a time.
And they have little to no management of these floating windows. I'm really not holding my breath for Apple to come up with breakthrough windows management given what they've done for the past decade.
If you don't think in term of potential and promises, but of actual value to the user right now, I'd understand why Meta hasn't the gimmick.
Is this a big lead for Apple ? Perhaps, the world mapping could be something difficult to reproduce. Or Meta could be at roughly the same point but decided it not to go there.
The user is pointing out that that the real fridge behind them is reflected by the surface of the virtual object in front of them. And consider on top of that, the fridge is not visible to the headset at that moment. It is captured in the 3d spatial model that was created of the room. None of this is a pre-rendered or rigged or specifically engineered scenario. It's just what the operating system does by default. So one app that is totally unknown to another app can introduce reflections into the objects it displays. This is just so far beyond what can happen in the Quest platform by any means at all. And it can only happen because the 3d spatial modeling is integrated deeply into the native rendering stack - not just layered on the surface of each app.
I'm with you on how incredible it is from a technical perspective.
The most fascinating thing to me is how we've gone from Apple being the pragmatic and real world product focused company, moving slower but making sure what they ship has undeniable practical value, and not promising much beyond ("we don't talk about future products and roadmap").
Compared to the "wow look at that technical prowess, not much useful right now, but such potential !" that we're getting with this device. I don't see it completely fall flat, but it feels it's on the same course as the Apple Watch or the HomePod, to be the biggest in the niche category it defines (whatever it ends up be), and a smaller presence in the general space ("smart eyewear ?") with better fitted and more practical devices taking 70% of the market.
The clunkier XReal probably keeping chugging along, being to the AVP what the Xiaomi or Huawei smart bands are to the Apple Watch. And Meta probably being the Samsung shooting at the target from 5 different angles.
I keep seeing people trying to shove this into the narrative of "Apple coming late but doing it better and solving real problems". But it doesn't fit that narrative well. Apple here is early to something else that just happens to look like the thing that people are viewing as the predecessor, and it's utility is highly questionable and full of all kinds of weird gaps. In a telling kind of way, they are actually in part leaning on the aspects they are not trying to sell (Here, look at these immersive experiences! But shhh don't call it VR) - to paper over the fact that the core of what they are really trying to build is just not ready yet.
Its just a skybox with the cubemap of the room, no? The Quest 3 does a full room scan and can you get a 3d mesh of the room as well. They could provide a cubemap as well.
Meta doesn't want to pass any of the camera feed to an app for privacy reasons so they don't make it available but its a legal issue not a technical one. They can (and should) do this for the browser model viewer.
Apple enforces a single material model so they can inject the lighting data in a uniform way. Its a bit of a nuclear option to have a fixed shader pipeline. But I digress...
>So one app that is totally unknown to another app can introduce reflections into the objects it displays
Reflections of the real environment on virtual objects do not imply a global scene graph, or the ability of apps to reflect one another. It just means that each app gets fed the environment map that mostly had to be generated anyway because of SLAM. Neat but not some kind of radical form of IPC.
Other people will come up with the right way to do spacial windowing… but they’ll fuck up somehow and Apple will take it, refine it, polish it, and “win”
I have negative confidence in Apple's ability to design a windowing system. Historically they have never once shipped a good one, and only occasionally have they shipped an acceptable one.
Current day Apple and its management launches products with weird twists ("send your pulse to your loved ones", "this method of input will stay in history alongside the mouse"), to then cut it down to only the features people really care about, shut it out from competiting OSes, still get the competition to execute better on that limited set of features, and get sued and forced to remove their most advanced feature after months of media humiliation.
That's why people get back to the first iPhone 17 years ago when they want to predict a bright future for the AVP. I still want to see it push the field forward, but odds are not in its favor IMHO.
And as an educator who thought an VR-development course at university for a few times since 2018 setting up and maintaining 15 Oculus Quest Mk I glasses was an absolute pain, with accounts that I have to setup, etc. Sure it worked somewhat like a android phone, but there was no real fast pass for users like me, a lot of the features and the UI changed over the time and it ultimately felt like the platform took itself too seriously and therefore had no problem wasting my time.
When designing a concept the core difference is always whether your design respects the user or whether it does not and tries to make them do things, spend more time on the platform, spend more money on the platform, etc.
To support copy&paste all you need is a common format for 3D objects, like HTML is for 2D documents; glTF might be a reasonable candidate.
The problem with the Apple approach is that there are no apps and games, and there probably won't be many given it's a 3500$ device with few users that Apple exerts its tyrannical grip over (or if there will be, they will be ports of Unity/Unreal, PC or Android VR apps, not using any of the special features that the Apple OS may have).
People have been trying to solve this problem since the VRML days in the '90s. I suspect you are underestimating the complexity of 3D data by a pretty huge extent.
3D is much, much, much more complicated than 2D, especially if you're trying to interchange between arbitrary applications that may have divergent needs.
Start with this little thought experiment.
What do you mean by 3d object?
Do you mean a set of polygons, like in a traditional triangle mesh?
A volume, like voxels? A set of 3d surfaces?
Do you need to model interior details, or only the exterior envelope? Do you need to be able to split or explode it at some arbitrary level of detail? Do we need to encode sharp edges or creases in some way?
etc, etc, etc
This is before you have touched materials, texturing, lighting, any of that.
The basic math is also dramatically worse, and much more challenging for entry level participants to grasp. The basic idea of matrix math grows dramatically more complex just in terms of sheer number operations. You might be able to get away with your entire app only needing a couple mults or adds for most interaction in 2D. Basic 3D, closer to 150 mults (usually 3 [4x4] mults at 49 mults per [4x4] pair) for the default.
In 2D apps and games, you can often get away with incredibly simplistic calculations. Rarely much other than a translation. Many times 1D with naively obvious solutions. With 3D, you rapidly need to move to 4D matrices than can handle arbitrary scale, translate, rotate, perspective, clip volumes.
Nearly every 3D app anywhere has to handle the model, to world, to camera, to clip space path, which involves a lot of complex math well beyond most 2D apps. Usually, 3 different matrix mults with 4x4 matrices.
It's one of the main reasons voxels have been the only real 3D implementation with large scale use. The amount of work necessary to develop, ... really anything that works with 3D is a large step upward in difficulty unless its totally regular and square. Otherwise, huge numbers of optimizations are no longer available. Plus, the compression cliff for normal users of effectively arbitrary 3D shape design and movement is really steep. Most first time users of an industry 3D CAD package (ProE, Solidworks, AutoCAD, Maya, 3DSMax, Blender, ect...) or similar have the "wall of difficulty" moment.
Stupid question… isn’t all that wrapped in a container?
Like in HTML with divs? So if you have a virtual lamp you want to copy, all the various elements that make up the lamp are in a VR equivalent object markup as <div id=‘lamp’ />. If you want to copy specific elements you can, but you’d have specific actions, e.g copy color etc.
Maybe I’m missing something though and it’s more complex.
Interesting. I assume you’d copy the object not the lighting. If you move a real object into a different room or outside you don’t expect the colour to stay the same. But if I’m pasting it into a word doc, I guess intuitively I might want it to look the same as source, but that breaks down unless I copy the whole virtual universe. A mirrored globe inside a room of mirrors is not going to look the same unless I copy the scene. People will learn this and maybe demand eg a choice of the copy scope. You might not even have rights to copy all objects. I can’t just copy your palace and paste it into mine unless you allow it (say).
That’s the entire crux. What exactly the hell is “the object”, and how does your target program DO anything to it, to include manipulating it, or getting it out to a GPU for rendering in some even vaguely terrible way - and you’re probably trying to render it 120 times (or more) a second with a decent level of resolution.
3D is not like tabular data. There isn’t some default resting state it naturally wants to exist in. It’s all edge cases and special logic. Also, it’s mind bogglingly vast amounts of raw data. Even a simple scene can contains hundreds of thousands of surfaces/polygons/spline patches/voxels/whatever representation.
A VR environment is essentially running a high end 3d game engine at all times.
Isn't this already a solved problem? See 3D apps, i.e. Blender, Unity, Unreal etc. You can copy objects easily.
I don't think the intention is to copy an object with the baked in lighting at the time of making a copy. I can imagine you just want to copy the object and the behavior how it reacts to whatever environment it's placed in.
I really hope USD is not it. Having worked with it trying to build stuff for the vision pro, it's a massive software library pretending to be a file format. It is inexorably linked to the source code that processes it to the point that making a processor for the format is a non-starter, and that seems to be by design.
The codebase is dense, hard to compile, using outdated dependencies, and doesn't play nice with anything else. Documentation is sparse, often incorrect, and severely lacking in anything like a new user guide. Everything assumes you work for Pixar already and know the ins and outs of their pipeline.
It goes back to what I have mentioned elsewhere in this thread that Apple always thinks product first. Hardware specs are only ever in service of the product Apple is trying to deliver. If they could never list specs, they wouldn't. The industry forces some capitulation which is why Apple ever talks about specs at all.
Oculus is a gaming device and doesn't have a "productivity" ambition. I believe it is because 3D glasses has very limited productivity application. But who knows, for people who think that 13" laptop is okay for work, Vision Pro may become something better for comparable price.
> I believe it is because 3D glasses has very limited productivity application.
AR has tremendous productivity applications if the device is small and wearable enough. Imagine being up in your attic running cables and seeing a projection of the floor plan of your house so you can see where the different rooms in your house are. Or driving a car, except all the blind spots disappear and are filled in with vehicle-mounted camera feeds, with unobtrusive overlays for navigation or to highlight potential safety hazards. Imagine assembling some IKEA furniture except instead of puzzling through the instruction book, you have an app that can recognize all the pieces using machine vision and simply show you what to do. Imagine never forgetting a name or a face, because every time you see even a distant acquaintance, your glasses can run facial recognition and make their name pop up by their face in real life. Imagine noticing a weird rash on your arm, but as soon as you look at it, your glasses immediately diagnose it as a potential MRSA infection and pop up a notification allowing you to call an urgent care clinic that’s open right this second.
>Imagine noticing a weird rash on your arm, but as soon as you look at it, your glasses immediately diagnose it as a potential MRSA infection and pop up a notification allowing you to call an urgent care clinic that’s open right this second.
This isn't really an application of 3D glasses, it's a "diagnose my rash" smartphone app. The 3D adds nothing. Your other examples similarly lean more heavily on the "always-on camera with problematic network connection" aspect, than 3D.
> Imagine never forgetting a name or a face, because every time you see even a distant acquaintance, your glasses can run facial recognition and make their name pop up by their face in real life.
This could work if they weren't wearing a VR helmet themselves.
I keep saying “glasses” because eventually the technology is going to get miniaturized to that extent, and you can facial recognize people wearing glasses. But you could also have a handshake protocol for the devices themselves.
Oculus has expanded its applications beyond just gaming. There are also productivity applications and tools available for Oculus devices like virtual desktops
I perceive it as an experimental sector. They want to keep a finger in the VR productivity pie; moreover, they want to keep their fingers in all VR pies. But if you check out their primary commm channels - email newsletter, ads etc - there's nothing about productivity there. In their app store it is a small insignificant and sometimes hard to find corner.
> Apple has had the advantage of green field engineering it exactly how they want it to be from the ground up.
It's not quite green field on the software side, albeit mostly. Clearly they already have experiencing re-platforming a whole operating system multiple times. The underpinnings of macOS power everything from desktops to smartphones to watches to tablets already all with diverging user interfaces. They had a solid first-party foundation to build the interface they want; Facebook is ultimately a third-party to Android and is having to solve the same Android hardware integration problems as everyone else.
> Think about what has to exist, to say, intelligently copy and paste parts of a 3D object made by one application into a 3D object made by another, the same way you would copy a flat image from photoshop into a Word document.
I own an AVP and this isn't something that can be done with it, to the best of my knowledge. Please explain how this is possible with the existing OS and apps.
I have seen people download 3d model file formats (stl) and position/scale them in front of them, and then walk around the 3d model. I am not sure if they added anything to the Vision Pro but it was pretty impressive. I would not be surprised if it can handle common 3d formats and render them straight to your AR environment out of the box.
Possible with the existing OS? Definitely. It’s just clipboard data
Possible with the current apps? None of them support a standard partial copy of 3D objects but they do allow copy pasting full objects between apps afaik. E.g I can drag a USDZ file from a message into keynote
None of this matters compared to the number of apps available. Given the high price of the Vision Pro and the resulting low sales, it would make little business sense for app developers to invest in creating apps for it instead of for the Quest 3.
This is a really interesting point and plenty of products have died on the hill of not realising that "content is king".
What makes it particularly interesting is that the VisionOS app store so far seems to have had quite an anemic reception from developers. Barely any novel non-toy apps have been released for it, with 8 months since devs got access last year and 2 months in the open dev ecosystem. It's possible the tsunami is just around the corner but it would have to be said that this seems to be diverging heavily at this point from the launch of the original iPhone app store. It was always going to be a question since the user base is miniscule compared to every other headset and iOS devs mostly have negligible experience in developing full scale VR / AR applications which is actually a very steep learning curve. So the barriers are high and the incentive relatively small.
If Apple fails to attract devs to its store it will create a huge problem for them that they are pretty unused to having. I wonder how they will approach a situation like that, since their culture is not used to dealing with that as a problem these days.
> None of this matters compared to the number of apps available.
There's a reason that iPadOS launched multi-window mode of arbitrary curved corner sizes with the same curved handle bar on the curved corner, several iPadOS iterations back.
Doing that ensured that VisionOS could launch opting all iPad apps in: most any iPad app respecting the ability to run in iPadOS's "stage manager" mode with multiple windows, works beautifully OOTB on VisionOS.
In fact, any iPad app run on Vision OS, if you "pull" the app close to you iPad sized, you can touch it as if an iPad screen, and your fingers and touch work as if touching an iPad.
The only apps that don't work as if native are those doing something special with multi-touch or touch gestures, but most apps "just work". It's pretty wild.
Press keeps comparing Vision Pro to MacOS. No, the 2D pass-through mode is a room sized iPad stage manager, infinite iPads.
> Given the high price of the Vision Pro and the resulting low sales, it would make little business sense for app developers to invest in creating apps for it instead of for the Quest 3.
For sure. That’s exactly how it’s played out in iOS vs Android. No developer makes anything for the higher priced, small market iOS, right?
Perhaps it matters because of apps. With OS that natively supports spatial features it could be easier to expand functionality of existing ios apps or interact with them in the ar/vr context.
it is high time to stop praising apple for their software ecosystem. i am still impressed by their level of engineering but it is not doing much in terms of real use-case since the ios days.
case in point - the whole ipad and "what is a computer" campaign. it is hilarious when a half-baked mouse support is celebrated in a tablet. despite using similar hardware, apple refuses to treat their tablets up to their true potential.
despite working on an RTOS for avp, there is no signs that the headset stack will be exploitable by professionals, like it used to for macs. for the coming future it will remain to be a good software demo built on top of nice displays.
I worked on an oculus team for close to a team that was charged with building a platform. The trouble at oculus was that there were multiple waring platform efforts.
> between Android underneath and Unity/Unreal at the application layer.
So they want to build a new kind of device and a new kind of experience, and they seriously think they can do that by just plugging together ready-made parts built by others? No wonder this is going nowhere.
Apple has made a fully realized spatial operating system
Said that out loud to a group of techies and they laughed so hard one of them fell out of their seat.
Apple put the iPad on your face. And that's pretty much it.
The few VP users that haven't returned the device don't use any of the "spatial" features like controlling the UI by pointing in space, since it's so inaccurate that it gives Swype a run for its money.
I think the description of the VisionPro as a dev kit is spot on. It's also a beta product in many way.
Apple know full well that this is not a mass market product, they have made no attempt to make it even remotely affordable to most people. But they also know that every aspect of the hardware will improve over the next decade, and as it does they will have ironed out many of the problems with how we use AR/VR and will be ready for it, based on the real life experiences of actual owners, rather than years of in-house testing.
The screen will get bigger (I hear FoV is pretty poor at the moment), the CPU/power/thermal performance will improve, battery density goes up, cameras and sensors get better and cheaper and many parts will get smaller/lighter. And in that time they will learn by doing, making it better/cheaper/lighter and working on the software and interaction model.
Hopefully at the same time it will really spur on the rest of the industry and we will see more competition and experimentation.
I can't see myself buying something like this for the next 10 years at least. But something like the VPro that is better, smaller and lighter and doesn't cost the earth could be quite tempting for late adopters like me.
I thought it was pretty good - but nowhere near ideal of course.
But discovered I could dispense with both of Apple's "Light Seal Cushions" and simply line the light seal with some 1/8 adhesive foam. It took a little experimenting to avoid hard pressure points, and then make it comfortable.
It is now very comfortable with the following benefits:
1. The field of view is noticeably wider. Yay! The immersion improvement feels cognitively significant.
2. I realized that greater peripheral vision downward is more important than upward. Being more aware of down makes us feel safer and is also where are our hands and keyboards live.
So I arranged the padding to wear the head set slightly lower, allocating all the increased vertical FOV downward.
3. The combination of being 1/4 inch or so closer to the face, and firmer padding, reduced the feeling of weight on the front of my head.
Warning - literally. I get an occasional popup warning that my eyes are too close to the lenses. The danger being if I were to fall I could potentially hit my eyes. I stay seated most the time, but occasionally walk through rooms, so it is worth being careful.
I use my Vision Pro for 10 hours a day on many days, comfortably. I had to switch to the two-strap support to do this. But I have ordered an adapter that allows the original behind the heat cushion strap to be used with a second cushion strap over the head. I anticipate that working even better, given how much surface area weight will be distributed across. (Also turning a knob is easier for adjustments than messing with velcro.)
Also, got some thicker (in width) lighter foam, to add some more light seal around the edges.
This feels like a real upgrade, a year or so before Apple will release a bump.
In the recent update it now lets you mouse off your Mac and onto vision apps just like iPad hands over. It made me switch my desk setup to have the desk attached to my chair so I can have 360 range of screens. The resolution is stupidly high.
I’ve attempted a coding workflow in all of the quests and it just wasn’t possible. It’s awesome in vision
No. Works in the dark. The vision has IR lights on it.
No the personas aren’t right. They just creep people out. They need more work, or some basic editablity. It generally nails your eyes perfectly at the expense of everything else.
Unrelated-but-related -- your username is fantastically appropriate for this discussion. I'm imagining a website with the same name, filled with images of people whose headsets have permanently melted onto their faces, like a Dali painting :D
For me it is not a novelty, it has completely stuck.
Yes, on comfort for 10 hours. I have even worked 12 hours, then watched a long 3D movie (Blade Runner 2049, Dune I, etc.) without hesitation.
I cannot imagine going back to only physical screens. I have a 98" monitor with two 55" monitors in portrait angled towards me on either side (heights all match), all wall mounted. Truly wonderful! But this has replaced that for me.
I have even considered beheading a MacBook Pro.
I love the following:
• Never needing to put on or take off reading glasses to see far, or within inches.
• I can have my main Mac "screen" whatever size I want, typically large. Also that I can lean into it when focusing on a patch of code, and it always looks perfect.
• Having multiple Vision safari screens, or utilities, surrounding me. With the look and pinch interface being very nice for navigating.
• Being able to tune out 180 degrees of my space with a natural scene so I am completely undistracted. Wish I could go 360 degrees, and still leave keyboard visible. (Either by having an unobstructed low circle, or having the keyboard "punch through" like hands do.
• Flexible screen position lets me sit with great posture all the time. I tend to pull right up to my desk, push my keyboard far out and lean forward on my elbows a bit. Have the screen large but close enough that I can lean in to focus on something.
• Two environments in one! I will put project organization and context notes on huge screens behind me on a wall. Personal mission control. In thoughtful moments I get out of my chair, walk around the room and see the large screens from anywhere, walk right up to it, make small edits with pinch and zoom.
• The incredible ergonomics of being able to code comfortably in bed, on a couch, recliner, etc. with good ergonomics, due to the screens being flexibly placed. Being able to code in many places keeps my brain fresh.
• I use a holster for the battery. Geeky, but after dropping it as I walked away from my desk 100 times I realized I need that. That elminated inhibitions about moving, and feelings of being chained down.
• I haven't been in flow so consistently for so many hours for a long time. For me the Mac interface expansion/isolation chamber IS what Vision is for.
Issues:
• As noted, wish the keyboard and my drinks would "punch through" 360 degree scenes, or there was an optional lower circle of punch rough.
• Keyboard and trackpad pointer are fussy when switching between Mac and Vision screens.
• Wish I could have more Mac screens, and drag Mac windows out to their own screens. Also pull in iPad and iPhone screens. And push windows/app-states back out to those machines too. Or two other people's devices.
• Wish the Mac screen operated with look and pinch. I do this a few times every day when in flow.
• Wish I could disconnect/reconnect my MacBook Pro screen. The headless MacBook Pro for Vision would be absolutely great. But having the option to use it as a laptop too would be great. Maybe remove my MacBook screen, but set it up so I can clip my iPad Pro to it too?
• Need a Vision Spaces interface for setting up work then moving to a different context, but being able to come back to those screens. Being able to set up a space that is location sensitive, so always available in that room, seat, whatever.
>• Never needing to put on or take off reading glasses to see far, or within inches.
Can you expand on this? Does it basically have built in vision correction? This actually sounds like a 'killer' feature if you don't need to mess with glasses.
It has optics to correct for vision problems yeah, you give Apple your prescription when buying the Vision Pro.
But more importantly, your eyes are always focusing at a consistent 1ish meter in front of you. That's why you don't have to switch vision correction ever when using the Vision Pro (or any VR display).
just for your information. there is only little knowledge about the influence of vr glasses on the vision. there have been reports of developers that worked in vr for a long time that had issues with theyr sight afterwards.
problems can come from increased heat within the vr device, but also because every lighty our eye receives comes in at the same angle, and thus the eye never needs to adjust to different distances, as it would have to do in a real environment. while it appears / looks the same as in reality it really isnt. thats also the reason you only need one correction.
> • Being able to tune out 180 degrees of my space with a natural scene so I am completely undistracted. Wish I could go 360 degrees, and still leave keyboard visible. (Either by having an unobstructed low circle, or having the keyboard "punch through" like hands do.
Oculus quests have had this feature for a while now so I guess it'll come to AVP too. It only supports a handful of models but that's no big deal for Apple users as they mostly will use Apple keyboards anyway.
Let me put it this way, then: having used a Vision Pro for two weeks (I bought one and returned it) I would gladly take a greater field of view in exchange for a slightly lower pixel density, and it would be a very easy decision.
I had some major issues with the Vision Pro, but pixel density was not one of them.
When I did the AVP demo I was impressed by how quickly my eyes would relax and drift away slightly from looking at something after initially focusing on it. It took some conscious effort at first to maintain steady eye focus on an object whilst actuating it with a gesture.
This is, coincidentally, one of my biggest issues with the Vision Pro. I never got used to it. I'd very frequently want to select one thing while also moving my eyes around to look at other things.
• The pinching focus remains on the control you just looked at for a fraction of a second as your eyes zoom off it.
That would be killer.
In retrospect, it would have been vintage Apple to have realized this was an important detail and resolved it already.
Also widely spreading fingers within a moment of looking at a control could act as "hovering" with a mouse pointer. Add some kind of glow to the control as an intuitive indicator that it is staying in pinch focus. So you can lock in, still look around, and pinch if you decide to - or just relax the hand to abort.
This ability to lock on last gaze, and pinch/abort, would dramatically free the eyes to continue roaming naturally.
> • The pinching focus remains on the control you just looked at for a fraction of a second as your eyes zoom off it.
I'm not convinced this would solve it. What if I really do want to select a different button quickly? Certainly, when I use traditional computers I hate mouse latency. You could add additional pinch controls like you said, but I think it would all continue to be finicky.
I think the problem is that eye tracking is bad, at least as a primary input mechanism.
If I were Apple, I would focus more on hand gestures. The Vision Pro lets you move application windows around with your hands (although you need to initially select them with your eyes), and this always felt much more natural to me than. I can imagine a system where you use your hands to manipulate a cursor in space, possibly even a 3D cursor.
I think if you pinch within fraction of a second after a minimum time previous gaze, and before another minimum time next gaze, it would work really well.
These minimum gaze times could be quite small. When we move our eyes, they move fast. I am guessing in the order of 10-30 ms. Just under our perception of what we are actually doing.
I find myself deciding and starting to pinch, but moving my eyes away at the same time. That is a small window where carry-over gaze would reliably do-what-I-mean without undercutting a follow up gaze and pinch
Ten years ago was pre oculus rift. We weren't saying anything about VR headsets.
Five years ago was pre valve index. We didn't have CPUs in a headset. Nor a battery. Cameras were only used for tracking. The things we were saying would improve is "screen door effect" and "tracking", both of which have.
The optical pathway is pretty much locked in. LEEP was invented in the 80s, and that's still the optical system used today. Compare the size to NASA's VR system from the early 90s. https://images.nasa.gov/details/ARC-1992-AC89-0437-6
It's been 30 years of massive improvements to all of the rest of computers, and VR has only shrunk a couple inches. There's not much else we can do to make it smaller.
There’s an insane amount of tech in the Vision Pro. Eyesight probably occupies a big chunk. Then there are more sensors than they need. Also the CPU and 100% processing is happening literally strapped to your face.
This is like having two 5k displays powered by a mobile device*.
* 2 x 5k = 28 million pixels, compared to Vision Pro’s 23 million pixels.
The AVP is leaps and bounds ahead of where we were collectively technically back then
But I don’t see us appreciably closer to the goal of ubiquitous persistent headworn see through visual computing
It’s a social expectations and data problem it’s not a “technical” problem
It’s probably gonna be decades before we see any regularized mainstream adoption, because the form factor is such a different thing that we’re not even close to make it a simple transition for the least savvy consumer
> Ten years ago was pre oculus rift. We weren't saying anything about VR headsets.
Rift DK1 was released in ~2013, and lots of gamers bought it throughout 2014. We got the first "consumer release" for the original Rift in 2016. I think its more than fair to say 10 years - we were absolutely talking a lot about Rift DK1 in 2014.
> Five years ago was pre valve index
Valve's first consumer VR headset was the HTC vive, released in 2016:
"The first-generation Vive was announced in 2015, as part of a collaboration with video game studio and distributor Valve Corporation, and implementing its VR software and hardware platform SteamVR; the first-generation consumer model was released in April 2016."
It demonstrates Valve have been at this longer than the ~5 years of the Index, and closer to a decade again (the point OP disputes and uses Index as evidence of).
not OP but it does seem like you're nitpicking details instead of engaging with what seems to be the intent of the response: AR/VR has come an incredible distance since DK1, the last 10 years have seen it go from a barely-discussed completely unavailable/fringe dev-kit-only technology to being an clearly viable spectrum of mass-market products.
edited: grammar. still feel like I've failed to produce readable english, but I'm giving up
Didn't Microsoft's hololens first launch around 10 years ago? It was AR rather than VR, but it was absolutely pitched as an early product meant for very specific use cases to act as a proof of concept before consumer versions.
I personally used a HoloLens for a few minutes and it had severe problems with field of view and brightness of the display. AR works for enterprise or the military to train people or present information at least the US military for the HoloLens [1]. Google finally axed the Glass Enterprise project in 2023 which was much longer than the original version.
Google Glass was pretty slick honestly, ahead of its time.
I had a friend that worked on the team for a couple years when it first started. The use case of a headsup display for directions while driving was a great experience.
I had a friend get Google Glass. I tried in on for a few minutes and was pretty disappointed. It was a tiny Android window stuck in the upper right of my FOV. Looking at the hardware, I guess it makes sense, but it’s not what the marketing seemed to be selling, and I expected a more custom UI that would get out of the way, rather than what looked like a tiny phone screen.
It wasn’t mine, so maybe there was more to it that I didn’t get from my brief interaction, but it didn’t leave me wanting more.
Yeah the UX definitely wasn't immersive. I liked the idea of a heads up display and have never really wanted a full display experience, Glass would have fit really well for me.
These days I don't even want that, but that's almost certainly of a combination of getting older and over reacting to how pervasive tech and displays have become.
There's been talk about VR and some kind of headset since the late 90s, even if it was cardboard, or some computer science professor wearing large goggles and backpack around campus. Google Glass came out in 2013.
The list on wikipedia [1] doesn't include it, I guess because it was a "development kit", and I just naively assumed the "Oculus Rift" was the DK1 not the CV1.
First Oculus headset versus Quest 3 right now? Quest 3 wins. There's progress. Perhaps not as fast as we'd want. There is progress though. I suspect that progress will continue.
There were a lot of tablets before the iPad but it wasn’t until the iPad that tablets really took off as a serious market segment. Ditto with AirPods and Bluetooth earbuds.
In the past, once Apple started pouring R&D money into a specific product type, the entire industry around it tends to advance very quickly. I’m optimistic about the Vision Pro, and I actually think the n+2 Meta release will be much better off for it.
My question is why does it seem like only Apple can do this, over and over? Why are they the only ones who seem to be able to knock a product category out of the park and legitimize it? Is it just the vast amount of money? Are they the only ones who can create products? Is everyone else that bad? Competitors work for ages and ages fighting each other, refining v1, v2, v2.1, v2.2, v2.25, and then suddenly Apple comes out with something v8-ish and the whole industry scrambles. Why does this keep happening?
They seem prepared to go in at higher price points.
Most other manufacturers seem to take the approach of getting as many features on the side of the box and then compete on price. They cost engineer the crap out of everything and it ends up being somewhat disappointing.
I often maintain that so much technology is 80% of the way to being amazing, but is stymied by commercial concerns that cause companies to cut corners and cheap out, or they hobble their own product to create barriers to interoperability.
While Apple still have to strike the right balance between between features and cost, and also like to make their own walled gardens, they are able to go for the higher price points, and also integrate really well between a wide swathe of products. They are prepared to let specific products be less competative in general (e.g Homepod), because they know that they integrate well into their overall ecosystem.
Yes, "stymied by commercial concerns" is a great way to put it. I get the feeling that many companies/managers don't have enough courage to make a different set of tradeoffs.
A lot of the replies are pretty vague, like they’re just “good at product” or they just “understand this or that” as if it’s some kind of mysticism. But why, and how? What is the formula? I think this reply chain starts to get at why.
I’m imagining a typical business school 2-axis chart where one axis is “willingness to take and commit to risks vs unwillingness/noncommittal” and the other axis is “acts independently vs. reacts to commercial/competitive pressures”. I guess what I want to understand is why is Apple kind of all alone on that plot, where the rest of the industry are clustered together far away from them? What are the business processes that lead to their position? Can a company follow a playbook and change their culture and have similar results? Are there other examples?
A lot of our industry are so extremely risk averse, have tunnel vision trying to copy each others’ feature checkboxes, rush things to market to try to make money before they are fully baked, and then give up when they aren’t instant successes. Everyone seems to follow this playbook.
As someone who is deep inside the Apple ecosystem after making enough to afford the devices, it’s because they make it pleasant to use. Before my first MBP, I had a Dell Inspiron which has good specs, but it was heavy, the plastic was flimsy and the screen was not good. The trackpad was abysimal. In my last work position, I got a Dell XPS and it was the same, so in the span of 8 years, nothing changes to show that they care for me as a user.
Most people don’t want to think about how to do something or care about optimizing it when they can get it done and not think further about it. But companies seems to want to put a lot of barriers into what I want to get done, like popups, complicated screens, ugly interfaces. For the majority of user workflows, Apple offers a simple, unobstrusive way to do them. Starlink routers are almost the same in that regard (the mobile app could use some work, and perhaps add a desktop interface)
My advice (as a user) is for to simplify the usual workflow to the point you only ask the few (0,1-3) indispensable questions, and then get out of the way. Further options can be buried inside Preferences and Settings. And then you perfect the apperance, ease of use, and general enjoyment of using the application/device.
Apple makes devices for the users. Dell makes them to sell as part of a service contract to a company. Microsoft makes an OS to sell to enterprises to provide a heavily managed experience for their employees so they can maximize productivity and profit. Apple makes an OS for people to use. (and get a 30% cut on almost every purchase the users make with it lol)
My personal machine is an M1 Air, and have to use PCs for work. The time it takes the PCs to wake from sleep until I can do actual work is a constant annoyance. The MacBook Air wakes just as quickly as an iPhone.
The MacBook team had this whole presentation planned for him, a usual dog and pony show about better specs and batteries and whatnot. Instead he just put an iPhone and a MacBook on the table, “woke” them both up, and said “why can’t this (the MacBook) do that (the iPhone)?” End of meeting.
Being pleasant to use also requires some courage to remove features, make compromises and spend extra time on the right things, rather than box-ticking.
In the end you need courage both to make it pleasant to use and to give it a big price.
I think they view design, especially of new products, as an intensely iterative process to identify and solve every problem they can find. And let that process lead them to a new very cohesive product definition.
That takes a very wide set of skills, to follow the series of discovered problems to be solved wherever they lead.
Other companies look at what parts are available, define a product from that, design have different teams build the different parts, each maximizing specs and reducing cost.
For the vast majority of already well defined products, the second path is the right one.
So that path is very familiar to every level of management at every corporation, and doing something completely different from the ground up isn’t easy or natural in that context.
For Apple, the other holistic discovery path is their mission.
Even “big” differences like being super vertical are a second level strategy for Apple, in service of being able to more easily follow problems to product definitions.
But even for Apple, that path is very risky. They have had a few half baked lemons in products that didn’t get as much discovery and attention as they needed.
You're getting close. Over the past 30-40 years, American corporations have focused more and more and more on profitability, and "making the numbers go up." They have sacrificed employee retention in order to pay executives eye-watering packages to focus on eliminating literally everything that doesn't contribute to that goal. They gutted all the R&D they can, years ago. Apple seems to be almost alone in retaining enough business acumen to think further out than the next quarter. It's not magic. They're just continuing to do what places like IBM and HP were famous for, decades ago. It's like the quip in Days of Thunder (and I have no idea why it sticks with me): "I'm not going faster. Everybody else is going slower." Wall Street has killed the future of America, and slowed human progress around the globe, in order to buy a bunch of already-filthy-rich people even more stuff.
Not that I'm bitter and jaded, as an engineer, or anything.
Apple has in house expertise for everything from designing their own processors, writing their own OS and applications, world class designers, manufacturing at scale, and sourcing parts and negotiating favorable pricing.
No other company has all these competencies at the same level.
> Most other manufacturers seem to take the approach of getting as many features on the side of the box and then compete on price. They cost engineer the crap out of everything and it ends up being somewhat disappointing.
This is a good summary of Windows Mixed Reality headsets, or Kinect
The price thing isn't just about competition. Meta and oculus before it has a stated goal to bring it to the masses. That's not going to work at a $3500 price point.
You need to get Devs interested too and that won't work if only the top 1% of the western world can afford it.
Apple can afford to build to standards, It is not like everyone else is dumb , they simply cannot pull it off the brand strength Apple has is without peer in the market.
If another brand launched first at same price points they simply will not get the traction Apple does.
Even with $3,500 price Apple likely needs sales hundreds of thousands of units to break even , no other manufacturers cannot pull it off
I think there are a lot of smaller companies that can build to standards, and then they either exceed their original vision or things explode to the point where they feel they need to move faster.
I love my Apple Watch (on my second one now) and I didn't like wearing watches. Except the Pebble that I bought (I think that I got the first generation Pebble colour, but it's been a while). After that product, things went sideways for Pebble for a lot of reasons. But the initial products were great and the build quality was good (not great, but good). The same applies to the first few generations of the Palm Pilot (and to a lesser degree, the Treo), although I think that the best PalmOS device built was the Clié NX70.
With respect to Apple's break even…I suspect that the research they did is going to produce benefits across all of Apple's product lines for the better part of the next decade (part of it already has, with the Apple Watch Double Tap hand gesture, although that is movement detection not camera-based).
> to the point where they feel they need to move faster
They feel the need because unlike Apple others cannot wait years to release a product or upgrade to a successful one and still sell enough. Everyone else have limited brand recall, if they don't move fast a competitor will and they loose relevance.
The point is nobody else can sustainably build to standards the way Apple can, because Apple can take its time enter a industry late and still win big.
Ya know the funny thing about Pebble, looking back as someone who is on his 3rd apple watch: At the time, I honestly thought Pebble was doing it the right way! And in hindsight, I still think that at launch, they had the perfect idea - for that point in time. Their initial success even matches that.
When the tech advanced, and use cases evolved, and users had become accustomed to the limitations of the apple watch style of smartwatch - which regarding battery life STILL HOLD TRUE... once all that was the case, Pebble had to deal with the "and now what?" and they couldn't.
It's not the money. They did it with the iMac when they were headed for the ground, and with the iPod when they were in a better position but still without infinite funding. Reality is actually quite simple: they spot technology advances, and integrate them into a neat, well-designed package that people actually want to buy.
The first iPod was a fancy shell around an IBM 1.8'' hard drive. There were MP3 players before but they were very bulky, or could store only a handful of files. They saw the hard drive coming, did the math, and went all in.
Same thing with the iPhone: there were smart phones before, but they spotted the capacitive digitizer that was orders of magnitude more accurate than the competition, and boom, multitouch.
Same thing with the AirPods: the killer feature being their fancy Bluetooth chip, which made the experience much better than the competition that was established for a decade at that point.
It is quite interesting that they do it over and over, going as far as saying what they do in interviews, and some people really don't see it for what it is.
> Are they the only ones who can create products?
They are not. They just have a vision of what they want to do, and once they start they put the effort needed (sometimes killing advanced designs before release). Then, they iterate relentlessly generation after generation. They play the long game, and often introduce their first generations at higher price points and keep improving and driving their price points down even if it is not an initial resounding success. Any company can do it, if they take design seriously and optimise for long term strategic goals rather than short-term economics.
> Competitors work for ages and ages fighting each other, refining v1, v2, v2.1, v2.2, v2.25, and then suddenly Apple comes out with something v8-ish and the whole industry scrambles.
If you look closely, when Apple comes in, it's because they have found a differentiating factor that they think will make the difference. They always have a compelling message about why you should choose their product above the competition. And it's never "same product, but cheaper".
Apple is AFAICT the only company in the world (outside of ultra-luxury brands) that actually cares about user experience enough to spend however much it takes to make it good.
Agree. And in a world where most technical people assume differentiation means better specs, Apple repeatedly prioritizes better UX: easier and/or more fun to use.
Agreed. I wasn’t trying to say Apple gets every bit of UX perfect (or even acceptable) in all products.
But they do have a history of disrupting markets by leveraging superior UX. Mainstreaming the GUI, the click wheel, the all-glass multitouch phone, etc, etc.
This. I consider myself a VR/AR enthusiast and I've had many VR headsets since the DK1, included Hololens 2 (and now Vision Pro). The day I started using Hololens 2 I just though "Wow, I could wear this for hours and even do real work on this if the displays and performance were a bit better". The product was simply amazing but it had a few issues (mainly performance) that it limited the device to very specific use cases.
Microsoft decided to mostly abandon the project, move/fire most of the team and give up rather than keep spending resources on a product that had an incredible potential... What would happen if Microsoft released a headset like Hololens 2 capable of running Windows apps for consumers at a similar price to AVP? They have Windows Mixed Reality, an almost infinite software catalogue, and the capabilities to do it... buy they simply don't (think about the Surface).
Steve Jobs is on record that Apple doesn’t care about being first (to market). They care about being the best.
This is why secrecy is a huge part of their culture: it allows them to spend years doing R&D work on multiple prototypes until they land on something they think is better than what is already out there.
If they can’t make it work due to the laws of physics (e.g. Apple AirPower) or indecision (e.g. Apple Car), they can shut it down without much fanfare and move on to the next secret R&D project.
Before Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the entire industry had decided separate software and hardware companies were the superior business model. With Intel processors, Microsoft software, and a huge number of PC compatible manufacturers.
Jobs doubled down on the combination of hardware and software designed and implemented under one roof. That bet paid off past anyone’s expectations.
So Apple now is far ahead of everyone else, when it comes to creating products deeply integrating hardware and software and design.
Because Apple is great at product. They have product built into their DNA. Specs and technology are only there to deliver a product experience. Few companies in the technology space think this way.
Other companies are also really bad at product. Google can't convey a coherent product strategy to save their lives. Great at technology (and building chat apps lol), terrible at product.
my generalized thoughts (and there are exceptions so don’t bother replying with “what about XYZ” because its a generalization):
1. Apple focus on customer story for every product. They may get it wrong sometimes but every product is sold with “this is how it will impact your life for the better”.
2. Apple understand brand and fashion. Unlike other companies, they don’t typically rush out the gate with a million variants to try and capture every part of the market. They don’t let it cheapen their brand and they avoid brand fatigue.
3. They stick with things for longer . Other companies tend to throw products at the wall early and hope they stick. Apple comes in later and then doesn’t relent for a long time compared to competitors.
4. They try and not focus on just specs. Other brands focus on features, and do a really bad job at telling you why you need it.
Apple aggressively focus on low-volume high-margin opportunities, have been doing so for some decades, and have a giant war chest to make bets with. In many ways, they work like the very very large version of a successfully bootstrapped business.
Most of their peers pursue maximum volume in an attempt to dominate a market and drown all competition, inebitably at much lower margins. It's the continuation of the VC launch-or-bust rocketship model most of them were born from.
The difference then means that Apple can try making something really unique and compelling and call it a profitable success based on much much smaller sales volume. And if it does happen to launch like a rocketship (as the iPod, iPhone, and iPad each did) all the better.
But their peers set a much higher mark for sales volume when thinking about what's a success or failure. If a product is only lightly taken up, even if nominally profitable at their margins, it's more like a distraction or clue rather than a success in itself. So they scavenge the project and move on to an alternative market or a parallel product idea.
This all sets Apple up to make slow, well-considered bets on quality and design coherency instead of strictly trying to race to market and outmaneuver everyone for volume.
They didn't need those numbers for the iPhone to be worth their original R&D effort, but winning those numbers is even more advantageous for them because of their core philosophy around volume and margins.
Meanwhile, Microsoft/Google/etc are playing a whole different game. When they succeed, they also saturate a market, but that's the only time they call it a success and so they approach the whole product design process differently.
Apple have only had 1 successful product, and thats a flat device with a screen for media consumption.
iPod, iPhone, and iPad are just different sizes of this device.
The only thing Apple have done which elevated themselves above their peers is have marketing which positioned them higher in the market.
Remember those Black and White ads of Steve Jobs next to Ghandi, Malcolm X, and Charlie Chaplin?
They are paying off now in spades.
That interpretation seems pretty out of sync with their financial history across divisions, their operating margin across divisions, their customer loyalty across divisions, and pretty much everyone's experience of the world, but maybe you're right.
You may not like their products, and you may think their customers are idiots hypnotized by villianous marketers or something, but that's kind of the point of it all: by targetting high margins and precisely volume instead of low margins and maximum volume, they really don't need to care what you think. And that lets them approach products differently.
>You may not like their products, and you may think their customers are idiots hypnotized by villianous marketers or something.
Thats quite a stretch to assume that opinion from my comment?
I actually love Macbook Pros. IMO they are the best Laptop ever built. However in the global market of laptops they are not patrticularly successful. The entiety of the MacOS ecosystem (of which Macbook Pros are a small percentage) barely breaks 20% of the market share.
Are their products more reliable, more fully featured, and objectivley better than their competitiors? No they are not. The reason they are regarded as a more premium option in the market is not because they make less product with more profit margin, its because they have had an incredibly clever marketing department for the last 20 years meticulously curating their brand presence and public perception into being the most premium tech company which produces the best products.
That's the difference in strategy. Apple only cares about profits not about market share. Market share only matters when margins are low and you need volume to bring revenue numbers up. When your margins are high, you can have a much smaller market share but also use that to create a more opinionated brand image and drive brand loyalty.
Thats fine until your revenue growth stagnates. Its then that your shareholders come knocking demanding growth, at which point market share becomes incredibly important. When that happens, opinionated brand image needs to become much more generic brand image to start attracting more of the market.
This is what happened with Xerox, IBM, Microsoft, and it will happen to Apple too.
Xerox, IBM, and Microsoft were unable to stay innovative. All three brands had huge missteps entering emerging market categories. Xerox stumbled during the PC transition, IBM with commodity servers, and Microsoft with mobile. The risk of building a brand is building an inflexible brand that doesn't have the agility to change.
It's true that trying to enter every market and own a huge market share in it can lead to lower risk of having to stay ahead of every innovation (as we can see with Google and its inability to productize AI properly) but since Apple's turnaround its execution has been top notch, and that was 20 years ago. With products like the Vision Pro Apple is explicitly trying to avoid losing the innovation race that Xerox, IBM, and Microsoft did.
> Are their products more reliable, more fully featured, and objectivley better than their competitiors? No they are not.
This is your personal opinion. My personal opinion, is very much the opposite.
> The reason they are regarded as a more premium option in the market is not because they make less product with more profit margin, its because they have had an incredibly clever marketing department for the last 20 years meticulously curating their brand presence and public perception into being the most premium tech company which produces the best products.
I've heard this same boring claim now for about 20 years. It was wrong as a broad statement twenty years ago, and such a statement I would hazard is still wrong now.
I've had a twenty year career in IT. Starting with PC repair and working for a PC OEM, however the vast majority of my career has been spent in fields involving Linux. (Linux Administrator/Systems Engineering/DevOPS through to executive leadership). I know how computers work, I know how the hardware works, I know the relative value of parts that go into things, yes I can, always have, and still will build machines including using on a regular basis all major operating systems in place today and despite all of this, I still remain an Apple customer and its not because im some dumbo non technical individual tricked by apples fancy marketing voodoo.
It's because for those twenty years Apple has consistently conducted themselves in a way with me personally that for the vast majority of cases, has served me best as a user and as their customer. As opposed to some third party who is paying them to exploit me through their operating system or some mass of adware shipped with their operating system, not just this years profit margins, not just for as long as im in the store and to which afterwards im left alone once ive paid them with a "fuck you, got mine."
Just a few of the events of the past twenty years that have kept me as an apple customer:
* 2006ish era macbook. HDD dies at random just outside of warranty. No local apple stores at the time. Local authorised repairer spends two weeks dicking me around on a fix, nothing. I push it to Apple who was not even local at the time. A week later I have a BRAND NEW macbook, not just a drive, outside of warranty, complete with brand new warranty, an additional year tacked on top and an apology for the service I had received. (We now have apple stores so this would not occur again I imagine.)
* 2014ish iPhone. Much like the macbook I start having issues outside of warranty, it is unable to be debugged in store. Dude wanders away, comes back. "Have you got a backup?", "Yes?", "We'll just give you a refurb, newer model, with warranty, are you happy with that?" "lol, yes I am."
* 2012 15" MacBook pro retina battery replacement - Battery dies outside of warranty in around 2017 and im informed no stock currently exists in the country, and that i'll be waiting months if I wanted a replacement. I am immediately informed that if I do not want to wait, I can instead have a significantly more powerful, and higher specced refurb model, complete with brand new warranty in place of waiting the month for a replacement. I took the replacement. Again, this machine was OUTSIDE of the warranty window. That one retina MBP purchase due to this replacement saw my laptop needs covered for a decade.
This is only touching on a tiny amount of the circumstances that have led to me remaining to continue investigating the purchase of products from Apple. Not everyone will have had these interactions, or come away from Apple positively, and perhaps one day, I also will not and my opinions will change. But at this point, from the day I became a customer through now, I have received a better long term support experience as a customer from Apple, then I have from any other organisation on the planet.
Do you even realize that Apple owns most of the above-1000$ laptop market and makes something like 40% of all computer profits because it sells so few computers at such a high price?
I'd love to be not successful making a luxury product that sells at commodity volume.
No, it is the vast amount of risk they are willing to take. Microsoft/alphabet have vast amounts of money too, but no appetite for risk.
Apple is willing to dump tens of billions and years into R&D for physical products, fail, and then try again. Microsoft half asses it, and then pulls back instead of plowing through (see them shutting down Microsoft retail stores and windows phone). But they have that Excel and Windows B2B gravy train they can ride for the foreseeable future.
Microsoft is actually doing great right now, but the thing they're doing great at is Azure and cloud services like 365, plus some very lucky AI investments.
Shutting down their bad products was a good move, even if they should've made good products in the first place.
AirPods/pro/max? They've taken major presence a space owned by Sony, Samsung and Bose.
Apple Watch Ultra?
Though it's thin and flat, The iPhone X was a huge leap in specs, contrary to the entire market analyst sentiment that people wanted cheaper phones. Apple made a big bet that people would want the opposite: more expensive phones, and they were right.
M series of chips is an arm processor, licensed by ARM and fabricated by TSMC.
On top of that it is a processor. Did apple R&D invent the processor? No, they licensed an existing design, tweaked it, and paid a factory to make it for them.
Airpods are just bluetooth headphones. Did Apple R&D invent bluetooth, or even bluetooth headphones?
Apple watch was not even the first smart watch to market. They did not invent the watch, and they did not invent the smart watch.
You must be pretty blinkard to think that Apple invented all these things instead of licensing existing patents and repackaging them, which is what they do best.
Who is talking about patents? I was talking about business risk. Since when does invention ever imply economic gain? It's business 101, invention rarely leads to business payoffs unless there is innovation in the market, i.e. it is manufactured, packaged, sold, distributed to the demands of the day. Who invented the PC? Kenbak corp & John Blankenbaker, arguably - they didn't last. Motorola invented the mobile phone. Invention is important but is no indication of long term business success.
On the M series of chips, "Tweaked it" is a heavy lift. You are vastly underplaying the amount of Apple's design work that went into the M series of chips. It's led to massive performance gains against the competition.
Airpods are "just" bluetooth headphones, but happen to be the ones that have the most market share by far. It's about design and quality.
The Apple Watch also is the most widely adopted smart watch, by far. Because of how it was designed and manufactured.
The facts are that Apple has taken major risks repeatedly with their design and product decisions, and reaps the rewards with higher margins and market share than the competition. This isn't blinkard, this is just reality.
I have no interest in convincing anyone else, maybe they are only risky according to me.
But I do know they seem to result in net incomes that others would seemingly find envious, and yet the others are not able to replicate, so the empirical evidence doesn’t make it seem so easy.
Apple has invested in developing the full stack for their products. Not only do they have the full stack of components for the products but the entire toolchain to develop those products. This gives them a very strong foundation for pretty much any product they want to pursue.
The AppleTV and HomePod both use older A-series SoCs and run iOS with a custom shell on top. They get all of the iOS media and peripheral handling capability "for free". Both projects can focus on TV or speaker features since the base OS is largely a solved problem for them. If they need some special consideration from somewhere in SWE they just file a Radar. They don't just get binary blob dumps of firmware from outside vendors and have to beg for bug fixes and hope their contract is big enough to get some consideration.
The Vision Pro leverages their ARM SoCs, base OS, and all the motion coprocessors that have been in their phones and watches for a decade. Novel improvements from the Vision Pro's development will just feed back to those components and make it into the next phone, watch, or whatever.
Most other companies don't actually own their whole product stack. Even Microsoft is at the mercy of their suppliers with the Surface line. They get what Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD have to offer. Smartphone manufacturers are grabbing Qualcomm and Samsung SoCs which are collections of Cortex cores then slap Android on top hoping that Google's latest version is better than the previous version.
It's hard to really make leapfrog products when you're shipping the same shit as your competitors and trying to compete on price.
Because they have spent decades building a brand which most people see as premium and desirable. Doesnt matter what the product is now, if it has an apple logo on it the majority of people will want one.
Other companies trying to compete with Apple in any space will automatically have this disadvantage that they are seen as the inferior choice because Apple have repeatedly positioned themselves as the most premium player in the market, and so thats just what people expect now.
OS: Windows is a add-riddled and always ignoring your preferences and getting in the way of your work.
Tablet: Android tablet are slow (or soon to be) and not much applications designed for them
Laptop: Windows and never a good mix of great components, perfomance, and weight.
Phone: Only a few do not add uninstallable junk, and these days, they all try to copy the iPhone which is not something I want is I’m trying to move away from the iPhone.
Speaker System: If I want a homepod alternative, I will not be looking to get inside another closed ecosystem. And I’d want lifetime support (airplay has been reversed-engineered). The last time I used Sonos, it wanted me to use its music player or something.
Apple is and always has been a product company. They invent technology to serve the product, and they don't particularly talk up the specifics of the technology, preferring to talk about what it enables. For example, the numerous interaction features introduced by the iPhone, such as swiping, pinching, and tapping. And the high resolution display they demanded for their Vision Pro.
One of the reasons for this is that Apple is a design-centric company. They really prioritize aesthetic and functional design, and they have a customer base that will allow them to flex these muscles in building luxury lifestyle products. Consumers respond to that. Products like that tend to have a segment-defining quality.
Consider Google. A couple years ago, a reporter documented the nearly (iirc) 20 attempts Google has made at a messenger. Meanwhile, Apple made one and ground away at it until it became great.
Google is a company that -- and this is true -- dropped trou and put apps on my phone called "Google Meet" and "Google Meet (Original)." And don't forget Duo. See also having "Google Pay" and "Google Wallet."
With a side of Android is kinda meh and look at pics of various Google execs at industry events. There's a solid chance there's an iphone in their hands.
Are you aware that Google Pay and Google Wallet are completely different products, and that Apple has exactly the same counterparts even named the same?
Apple does have similar level of branding confusion elsewhere. Look at Apple Music vs iTunes Store. How many people understand the difference between the two subscriptions?
Anyone who has been around longer than a minute in the ecosystem. The iTunes Store isn't a subscription service, it's an a la carte store. Done!
More importantly: it's not confusing because no one really cares or needs to care. New folks use the Apple Music subscription, old folks that know the difference use either.
There is, in fact, an iTunes subscription called iTunes Match. That's the one that lets you upload your own tracks to the cloud, scans them to match against the catalog, and then gives you DRM-free high quality downloads of it.
On the other hand, with Apple Music, there's a different subscription that also lets you upload your music to the cloud and scans them for matches, but what you get back out of it is DRMed downloads. Which don't work outside of the Apple ecosystem, and stop working even on it if you cancel your Apple Music subscription.
On top of that, the way matching works is different for the two services. iTunes Match actually analyzes the raw data of the track to do the exact match, while Apple Music seems to prefer metadata. Which means that, with the latter, you'll often get a different variant of the song, in cases where multiple versions exist.
I'm aware of iTunes Match vs Apple Music Sync Library. Incorporating legacy services into new ones is always a product management tap dance of tradeoffs.
My point is that bring your own library of pre-ripped music into a subscription service for syncing is rare these days unless you're over a certain age or are an audiophile (at which point there are better alternatives like Roon). If you're going to do rare things, then there will always be nuances to understanding the tradeoffs Apple took to support you.
It's not rare for anyone who already has a collection of music, e.g. because they are coming from a different service. It doesn't have to be ripped - it may well have been purchased via numerous existing services that sell downloadable files, from Amazon to Apple itself.
>My question is why does it seem like only Apple can do this, over and over?
Because they don't just treat things as hardware, but as a complete ecosystem. Sure, they price things at a point where they can afford to make a quality product, but it's more than that... There are times when things aren't perfect, but overall everything works together and is very high quality. When I've tried in the past to buy non-Apple gear, things tend to be clunky, incomplete, and put a high burden on me as a user, even in cases where the specs might be better than Apple gear.
Because they're able to understand what is actually valuable to their customers, and they'll go the extra mile to make sure that what matters is done properly.
It's comparable to why 'Google Video Search' lost out to youtube way back in the day. The google engineer nerds couldn't understand why no one liked their product: it had all these options for uploading video with the best quality and all these formats, while youtube had worse quality and few options. They missed the point and didn't understand the users, and were caught up in the tech rather than what was actually valuable to the users (basically: dead simple to 'just upload a video' - quality doesn't matter as much as that).
Kinda like how Mark Z. has been talking about how the Oculus has similar resolution. It's not the tech specs that make the product - those are necessary but not sufficient. If the product is supposed to be AR: then it needs to actually be AR. And that means. e.g., that details like virtual shadows on real surfaces MUST be included, and must actually work properly. If it's not, then it's only kinda-AR. That's the kind of long tail that Apple understands, and other companies don't. The tech must fit the users, and the experience must be complete.
First, we cannot ignore Apple Fanboys (and I am not using that in a negative sense). They have a large base of users who will jump at nearly anything they put out.
However they also have a track record of doing things, both big and small, and pushing the industry to go a certain way. Dropping CD drives is a great example of this, this was an inevitability with more and more distribution through the internet. This would be a risk for a manufacture to try with a random computer because consumers may just ignore it. Apple has the power to say, well you want a Mac? here are your couple options and we are doing this anyways.
Sometimes this fails, see all USB-C Laptops.
But I think it also often comes from thinking about the entire experience. Take them removing the head phone jack (the debate on whether or not they actually needed to do that aside), at the same time we got the AirPods.
Or the iPhone wasn't just simply, without a physical keyboard. It emphasized the advantages of this throughout the entire OS.
But regardless of all the above, I think the simple fact that they just happen to generally sell a lot of devices. Enough that it can normalize a decision for consumers and then other manufactures can follow without risk.
It’s because the majority of tech firms with sufficient capital are not willing to invest in the development of a full product, nor frankly, do they have the leadership to do so. I also believe they don’t have the smarts to capitalise on disruption, so they’d much rather maintain the status quo by swatting competitors.
However the c-levels at those companies are happy to chase $$$, and will closely copy whichever hardware and software is deemed the best in the market at the time. Some also do this because they see the product as a threat to their core business.
There will also be various cheerleaders who exalt that apple’s ideas are trivially obvious and were always the pre-destined pathway for the category. Seemingly ignoring the long floundering that occurred before Apple’s entry.
Apple tends to jump on the bandwagon late but then turns thing mainstream. That worked well for ultrabooks (e.g. sony vaio, then MacBook air, nowadays every laptop) or earbuds.
The AR/VR or visionsomething^TM case is a bit different in that apple actually has to implement a new market. Thus far they don't seem to be trying that hard.
They don't really have to implement the market themselves - they just have to create the marketting buzz. Then they'll happily let Meta build the volume market where the profit margins suck (much as Android did for the iPhone business)
The problem with every headset over the last ten years was that they just didn’t have the technical commitment to really overcome the major problems. Making good VR is a VERY tech heavy endeavor. Apple has shown that they can make hardware which really begins to solve those issues (good resolution and quality pass through being one, having a nice OS being another). The AVP is truly starting to make a difference in what is possible with VR. It’s not just more optimism.
Apple has a history to sticking with things like this. Watch and HomePod were both seen as over-priced and sold poorly the first iterations. Apple leadership had the confidence to see through those initial versions. This was part of the internal culture during my time at Apple.
> This was part of the internal culture during my time at Apple.
From a management perspective, how do they handle the people side of that - keeping good people on the team and keeping them motivated to do something extraordinary?
People don't like spending time on unsuccessful projects and don't want their names associated with them, and don't want to work extra hard on something that won't come to fruition.
Maybe Apple management has enough internal reputation that employees are willing to take that risk (but even Apple management has flops - the car seeming to be a recent example). But that doesn't feel like a sufficient explanation to me.
You don't know if Apple sees them as failures. We weren't building to v1. We were building a long lived product. We knew that. We understood our vision and that it might take years to see that through. I don't think anyone would be ashamed to have Apple Watch or HomePod on their resume.
Clearly you are right and they were right, but that's hindsight.
Getting people to see that in forseight when they aren't seeing results, they won't for years, and it's all uncertain that it all won't be a waste of time, and it's frustrating and they have other, more certain offers - that's difficult leadership and management, and I wonder how Apple does it.
But we were getting the results we expected, just not what articles and blog posts expected. I learned very quickly that most things I read regarding projects I had knowledge of were wildly inaccurate.
So basically they have the patience, the cash stockpile, and the management culture to support large multi-year product field testing with non-employees.
I know this is anecdotal but my brother uses the Vison Pro daily ever since we have had it. He got a Oculus DK1 and a Oculus Quest 2 (I bought the Quest 2 off from him) and if he wasn't wearing it so much I have worn it and the best experience from it is media consumption. Its really a iPad with a ridiculous screen.
My main concern with the vision pro is that all use cases I know of (other than gaming) work better with some sort of pass through HUD display like the HoloLens.
They spent a ton of company resources, weight and power making the wrong form factor emulate the right form factor, and are shipping with zero killer apps.
You can’t even let your friends play with it without getting it re-fit to their head at the Apple Store, which basically kills social/word of mouth marketing. It certainly isn’t a fashion item / status symbol to be seen in public like all their other stuff.
Maybe the “real” product is sitting in the wings and will be ready to ship in a few years, but the current form factor seems like a non-starter to me.
My opinion, and its very naive because I've only really tried the Vision Pro for this type of content, but immersive video is the current killer app for the Vision Pro. Sitting in the studio with Alicia Keys warming up for her tour was almost equal parts uncomfortable and amazing.
But their work on the software side transfers seamlessly to a pass through device later. It still serves its purpose as a beta (beta meaning data collection and improvement process, not its modern “we just don’t support this” definition.
"Pro" is a misnomer here, though. "Pro" normally means "with extra features for professionals", where here it means "it's more of a dev kit than it is an actual product".
The main use case Apple presented, productivity, works much better with an opaque screen, not pass-through. There's a reason we don't make transparent screens, nor transparent windows on our screens: text and images are much easier to read if they are opaque.
There were lots of rumors that Apple was working on both AR glasses and VR goggles, but had to focus on the latter because the tech just isn't there to do glasses right.
There's nothing that says that a pair of glasses can't have panels on the sides and top to provide full coverage [0]. The main obstacle is miniaturizing the necessary compute and display technology.
Given my age, I would say the same applies to all headsets I have seen since 1994, when I saw someone using one to play Doom at the Lisbon computer fair.
> Apple know full well that this is not a mass market product.
I really feel like too many people are ignoring this. If anyone understands how to play the long game with a new product it is Apple. I mean the Apple TV was a "Hobby" for many years.
Has Apple ever put out a "Pro" version of a product before the "normal" version?
I think it also helps the clear sharing of technology between this and other products. From using the M2 tech, to iOS and (I assume) built with much of the AR tech they have been showing off for the last several years on iPhone.
I honestly kinda wonder how much of ARKit was directly made from work on the Vision Pro?
This version of Vision Pro was never going to be a massive product, I expect they knew they would get returns (and they hoped to mitigate that with the in store demos but that only does so much). But it is setting the ground work for a long term investment.
There are many headsets much more expensive than that. They aren't as mainstream but for the hobbyist who is willing to pay more for better, they are definitely out there.
It could play out like the iPhone where it costs N times more than the competition, but lasts 2N times longer, and has better resale value. (For iPhone, N is ~1.5)
I’m having a hard time imagining that level of planned obsolescence for VR displays though. If anything, I’d expect the quest 4 (or 5, or whatever generation matches Apple specs) to last longer.
Of course, it’s a moot point for me and the large percentage of the population that will never strap Facebook-controlled eye trackers to their head.
iPhones on average don't last 3 times as much ib people's hands as Android phones that cost 66% as much. Better resale value is fair, but I am contesting that 2N figure strongly.
I regularly replace my screen 1-2 times between iPhone upgrades, and have never kept one until end of security update support. I've never managed to replace an android screen, and have only replaced one android phone that still had security update support (I've only bought flagship androids.)
The accelerometer on my X finally started failing, making it impossible to hang up voice calls. It wouldn't turn the screen back on after I took the phone away from my face :-D
Looking at the number of articles which compare m3 macbooks against "intel" but mean "the intel macbook from years ago", I totally expect to read lots of articles which pretend non-apple devices don't exist.
In some ways that’s understandable and can be very helpful. Because if you’re a Mac person looking to buy a new Mac then that may be what you have. Newer Intel Macs don’t exist.
If you’re a PC user looking to switch to Mac, or you’re looking for a machine and don’t care about which operating system it has, then it’s less useful.
I hate windows as much as the herd, but OS choice isn't always as clean as "better or worse".
I need to run Windows in some form for various industry specific needs that a VM or emulation simply cannot meet at the moment. I don't like it, but that isn't going to change the state of things.
It's a delight to be able to choose what and where you work with, but it's not the reality a lot of us have to deal with.
It’s the first one. Apple packed a ridiculous amount of ultra powerful stuff in it. As the article says they may find out that they don’t need some of that stuff. Also we know that everything gets cheaper overtime.
And Apple put an absolute ridiculous amount of money into designing and building that thing and they’re trying to recoup some of that. But by version two or three a lot more of it will have already been recouped and it won’t be as necessary to keep the prices high.
The first color televisions, cell phones, refrigerators, computers, and microwave ovens were not exactly cheap either.
In the same way that a MacBook is 4x the price of an Xbox.
As far as the market is concerned: the Quest is a gaming platform that can do computer stuff if needed. The AVP is a computer that can do gaming stuff.
So what? the iPhones have 4x the price of mid-tier Android phones the whole time.
The point is, for now the AVP is the only iPhone-tier (Pro Ultra Whatever) VR headset. Meta's crap (I have all of them) is analogous to the mid tier budget phones, in this metaphor. (Even the fantastically expensive Quest Pro is just like... an insult, even though it does have eye tracking which is now absolute minimum table stakes (and Quest 3 doesn't have it))
The current price it too high to go mainstream, yes, for sure. But let's see the next. AVP 3Gs could fuckin' destabilize the fuck out of this whole nascent ecosystem.
Until now, VR headsets were used almost exclusively for gaming, even if they were capable of other things.
The AVP was made to be a general use device in a way that other headsets just aren’t.
This is like iPhone vs. flip phones in 2006 as far as I can tell.
Yes, your flip phone can play music, take pictures, use the internet, etc. just like an iPhone. But, you would be a fool think the devices are in the same league. Apple just sort of defined a genre of product that didn't exist.
My problem with the vision pro is that it doesn’t do enough new, the iPhone and the MacBook Air let you use a computer in an area where you previously couldn’t and made it accessible to normal people. The vision pro isn’t that much better in terms of bringing the technology in a user friendly package to the masses than the quest.
A good measure of an Apple product is if you can pitch a version of it to your grandma or dad who can’t open PDF file. If something only appeals to tech enthusiasts it is not a good Apple product (except the professional line products intended to be used for serious work by professionals which the vision pro isn’t)
iPhone 1 was limited but extremely useful at launch. People like me that bought on day 1 couldn’t get enough of it. Had an amazing unparalleled Web browser experience and email, an iPod replacement and Google Maps / Youtube in your pocket felt magical. Also got a Vision Pro on day one and used it just a handful of times. Use cases and value prop of AVP nebulous. Smartphones were a popular product category when iPhone launched in a way VR / AR headsets aren’t today.
I don't think VR is all that different from smartphones at the time of the iPhone launch. The Quest has sold over 20 million units. And at the time of the iPhone launch, a lot of people still had "camera phones" and "feature phones". Business users (like me) has Blackberry / Treo / or a few Windows devices. There were weird texting phones for teens that had keyboards, etc. But most people did not have a smartphone.
You are saying that sales, usage, range of use cases and types of audiences of VR headsets today is comparable to Smartphones (Blackberry Palm), Cell phones and personal music players in 2007? Those are the devices that iPhone improved upon and replaced. Most VR headsets stopped being used shortly after purchase and only a few games sub genres have signs of product-market fit
the first iPhone (2007) cost $499 and the second iPhone, iPhone 3g (2008), cost $199. while the 3g support and App Store helped, I think the much lower price led to volume increase from 1.39M to 11.63M YoY.
They actually cost the same the behind the scenes the difference was the subsidy was available by the time the 3G came out when it wasn’t available at lunch.
A good measure for an Apple product was for me always: it makes tech disappear. That was always the differentiator, I feel: it doesn’t feel like tech and it doesn’t look like it.
One of the things I remember about it was someone, maybe Jeff Atwood, spent a fortune on a maxed out model with an SSD.
Even though the SSD was much tinier than the hard drive and the processor in the machine was slow and under clocked to be able to manage heat, in combination with the SSD it was fast compiling code and ran smoother than a normal MacBook Pro.
The flipside is I think the hard drive was a 4200 RPM model and performed absolutely abysmally.
But if you didn’t need much computing power, say you’re a writer, it was extremely small and lightweight and easy to carry. It’s not surprising it changed the industry.
I think of the Vision Pro as the 1984 Mac of VR/AR. The original Mac was next to useless and, adjusted for inflation, cost twice what the Vision Pro does. But it changed the world.
(Yes, it was near useless. The original Mac had 128k of RAM, which allowed for only the smallest of applications. It wasn't until the Mac 512k came out that people could do real work on these machines.)
The next rev of Vision products from Apple, or maybe the rev after that, will just be leaps and bounds beyond what anyone else is doing in the space. No new paradigm of computing truly begins until Apple starts it.
Also, much like the Apple Watch, they took their best guess at what it’s good for but don’t really know yet. So they’ve kind of tried to prepare for everything.
It’s going to be interesting to see what it really shines at as more developers make different kinds of apps.
Personally I'm betting it's not even a dev kit for future VR devices, though we will almost definitely get an iteration or two of them before we get to what I think is their true goal, AR glasses. There's so much unnecessary stuff here if the goal isn't that, mainly the ridiculous outward facing eye screen, that makes sense if it's just to simulate as close as possible using AR glasses.
I can't remember if it was here or somewhere else I saw the point made that the current Vision Pro is the worst one Apple will ever make. All future Vision* products will likely be technically improved from the current model. So if the Vision Pro is good right now it really can only be refined and get better.
The original Apple Lisa, which cost $9,995 in 1983, would cost approximately $27,905 in today's dollars, adjusting for inflation over the period up to 2023.
I am happy and avid user of Meta's recent Ray Ban Smart Glasses as Im a sunglass wearer (think a huge part of the population are too) and use my phone to take pics a lot. Now do that reliably through Meta's glasses and Zuckerberg just showed the latest Meta glass beta which you can ask "what mountain am i looking at," at it audibly tells you.
Im betting Apple will release similar smart glasses like Meta's in the next year or two.
> I think the description of the VisionPro as a dev kit is spot on.
A devkit prepared for lock down. It's the old formula: let devs make the platform great, then pull a Sherlock or increase the platform fees. Count me out.
iOS non-game apps aren't exactly innovative. It's Gmail. It's YouTube. It's social media photo and video scrolls. It's been more than a decade, and the most innovative thing I can find on top downloads and top grossing, Duolingo, is also kind of a game, like if you remove the game part of it it's kind of not much, is it? All the innovations in Google Maps are kind of tied up in backend technologies that aren't specific to the phone at all, indeed predated it.
Once they figured out touchscreen keyboard and accelerated web browsing sort of everything else fell into place. Then the retina display was introduced, and software improved the camera. I don't know what roles 3rd party devs played in all of this, but those list of innovations happened years ago.
They don't Sherlock games.
Even then, is Apple going to approve a game with guns on the AVP? Time will tell. Beatsaber is an innovative game but it leaned on the basic premise of people doing something illegal, uploading non licensed maps and tracks.
Hacker News commenters don't know much about making games - even when they work for huge game studios! - and they don't know much about VR - even when they work at companies making VR headsets!
Hugo must certainly be aware of the Varjo XR3, which is actually the most comparable device to the AVP and even more expensive, but there were developers at Apple on the AVP team who never heard of it, and many more Oculus developers.
At the end of the day this is a love letter to halo product positioning coupled with relentless vendor lock-in applied to helpless consumers. I agree with you that the locked down nature of the product makes it as DoA for developers as the Apple Watch was. People forget that the first apps for iPhones were delivered via jailbreaks made by hackers, who had unlimited access, and that plus Steam ultimately teed up what limited things you can do in iOS apps today, not brilliant strategy.
Agree there is less worry about Apple Sherlocking games. But you are looking at existing apps, not considering Apple is sending emails to devs like me saying “please invent new greenfield use cases for this!” But this time some devs realize Apple will copy the first app that gets popular with AVP users.
For a recent example, during the pandemic mental health journaling apps became popular, and now Apple has their own that has 10x the capability by sticking fingers in all your sensitive location, photo, health data that those 3rd party apps could never dream of.
Aren't they already charging the 30% app store tax for the privilege of running software on the device you bought? I doubt that fees going to go up from there.
My two cents (as an owner of a Vision Pro): 1) This is a beta product and I wouldnt recommend it to anyone that is not a developer or in a position to create apps for it, 2) this is going to have as big of an impact on humanity as the computer or the internet did and every engineer or aspiring entrepreneur should pay it attention.
This device is magical. Yes it's too heavy, yes there are not enough apps, yes sharing it with other people is a hassle. Every one of those issues will be solved in the next 2 generations.
When the screen is 50% better and it weighs 50% less, 20% of knowledge workers will be tuned in daily. Technology isnt a zero sum game, but I genuinely believe the impact will be bigger than AI. AI changes the way you work, Apple Vision will change the way you live, which will change the things you consume, which will impact the work that needs to be done to serve you. Empires will rise and fall. Travel to beaches will go up, travel to tier 3 towns and cities with minor attractions could get obliterated. Most TVs will disappear. My grand children will be able to experience memories with me long after I'm dead. After this, looking at my smartphone seems so analog. Anyway, I could go on for hours
Lastly, on the topic of pricing, there is a great book titled Positioning by Al Reiss that highlights the rational behind Apple's strategy on pricing. They are a second mover in this space, they needed to come out of the gate as the absolute gold standard of this technology and position it as the best money can buy. They delivered on both the tech and pricing. Long after the price comes down, they'll still own that position of being the best money can buy. When you own the position, it takes a lot to lose it. It will be almost impossible for Meta to take that from them now. Big mistake on Meta's part.
Having tried the VP out for a week, I categorically disagree that VR is going to have remotely this level of impact on humanity. Having to wear something on your head to compute is fatiguing and isolating. You can’t bring your existing peripherals and audio equipment unless they’re proprietary and wireless. Passthrough video is nauseating and blurry even at the highest refresh rates. The paradigm is also intrinsically inaccessible to the blind and disabled.
The immersiveness for entertainment is neat, but this seems like a relatively minor use case in the grand scheme of things. And with gesture based controls, gaming is pretty much a non-starter.
Do you really envision a future of families hanging out together on the couch, each member with their own VR goggles…? Halfway through my return period, I realized that I much preferred reality.
FWIW, I love my Quest for the occasional gaming romp, but little else.
100% agree. Until this tech has the same form factor as a pair of glasses and no wires it will be stuck in the realms of gaming and porn. Not a small market, perhaps, but hardly a seismic shift in life on Earth.
Having actually tried the thing, and having used VR for several years before that, I’d like to think that my opinion is not just a simple knee-jerk response.
Did you own prior VR headsets? If so, what is different about this one?
I also have been telling people that VR is magical and that while both current hardware and the current software has issues it will get better and that this stuff is going to have a big impact on humanity... only, I've been telling people this for just shy of a decade now ;P. I don't see the Apple Vision Pro as either the product that made any of this magical nor is it the product that made any of this viable... it is just yet another incrementally-improved product in a category that has been on the verge of getting it right for, well, forever.
I agree. It's obvious this technology has a big future, the question is, outside of the current $3500+ niche marker, when? The Oculus Rift was created in 2011, id Software was demoing it at E3 2012, and in 2016 consumer versions of HTC Vive and Oculus Rift launched, as did Microsoft HoloLens and Google Daydream.
As it improves, I don't question that it has a future, and some people like it so much they're working on it and writing apps now. The question is how many years from now before a larger mass of people are using it?
The OP talks about the Internet, but the Internet started some time between the 1969 first ARPAnet transmission and 1974 paper on the Internet protocol. Out to 1993 most people were not consciously using the Internet, it was a rather niche thing. With the release of the Netscape web browser in 1994, the inclusion of IP networking capability in Windows 1995 etc., this began to change.
One could say this about AI as well. Up until 2019, Norvig and Russell's CS textbook "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" had only a ten page sub-chapter on neural networks. The now recognized as groundbreaking 2012 ImageNet competition victory by Krizhevsky, Sutskever and Hinton, was greeted with skepticism and disinterest on this forum ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4611830 ). The ideas for connectionist AI were there starting with McCulloch and Pitts 1943 paper, so that's a lot of development where things still weren't really happening until around 2012 or even 2019.
Some people can see the potential in things decades in advance, but they can take time to move into the mainstream, and it is difficult to determine how long that can take.
Lots of companies had made “smart phones“ before the iPhone came along. The iPhone is what blew the market open.
Other companies had MP3 players for a few years first. The iPod exploded.
You listed some good examples yourself. Windows 3 was nice but it was 95 that really made it big. The Internet existed but it was Netscape that made it takeoff, followed by AOL.
There’s always an invisible threshold. You can make something in a category but until it passes that threshold it doesn’t really change the world. It could be price, speed, ease of use, some new piece of technology, or a combination of all those factors.
Existing VR headsets obviously sell well enough that an industry exists, but it’s nowhere near ubiquitous. It hasn’t hit that threshold (assuming it exists for VR). Apple clearly has set their own bar, much higher than others, hoping that they’ve hit that magical point or at least gotten close enough to it. Today that cost a lot of money like the original Mac.
Going from the quest one to the two to the three has increased sales but I’m not sure it’s done anything to really approach that magic inflection point. Who knows how long it would have taken to get there. Maybe the quest four or five would, maybe the eight. We still don’t know where that line is.
But Apple is really pushing and that makes it interesting to watch if nothing else.
I bought an HTC vive 7+ years ago and have middling opinions on its viability long-term as a major game platform. VR is fun and novel, but once the novelty wears off it can be tedious.
It's worth doing a vision pro demo in an Apple store if you can. I'm not planning to buy one in its current state, but it was immediately obvious that this was entirely new territory. It moved a piece of technology from fiction to reality in my mind. The eye tracking is hard to believe without having experienced it.
I'm not ready to say that this device will be responsible for such a large technology shift as the previous person, but I think it will play an large, perhaps pivotal role on our way to the next thing.
Disclaimer: I know a lot of people compare this to a device that I can surmise was meant to do a lot of similar things made by Meta; I have not tried this and may be attributing first-mover credit to Apple for things that Meta may have done similarly well. My comment is made from the perspective of somebody who has never experienced eye tracking in any capacity before.
Other headsets are like a DC film and the Vision Pro is like a marvel film before endgame. The differences (that matter in GP’s context) are qualitative rather than quantitative, and a big distinction is the shift from VR gaming, which most incumbents and current VR fans won’t “get” nearly as fast as the public will (once things get going).
Somewhat ironically, I have no interest in showing people my AVP, I use it for hours everyday but showing it to people feels weird in the same way showing your neighbor your workstation and monitors feels weird. (Part of that is, of course, that I’m not going to give them my laptop to run Mac virtual display, which means they won’t fully “get” it anyhow.)
In contrast the quest devices are practically begging to be shown off but lie in disuse a majority of the time, especially if you don’t have time for gaming.
> this is going to have as big of an impact on humanity as the computer or the internet
I don't see how anyone can say this with a straight face. VR/AR just isn't there and won't be there for a lot longer than people think. Everyone always acts like we're -so close- but then we just aren't. Hololens and Oculus are over a decade old, and honestly when I first demo'd both ages ago, they were incredible (especially Hololens.) If I put on a headset now, sure it's better but it's still stuck on that same idea and seems to fundamentally misunderstand how humans interact. Apple's newest product is no different. I think the future of wearable devices looks a lot more like the Meta Ray-bans with some sort of small HUD than a full computer strapped to your face that you can't wear anywhere (without being socially ostracized or robbed).
One way to look at VR headsets is that it's a better computer display -- as large and immersive as you want, without physical limitation. People prefer retina displays and will pay for multi-monitor setups, so we know people value this.
We also know that people are perfectly willing to wear something on their face to be able to see better, and willing to carry something around in their pockets to be more connected -- glasses and phones.
So I think the only real barrier is technical feasibility: can you make it small enough, light enough, power efficient enough, and, of course, affordable enough?
AVP and Oculus clearly aren't there yet. Relative to smartphones, I think we're at the "Palm III" or maybe "Palm V" level of things. I personally have no idea if a path forward to the "iPhone 3S/iPhone 4" level even really exists for VR headsets.
But if it does and we get there, I think there's no doubt that these headsets (probably just goggles at that point) will take over the world, like phones have.
> One way to look at VR headsets is that it's a better computer display -- as large and immersive as you want, without physical limitation.
I just don't agree, because VR's input system is fundamentally flawed. The Verge actually did a good video on this, the input of VR is just wonky. It makes you want to rip your headset off and just use your laptop/tablet (and I'm aware they can act as companions, but at that point...why do you need the headset?). I just don't see how that's going to change anytime soon. There also -are- physical limitations, for one, it's exhausting to wear for extended periods. You have absolutely no peripheral vision, and how is that going to be solved? Even if you made it light, unless it's as light as a pair of glasses, it's not going to be something I want to put on for several -hours- a day. You can't walk away from it; you have to physically remove it.
The best move imo, for VR/AR is as a "background" tech, it can physically remove us from our devices and shouldn't be a new fully fledged computer I'm putting on my face. You also have to understand that generations after Millennials are steadily enjoying -less- "in your face" things, and I think that's the right. I think the future is going to look a lot more like "Her" and a lot less like "Ready Player One," at least on the mass market.
This can change in 30-50 years, but right now? It's just a gimmick and junk drawer tech. Unless there is some crazy jump in the tech in the near future (I doubt given Hololens and Oculus and now Apple have only marginally improved it over a full decade,) I don't see it as anything that is going to penetrate my life.
> One way to look at VR headsets is that it's a better computer display -- as large and immersive as you want, without physical limitation. People prefer retina displays and will pay for multi-monitor setups, so we know people value this.
Except it isn't, because the density just isn't there. The PPD is incredibly low, which is why you have to make things "huge" to compensate. And while huge screens are great for watching movies, it's not great for a lot of other things. It's not comfortable to move your head back & forth just to read a line of text.
In a hypothetical future where these microled displays have 3-5x the density they do today then this starts becoming competitive with today's multi-monitor setups. Except those will also have had improvements to them as well. And even then, the number of people with multi-monitor setups is also pretty small. That's not a smartphone-level revolution or impact.
Totally agree. Best thing about working a life-long career with computers is that you can get away from them quite easily, leave your phone at home, turn off your monitor.
Every time I see an intent by companies to increment my time spent with a computer, to watch their ads, buy another thing I don't need ... I know that I should be doing the exact opposite.
Businesses are not their target market, never has been. They dominated the mobile phone market with their iPhone, and the iPad is still a gold standard product for tablets compared to the dozens of shoddy Android versions out there (coming from someone who leans more Android than Apple with their tech). I can see GP's point regardless of the rollout. Before the VR app stores become such critical masses, Apple will have plenty of time to delight users and capture market share. They have tons of cash and great execution.
> the iPad is still a gold standard product for tablets compared to the dozens of shoddy Android versions out there
iPad are the best versions of "tablets", if we see tablets as a frozen in time "large iphone" version of the concept. Android tablets perfectly fit the category and Samsung is the only distant competion (yet Samsung has Dex, which is increasingly showing its teeth)
But they're way behind in term of tablets as touch enabled computers. Chromebooks have seen more adoption as schools and orgs couldn't justify iPad's price, the top of the line is above what the iPad has to offer, and the Surface Pro took the spot of the North Star of the category, to use the article's metaphor.
So yes, I'd agree with parent, Apple could have made the "what is a computer?" marketing campaign a reality, but didn't have the courage to canibalize their mac line.
I think both are right in different ways. Apple isn't a big enterprise player as far as (except for development), I give all my employees macs to do their daily work on. You don't walk into a bank and see iMacs sitting there usually. So from the desktop computer side, they are not that deep into enterprise. HOWEVER, iPhones, yes. Tons of companies issue iPhones as their company phone. Walk into a store, its getting more and more common that the cashier is using an iPad hooked up to some sort of payment processing device. That is where Apple has their business adoption. Or I take my kids to the trampoline park and the clerk hands me an iPad to fill out the waiver. Their enterprise isn't really that deep in desktops, but it for damn sure is in portable device (iPhone and iPad).
> Apple isn't a big enterprise player as far as (except for development)
They never really went after the tech companies themselves. The way Macs dominate certain development fields is a result of their popularity with consumers that drove companies to adopt the tech to attract talent. Me and many colleagues 5 years ago weren't interested in web startups using a Windows dev environment. Not saying there's merit to that, but my main point is that Apple focused on the end user(which happened to be a burgeoning web dev class during the last 15 years) rather than enterprise.
I think it's further evidenced by how relatively slow Apple has been to deploy some management tools that are more common in Windows-land. Anecodtally it feels like 3rd parties filled the gap on that side for Apple for quite a while. MDM, other IT tools, repair networks, and more recently self-repair kits were all much slower to deploy than how Microsoft (think Dell) went after their corporate customers.
For each family memeber too! There's something incredibly sinister about how Apple operates that people just accept. All those dark patterns and control is just so icky I don't understand how anyone aware of this can submit to this. Just from sheer self-respect.
50% of all our employees choose Mac over PCs. When you wear an Apple Vision Pro and look at your Macbook, it transfers the screen to Apple Vision and allows you to duplicate and extend. No other PC will have this level of integration.
> When the screen is 50% better and it weighs 50% less, 20% of knowledge workers will be tuned in daily.
I don't believe that for a second. Even 50% lighter and it's still going to be more uncomfortable than not wearing one. All so you can have a blurrier screen?
If/when it gets to the weight/comfort of normal glasses then sure. But that's at least a decade away. Probably more.
I spent nearly 40 years of my life glasses-free. Now I need to wear glasses to read a computer display without eye strain. I'd go back to glasses-free in a heartbeat, if I could.
If they can't fix the ever so slight blurryness for everyone it will continue to be a niche product simply because only a small niche wants to accept such a thing. Or only a small niche of people has eyes that can deal with it. Btw I consider my Meta Quest 3 to be a terrible product in almost every way, from hardware to software, from blurryness, from weight, from app availability, from PC compatability, from having to buy extra cables, weight, the strap, passthrough, from even the simplest interactions like clicking on a button... everything was bad.
As the article mentions, this is an intentional thing they've done to cover up the remaining vestiges of the screen door effect. The better the screens get, the less and less they'll have any reason to do it.
Increasing resolution increases computational complexity. This is especially true with the 100hz refresh rate of the display. Current Vision Pro resolution is higher than 4k. Imagine trying to build a 8k 100hz PC. You couldn't even use Display Port or HDMI to transport video data because those channels don't provide enough data.
With the questionable state of Moore's law, and the battery powered nature of the device, it might be awhile before tech catches up. Faster components would use more energy. We need to balance performance with battery capacity, and I expect the product that really catches on will have more of both.
> this is going to have as big of an impact on humanity as the computer or the internet did
I see statements like this about AI too. How can something be bigger than the technology it is built on? The AVP is a computer. AI is a computer accessed through the internet... any computing device that accesses another computing device is further extending the "impact of computers and the internet." I don't get it. Maybe I'm too caught up on the semantics.
If you look at it as purely additive, then sure. If you look at it like this, the era or the horse drawn carriage ended with the motor car, it doesn't get to claim any of the car's influence, despite being a precursor, then no.
VR is the most extreme case of a product that a subset of technophiles absolutely love and that the rest of the population is decidedly meh on. I think that you are vastly overestimating the amount of people who want to spend a large portion of their daily life with large googles strapped to their head isolating them from the people and things in their immediate environment.
This isn't to say that VR won't improve and find some useful niches, but the idea that it could have anywhere near the global impact of smart phones seems wildly optimistic to me.
> I think that you are vastly overestimating the amount of people who want to spend a large portion of their daily life with large googles strapped to their head
For some reason this illogical phrasing that totally excludes the value proposition has become the standard phrasing for arguing why VR/AR won't succeed. It makes no sense. You haven't expressed any part of the value proposition of the product, only a negative aspect of it, so why are you assessing it's value based on that? I could assess the value of a car as "a metal box you are trapped inside of for hours on end" or a phone as a "fragile object that requires constant charging" and decide these products will just never make it.
Of course people don't want goggles strapped to their face. But we already know they will do it, given a value proposition because humans do exactly that : they wear glasses and sunglasses and hats quite happily, sometimes all day long.
It seems fairly obvious to me that no amount of improvement of the technology will make people accept that barrier. Even if every technical hurdle is solved I still firmly believe most people would rather not have a thing on their head and be isolated from their friends and family.
> I think that you are vastly overestimating the amount of people who want to spend a large portion of their daily life with large googles strapped to their head isolating them from the people and things in their immediate environment.
I wish you were right. But, man, look around. People are immersed in their mobile devices. No one gives a shit about their surroundings anymore.
I experienced AR for the first time with the Vision Pro, and I came away with the same impressions; it’s not quite ready for mainstream but “magical” really is apt. I was a big skeptic on AR/VR in general before, but the demo for Vision Pro convinced me. I wrote about it here.[1]
AI does a whole lot more than that. I imagine that the vast majority of content people consume will at some point be created by AI perhaps with some marginal human input. Probably before your VR vision becomes a reality.
> this is going to have as big of an impact on humanity as the computer or the internet did and every engineer or aspiring entrepreneur should pay it attention
I predict it will go the way of 3D TVs. Most people don't want to walk around with half a kilogram of computers inside goggles strapped to their faces.
You have lived in your bubble for too long. Just talk to people around you -- could include other software engineers or tech enthusiasts -- and I'm sure most people don't think about the product the same way you feel. I'll put it sinply: most people DON'T want to put this thing on their face. Not Oculus Quest. Not Apple Vision Pro.
I am perhaps missing your point, but if people will be able to experience incredible VR worlds, couldn't people happily spend their time sitting in tiny windowless rooms rather than physically travelling to a beach?
I think there might end up being a greater division between "IRL places you really need to be IRL to enjoy" and "IRL places that are good enough in VR."
A beach seems like the former, and cities and minor attractions seem like the latter.
His point on the significant motion-blur / image quality issues that exists with pass-through is my biggest complaint with the device hardware-wise.
I got the prescription lens inserts that Apple had suggested, and when I first put on the device I thought that either my eye doctor had gotten my prescription wrong, or something was defective with my device.
The blur is distracting -- and looking further away makes it more obvious, as the objects in the background move around a lot more when turning your head vs items really close to your eyes.
He also says you can read your screens through passthrough, but I've found that not really to be the case, at least for devices like the iPhone or Apple watch.
I've had to take my Vision Pro off many times not only to read a phone notification, but also for anything that requires Face-ID (which doesn't work well when the Vision Pro is covering your face, which feels like an Apple ecosystem fail).
I'm still enjoying it, and I bought it knowing it was a V1 product, but it also shows how far have to go, even with a ton of engineering put into a product.
This actually helps me a little bit. I've also seen people say they can read screens, and that's not my experience. I also have the lens inserts, and I suspect that part of the problem is how they implement the prescription. I'm not knowledgeable enough about lenses to say this with confidence (please correct me!), but I wonder if this is because Apple prioritizes a farther away focal point for the inserts, so you literally can't focus on anything close up.
I've noticed that I can almost read things if I hold my phone a little farther away, but I wouldn't call it usable by any stretch. I've considered getting contacts for the first time just to test all of this, but I'm extremely turned off by the upkeep of them (to say nothing of the idea of touching my eyeball to put them in).
> I wonder if this is because Apple prioritizes a farther away focal point for the inserts, so you literally can't focus on anything close up
VR is interesting all because all manufactures (that I know of) have a fixed focal distance for the screens. This is why you need inserts in the first place, even though the lenses are right in front of your eyes. For example, on the valve index this is set to ~6ft, so if you can see up to 6ft perfectly, you do not need inserts.
Moving your phone around doesn't change this number, its a relationship between the lenses and the screens
Stupid question: Are you wearing it in an environment with good lighting? Passthrough camera performance suffers a lot in low light, and the blur increases with the longer exposure.
I can read screens "fine" while wearing it (fine as in, I can read them, I wouldn't want to do it for an extended amount of time).
Counter anecdote: I didn't find the blur distracting at all, and was able to read my iphone 13 mini perfectly fine. I beleive your experience of course, though.
> but also for anything that requires Face-ID (which doesn't work well when the Vision Pro is covering your face, which feels like an Apple ecosystem fail).
At some point don't we need to accept the laws of physics and biology? That is, The VisionPro covers a significant part of your face, much more than a pair of glasses. Face-ID already has the challenge of needing to recognize you in tons of different conditions (lighting, pale/tan skin color, wildly different hairstyles, facial hair, etc.), while for security reasons nearly never letting someone else impersonate you. Is it really possible to get that level of forgiveness with accuracy if Face-ID only gets to consider the bottom half of your face?
I think the complaint is that the vision pro can’t authenticate the wearer to the iphone. Just like using your apple watch to unlock a mac, the vision pro will probably eventually be able to set up a trusted relationship between the user and their phone, and fix this issue. That’s what I understood from “ecosystem fail”
Quest is clearly a gaming device. It boot straight into the store. The re-opens the store at every opportunity. This means, trying to use it for non-gaming means you're constantly reminded your on a VR game console. It'd be like trying to use a PS5 for work. I kind of get why they did it but I hate it. I'm happy my iPhone does not boot into the store and does not go back to the store every time I go to the home screen.
(2) Quest doesn't care about productivity
This is kind of the same as 1 but, ... I actually try to use my Rift-S with my desktop for certain activities almost daily. I press the right controller's system button, close the home tab, close the library tab, close the store tab, open the desktop. Then I interact with the a few desktop apps. I copy or move files and I run certain apps that I've written that work reasonably well with point and click controls
But, I tried accessing my desktop on a Quest via the various link (wired and wireless) and it crashed 1 of 3 times. This is clearly a niche feature to Meta. Meta expects you're just playing games from their store.
--
You can certainly argue Meta didn't get those things wrong but for me, they are wrong. The more productivity I can do on a Quest the more useful it is it me any many others. There are more phones than game consoles. IMO they should make the device be general purpose, not sell a "pro" version for productivity. Phone game sales far out shadow game console game sales. They don't need to design the Quest around a game console experience.
I'm going to die on the hill that gaze sucks. I really hate focus follows gaze and not having a workable keyboard or buttons makes it hard to actually use this for productivity. It's fine for an alt mode type thing but as the main form of input I kind of hate it.
That said, forcing your hands to be full of controllers also sucks but at least you can play a game. I don't have a solution but it needs to get solved for these things to be seamless enough to wear and useful enough to want to.
I liked the thumb gesture idea they presented in Peripheral. Enough movement to be discernible by a camera, but really only requires a small amount of energy and dexterity.
Though ideally we probably want some sort of “force gloves” that allow us to feel the weight of and manipulate objects in a virtual world using. We need way higher resolution on inputs than we have today, though, which currently amounts to an x/y/z and some button presses.
imo for AR purposes the gaze is a huge improvement than just pinching (a-la HoloLens). I agree though that for productivity, a more tactile device is needed. In practice I end up connecting my keyboard via Bluetooth, or just end up mirroring my MacBook, when I need to do real work
For work purposes, the privacy factor is a huge benefit -- nobody in the room can peek at your "screen"
^ agree with this take. If you're slow with tech, then this is amazing! And I think Apple has been great at making interfaces that are natural to use and easy to get into if you're not tech-savy. But for someone who's used to multi-task, or perform operations without looking at what I'm actually operating on, it sucks. I tried using keynote to create diagrams in Vision pro and the experience was so infuriating, I had to painfully look at everything and keep my focus on them while I also tried to repeatedly snap my fingers as the Vision Pro failed to detect it half of the times. I just want controllers.
Can’t you just use a mouse and keyboard as controllers? It’s hard to imagine any hardware peripheral that would improve on them for making a keynote or we’d already be using it on our desktops.
This was just one example, but yeah if the answer is always “just use a mouse and keyboard” then the experiences are going to be quite limited. I guess I’m used to the high interactivity of experiences on the Quest and the Vision Pro is just a glorified screen to me.
I like my Oculus Rift. But the software is so bad. It is confusing, after a month not using it, I don't know where each setting is. Sometimes I misconfigure, and there is no easy way to reset it and move everything into view again. Hardware is fine for my needs (playing Alyx), but the software looks like somthing bought from seven sources and glued together.
It's gone through so much reshuffling and clearly been kicked around internally between managers/PMs.
The earlier versions were much easier to use and the later ones can become quite a nightmare to setup navigating the oculus/meta/facebook account silliness then ultimately it all feels a lot jankier than very early versions of the software both in Rift and Quest respectively.
Think if Zuck believes in this going forwards it would be wise to focus on removing some of this platform bureaucracy friction, took me 15-20 minutes to get my Quest up and running and logged in after not using it for 18 months.
Yeah it's wildly, embarrassingly bad - to such a point it feels like Zuck must not be using it. Maybe most of his attention is on the AI stuff and the Ray Bans?
There's a ton of half-baked old ideas in the UI, it's extremely confusing. Even basic stuff like trying to add my dad as a friend is super hard to do.
Literally every person I've helped set it up has also had to do a full manual restore (holding down hardware buttons to reset from a boot menu) because they app fails to connect during initial setup or there's some bug with adding payment.
Someone really needs to go into that team and rip lots of stuff out.
Their touch controllers and basic UI navigation are good though.
Attaching a computer-tethered VR display should be as much of a non-event as plugging in a monitor. The Rift’s software experience is so unnecessarily sad.
Did Mark Zuckerberg ever actually use it? I felt like it got shitty after John Carmack left FB. I don't think he was direct in the UI side much (more like increasing framerate in software updates) but I got the sense that as VR CTO or whatever he was able to say "Hey — what, come on, fuck that shit get rid of it" but now there is nobody to do that job.
Is there something inherently difficult or novel about VR operating software that would make it difficult to design or implement controls? I can understand tracking hands is difficult, but I mean the problems you have.
It seems crazy that after investing so much in the 'hard part', the VR hardware and software itself, they'd drop the ball on what seems mundane - basic design of UI controls.
No I don't think so. They just miss the Apple attitude of UI.
It's like the Windows setting system. I'm using Win11/WSL, and while it works, the Windows settings are a mixture of Win95/Aero/3rd Party Plugins (Nvidia)/Win11 and some things that just look like Win3.1.
Googling to change DNS settings:
Step 1: Open the Control Panel. ...
Step 2: Open Network and Sharing Center. ...
Step 3: Choose the connection. ...
Step 4: Change adapter settings. ...
Step 5: Choose Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) ...
Step 6: Click on Properties. ...
Yep. Microsoft has taken a lot of effort in the last two years to empty out Control Panel and get everything into Settings, along with unifying everything into the Win11 Fluent (or whatever it is called these days) style.
To be honest, in a lot of cases when you need “Advanced $ Settings” it still kicks you into the old Control Panel-style pop-up windows, but at least it’s almost all in one place now.
Let's not give them credit for having two subsystems called 'control panel' and 'settings'. That it happened even once is an embarassment, and I think they started that with Windows 8.
That is indeed when it is started, but that's the one and only time - it's just that this transition is still ongoing, after 11 years. By now everything that a casual user might need is in the "new" settings, and much of the advanced stuff is as well, but it's not complete.
Have they finally unfucked the settings and brought them all into a consistent ui, or have they just moved that particular one to yet another new layer?
It’s a new UI paradigm, not just a new UI toolkit or something like that. I think those are quite difficult, I can only think of like 4 in the computer space: text & terminals, windows mouse and keyboard, menu driven (consoles & cable boxes), and smartphone.
We don’t come up with totally new ways to interact with our computers often. And Facebook has never stood out for their UI brilliance.
Maybe I'm old fashioned but one of the biggest barriers for me adopting VR/AR is there isn't a socially acceptable way to "duck out" of a VR experience you're just not into. I've been given a couple of demos of headsets by friends and more often than not by the end I feel trapped -- you're strapped into a thing that fully occupies your visual field, yet it's obvious and socially awkward when you take it off.
And your eyes are both covered so there isn't a good way to non-verbally communicate waning interest levels...I suppose a solution is to simply care less if I hurt my friend's feelings but I'd also like a way to spend time with friends without feeling trapped.
At least in an f2f or video call meeting that I'm bored of, I can zone out or look at my phone or tap on my laptop, or do anything but stare at the slides. With eye tracking, the headset knows (and presumably everyone else could know as well) when you're tuned out.
The eye tracking thing also kind of weirds me out from a privacy standpoint. It's already bad enough that web pages track how long you engage with different portions of content. Now they know what parts of images I stare at, and can algorithmically feed me content based solely on my gaze alone. Does that prospect not weird anyone else out? Or are most normal users like "plug me into AR TikTok, but with gaze mechanics now!"
> What do you do if someone hands you a controller for a tv game equivalent?
I'm not the GP, but as they said you have all your other body language for communication. In VR-world, you have your eye direction and hands - not even your full eyes, with all the muscles around them that may communicate more than anything else on your body. I suppose you could flip them off. :)
It's an interesting point about how VR avatars, for all their 'presence', are very limited. VR video chat seems much better.
If someone is showing you a tv show it seems extremely rude to me to not look at the show as a way of passively showing disinterest vs just saying it’s not for you; no?
> If someone is showing you a tv show it seems extremely rude to me to not look at the show as a way of passively showing disinterest vs just saying it’s not for you; no?
Those aren't your only two options. There are almost infinite ways to communicate.
I don't understand your question. That's how people express emotion, mostly. I'll trust you are not being argumentative:
Facial expression - eyes (the muscles around them), mouth (smile, blank, frown, etc) - posture, legs, arms, etc etc etc. You can look disinterested, you can look like it's the best thing ever, or any other human emotion.
> And your eyes are both covered so there isn't a good way to non-verbally communicate waning interest levels...I suppose a solution is to simply care less if I hurt my friend's feelings but I'd also like a way to spend time with friends without feeling trapped.
I hadn’t considered those antisocial patterns that the technology is foisting on users, but I suppose one can also juts directly communicate verbally. Could work in low context cultures but not so well in high context cultures.
> The eye tracking thing also kind of weirds me out from a privacy standpoint.
Indeed. While I am less worried about Apple “going after me in a direct targeted nefarious way”, I don’t appreciate more levers for technology to disintermediate my manipulate my behavior, emotions, or interactions.
That's a very interesting comment, because I've definitely felt that just playing a game on console (portable or plugged to a TV) or on PC. Sometimes games get so intense that I can't stop it and I have to force myself to get out of the world. I remember getting a massive headache playing Elden Ring and forcing myself to just stop the game.
Also, I've played Catan in VR and felt like I couldn't leave "like that". I had to finish the game and shake hands with the strangers I played with before leaving the game, it just felt like I was really there and it would have been rude to leave the game like that.
I did freak out the first time I joined a cinema room (can't remember the name of the game) as when I looked on my left side I saw people staring at me in the cinema room (which made me yell and it made everyone laugh, indicating to me that even my mic was on!)
> Vision Pro is a meticulously over-engineered “devkit” that is far too heavy to have product-market fit but good enough to seed curiosity into the world
That's exactly what I think. And that's exactly why I bought it.
I have:
* Oculus Rift 1
* HTC Vive
* Quest 2
None of those made me want to write apps for them. They have nice games and I spent quality time with them, but just playing. I tried watching videos and it was ok, but it was still better to do that on my TV. I tried actually working with them, and the resolution was not enough.
The Vision Pro? It's the opposite. Games, such as they are, are underwhelming. It doesn't even have many '3d' experiences, windows are mostly flat (for now). And guess what? It excel at all the tasks the others fail at, because it's an iPad with a different form factor. If you can work from an iPad, you can work from the Vision Pro. Even watching videos is a better experience due to the passthrough, as you can still interact with people around you(if you so choose) – you can passthrough with the Quest, but you have to choose between your content and the world.
So now I'm spending my time learning how to work with it. It has incredible potential. It is not the mass market device yet, but the next one should be transformative.
Sorry I can't and why the heck should I. I can get vastly superior work computer for 10% of the price (of goggles) that has none of the apple nor general tablet hard and massive limits. Huge constant time saving on work effectivity.
I could do some work with samsung ultra series (mouse, keyboard and massive screen cinnectivity via single usbc out if box), but even that is massively subpar.
Maybe we just do vastly different things, but all folks I know fall into my category, IT or not.
Many people have desk jobs where all they do is emails, web browsing, and editing Google Docs, a perfect scenario. And if you need it, it can show your mac in a virtual window while you have other apps open around you.
But this is missing the point that, while it can do work things reasonably well, that's not its primary use case. All of the marketing focuses on content consumption - movies, reading, reliving photos and videos, facetime - and other things typically already done on an iPhone or iPad. For those use cases, it's pretty much perfect, with the text clarity being leagues ahead of any other production device, maybe except some enterprise-targeted Varjo headsets.
tl;dw -- reviewers are understandably focusing on the technical specs, but ignoring the much more simple metric: conceptually, does the device fool the mind into accepting what it sees as "real"? And the answer for the Vision Pro is yes. It will get lighter, better, cheaper, but even now, it's important to realize that the AVP can transport you to another realistic reality in a way no other device has managed. I've only done the in-store demo, but I understand what the video is saying, and it resonates for me.
I found the demo a bit underwhelming, if only because it was guided. However I must admit the scene on the mountain, in front of the piano, and on the football pitch were amazing.
Free advice for anyone going in for the demo: be comfortable in VR, read up on how the AVP works ahead of time, and tell the Apple person that. I got to see/experience a lot more during my demo than a friend did because I was always jumping ahead and pushing the pace.
One of the things that I will never understand of the Vision Pro is why on earth they went to design and build the front of the headset to have that colorful alive gradient or a truly bad rendering of the user's face. That screams bad overengineering with undesired added weight and extra power consumption. Also it seems that the front glass from some batches crack exactly the same way. Again, why go with that at all? Why not use some better material? Carbon fiber seems like a good choice when it comes to weight though I do not know if it has downsides besides cost.
This is apple. They see users break their phone screens and they go OK, lets make them more soap bar like and also give them glass on the backside too so you can’t get lucky landing on that side. All to pocket your couple hundred dollars replacing it or in applecare coverage which probably costed you more than the one screen replacement did over its life.
> users break their phone screens and they go OK, lets make them more soap bar like
They also massively strengthened the glass. (I don’t have a case on my iPhone. I drop it constantly, most recently on a double-black ski run while I was trying to get it to be a GoPro.)
> give them glass on the backside too so you can’t get lucky landing on that side
Fair enough, just noticed mine is cracked there. Not bothering me so will leave as is.
Vision Pro front glass weighs 34g. There are bigger weight problems than that.
And they are anticipating a future where the weight is significantly lower and people are wearing them for many hours a day. And so they wanted a corollary for AirPod transparency mode i.e. being able to interact with people without taking device off.
I got mine on day 1 (February 2) and have spent many hours using it and experimenting, trying to make the device as unobtrusive as possible so I can use it for hours watching movies/surfing the web/etc., activities which become enjoyable if you're not constantly adjusting your position/VP's position on your head and face.
Here are my takeaways FWIW:
1. The only body position I find comfortable and compatible with prolonged use is laying down on a couch with my head elevated on the arm. This automatically relieves all pressure on the top and back of my head from the device, and transfers it to my face.
By finding just the right head position/angle, looking up and away, I can create a balance of downward forces distributed across my forehead/nose/cheekbones. If done just right, that 600 grams (1.3 lbs.) of VP hardware then has an effective surface area of about 8 square inches of skin interface with the foam of the light shield cushion.
Note: the VP with knitted strap weighs 600 grams; without the strap it weighs 550 grams (1.2 lbs.)
Lying down while using VP, strap weight is irrelevant since it does not exert force on your head.
Do this experiment: get bags of coffee beans/nuts/raisins/frozen peas/corn, or a steak or bacon or ground beef, whatever weighs a total of around 1.2 pounds, then lie down and put it over your upper face.
Close your eyes and think about how it feels. Remember the VP interface with your skin will be soft foam — NOT product packaging.
Consider that when using VP, your attention will NOT be on how it feels but rather on whatever it is you're doing/watching.
2. For use in the supine position as detailed above, the knitted strap is far more comfortable and easy to use compared to the two-strap alternative that comes with VP.
You don't even have to tighten the strap when you're lying down, since the seal against your face is provided courtesy of gravity.
"Apple intentionally calibrated the Vision Pro display slightly out of focus to make pixels a bit blurry and hide the screen door effect “in plain sight”
Makes me think of the blurring effect of phosphors on a CRT.
This is shocking to read. I tried the in store demo and my main take away was that the display wasn’t as crisp or sharp as I expected for a $4k device.
That would be the case blurring or no blurring. Apple managed to cram 4K displays per eye there, which is very impressive when you compare it against Quest etc - but that's 4K shoved right against your eyeballs. That is, it is the rough equivalent of sitting so close next to a 4K TV that it covers your entire field of vision. If you've ever tried that, you know that it's not exactly retina, and you can still very much see the pixels.
But even that is a massive technological achievement when you look at raw numbers in the article - those 4K displays in Vision Pro are already 3386 PPI.
I'm well aware, and that doesn't change anything. What Apple gave us in Vision Pro is what you get for the price tag given modern technology. High-res VR is insanely expensive for good reasons, both the extreme DPI required, and the powerful hardware needed to drive it all at speeds fast enough to avoid motion sickness.
I remember being sooooo tempted to buy a devkit just so I could play about, see if I can get it to work with my own 3D games. Would it be a pointless exercise? Yes. However, would I learn from it as a programmer? Yes.
To this very day, I still dont have a VR headset. I am actually a tad behind with the latest ones, if I am honest about it.
There is a VR place in our City which I take my children to (and myself) for some fun for an hour. I do enjoy it. We play together on those Zombie or Archery games.
One of the main reasons I am tempted to get VR is to got the extra mile for some games or.. more specifically.. simulations.
I want to give my kids a slight head start to things like driving. With a decent simulator, steering wheel and VR, will be educational for them. I would need to build (or perhaps just buy) a new PC.
Is all this worth it for a driving simulator experience?
Interesting to see the future of VR and AR. I think these techs will merge in one way or another, ending up being small like a pair of glasses. I do think this tech as it evolves will eventually replace monitors. Things like this will be replaced, like giant mainframes are nothing compared to modern phones.
I find it weird that people who are clearly interested will vacillate on buying a headset these days. Quest 3 is mind bogglingly cheap for what it is. It's selling in the millions and the Quest platform already has tens of millions of users.
If you are from a developed country with decent wages and think of yourself as a tech enthusiast you should just go buy it as a professional investment to learn about the tech. Even if you don't want the gaming it is easily good enough to give you insight into the the broader tech (working in VR, social experiences, etc) and it's a pretty good standalone WebXR viewer which very easy to pick up.
(I have the same logic that anybody who buys a Vision Pro for development is insane not to also pick up a Quest at 1/7th the price so that they can at least have a full perspective on where VR is at)
It is not just the price of the VR headset. Quest 3 is £400+. I need a good PC for the headshet as well. This is likely £700+ (likely closer to £1000+)
Yes, without sounding like a big shot, can affort to splash this type of money. However, just because I can does not mean I should. I have a family and spending money needs discussion with the Mrs (as she does to me)
Also, it is finding a place to put it in the home especially with a toddler.
I have to prioritise, as there are other things in tech to be enthusiastic about. There are atleast 4 other things as well as wanting to dive into VR. Thing is, the other things I have access now.
> Launch high-definition room scanning and unlock teleportation using technology that has existed within Oculus Research for several years now; it is time for Meta to make this future a reality where people can be remote but feel truly present by visiting each other’s home, office or favorite place.
This teleportation/telepresence is the thing that struck me the most. I'd love to pop into a friend's living room for a beer without worrying about them living in another country.
It’s not the same. Seeing your friend or family member trapped in a small box is very different from having out with a low fidelity version of them playing mini golf or ping pong. Immersion and presence are things that you won’t understand if you refuse to try VR for longer than 5 minutes.
Yeah, that sort of works, but I think there's something meaningful to be gained by bringing the embodied experience into it, even if it's just simulated.
On a related note, we're probably also less than a decade away from telepresence via a humanoid robot at an affordable price.
It has many of the problems, but it also has crucial improvements (mostly nails the user interface, vastly better pass-through, massively better screens). Did you read the article or just immediately come here to drop comments?
The author is also delusional, having pushed Oculus before VR was ready for the masses. It wasn't then. It isn't now. The technology won't be good enough for a decade.
I don't think anyone is saying the AVP is a mass market product, and neither were the early Oculus products.
VR as a category is niche. Apple will expand the public consciousness of it, but at $3,500 AVP is also niche.
There's nothing wrong with that. If it takes a decade for the tech to be good enough so be it--I'll be glad people were innovating and experimenting in the interim to get it right, and that the folks willing to sign up as beta testers helped push progress forward.
People get mad about this stuff--you don't have to buy it! I still haven't and probably won't until it feels more ready.
The Commodore 64 (or, staying on-brand, the Apple II) wasn't ready for the masses. Still if we hadn't had that, the computers that followed would have been worse due to not benefiting from lessons learned, built up user affinity etc.
And being there it was hella interesting to see it develop. Most tech isn't born right for the masses. And without the pioneers it likely won't get there.
Incomplete, with a poor launch app ecosystem, dependent on owning another of the company's devices to scan your head to get a rather variable quality of mask fit, and when that phone guesses wrong it costs the customer a further $300 for a second guess? As long as the fans keep paying, I suppose you're right.
you just described the first iPod, iPhone, and iPad. they were right about them. you could see where they would assume the magic would happen again just from hubris.
None of them cost even half as much as this thing. What's with the endless comparisons with previous Apple products that were completely different in a completely different market and competitive environment.
If you read the unwritten subtlety of the phrasing, you can see I'm not exactly comparing these devices. Instead, I'm providing an example of where the company's ego would allow them to think that whatever device they do release would eventually be a smash hit. I intentionally didn't list all of the ways these devices are not the same, as I assumed that the audience would be able to put 1+1 together. I guess I'm yet again reminded of why it is bad to assume
They are being compared because the criticisms are the same or very similar.
The iPhone was form over function, no keyboard, no apps, and too expensive. You can't even use a stylus with it! It doesn't do anything that my phone and ipod don't already do better.
The iPad was absolutely roasted for just being a giant expensive iPhone with a dumb name, it doesn't even have its own apps. It doesn't do anything that my iPhone can't already do.
The iMac was underpowered and overpriced, didn't even have a floppy drive, didn't have real connectors just something called USB that no one had ever heard of, it wasn't compatible with 99% of the software on the market. It doesn't do anything that my PC doesn't already do.
We see all these products as unmitigated hits now, but at the time they launched, it was still very much up for debate.
Also, as with the iPhone, etc., they appear to have solved the fundamental problems: in this case, screen quality, UI, and hopefully presence in the surrounding environment.
From here they hardware will get cheaper, the bugs can be worked out, and everything will become more refined.
> Motion blur in passthrough mode ended up being one of the many reasons why I decided to return my Vision Pro, because it’s just uncomfortable
If I am in VR field, and wasn't very tight on the money (which I assume the author isn't), I probably will keep a Vision Pro with me even if it's a literal peace of junk just so I can play with it occasionally for my curiosity.
I wonder what's the difference between me and him.
To make it clear, this is not a loaded question but a genuine one. His decision is objectively more reasonable than mine (keeping unneeded junk around), but I just can't get it.
At the end of the article, that's my takeaway too. I can't imagine going to this level of effort on the Vision Pro and not keeping it to see how the software develops.
I'm so glad he mentioned weight. I was worried that the competition would say 'okay, apple has this so we need this or better' when there is so much on this device that I really don't care for. I don't need curved glass, I don't need fake LED eyes draining my battery, I don't need a physical knob to slowly fade out reality.
I would really prefer a device that is lighter, cooler, with longer battery life, more CPU available to the displays that matter, and probably cheaper by having less stuff.
I don't think the fake eyes make any part of the experience less creepy in social interactions. Instead that energy could have been used to, for instance, illuminate 850hz IR light so the user would have superhuman night vision. Being in a dark place and not being able to read a menu is much more immersion breaking than having to tell someone "yes I see you" and in fact you have this conversation with everyone regardless of the fake eyes.
> Watching movies in Vision Pro is great at first but most people will stop doing it after the initial novelty excitement wears off
Watching TV/movies in virtual reality seemed like such an incredibly compelling idea that we (the Oculus team at Meta/Facebook) built an entire product around that idea — Oculus Go. Launched in 2018, Oculus Go was the biggest product failure I’ve ever been associated with for the simple reason that it had extremely low retention despite strong partnerships with Netflix and YouTube. Most users who bought Oculus Go completely abandoned the headset after a few weeks.
You can't possibly extrapolate the movie watching retention rate from Oculus Go to Apple Vision Pro. That's like saying most people won't use ipod based on the data we collected from our walkman.
I don't know. I have roughly 0 interest in watching movies with a VR headset. And I have a VR headset, such that I have tried it a bit.
You are also kind of... ignoring the fact that the walkman was very successful. Ridiculously so, in fact. Such that, people did predict ipod like things would be a success because of it. There was a whole line of successful portable music devices leading up to the ipod.
I thought this was one of the most interesting insights because there is a lot of discussion around why Meta isn't / hasn't gone after media viewing as a primary use case. Understanding now that they really tried and it failed hard at Oculus previously adds a lot of insight to that.
I do have to say, for me it does add up to one huge missing element for Vision Pro: why Apple didn't ship some kind of co-presence features on day 1 is totally baffling to me. I think it likely stems from the fact they clearly missed their mark with Personas and presumably they didn't want to then introduce cartoon style avatars like Meta did. They've decided to die on the hill of realistic avatars and they are actually dying there. It means people hate Personas, they don't have co-presence which is damaging the media viewing and preventing a lot of the AR and professional use cases from developing where co-presence is also a must, sometimes the primary feature.
It's fascinating to me because Apple pitched so hard at their headset not being socially isolating, but they ultimately created the most socially isolating headset of all.
Agreed, I've had my Vision Pro for a month, and I still use it to watch shows/movies and as my portable external display. It has its daily and weekly use cases
I loved movie watching with my AVP but I agree it's too uncomfortable, even lying in bed and having less weight on my cheek bones. I watched two hours of Guards of the Galaxy 3 and got tired of wearing it and finished the last hour on my 13" laptop screen
The dual loop makes a world of difference to me. Interestingly, lying in bed makes it more uncomfortable, not less, since more of the weight is on the face.
I wear it about 30 min at a time, 2 min breaks in between, 2-3 hours total daily.
Daily use case: portable Macbook monitor
weekly use case: watching shows or a movie. I have to pause due to dry eyes, not due to the heaviness. After the first 2 days of using it, it's not actually that heavy afterward, but it is noticeable if you pay attention.
Why not? The device has a very similar form factor and the use case is the same, except they’re missing the partnerships with Netflix and YouTube. The Walkman was also an incredibly popular device for years. Not to undersell the iPod, either, but I think the innovation was as much in the distribution channel (iTunes) as the product design.
People keep vastly overestimating the amount of content that is consumed in group settings.
I watch a show / movie with my girlfriend a couple times a week. A nice TV is still better for that obviously.
But I watch stuff on my own every single day. Personal media consumption for me is probably 8x my group-based consumption. I would wager most people these days have similar habits.
I do think my situation fits current society more though. Families under one roof consuming media only through the shared TV is less and less how the (at least Western) world operates.
Something I observed in the late 90's/early 2000's with my experiments of outputting video from a PC to a TV is - something that looks really rough even at the same resolution on a PC looks significantly better on a TV. The reason being twofold:
1. TV pixels on a CRT are usually diagonally arranged, instead of side-by-side, which helps to hide jaggies.
2. The phosphorous illumination on the glass itself isn't super sharp on a CRT like it is on more modern displays.
The result being - something a little fuzzier makes for a better viewing experience. You can perceive individual pixels (and resulting artifacts) less.
No matter how much I contemplate about it, there was still no “killer” app that affords me to buy a VR set. I’ve tried them, it’s nice. But it really has no place in my life. And how could this change? Even with better displays etc. the whole idea of disconnecting my main sense - the eyes - from my surroundings is so strange to me that it seems irreconcilable.
Racing sims are the killer app, because depth perception really helps with sense of speed, and tight corners on a monitor are often outside the field of view and you can't just turn your head to look at them.
Even then, it's not something I can do indefinitely. I've played GT7 on a friend's PSVR2, and sometimes elevation changes in particular tend to mess up the brain for a moment. It's somewhat disconcerting. Also, as someone who wears glasses, there's just no way to make the headset fit entirely correctly, and it tends to slip over time and the view becomes blurry.
Outside of that... control schemes are the major issue for me. You can't just blindly walk around in your room without falling over things, so movement is highly unnatural in VR unless you're in a cockpit. And the various attempts at making the player manipulate something with those hand controllers are just embarrassingly bad. I think this is one of the reason why so many VR games feel like toys you play with once before discarding them as a failed experiment.
The only other killer app are pinball simulations. It's surprising how much depth perception can make it so much clearer what the ball is doing, and the downsides of VR don't matter because you're stationary and only need two buttons.
I like racing sims, so I was interested in VR in the early days, but after experiencing it, I decided for now that I just don't want the associated hassle.
Mind that the two racing games I've tried were Redout and Trackmania Turbo, which have some more extreme movements like loops and high speeds, but being sitting in a VR headset and not feeling the accelerations that match your movement is just a recipe for motion sickness even if you don't normally feel motion sick. Add in the shitty FoV in all current VR headsets and I think we are a far way from that being a killer app.
For me the only apps that kept any of my interest are rhythm games like Beat Saber or Pistol Whip.
No offense, but I think you either don’t understand how niche racing sims are or don’t understand that “killer app” is meant to convey an app which justifies the existence of the device for a broad segment of the market.
And, if anything, Half Life Alyx remains the killer _gaming_ app (and it probably isn’t either if I’m being honest).
While Alyx is definitely up there in the best VR gaming has to offer, the real killer app has clearly been Beatsaber (hitting both the "gaming" and "workout" use cases). Some quick googling suggests that half of all Quest users have bought a copy, which is insane.
> the whole idea of disconnecting my main sense - the eyes - from my surroundings is so strange to me that it seems irreconcilable.
to me, this is the entire point of VR. you want to virtually see something other than what your eyes can see in reality. a situation where you want to be fully immersed into this other space. i totally buy into that.
the confusion of use to me is the AR aspect of it. that's where the limitations take center stage. the limited FOV can't be ignored in AR. my brain buys into the suspension of disbelief for VR, but for AR my brain knows it's my real world, just limited.
I'm open to the idea of VR gaming but the industry just can't seem to break out of the chicken-and-egg problem of hardly any content being made, because hardly anyone has the hardware, because there's hardly any content. Even with Meta and Sony throwing money around for exclusives their libraries are barren, and PC VR is even worse since Valve isn't interested in subsidising game development beyond their one big first party title. It's been this way for years with little change and it stands to get even worse when Meta finally gets tired of losing billions of dollars each year to keep Reality Labs afloat.
Apples current approach to VR doesn't seem like it's going to help the gaming situation much either, since they opted to rely entirely on hand tracking which is much less accurate and capable than the standard-ish controllers used on every other VR platform. Releasing a game on Apple Vision opens up more potential buyers, but comes at the cost of having to accommodate a very limited lowest common denominator input method.
I own 2 VR headsets, primarily for gaming. I've had a lot of fun with stuff like Beat Saber or Superhot VR, and Half Life Alyx is an incredible experience that could only exit with VR.
Despite that, VR is pretty much just a cool toy. Yes there are cool and interesting experiences in VR, but there are also a lot of limitations, not all of which are technological. I think VR will stay around for a while, but I don't see it moving past the "cool toy" stage anytime soon.
The fact that superhot is mentioned so little here tells me what i should think of the opinions of these posters. Q3 + superhot is an amazing experience. It’s fun for social game nights and also decent exercise.
AVPro is the best thing to happen to Q3 because the Q3 is ready for prime time at a price point people want and, despite metas reputation, with an open enough platform to support general computing. If you aren’t a gamer or aren’t consuming 3d content, yeah VR isn’t for you. But otherwise, yeah it’s a pretty cool experience for the price.
I'm in the same boat. I have no desire for these. If anything, I'm trying to reduce my screen time and increase my access and accessibility to the real world. This feels like the exact opposite.
I'm not a gamer, but I found shooter games in VR to be extremely cool for procrastination. I can play Contractors for hours.
Last winter I had limited opportunities to excercise, so I tried FitXR and it turned out to be insanely engaging. Reality can't give that level of engagement and multisensory feedback. I did boxing and HIIT daily, and while I don't like to sweat like crazy in my living room, that was extremely positive experience that helped me get through the winter.
This is a bit of how I feel about Beat Saber modded with community maps.
It’s engaging and challenging in a way little else I can do at home is, and it’s pretty good for getting some movement and cardio in to boot. The days I play it’s almost always for an hour and if it weren’t for physical exhaustion I could go longer (once when live-streaming my play to and audio chatting with a family member, I played for closer to two hours straight thanks to having something to distract me from my tiredness).
Shooters are less energy demanding though. Even a bit disappointingly so. I even used to put gym hand weights so my muscles get more work to do while playing (also helps with stabilizing the gun, as I don't have gunstock).
For someone who lives in a very small apartment, my WFH setup takes an annoyingly large part of my living space. If I can build a comfortable work environment in VR/AR, I can get rid of my work desk entirely and keep a strong separation between work and my personal life (take headset off and put it + keyboard + mouse away in the closet => done with work). I get to even take it with me so I could work at any desk (in a hotel room, at my parents', etc.)
Even now, I'd love a solution to easily put up and teardown a monitor on my dinner table so I can get rid of my desk.
I believe he nailed it with the live sports argument.if Apple can get that going people will buy it for that alone.
I have personally wanted VR for flight sims. It is jarring to have a screen full of instruments or looking out the window, but difficult to do both without a crazy physical setup that I do not want in my office. VR solves this by simply moving your head, the same as pilots do in real life.
Live sports is potentially huge. I am sure companies like Second Spectrum are thinking about how to use their player tracking tech plus traditional video coverage to provide a real time PoV shot from anywhere on the court/field.
In terms of straight VR I'm completely with you. As someone who doesn't game they hold no attraction.
The disconnection is also my big issue with VR.
However, as an AR platform, whether it's pass-through or some future passive system, I can see a time when I might get one. I can imagine a significantly better version of the VisionPro that replaces my laptop as my "big" computing device.
I think the form factor is the feature. In the same way that my tablet doesn't do anything my laptop can't do, but it's form factor makes it useable in different scenarios. I know people who exclusively use iPad Pros as their all-purpose "big" computing device, never touching a laptop.
Before it becomes widespread I can see it being adopted in specialist situations, many of the same things that the Microsoft AR hardware was never good enough for. Hololens was amazing to experience, but no where near amazing enough to actually be that useful. Passthrough AR like the VisionPro might actually manage it.
I don't think it will become something everyone has, but it will fill a slot in the mix of technology for some people, along with smart-watches, phones, tablets, laptops and desktops. Each appeals to different people.
Now, whether the technology ever quite gets there is the big question for me. I think a lot has to improve in the hardware if they can ever make it something I would want to use on a daily basis.
It doesn’t matter. A perfect form factor like a contact lens or sunglasses would have the same issue. It’d psychologically be like walking around with a phone strapped to your eyeballs. Having screens be localized in physical space is a FEATURE.
I found the killer app for me with AVP: working. I have my screens in front of me while I'm in front a roller-standing desk with really nice passthrough being able to see my garden outside. Everything looks crisp and the music quality is excellent
Software eng. It's been amazing to have my terminal, IDE , github in Safari on one side, apple music in the back, news tickers above the screen, and being able to resize, bring them anywhere with me
I'm going to relate in a different way / non VR user way:
Once in a while I want to get into VR, but understanding all the options and etc makes my head spin and I quit on it, go back to other hobbies. Much of the discussion online, news stories (with any detail) and etc is all very "already knows the VR lay of the land / knee deep in it". It makes it difficult to understand / get the lay of the land. I'm almost burnt out just thinking about looking into it again.
Now if Apple provided a more affordable route in in the future, I know my consistent user experence with Apple would make that choice potentially a lot easier.
The killer app for VR is the novelty of putting it on for the first 15 minutes / first 2 hours (depending on if you suffer from motion sickness or not) imho.
Thiking about it we would have VR predecessors in shape of screens attached to our forehead if this way of using technology was useful. We don't have that though so VR has nothing to replace.
PS: I bought a VR headset to check my bias and I don't use it because it's just uncomfortable to wear.
i felt this way too. i did buy the AVP because of the 14 day return policy. i ended up using it four hours a day, which is all of my non meeting work time.
I think the killer app will be online meetings. Online socializing really.
I work fully remote and Zoom/Meet works fine for meetings. But I kinda dread things like team happy hour and find you have to keep them structured like a meeting to work with group video calls.
Visuals aren't even the key factor here. It's audio. I find the obstacle to casual socializing is not being able to directionally focus audio so overlapping conversations are possible.
Same. Every time I try a VR headset (starting from the Oculus Rift dev kit back in the day with that rollercoaster and other demos) I am blown away by the experience, but then I take it off and never think about it again. VR/AR simply isn't something that is missing from my life, and a decade+ later the software still hasn't made the case for itself.
I think it’s partly generational. We don’t see as much value because traditional computers are familiar and get the job done for us
But younger people won’t have the same attachment. Young people already use mobile phones for things we would never do outside of a desktop. There is no question that the range of experiences you can have in AR/VR.
Yeah, the last thing I want is the scurge of Apple, Meta, or any other big tech parasite directly on my face.
They are soulless, passionless, sterile companies with only the goal of market dominance and investor growth. VR is never going to flourish here though I'm sure that won't stop the iSheep lapping it up and buying what marketing tells them to, like the Apple watch.
> whole idea of disconnecting my main sense - the eyes - from my surroundings is so strange to me that it seems irreconcilable.
FWIW Apple's fundamental concept is to address that very problem - to not disconnect your eyes from your surroundings; they work very hard so that you can see your surroundings and that others can see your eyes, and so that their apps tend into integrate your surroundings.
(The article talks about it, and the author thinks they are shortchanging VR.)
> Can anybody relate?
The way I personally relate is the old, seemingly fundamental human instinct I have that shows up especially when new tech is incompatible with my existing life. It forces change if I adopt it, which I don't appreciate, and worse I might be compelled to change if it becomes a normal part of life - if it's necessary competitively or to sufficiently fit into society (e.g., smartphones).
So it's the old story: First I laugh at it (we seem past that for VR); second I say it conflicts with the orthodoxy (my established life, in this case); and third, someday, I'll say I knew it all along. :)
I'm kinda in the second stage, and maybe you are too? As a technologist - that is, as someone whose job is to evaluate and adapt new technologies - I can't afford to indulge that 3-step cycle or I will be giving people advice based on those instincts (1. 'that's ridiculous/vaporware/useless, don't worry about it', 2. 'it's not compatible/applicable for your business', 3. 'it's what everyone is doing!') and fail to be ahead of the curve. Plus, those instincts limit me as a person. So I've needed to learn to recognize that cycle and not act on it, but to evaluate new tech on its own merits.
That turns out to be hard even after lots of practice - it's hard to ignore all the instinct and the constant signals from everyone else, and think for yourself. We're social animals. So it's hard to imagine the killer, high value apps until they are out there, until everyone else signals their value. But some that stand out as possibilities to me:
- AR: Data and metadata on things in the world around me. It seems especially good for work with physical objects: Showing me their specs, diagrams of how they should look, alternate perspectives. Imagine working on your car with AR.
- 3-D VR work rooms: A room with all of your electronic documents, videos, applications, etc. for a project. Also you can have virtual objects - the live control panel from the router, copies of the physical object you are designing, etc. The room can be as large as you want. It seems especially great for teams, where people can bring in documents and objects to share and work on together with everyone else. This seems so much better than current collaboration.
- Presence at things like sporting events: Seats right on the sideline or even views from the field itself: Watch Messi's dribbling and goal form the goalie's perspective. Watch the pitch from the batter's perspective (or the referee's, for those controversial calls). Also for theater, etc.
- 3-D, immersive films and games, of course. Art seems to have great potential, but will need some time to develop, as artists learn the nuances of the medium (and as only games get funding).
I made a pointless cube with a square in VRML a long time ago and VR is ultimately going to be the biggest tech disappointment of my life.
The killer app is what I have when I get lucid inside a dream. To only cover vision is missing so much. I can remember being in a war in a plane and getting shot down in a dream. The decent felt unbelievable. That is the killer app for me. That had nothing to do with vision.
I tried the Vision Pro today at the apple store in Manhattan by Central Park. I used to own a quest pro, but I sold it a year ago since it was catching dust. My expectations were that the passthrough would almost be life like (or much better than oculus). Reality, I couldn't tell the difference. It still looked like I was watching life through a camera.
The UI was also a bit clumsy. I noticed bugs and even the apple employee was stunned how I got a window 'stuck' in a place. It became unresponsive.
Having said that, the 3d spatial videos were spectacular. I did feel like I was almost there. The 3d movies were also amazing and had fairly good colors. Overall it wouldn't replace an OLED tv, but it was impressive.
When I took it off, I was thankful of how clear I can see with my eyes. Everything seemed like '8k'. I guess the Vision Pro is fun, but it was a bit uncomfortable and not really AR imo
What stopped oculus was the realities of a headset. Some of my friends were early adapters to oculus which I got to test out. They would use it as a toy really not as a main device (for gaming in this case) because you’d get nauseous before long and playing in VR is kind of an annoying gimmick once the luster wears off. Mouse and keyboard and a good monitor (or three) is more than fine and you can actually game for hours on that.
I know, I'm one of the unfortunates that gets nauseous in 15 minutes. Tested on a gen 1 PSVR that i was able to borrow for a weekend. I strongly doubt even the 3500 apple thingy would be much better.
But when Facebook bought them, they could have afforded to do the same thing as apple. Make a very expensive "here's the future, now queue up in an orderly manner and wait while we make it affordable" Rift Mega-Giga-Something model.
Does anyone else find it implausible that Apple will offload things like the CPU to the external battery pack like claimed here? The R1 chip surely has to stay on the headset to keep their 12 ms latency, and wouldn't there be a similar issue with moving the CPU away and having to serialize a bunch of data back and forth? Presumably for many AR applications, it's important to have similarly low latency to the CPU. I'm really curious if people with this.
More likely they will reduce the weight by release a non-pro version without features that most people don't really need (like the external screen).
On the other hand, I think the author is overly pessimistic in thinking that no VR headset will be able to replace his dual 6k monitors. In the long term, aren't we headed for VR with the equivalent of a retina display?
I like the suggestion to "Launch Android 2D tablet apps natively on Quest".
Imagine, that you can pin these apps somewhere fix in physical space or walk around with them with fix positioning while being in a high quality pass through...
> Less so in a scene like this intimate music concert or sports game, but probably a lot more so in dramatic storytelling and other types of more realistic films.
Presumably he has a specific type of film in mind here.
How difficult would it be to build an app where your friends could join remotely, watch the same movie, and appear right next to you? With good enough latency you could talk to each other like you were sitting right next to each other?
Those have existed pretty much since the start of VR multiplayer games. VR chat has them, RecRoom has them I think, there are dedicated apps for this, and many "screen mirroring" apps also have multi-user and presence.
They aren't used that much because it's a silly gimmick and nothing more. People don't roleplay nearly as much in actual VR experiences. Real life isn't Ready Player One, and real people may say they want this, but then they try it and never do it again.
It was neat to socialize with strangers in VR during covid lockdowns. It was instantly less neat when I could socialize with my real friends again. I don't have any friends from that period, and I was hanging out with VR strangers for tens of hours a weekend. There's just too many real, physical drawbacks to doing anything in VR that means unless you specifically crave the experience that ONLY VR can provide, like a driving simulator game, you don't really do it.
I've gone clubbing in VR. It's just not that special.
All the talk about AVP is full of people who seem to have zero understanding of what has existed for almost a decade in the VR space, don't seem very familiar with VR, and haven't tried to get friends and family to try VR. They all think Ready Player One, or The Matrix is right around the corner. Reality isn't magic.
For reference, VR is literally a game changer for Sim Racing, and even there most people don't care about it. Even then, it's only brought out occasionally, or for specific reasons. Headsets just suck, blocking your eyes with some form of screen will always suck for a social species like humans.
It's so easy there are probably a dozen apps that do it on Quest and other platforms. I sat in a theatre with 15 other people the other day and watched Jurassic Park in 3D the other day on my Quest 3. It was cool.
So why isn't it happening with Vision Pro? Because Apple hasn't shipped proper co-presence features. Vision Pro lacks a proper Avatar system like every other platform has, so they can't have apps like this, ergo they are left entirely with trying to convince people that solo experiences are a valid value proposition, all the while attempting to sell their headset as non-isolating.
I do think these kinds of "virtual presence" apps are possible and exciting - and also I think there are huge new challenges that come with the Vision Pro's better spatial computing. If you are in a video game (like fortnight) you easily forgive a lot of jank - your brain isn't expecting it. On the flip side, people will not like someone jumping around "in space" right next to them. Same goes for reproducing movements in avatars.
You can always choose a lower fidelity co-presence, but again if you are doing that why are you wearing the heavy goggles? Just get a discord server and watch on there. I think there are very real technical challenges to combining all of the important aspects, but it is also the category of experience I am most excited by.
There's an immersive viewing setting on the Vision Pro called Cinema that's very close. It puts you inside a theater-like room without seats and gives you a pretty convincing feeling of looking at a movie screen — way better than any of the stupid immersive viewing rooms in Disney Plus or whatever.
Also, there's an IMAX app that actually simulates being in an IMAX theater. It's silly, but having the seats and railing and being able to look to the side and see the dim IMAX sign glowing on the wall goes a very, very long way. But for now there's not much you can do inside of it. I really,
The only thing that's really missing is the sound. The built-in speakers sound fantastic, but lack that low-end, guttural rumble that you can only get in a theater or with a very fancy home theater setup (which I don't have because I have a family, with a partner who's very noise-sensitive, and a house that's just not big enough to watch movies in without waking up my kid — I'd just never get to use it).
I haven't actually tried watching it hooked up to my homepods, which I'd guess would help. But yeah, the visual experience is remarkable. They can get there if they keep putting effort into it.
> If the Vision Pro can soon replicate that experience they will print (even more) money and could lock the big film studios down forever pretty much.
Visually? It looks far better than an IMAX screen. It's an order of magnitude better compared to watching 3D movies in a movie theater with '3d glasses'.
All it is missing is sound. It's no slouch, but you don't have a subwoofer :)
Eh not really. What IMAX does with the sound matters too. You can't replicate that with Airpods. Also you do not feel like a weight is pushing into your face. That is a big part of an enjoyable experience.
Gotta have the kid kicking your seat from behind, and the dude a few rows up who's on his phone the whole time too. Just can't replicate that with AVP.
What I want is a dollar for every evangelist and every early adopter that has told me that the ?R explosion is right around the corner. I have worked in the game industry for 30 years and would be well retired by now, had I made my money by listening to people tell me how ?R would be mainstream in Just A Few Years Now. The tech industry NEVER tires of telling that story and hearing it. Yet it never, ever, EVER happens as a mainstream product.
The author of this article and quite a few people in this HN thread all seem to be mainly looking at Vision Pro through the lens of VR gaming. Why else would the author return his Vision Pro?
What makes Vision Pro truly interesting to me is that we can replace our laptop screen with a view containing a larger display and multiple ancillary displays.
I don't think you are accurately reflecting the article - the author is pointing out that Vision Pro is surprisingly weak in the area of "VR Gaming," which is the most successful experience category for headsets so far. He's not suggesting that's the only use - in fact he spends most of the article talking about other uses. He also goes into detail about his thoughts around displays and says that the Vision Pro will be a compelling alternative as a travel display in the near future - but that he does not see it replacing high quality physical displays.
My sense is that the Vision Pro is certainly, at least, the best "travel monitor" ever built - and it's at a price point and comfort point where that is very hard to use to justify a purchase. That said, future work can improve both substantially.
> Except most reviews find the fov and resolution inadequate for desktop work
I have not heard any such complaints.
Sure, I heard some complaining that the FOV should be wider, but not being able to work because of it? Not a peep.
The resolution is incredible, you can't see any pixels at all. There's zero screen door effect.
If the concern is with the Mac Virtual Display, then it's understandable. There seems to be some compression going on and it doesn't look as crisp.
Native apps though? They are perfect
> eschewing gamers
They are not doing that. It's the companies not porting games over (the ones that don't have issues with the lack of controllers). It may be simply a matter of time, as just porting games and keeping existing assets will make them look terrible with the higher resolution of the Vision Pro.
The article explains that you can’t see the pixels because the AVP is purposely blurring them. The effective resolution of a mirrored Mac screen is below that of a physical 4K screen.
The author of this article is looking at it through the lens of wanting to get consumers to buy it. He spends a very large part of the post talking about consumer sentiment and willingness to pay for different use-cases, including why the current generation headsets (including Apple's) are not quite there yet for daily productivity.
IMHO Meta's #1 mistake with VR thus far has been presentation. No good press has ever come with screenshots of silly cartoon avatars (with or without legs). The focus on games highlighted its lack of utility. AVP only highlighted utility, which draws instant connection to our daily lives.
Just speaking for myself here, but owning a Quest I don't entirely agree. The utility of it is kinda crazy - I can browse the web and OpenXR apps from my browser, or tether myself to my PC with the push of a button. Wanna sideload streaming apps and watch movies over SFTP from your homeserver? There are no guardrails in place to stop you.
If I try to imagine myself living the same workflow on Apple Vision Pro, I get hung up on the cost. $3,500 is a big ask for a VR iPad with a lot of the same pitfalls as the tablet.
Meta severely underplays those capabilities. I've always known they're "there", but it's not their preferred presentation of the device. It also takes a bit of "power user" to be comfortable doing much of what you're describing.
I'm not even sure if AVP can side load apps or watch movies over SFTP, but I don't think it matters at this point: the global mindshare is sold on Apple being the leader now, and personally I don't think it's the hardware driving the difference. Strangely, I think it came down to "look n feel" for a lot of it.
They definitely underplay it - Meta is big on services, selling people a quest for sideloading or Blu-Ray streaming probably threatens their bottom line. Hard to blame them when the hardware costs the same as a Switch though. At the price Apple is asking (and the hardware margins they enjoy), I'd expect more capabilities than just spatialized iOS. I'm not sure the Apple customers in my life would buy a Vision Pro even if it was the same price as an iPhone.
> the global mindshare is sold on Apple being the leader now
Besides Casey Neistat and Mark Gurman, I'm really not hearing much from the "global mindshare" anymore. The Quest didn't really get any fanfare either, but it did move units and get market penetration from the start. Apple is on a slow roll right now, and until they get Half Life: Alyx or MSFS2020-tier system sellers, I'm not sure the in-group will even consider them on-par with PCVR. Given Apple's audience, I half expect their biggest VR competitor to be Sony's PSVR2.
It's possible Apple isn't truly interested in typical VR/AR gameplay, or at least the way we (and Meta) have been thinking about it. The high price (as of now) and focus on utility leads me to think their long term game here is as a complement to macbooks, and AVP is a Display replacement, rather than a standalone unit. I can see them pushing this on Enterprise customers a lot.
Time will tell. I worked at a startup that bought Apple Silicon build servers day-and-date with announcement (despite our stack not building on ARM). There is certainly a demand for anything with the "made in Cupertino" label.
Like so much else with VR, it's a real challenge of perception. Because nearly everyone who actually tries it finds that those cartoon avatars are actually surprisingly good in giving you a real sense of co-presence with someone else. Especially when linked with good eye and face tracking. You really quickly just forget it's not the real person you are with. But I totally agree, every time you see a screen shot or even video of it, it just looks totally silly.
Isn't one of the biggest problems with these VR headsets the nearness of the display to the eye? It seems like prolonged exposure to this would result in myopia that would worsen faster than it does when exposed to screens that are farther away.
The current model is not going to work, but it is a large leap to the ideal state of the future world to come. Probably we will adjust but it will be an odd world to adjust to when we have this thing over our face all day
I think it's natural. With the end of the Free Money Era, every New Shiny Thing in your life is going to require a subscription, permission to harvest data on everything about you that can be measured, as many advertisements as users will tolerate, and gambling-tier microtransactions. It's tiring, demoralizing, and stupid. Walking away is liberating.
Yes the VR experience was pretty dang sick, but to be real… the pass though is not as good your own vision. Is it ground breaking? Yes. But it’s v1.0, details are fuzzy, the color palette was meh, and we’ve still yet to invent an instrument with the dynamic contrast of the human eye.
I tell you what was quite fascinating: the audio. Nearly every clip they shot they must have used a head dummy spatial microphone and hired industry best to master the audio tracks. My eyes weren’t fooled, but my ears were (other than a roll off under 142hz or so); mainly due to the phase and eq shifting and their use of multiple sources along the head band.
I’d really like to see far more focus on the audio side.
And as far as actual use cases? They need to go after live sports. Otherwise it’ll stay a gadget of the technophile.
I mean the Vision Pro seems like an over engineered dev kit to me, like the article describes.
The vision pro seems to miss the mark in some many areas and seems like it's ahead of it's time, which is odd for Apple and the Quest 3 seems to beat it in a lot of areas.
In some ways I am surprised Apple released it and didn't keep working on it in the lab, but in others, I think they wanted to get it out in users hands and see how they use it and what devs start to build with it, they also wanted to normalise the idea of such devices, so when something more functional is out there, people will be happier to use it.
I'm going to go against the grain a bit here and say that in my experience, the description of the Vision Pro as a dev kit feels pretty reductive.
I was a day 1 purchaser who bought it fully expecting the device to just be an early access "dev kit" and have been shocked at how well it's fit into my day-to-day uses for a huge variety of things.
Some of the things I like to do with it:
1. Gaming with friends: I play Baldur's Gate 3 with a group of 4 every week and can very comfortably relax on my recliner while running a discord window and stream BG3 from Geforce Now with an app called Nexus+ just using a ps5 controller. It's a very seamless experience and one of the highlights of my week.
2. Reading comic books: I thing this is one of the most underrated things to do with the Vision Pro. Being able to adjust the size of comic panels to an enormous size helps me appreciate the linework and detail put into every page.
3. Software development/photo + video editing: I use my MacBook Pro + screen mirroring to get a larger screen in an immersive environment that I personally find less distracting to get into a focused state of mind for writing code or creative endeavors like photo + video editing.
4. Entertainment: Watching movies, tv shows, and 180 SBS videos like SliceofLifeVR's content has been awesome and incredibly immersive. I much prefer the Vision Pro to my TV for solo viewing. Obviously, this falls short when looking to share the experience with others, but a lot of my viewing is alone, so it's fine for me.
Things that haven't really worked very well that I wanted to like:
1. Reading books + taking notes: I read a lot for book clubs I host and envisioned this being a great way to have a lot of available space to spread out notes and things during book clubs on discord and just find it to not be particularly enjoyable compared to reading a physical book or kindle.
2. VisionOS Native productivity: I've spent a decent amount of time editing spreadsheets and writing documentation with the VisionOS Native Microsoft Office Suite + PDF readers but find that there's a lot of minor things that add up to make it a less usable product for productivity outside of the context of screen mirroring. I'm going to keep trying to figure out a workflow that works better for me, but just haven't yet.
For context, I'm in my late 20's and live alone currently, so there are a lot of people for whom this device doesn't make as much sense for—I'm solely describing my personal uses for it as a member of the likely target audience.
Overall, I'm extremely pleased that it can do a lot of things that I find fulfilling and entertaining with little to no resistance. I can confidently say that for the tasks I listed above, it's my favorite way of doing them by a pretty large margin.
Additionally, I use the Solo Knit Band (M) for all of my usage with no modifications and find it comfortable for around 5-6 hours with no breaks in wearing it. I fully recognize that this isn't the normal experience for many consumers, and I likely will upgrade to some type of Halo band when a company like BoboVR release an AVP product line, but out of the box, the comfort is more than enough for me to use for extended periods of time with no mods.
Since buying it on release day, I've used it probably 2-4 hours most days with some days of 10-12 hours and some days of no usage and it's become an integrated part of my lifestyle. If anyone has any questions for me, I'd be happy to answer about my experience with it.
I thought the Vision Pro didn't support SBS video? And that that was the reason why the people who like to bring up porn in every conversation about VR said it would fail.
It doesn't natively support it in the Photos app but 3rd party apps like Moon Player work for the content. None of the solutions are as robust as their implementations on other platforms (i.e. Meta Quest 3) but they're perfectly functional and are constantly getting improved.
I anticipate within 3-6 months, other major offerings will have been ported over and have relative feature parity with their counterparts but with the benefit of the increased resolution and no screen door effect.
I've been using my AVP pretty regularly since release day. I'm using it less now that the novelty is wearing off, but still fairly often.
Things I like:
1) It really is an upgrade vs. working on just my 16" MBP screen. I'm in the minority that actually finds the knit headband pretty comfortable, and can fairly easily go 3-4 hours with it on before it starts to bother me. I do wish there was the option to break specific OSX apps out into their own window or at least have multiple screens, but when I can put most of my work in a web browser or app that the AVP supports, it works extremely well. At worst, it's still more eyeball real estate than just the MBP screen itself.
2) ALVR/Moonlight actually work pretty well, if you have the WiFi infrastructure to support it. It works properly on my Unifi setup but it struggled a bit on a friend's wifi. But it's really cool to play PCVR games using such a high resolution display, as well as playing 2D games on a screen that appears far larger than even my 65" TV
3) 3D movies are insanely good on it. I've always wanted to really love 3D movies, but the downsides for both active and passive 3D really kept them from being a resounding hit with me. Not the case on the AVP. No compromise on brightness or FPS makes it a much nicer experience. 2D movies and TV are also quite nice, with the only real downside being the audio - it's reasonably good, and I can enjoy movies on it no problem, but it also doesn't match proper home theater audio. On the whole, though, I think it's the best personal movie watching experience you can get for 3.5k. A projector that even approaches the visual quality/relative screen size of the AVP is $5k+. Obviously, though, a real home theater setup can be enjoyed with more people. The individual nature can also be a strength, though - if you want to watch something without disturbing your partner, you don't have to have a TV on in the bedroom.
4) I feel significantly less disconnected from the world when using it than I have my other VR/AR headsets. I can function with it on moving around my house, etc.
Things I dislike:
1) I would love it if it was lighter and I could wear it all day, but it's not a huge deal for me.
2) The OS is miles ahead of my Quest Pro, but it still feels unpolished at times. When everything works it's perfect - but there are still some bugs. Until 1.1 released, something was going on with Safari that could bring the whole thing to it's knees until you rebooted it. Not sure if it was a memory leak or if it was something else, but if I had a web browser open for an extended period of time, it would eventually bring the whole system to it's knees. This is fixed, but I still have some (more rare) issues with apps going nonresponsive and not being closable via the usual X, etc., requiring a force quit. I'm sure this will all get fixed in time, but it's not the same level of polish I've grown accustomed to with Apple software.
3) I'd really like some way to sync audio to external sources. You can do some hackery with a Siri shortcut, but I'd love to be able to sit down on my couch, put on a movie, and watch it while making use of my sound system vs. being forced to go with the AVP speakers or bluetooth headphones.
All in all, I like it quite a bit. I don't know that I would recommend it, with the pricing being what it is - I think if you're a good fit for it, you already are interested in it or will be interested in it when you hear about it in general.
If people wanted to wear a phone screen taped over their eyes out in public, the technical limitations wouldn't barely make a dent in that desire. But the vast majority of people want to have real in-person human interactions when they're out in the world. That's what the makers of these devices fail to see. But they can't see that because they're self-described VR enthusiasts. If they talk to non VR enthusiasts (which is everyone else), they'll see that the limiting factor isn't the hardware.
Think of it this way. Most people think it's rude to talk to each other indoors with sunglasses on. That's the slimmest form factor you're going to get, and it still steps on the toes of human connection.
I’m in my late 30’s, and I was a high school educator for about a decade. Teenagers have become quite comfortable holding an entire conversation while wearing earbuds. As an ancient and outdated old person, my initial gut reaction was that it was… a bit rude(?); however, these teenagers just internalized that audio pass-through was a thing, and wearing earbuds didn’t indicate a lack of attention to the conversant. My point being, we may not be comfortable having a conversation indoors with sunglasses on today - but that could change in a flash and only ‘old people’ would even notice.
The AirPods are really the first mass-market augmented reality device. It's so well done that no one even thinks about them that way. That's how it'll need to be with visual augmentation, but there's no reason I've seen that we won't get there eventually. I'm bullish on Apple being the first major player here in part because they already are, by a huge, huge margin, the biggest player in augmented reality.
Apple is IMO the only company that seems capable of simultaneously tackling the form factor, outside-viewer perception factor (AirPods are fully socialized, as you mention), inside-viewer perception factor (AirPods on transparency really do feel 99.9% fully "transparent")
There is a major difference between earbuds and sunglasses. There is a lot of subconscious communication that goes on with facial gestures (including but not limited to eye gestures). This is where the sterotype of poker players wearing sunglasses comes from.
Would the new generation be get used to it? Probably. But that does not mean it is healthy. We have gotten used to a lot of things that are objectively bad for us.
Yeah, it could be a “bad thing”, but it won’t be a bad thing just because prior norms have been broken.
We’re already deep into the process of merging modern technology into every aspect of our lives, and in some cases it’s been bad. In some cases it’s been a necessary evolution to survive in a modern society. In some cases, it’s been good.
On the one hand, I worry that face helmets will further erode human connection, and people will live in a lower resolution reality than what is possible with direct human contact. On the other hand, the current reality is that more and more people are looking down into a slab of glass instead of up/out at the world around them.
It could be that the ultimate version of AVP (some kind of glasses that are barely more noticeable than AirPods) is what gets people to look up/out again.
The “bad thing” is arguably already here, and it’s just a question of whether future tech will make it worse, or do a better job of merging the real world with the digital world, enabling people to participate in both instead of disappearing into their pocket computer.
> But the vast majority of people want to have real in-person human interactions when they're out in the world.
I think this statement is too strong. I see too many people every day in elevators, in lines, all sorts of different places that are on their phone and specifically avoiding eye contact with other human beings. That suggests that the term “vast majority” is probably too strong.
Right? Eyes down at their phone, Air Pods in, it's not easy to get their attention even if you need to. They're essentially already connected to a VR headset, just a poor version of one.
Seconded. One glance around coffee shops, buses, or the like is enough to show that screens dominate “out in the world” too. And looking at the trend lines for the past decade, it seems set to continue.
I would encourage you to try out both the Quest 3 and the Apple Vision Pro for an extended period of time. If you had asked people during the advent of the television, they would have expressed the same opinion about people wanting social connection instead of sitting in front of a box.
No they clearly wouldn't be right. Even if we accept as fact the idea that both
those things have had negative effects on society and on us, quite clearly huge numbers of people DO want TVs and smartphones, even if those things aren't leading to better, happier lives.
I'm not sure how we could possibly quantify and compare better, happier lives before and after TVs or smartphones, but it would be impossible to narrow down the metrics to peg the change over such a long period of time on just those technologies. The scale is just too big and the timeline to long to possibly know why happiness may have increased, if it did at all.
> quite clearly huge numbers of people DO want TVs and smartphones
This really ventures into the space of addictive behaviors. Do meth addicts really want meth, or are they using for some other reason? Can we assume that they DO want the meth and that's the primary driver simply because they keep using it?
That's true. But as far as business and popularity go, TV and smartphones were a huge success. In the end what makes money will be sold without regard for social consequences.
shrug I don't spend my entire life in company. Reading a book is hardly a group event....
Also, when shared experience hits the next version (or the one after that, or..) and I can watch Liverpool beat Man Utd with my brother on a different continent (with whatever lag being compensated for) I'll get more of a shared experience than I could have today.
This is a version-1 product. It's only going to get better - I have one of the original iPhones, and compared to the '15 Pro I have now, it's pitiful. Apple are generally a long-term game company, and they're not going to let this just drop.
So sure, in company down at the pub, I won't be wearing goggles like this. Funnily enough I don't think that's the target market, making your argument a bit of a strawman one. Apple (I expect) will focus is attention on where it can make a difference. And (again, I expect) it will.
I think the key to your last bit is "indoors." People don't consider it rude when talking to each other outdoors because it's mutually understood that wearing the device is beneficial.
All it takes is to get to that point with AR. So it's more a critique of the state of AR's present usefulness rather than an innate, immovable reflection on society.
The problem isn't the form factor, it's the purpose. Wearing sunglasses is beneficial because it protects my eyes and makes it easier to look at you when you're talking to me.
Wearing an AR device is like telling you something more important than our conversation might come up and I need to be able to quickly shift my focus from you to it.
Maybe it's my age (early 40s) but it's common for our friend/family group to shame each other (in a half-kidding-half-not way) when somebody gets into their phone too much during a social event. "If you're going to be here, be here" is a mantra we tease each other with. We hold each other accountable enough to where when my elementary-age son picks out a movie for us to watch, if one of the adults in the room starts scrolling on their phone he'll pause the movie and ask them if they're going to pay attention or not.
My assumption is that this expectation will shift as time passes.
I can see a future where people use AR, there's a setting that indicates "full focus" vs "distracted", and people will ask others to stay in "full focus" mode when talking. This would minimize the number of notifications the user receives in an effort to lend focus to the conversation.
It'll be the same general expectation as what you're describing, but with a step towards concession and acceptance of the tech.
There will also probably be an in-between period where people who remain glued to their phone try to take the morale high ground against those who are using AR goggles by saying they're giving more focus to the conversation :)
I guess I don't use this feature when having a conversation with another person because it would require me to get out my phone and change modes when the conversation begins. That's too much of a barrier. In some settings, though, like when going to watch a movie in public, there's a dedicated window where people are expected to shift their phones to a socially acceptable mode. I do respond accordingly in those situations.
With AR, it would seem this process could be automated through facial recognition / voice detection. If there was a setting that said, "Don't notify me of text messages when the system detects I am conversing with another person. Do this automatically" then it seems quite practical to have that enabled. It also seems reasonable that it would be implemented because the concept of "disable notifications temporarily" already exists on phones.
Full focus mode would have to be passthrough with no notifications or external information. I feel like anything less would just be the current phone status quo.
I dunno. Some people have trouble reading emotions from other people's facial expressions. A heads-up display that conveys this sort of information in real-time could help improve the conversation. Or pulling up highlights from the last time a conversation occurred so you can more easily pick up where you left off.
Of course, some people will feel like these changes reduce the humanity of the interaction because you're letting the device do too much of the work and others will disagree and say that the tech is just helping automate and improve a task they were already performing. Both camps will have fair points.
These sorts of behaviors which augment the conversation seem distinct from concepts like "be shown new text messages while mid-conversation" which I do think should be able to be silenced and conveyed as being silenced.
I agree that a CRM mode would indeed be very valuable, but I'm skeptical of such a feature shipping given that a similar thing could be surfaced on the phone but I've never even heard of people using it.
I agree it would be breaking some new grounds. The only things that I can think of right now are tech like Babel Fish earbuds, which strive to translate conversations in real-time, and Google Lens for real-time visual translations.
I did make good use of Google Lens when traveling to France last year. I found myself engaging with the world by looking through my phone's camera frequently as it made understanding restaurant menus much easier.
I agree it is unfortunate that you can't tell where someone's eyes are at when talking with sunglasses on and I also agree that it detracts from the socialization experience.
I do not feel that this loss makes it rude to have an outside conversation wearing sunglasses in a sunny environment.
So, I still think that AR will find its way in. I'm not saying it won't reduce the socialization experience further. It'll just be perceived as semi-necessary, understandable, and life will move on.
Except what is the benefit that it’s providing, that people asked to have solved?
I feel like if you went up to someone and asked “how can we improve this social interaction?” Literally nobody would suggest strapping a screen to your face anywhere in the list of improvements.
Here’s some other technology improvements:
What would make your TV experience better?
* make it bigger
* allow it to use the internet to watch infinite shows
* make it cheaper
* make the colors brighter
What would make your analog home-phone experience better?
* make it portable
* make it smaller
* allow me to save contacts within it
* allow me to take other notes
* now that I have this little thing in my pocket anyways, make it do more stuff
Then when we think of the problems that lead to AR being the solution, it’s almost entirely related to business problems. Surgery, manufacturing, carpentry, construction… all would benefit from a HUD that tells you what to put where. Those are real benefits.
But anything that people would do in a social situation? Almost never will the answer to a human interaction problem to be “attach a screen to your face”. In that scenario, all of the solutions are really in search of a problem.
> Then when we think of the problems that lead to AR being the solution, it’s almost entirely related to business problems. Surgery, manufacturing, carpentry, construction… all would benefit from a HUD that tells you what to put where. Those are real benefits.
I think you're on to something. Glass was an expensive flop from the word "go" but the second generation did live on in these specialized sectors.
I suspect that - at least for this decade - AR is still going to be the specialized/industry tech and that VR is going to be the consumer oriented tech.
I think a convincing example is to show a heads-up display of what two people last talked about as to enrich the conversation.
I already do this but more manually. For example, I don't try to remember everyone's birthday. Instead, I put their birthday's in my calendar, get a notification when it's close, and use this information to enrich our relationship.
It seems reasonable to believe this could be extended much further if the barrier to recording and recalling the information was reduced.
> I think a convincing example is to show a heads-up display of what two people last talked about as to enrich the conversation.
Perhaps. It might be a generation or two before the "that's ... creepy" vibes fade. Reminds me a bit of that scene in minority report after the eye swap and the protagonist passes by a billboard and the avatar asks him about how the pants he purchased worked out.
I do something similar to the calendar thing too. I reach out a few days ahead of time so it doesn't seem like I'm just doing it reflexively like an unfeeling robot because facebook prompted me to do so day of.
The main difference is that there might be any number of equally-or-more-valid reasons to have AR/MR glasses on than "it's too bright".
Like, "I'm on call for blahblah" or "I'm watching the baby monitor" or... whatever, a million possibilities.
So yes, AR glasses detract, but no, it's not different.
Also, lots of wearers consider that social interaction complexifier a feature, not a bug. Which is why you see a lot of cops wear sunglasses all the time, even with no sun. For a deep, heart-to-heart conversation with somebody important? Sure, take them off. For anything else...
Your arguments are from the PoV of the wearer. Sure, as a wearer, you know that you are paying attention to whoever you are talking to, but as someone on the other side, I don't know that.
That's not a problem with sunglasses because it's inherently impossible for you to be doing something else.
The issue that people have with AR glasses (and to some extent, people wearing sunglasses unnecessarily) is that AR glass wearers are thinking more about themselves than the perspective of other person. And then to defend AR glasses saying "I could be doing something important but actually I'm paying attention" is like doubling down on that lack of awareness.
I'm not opposed to AR glassses. I'm just explaining why they are a bit of a faux pas and the people who think they are OK are also the reason why they are not OK.
Why do you think VR makers think people are going to wear the thing all the time? Not being appropriate to use everywhere doesn’t hurt computer monitors, or game consoles, or cars, etc. It’s not going to replace phones, but that isn’t what it needs to do to succeed as a product.
This is why linux perpetually has <5% adoption. It's made and maintained by linux enthusiasts who are incapable of understanding how the average person wants to use a computer.
But, how the average person wants to use a computer is extremely, irreconcilably different from how the 5% (or 2% probably but whatever, doesn't matter) want to use their computers.
So... sniffsniff what's that smell? The market working is it then?
Both Vitamix blenders and recumbent bicycles have less market share than desktop Linux. Is that because recumbent bike makers just really have no idea how people want to ride bicycles, or...
> This is why linux perpetually has <5% adoption. It's made and maintained by linux enthusiasts who are incapable of understanding how the average person wants to use a computer.
No. That's a gross generalization. You have all sorts of people using Linux, including leading UX experts.
What you don't have is a single governing body pulling everyone in the same direction, so efforts get diluted(even when prioritized).
I think you could make the exact same argument about almost any tech device, like the iPhone itself which is wildly popular along with the spinoffs.
Also VR isn’t what companies, Apple at least, care about. It’s a stepping stone to AR which is why the AVP does a “fake AR” of sorts as its primary mode of operation. You have to walk before you run which is also why Apple pushed VR/ARKit so hard even before they had a device to really take full advantage of it (as in a device that’s not just holding an iPad up and pointing it at table, all of 5 people care about that).
The Overton window will shift if people get true utility out of VR/AR in the same way it’s shifted on everything else. Right now there just isn’t anything compelling enough to force that shift but I think it will happen quickly when there is.
And before “I find X compelling”, ok, that’s great for you, for the vast majority of people the tech and/or use-cases are not there yet.
> Also VR isn’t what companies, Apple at least, care about. It’s a stepping stone to AR
I couldn't care less about AR. I want VR and only VR.
I don't want digital overlays of the world around me at all. That's completely useless and will be filled with ads and noise. I want to live and breathe in imaginative fantasy worlds and escape the real world completely.
I want to be a character in interactive movies. Have realistic D&D sessions with friends where the real world disappears completely. To create entire planets and universes and populate them with stories and adventures.
I don't want labels on cooking ingredients, advertisements for Taco Bell while I walk around, or email notifications popping up during conversations. AR might have industrial use cases, but the real world implications are annoying.
> you could make the exact same argument about almost any tech device, like the iPhone itself
I don't think this is true. There was a massive appetite for the iPhone for decades leading up to its release, and there was no question that mobile was going to have a giant role in the future of computing. If you look back, most nay-sayers didn't doubt the value or utility of pocket-computers, but rather just that Apple specifically would be out-competed by established vendors.
It used to be extremely rude to not take off headphones when people talk to you. Nowadays it is quite accepted for earbuds and "transparency mode" is even a selling point.
My guess would be that once AR allows easy sharing, e.g. showing others a funny AR cat video, it will quickly become socially accepted to wear frequently.
Hard disagree. Except for brief interactions like ordering a coffee, I don’t think it is at all socially common for people to keep headphones on when they talk with others. Maybe it varies by culture, or social circle.
It varies. I’m totally fine with it if it’s clear the person can hear and interact with me, and the people I interact with a lot do it to varying degrees, and no one’s offended.
I find that it is sadly getting socially acceptable to be worse than that: to talk straight out loud with someone over the phone over the airbuds while around other people, even making eye contact with other people.
When someone makes eye contact with you and speak, you can no longer expect that they intend to speak with you.
The people with the worst behaviour are pushing the norm.
There's an important difference: the subtle face mimicry is extremely important for sub-conscious (and conscious) communication. Having headphones on is rude because it indicates that the other person is not interested in hearing what you have to say. The problem with having an opaque visor covering your face is not that it's rude, it's that you completely lose the non-verbal part of communication. This is why email and phone communication can be so easy to misunderstand. Without seeing the face and body languages of the other person, your mind will have a tendency to overlay biases and prejudices on what is being communicated. A simple "sure, whatever" can be interpreted as obnoxiously dismissive, as a surrender, or friendly banter. If you can see the body language of the other person, the intent is usually clear. If you can't, it isn't.
It used to be rude because people understood it to signal that.
With younger people earbuds seem more like a fashion statement (you also don't take off ear rings to talk to people) and the noise cancelling/transparency will actually do the opposite: filter out background noise so that you can be heard more clearly.
Similarly taking out a Nokia used to signal that you will not be paying attention for a while. Nowadays it might instead be you taking a nice photo, showing off something to others etc.
VR headsets are definitely not at this point yet, but I am not so sure they never will be.
My point is that with the current VR implementation the problem is not about rudeness, but fundamentally hampering personal communication.
If I go and meet with someone in person, I generally do it because I want to see them up close, face to face. If we are both wearing VR headsets that hide our faces, the whole premise goes out the window.
Eventually, VR headsets might overcome this problem by accurately portraying the other person's face in some way, but we are nowhere there yet.
The second paragraph seems silly. Nobody thinks its rude to talk with normal glasses on, and that's the same form factor. Meta's AR glasses are already available as both sunglasses and normal glasses (though obviously lacking in actual AR).
I disagree, there is a difference between desire and practicality.
For example, I would love and could easily justify the 12.9 inch iPad but the logistics of traveling with it make no sense for me.
I could justify the benefits of traveling everywhere with my high powered gaming pc but logistically it makes no sense.
These devices are still largely impractical for long term use, and particularly outside use. They won't be until the hardware catches up with what we are working on with the software and it is an almost invisible technology except for a mostly standard looking pair of glasses.
People already walk around with their phone almost attached to their face, it isn't hard to imagine wanting an AR headset.
I'm confused by comments like this one. Apple very specifically designed Vision Pro to address this problem, going to great lengths to make the outside world visible to the user and the user's eyes visible to others, and marketing that they don't want to create isolation. It is also described in the article (where the author thinks they went too far).
What do you think of how the Vision Pro addresses this problem?
The "user's eyes visible to others" part has been widely panned, even by the most enthusiastic reviews. There are two major problems with it.
One, it's not the actual user's eyes, it's just a bad rendition of some eyes - without any of the extremely subtle facial expressions that happen with the skin around the eyes, and without any amount of certainty from the other that they are correctly reflecting exactly what you're looking at. We are extremely good at noticing exactly which direction another human is looking in, and when theire gaze shifts, so even minor inaccuracies or lag are jarring.
Much worse, the screen they used is so bad that the eyes are barely visible in almost any amount of lighting.
Either way, even if this "solution" actually worked, the visor still covers far too much of the face to be able to get a normal expression.
I don’t buy this. So many people walking around absolutely glued to their smartphones. Neck crooked down, ignoring the world, even inside businesses, social situations, at home, at work, and the taboo is very quickly softening! I often notice couples sitting in a restaurant, basically ignoring each other in favor of their phones for an entire meal. No human connection going on here!
People want human connections less and less, especially with strangers, service providers, “NPCs” as some would lovingly call them. I think good AR will accelerate this, not fail due to a shrinking taboo.
IMO people on their smartphones are generally experiencing 10-100x the human connections that people without their smartphones are experiencing. That's exactly why they're so addictive. Smart phones let people push themselves right to the very edge of Dunbar's limit for social connectivity, which is why it can get stressful and exhausting, and is probably damaging when done in extended periods.
Putting your phone down for a few hours to stare at the trees, or the water, or the clouds passing by, and maybe chatting up a couple nearby people doing the same, that is now the epitome of disconnected blissful ignorance.
> > But the vast majority of people want to have real in-person human interactions when they're out in the world.
> I don’t buy this. So many people walking around absolutely glued to their smartphones.
I think it is right-ish, and just needs refinement:
Where people have to have human interactions when they're out in the world, the vast majority of them want them to be real in-person.
If I choose to interact with someone, or accept their attempt at interaction, I don't want a device between me and them. I often don't choose that, but this doesn't minimise my preference for non-tech-filtered integration if interaction does happen.
If I'm out on a trail run or trek I'm perfectly happy to exchange pleasantries with others out and about, I'm quite happy to give directions or similar assistance to a tourist while meandering locally (if asked politely, otherwise you will get sent well out of your way), but far less so if they are not looking me in the face.¹
> especially with strangers, service providers, “NPCs”, …
…, bloody survey people, charity muggers, those who think that because they believe [deity] loves me I'm somehow beholden to care, local press outside the station when I get off a train delayed by a significant incident, …
--
[1] caveat: I'm away that some people are very uncomfortable with direct eye contact, that is quite different from not entirely paying attention because of a bit of tech.
I've always found examples like "couples sitting in a restaurant, ignoring each other in favor of their phones" as kind of hilariously judgemental. Almost in the same way that ignorant extroverts view introverts.
If they're a couple, why would they feel the need to always talk? You don't need to always be talking to enjoy just doing your own thing in each other's presence. Even prior to the proliferation of smartphones this was pretty normal in my experience, you spend most of your time having the ability to talk to the people you like, at some point you run out of things to say and are comfortable enough with each other to just do your own thing while in each other's company. It says nothing about their connection with each other.
> But the vast majority of people want to have real in-person human interactions when they're out in the world.
Is this true? Most of the time when I'm out and about I'm going from point a to point b and I'm not really interested in talking to anyone I dont already know. If I'm already at a specific place to do a specific thing... I'm not going to have a vr headset on and I'm not really interested in interacting with people I dont already know.
these things change quiet quickly.
Ask any zoomers (which i might add arent young anymore either, the first ones'll start turning 30 next year!) if its rude to glance at the phone mid conversation.
Gen Y/X generally considered that extremely rude, while gen Z started to see it as completely normal.
People used to think it's rude to stare at a phone screen too, but here we are.
I'm not saying VR will become as normalised as smartphones, mind you, just that it's a possible outcome. That said, VR / AR as we know it now has been a thing for a while now and it hasn't taken off as much.
I wouldn’t mind wearing glasses outdoors as long as the environment could provide me with useful information. From a nearby shop that has discounts, to real time traffic updates. What AR was supposed to deliver but never really materialized.
What we consider acceptable changes all the time. A lot of people have conversations with earbuds in. And in the 90s it would have been inconceivable to go out for dinner and have half of the people hacking away on their phones.
What's wrong with AR glasses in a form factor akin to actual prescription glasses? It seems from my perspective a cool way to augment our perception about the world, not to diminish it.
> Most people think it's rude to talk to each other indoors with sunglasses on.
Nobody finds it rude to talk to each other with actual glasses on. If AR had similar utility and minimal impact on seeing each others eyes, then the same would be true. Sunglasses prevent people from tracking where people are looking which is why they come off as rude.
> That's the slimmest form factor you're going to get, and it still steps on the toes of human connection.
The minimalist form factor for AR is contact lenses not glasses. Several companies are working on them though it's a long way from a consumer product.
> The minimalist form factor for AR is contact lenses not glasses.
That is extremely unlikely to ever be possible. A chip that size that did both high-bandwidth radio AND wireless charging (since you're not gonna have wires dangling from your eyes) AND high refresh rate display would fundamentally have to get extremely hot, with anything resembling current electronics.
You'd have to invent an entirely different transistor to do something like this.
You don't need a high bandwidth connection for AR. Vector graphics + text dramatically reduces the bandwidth requirements.
That's not immersive 3D, but the useful bit of AR would be things like putting peoples names above them at a party as if you where in an MMO. Countdown timers over cooking pots, a map or just an arrow when walking somewhere etc.
You may not have realized it, but the glasses on tip of nose thing where people lean forward to look at you is because reading glasses make things blurry at conversation distance. Basically this: https://levinsoneyeclinic.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/shu...
However, sometimes people don't bother and they really can't see you very clearly. But, you can still track the body language from where they eyes are looking so it's fine, that's the difference clear lenses make.
> Most people think it’s rude to talk to each other indoors with sunglasses on
…really? I have prescription glasses/sunglasses and I often don’t bother switching them during a quick excursion- such as daycare pickup/drop off. It’s never crossed my mind that I could be perceived as rude. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that anyone with such opinions do not have the level prescription that are required for driving and just general consent use. And for anyone thinking transition lenses would be the solution- those do not work in vehicles with UV blocking windows.
How many people have you seen wearing sunglasses inside an office, or talking at home?
If you're having a quick interaction like popping in and out of a building to pick up / drop off someone or something, sure. But otherwise, it's quite universally rude.
This is the trap of when a company needs a user to buy a product more than the user needs the product.
This was something jobs was adept at navigating around along with Jonny Ive.
Tim Cook is a product idiot. Or maybe more to the point he is adept at making factories and has run out of products for them to manufacture. So what’s more important to him his giving the factory more to do vs designing the right product.
The author is former head of Oculus at Meta, Hugo Barra
The full title, which of course wouldn't fit:
Vision Pro is an over-engineered “devkit” // Hardware bleeds genius & audacity but software story is disheartening // What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right // Why Meta could finally have its Android moment
After obsessing on thinness and weight for a decade on the iPhone and MacBook, Apple
inexplicably did the opposite and missed the opportunity to focus on the major painpoint or VR : every headset hurts after 30 minutes. The Vision Pro is heavier than most flagship headsets.
I have 1000 hours on SteamVR, but coming back is a chore. And my face is red after every session.
I'm not really disputing your broader point, but this:
> Porn is what got VHS to succeed over Beta.
Is just not true. For one, porn absolutely existed on Beta. But more broadly, by the time the content available on each format mattered, VHS had already won the format war.
That's because both Beta and VHS were primarily developed and marketed as a way to record TV to watch later. Tapes were way too expensive to make selling pre-recorded tapes viable when both systems launched. Pre-recorded tapes eventually did become popular, especially in the rental market. But that only happened well after VHS clearly won the format war, mostly due to VHS's longer recording time.
It's not that immersive because you either get a video that you can't interact with where you get to play the part of dead fish wearing a camera rig, or it's absolutely insanely bad 3D models that will only ever get deeper into the uncanny valley. The videos are also terrible quality because making VR porn is expensive, and if you prefer somewhat amateur content, you are completely out of luck, because couples moonlighting porn aren't buying those camera rigs.
I have shown VR porn to many people. They go "woah". I tell them they can have a similar experience literally on their phone with a normal $30 phone holder "headset", none of them buy the headset. None of them even try it ever again.
Very very few whales are optimizing their porn experience. The vast majority of human beings simply scroll through pornhub for 12 minutes and watch half of two videos and then continue their lives.
"Immersiveness" is not a strict benefit for everything.
I found a single VR porn website that worked with the AVP. It was super finicky (around 30 seconds to load a page and actually get it playing, involving 6 button presses). Also was a paid website.
Interesting article. Does the average person distrust meta as much as I do? I wouldn’t consider anything made by meta in my house - I imagine this is a common position it’s a shame it didn’t get a mention.
Great article. It's so long, the four-part title is deserved and necessary to understand what's here.
I found this part somewhat funny or perhaps disingenuous:
> "I admit Vision Pro is the ultimate tech toy, but since I’m not an active developer I can’t justify the $4,049.78 price tag (512GB model + California sales tax) simply for keeping up with the VR market, so I returned my Vision Pro for a full refund inside the 14-day return window."
Mr Barra has held VP positions at companies like Google, Xiaomi and Meta since 2008. He's obviously a multimillionaire just from stock awards. Surely he can afford a $4k toy...
I need to call myself also 'rich' (because of values i hold but can't liquify and i earn enough that i could buy more expensive toys without thinking too much about it) but this doesn't mean my mindset changed.
I have to remind myself that i can afford certain things or i'm wasting too much thought about prices of products.
This probably shows a more realistic, less material and proper upbringing of Mr Barra than 'not being able to afford it'
Likewise. I could absolutely afford one, but I can't justify one.
I'm the same with a smartwatch. I'd like one, but if I got one it would need to be cellular so I can leave my phone at home most of the time. But I just can't justify the cost for the utility I would get.
In some way, this is probably one of the reasons I'm in the situation that I can buy these things, because of all the other things I have not bought in the past.
Just an FYI in regards to a smart watch; if you're in the US, check your health insurance. Some of them have an offer of "if you go to the gym N times, you can have an Apple Watch for free or at a discount".
It sort of makes sense; the calorie counting feature on my Garmin has actually been really helpful in me losing weight, and I think the insurance companies feel like nearly anything to help people lose weight is probably going to save them money in the long run.
I'm hardly "rich" but I do alright, but similarly there are plenty of toys that I certainly could "afford", but can't really justify.
For example, I would really like a real pinball machine, but a nice refurbished one or brand new one cost anywhere between $3,000 and $10,000. If I wanted, I could save up for a bit and buy one, but it's really hard for me to tell myself that $5,000 for a toy is "worth it", so I never have.
The most extravagant toy that I've purchased in the last few years with the MiSTer, and even that was a little hard to justify.
He's been heading up a small health-care startup since 2020. I'd be surprised if he was swimming in cash and liquidity (like he's used too). Companies can no longer write off R&D for the year that they've spent it. Countries like China have major R&D sectors because they allow softare development to be a tax write-off. The US killed this in 2022. Maybe he -- like many of us -- just can't justify spending money on luxury VR goggles given the circumstances.
I balked at this too - more because the idea of returning something I bought that arrived in perfect condition, after I’ve given it a fair amount of use, just because I decide I don’t like it never occurs to me. It feels vaguely entitled and unethical. In my head, you can’t return things you’ve used!
In this situation I’d either keep it and use it infrequently (or maybe it’d grow on me), or perhaps sell it.
It’s a legitimate form of “try before you buy” for online purchases. Even when buying in-store where you can try it before purchase, the demo is rather limited in time and exploration freedom to really make an informed decision. Companies like Apple know that their lenient return policy is worth the extra purchases it generates.
Rich, literally headed Oculus at Meta, extremely relevant to his career and interests, spends many hours writing at least one article about the device. But no, can't justify the purchase. If this guy can't justify the purchase who can??
Being a multi millionaire isn’t really relevant here. If you’re not the type of person who spends $4k on a tech toy then you’ll have a hard time justifying it.
I think even at $100 the AVP is hard to justify for most people. It’s a solution in search of a problem (which I feel is generally the case for all VR tech).
Overall though I think the issue is common across consumer tech. The space is extremely saturated. People have so little time left it’s crazy. Devices monopolize people’s attention. I wonder if we’ll figure out a way to move past this, as a species, and get back to more meaningful interactions.
I have found that many of the affluent engineers that I know exhibit this sort of... line of thinking. this how should I say, false frugality, that at the end of the day doesn't really move the needle much (since they're making 200-300+K TC minimum) but makes them feel good
people who will, instead of directly using their subsidized subsidized clipper card benefits, will load their clipper card with credit cards for the 2% cash back, and then manually submit an expense, creating an operational burden for their company finance team so that they personally can read the benefits of... $25 a year in cash back
people who will take UberPool/Lyft Line to save 4-5 dollars for their commute home at the expense of an extra 20/30 minutes instead of either a) just taking public transit or b) taking a regular uber
people who will buy take out containers and bring them to work to take company-provided catered food so that they can save $20 a day
people who will use credit cards to buy gift cards at grocery stores for 5% cash back (obviously if you buy a $1000 gift card for $50 cash back, that's great but you run the risk of either losing the card/and thus losing cash/losing the credit card purchase/price matching benefits/etc etc)
all in all I think regardless of income/net worth sometimes it's not about the money. they can afford it. but it just feels good to save a little bit of money relative to your net worth way more than the actual financial impact
In short: Apple has made a fully realized spatial operating system, while Meta has made an app launcher for immersive Unity/Unreal apps for vanilla Android. You can get away with an app launcher when all you want to support is fully immersive apps that don't talk to each other. But that fails completely if you are trying to build a true operating system.
Think about what has to exist, to say, intelligently copy and paste parts of a 3D object made by one application into a 3D object made by another, the same way you would copy a flat image from photoshop into a Word document. The operating system has to truly understand 3D concepts internally. Meta is building these features but it is stuck in a really weird space trying to wedge them in between Android underneath and Unity/Unreal at the application layer. Apple has had the advantage of green field engineering it exactly how they want it to be from the ground up.