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Apple Vision Pro review

zmmmmm
441 replies
20h7m

Lots of surprises on the downside from all the reviews. Pass through much more limited in quality with motion blur, pixelation, distortions, limited color and dynamic range. The eye tracking driven input method which was seen as holy grail turns out to be annoying after a while because people don't naturally always look at what they want to click on. Personas straight up aren't ready. The lack of AR features is the biggest surprise. They tried hard to avoid it being a VR device but all the actual high quality experiences, especially the ones people are impressed by are the VR ones.

For me the biggest issue though is that it can't fulfil it's primary use cases:

Want it for productivity? it can't run MacOS applications and if you want to use your actual Mac it can't do multiple monitors.

Want it for entertainment? people want to enjoy photos, videos, movies with other people and it can't include them. Even if they have a Vision Pro, I haven't yet seen any sign of ability for multiple people to do these things together.

All up, it all seems far more immature and dev-kit stage than I was expecting.

Johnie
122 replies
18h58m

Reminds me of iPhone 1.

Everything you've said is reminiscent of the reviews of the first iPhone.

nvarsj
76 replies
18h10m

This iPhone trope has gotta die. I worked at Motorola when the iPhone came out. Every single engineer knew this thing would blow everything else out of the water. It was one of the largest leaps in consumer tech devices ever. I assure you the Vision Pro is nowhere close to that.

ActorNightly
16 replies
16h15m

I love how people just rewrite history on the internet lol.

Iphone 1 was a collosal PoC. Slow, most of web didnt work. Its only appeal was the full touchscreen, which of course sucked to type on, but looked cool (which is the reason people bought it mostly). Everyone that needed mobile compute functionality was still on Blackberry and some other devices.

There was a time during early 2010s where the iphone was better than everything else due to native hardware and in house software and updated functionality. However by 2016 Android caught up, and since the first Pixel came out it pretty much has been ahead ever since.

jnaina
4 replies
14h21m

Not sure what you are going on about, that the original iPhone was a PoC.

Given what was available at that time (I was using a Windows Mobile O2 XDA AND a Blackberry at that time), the iPhone was simply magical. The ability to browse the full web on the go and a proper mail client, was amazing.

Worth the money to travel to San Francisco from Singapore just to get one (and the cost of the AT&T SIM masker to spoof it on the local Singapore telco network)

kj99
1 replies
13h55m

I think you have rose tinted glasses. I had one too, and the browser was garbage over 2g. You forget how much time was spent looking at that checkerboard pattern.

As for email. Proper email client? It was pop3 only, and you had to manually tap to fetch new messages.

vel0city
0 replies
13h4m

You're right about the email client. I had IMAP email clients on mobile for a while before the iPhone supported it. Email on the OG iPhone was terrible.

adra
0 replies
12h3m

I wouldn't bother responding to grandfather. Literally every time apple releases a new product, there's a bunch of people collectively shrugging off whatever the product claims to be bringing, and along come the "the iPhone v1 was crap too and look how that turned out" apologists. Not worth the discourse.

ActorNightly
0 replies
11h28m

Again, no. You completely somehow forgot tech in late 2000s lol.

The internet on anything mobile was pretty painful when it launched in general. Websites weren't optimized for mobile, mobile data was unusably slow. Most people who wanted portability were using things like netbooks, which you could actually multitask on.

Blackberry was the goto for actual phone because it was much easier to type on due to the best keyboard at the time, well developed software for things like email, basic browser, e.t.c.

Ill leave you with this staplepiece of internet history: https://maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=iphone/

pests
2 replies
15h52m

That's the history I remember tho.

I remember the first time I saw an iPhone. It was 2am at a house party with a bunch of 19-25 year olds. Pretty much everyone stopped drinking or dancing and played with this dudes phone for three hours.

elboru
0 replies
15h0m

This was my first experience with an iPhone too. A rich guy (friend of a friend) had one, my friend and I spent the rest of the night trying it.

ActorNightly
0 replies
11h25m

I had the first Occulus when it came out. Big hit at my workplace. Anything flashy is going to get attention. The problem with Apple is that they have, do, and will continue on prioritizing flashiness over usability. Its actually pathetic that you can't install linux on Apple silicon (and no, REd hacked together Asahi linux does not count)

fnordpiglet
2 replies
16h7m

I think if you talked to someone working on Meta Quest they would say this is going to blow the competitors away. If you talk to a reviewer for a tech magazine they’re going to complain about any detail they can find in the 1.0 launch of a new product line as if it’s a colossal failure (aka PoC).

rgarrett88
0 replies
15h57m

I think the difference is everyone knew market penetration on cell phones would be close to 90%. This may be better than the Quest but is it going to take AR/VR mainstream? Seems iffy. In which case drawbacks may never get ironed out.

ActorNightly
0 replies
11h40m

Quest and Vive weren't great, but they actually had working VR that set the stage for subsequent development.

Iphone 1 set the stage for tech jewelry.

ben_w
2 replies
8h6m

Its only appeal was the full touchscreen, which of course sucked to type on

I could've sworn that "it's easy to type on" was the one weird trick it did right? Though perhaps I'm just misremembering the media; my first iOS device of any kind was the iPod touch with retina display.

Something about Apple having a temporary monopoly (or possibly monopsony) on capacitive touch screens, where everyone else was stuck with resistive ones?

spogbiper
1 replies
2h39m

I don't think Apple had a monopoly on capacitive screens. There were a couple other mobile devices that used them and came out around the same time. Maybe they tied up all/most the available production capacity for a bit?

Typing on the original iphone wasn't perfect, but it was generally better than tiny physical keyboards in many cases

ActorNightly
0 replies
1h35m

Physical keyboards were better than any touch screen one until the swipe typing became standard. You could type on them faster, and had more features like arrow keys, which were useful for smaller screens.

There was a whole era of autocorrect and the memes that came with it due to how much it was being used with touchscreen keyboards.

Of course the advantage of a full screen for things like web and media was more important, and making fullscreen phones was cheaper, so physical keyboards died out. The size of the screen increased as well.

wnevets
0 replies
16h11m

Its only appeal was the full touchscreen, which of course sucked to type on, but looked cool

and motion controls. Between the Nintendo Wii and the first iPhone people were obsessed with motion controls for some reason.

pjmlp
0 replies
10h31m

Internet is the new story telling at the camp fire, turning humble actions into historical myths for eternity.

slg
14 replies
17h40m

The better analogy is probably something like the Apple Watch.

Apple certainly wasn't the first smartwatch, but anyone who owned one before that was obviously a geek (said lovingly). Apple made the first mainstream acceptable smartwatch by smoothing over a lot of the complaints about their competitors, while adding some of their own in the process, just like the Vision Pro. It took a few iterations, but today people from all walks of life wear smartwatches. Certainly not as ubiquitous as smartphones, but Apple made smartwatches a standard piece of tech that millions of people own and they made plenty of money along the way.

The Vision Pro will probably be similar. For example, anyone wearing a VR/AR headset on a plane today would likely get stares. I bet a few years from now there will be several people on every plane wearing one of these. That doesn't mean Apple will make the best VR/AR headset or that VR/AR headsets will be a piece of tech that everyone owns, but Apple is capable of mainstreaming a piece of technology in ways that the Facebooks and Googles of the world aren't even if that is due to their marketing prowess and the strength of their brand just as much as their technical expertise. And in that sense, the thing that is more important than any of these reviews dropping today is the Super Bowl commercial Apple has almost assuredly bought to show this thing off in two weeks.

hackernewds
5 replies
11h50m

Apple made the first mainstream acceptable smartwatch by smoothing over a lot of the complaints about their competitors,

Really? Why do Apple fanboys make these kinda claims.. same as wireless Bluetooth pods, or fingerprint readers, or faceID. There are ample examples of these done well on the hardware side prior. The main advantage Apple has is its seamless integration with software, which of course it pairs well with iOS because nothing else is allowed to.

slg
2 replies
11h19m

You clearly missed my point entirely. I'm not a fanboy saying Apple's products are the best. I even specifically said their success is "due to their marketing prowess and the strength of their brand just as much as their technical expertise."

They weren't the first smartwatch, but Apple is the company most responsibly for changing arbitrary societal metrics of "mainstream acceptance" like the percentage of people who would wear a smartwatch on a first date. That seems like an obvious observation and a "win" even if smartwatches aren't as ubiquitous as smartphones. I think the Vision Pro will follow a similar trajectory of success in that it will take years before anyone uses that word "success", but a few years from now you'll get on a plane and notice more than a few people wearing headsets and that will be because of Apple.

Thlom
1 replies
5h6m

I agree with you, but not about the Vision Pro. I could see the potential and use cases for the iPhone, iPad, AirPods, Apple Watch, Apple TV. This headset though? It's a gimmick. I can see some niche use cases for it in very specific industries and in gaming. But I don't see that "normal" people would want to spend significant money on this. Not even if the price dropped to $999.

codethief
0 replies
1h32m

I would consider my use case (desire) of comfortably working from, say, a coffee shop without having to bring my 24" screen pretty "normal" and non-niche.

theshrike79
1 replies
11h18m

"Done well" was the Nokia motto. They did solid phones with a ton of features. Look what happened to them?

Their problem was that none of the features was _usable_. It was like they released the first MVP the engineering team got done and forgot that people needed to use it too. But it gave them a bonus and another line on spec sheet, so all was good.

For example Nokia had Copy & Paste years before Apple. But it was shit. They _had_ it, but you could copy very specific text bits to other very specific locations. Even Android had the same issue, you could copy some bits not others.

Apple isn't innovating, they haven't for a long time. They rarely come up with something "new" that _nobody_ has done yet.

What they are pretty much the best at is getting the tech everyone else has tried and packaging it to a usable form factor for the normal non-Hackernews consumer.

Wireless BT headphones existed before the Airpods, but they made it so seamless even my mom could do it and hasn't needed any help with them. Open box, insert in ear, done.

whywhywhywhy
0 replies
3h49m

For example Nokia had Copy & Paste years before Apple. But it was shit

To be fair iOS copy and paste is still shit today, selecting and copying/pasting is really one of the worst experiences on iOS.

m463
3 replies
15h48m

Correlation does not imply causation. I think smartwatches (and step trackers) were a thing, independent of apple.

I remember a friend talking about load balancers when they were first came on the market 20 years ago. Cisco had this thing called "localdirector" which I believe couldn't handle load in the first place, while competitors did load balancing in hardware.

I was puzzled why people bought them.

My friend said, "Look, people buy $1M of cisco equipment, and they can just add a line item for one or 10 of these with no friction"

So, I think Apple made their watch a "line item". People buy a phone, and they need cables and the watch is sitting there, and they say "ok!" and try one.

(aside, I love my garmin watch. I just put it on my wrist. I haven't hooked it to my phone or connected it to the internet. It is great with battery life. I track my sleep, which seems to be when most people put their apple watch on a charger. I put my watch on the charger during my shower, which is all it needs)

hartator
2 replies
15h2m

I put my watch on the charger during my shower, which is all it needs

Same as the Apple Watch.

muppetman
0 replies
14h16m

Every day though. I charge my Garmin once a week when it gets down to 50%. The Garmin is a fitness watch with a few basic smartwatch features though. The Apple watch is a Smartwatch (with a lot of fitness features) The two aren't really comparable I don't think.

m463
0 replies
10h3m

which is all it needs

...to top it up to 7 days of charge

darkwater
3 replies
9h48m

3500USD, an external battery and still "looking weird", I don't think you are going to see too many of them on planes, unless it's some die-hard Apple fanboy. If they manage to make next iteration slimmer (like, half the size) and with a battery in it, this might start to happen. But the market will be anyway smaller than the smartwatch one.

fouc
1 replies
8h57m

prices will come down, there'll be a non-Pro line, you think the market will be smaller but you forget it replaces displays, so people with laptops will migrate to using this, and then Apple will come out with headless laptops.

darkwater
0 replies
7h42m

Until the ergonomic radically improves, it will be a niche device for enthusiasts.

IF they manage to produce some AR device that 1) you almost won't notice you are wearing 2) it has pass-through light capabilities so being real AR and not VR mimicking AR, THEN it can get mass-adoption, at least for office workers or to replace big TV screens.

vaylian
0 replies
5h15m

I still think it's weird how many people's eyes are glued to their phone screen in everyday situations and social settings. I think it's realistic that these headsets become acceptable and normal.

kj99
13 replies
14h0m

How can you assure us that Vision Pro is nowhere close to that? Do you have one?

As someone who bought the original iPhone, it was extremely impressive, but had many many flaws. The browser was practically unusable over 2g and the whole pinch to zoom the New York Times desktop site was never actually practical.

I think the parallels are clear.

I also bought the original MacBook Air. Now that truly was terrible and stupidly overpriced. More expensive than the Vision Pro when adjusted for inflation, and with major functional problems. Today it’s the world’s most popular laptop.

jojobas
6 replies
13h4m

Iphone was made from pretty much what was available to other manufacturers plus some secret software sauce, and was priced like a Blackberry of the time. There was immediately plenty of use cases that competitors kinda did, but not so well.

These googles are as bespoke as it gets, are priced at 7x the competition and more than a flagship laptop, steer clear of the most popular existing use case, which is games, and offers... what exactly again?

That's quite some difference.

kj99
3 replies
12h59m

Iphone was made from pretty much what was available to other manufacturers plus some secret software sauce, and was priced like a Blackberry of the time.

Neither of these statements is remotely true.

jojobas
2 replies
11h6m

Samsung CPU, samsung oled display, Balda touchscreen analogous to what LG has used previously, Marvell wi-fi, Skyworks cellular, various Intel and Infineon aux chips. $499 vs Blackberry's 8320 at $449.

Not even remotely.

dpkonofa
0 replies
3h19m

The iPhone was also subsidized by Cingular/AT&T at launch. The $449 was the retail cost of the BlackBerry.

cromka
0 replies
8h24m

Samsung OLED? iPhone X was first to feature OLED display. Surely you meant LCD?

treprinum
1 replies
7h26m

iPhone used capacitive touchscreen whereas the competitors used resistive touchscreens in their smartphones, which instantly added more usability to iPhone compared to Nokia N95/97 that was already a fully featured pocket computer in mobile case and likely much more powerful than the original iPhone. Apple did the dirty logistics trick on other smartphone manufacturers by buying all production of capacitive touchscreen factories and similar key components 3 years ahead, leaving other phone manufacturers unable to respond.

jojobas
0 replies
7h15m
Takennickname
5 replies
12h42m

Except when the iPhone came out all the reviewers were like "holy shit, this is mind blowing" while with this one everyone is like "it's a shittier oculus quest with some apple polish"

saagarjha
2 replies
10h11m

Almost every outlet is calling it a better Oculus Quest but one that is fantastically expensive.

whywhywhywhy
0 replies
3h45m

Definitely looks better for productivity, but for gaming and social?

Nothing on Vision Pro is comparable to things like Beatsaber, VR Chat, Pavlov.

Hard to tell if the hand tracking could handle those sort of experiences currently.

Cthulhu_
0 replies
9h17m

I mean it's been over ten years since the new generation of VR headsets (I'm thinking of the Oculus Rift) came out; if at this point in modern VR development it wouldn't be better than existing offerings, I'd be deeply disappointed in Apple's R&D.

Anyway, I bring that up because when the iphone came out, it really did do something different than the locked-in feature phones of the time; I did have to look it up to refresh my memory (https://www.cnet.com/pictures/original-apple-iphone-competit...), but its competition in that year was a lot of Blackberry-style physical keyboard and resistive touch screens running Windows Mobile. I do want to highlight the LG Prada, the first capacitive touch screen smartphone - came out in the same year the iPhone was announced, and it along with the HTC Touch on that page had a similar screen focused form factor.

kj99
0 replies
11h14m

The verge is probably the most critical. Here’s what they say:

“marvelous display, great hand and eye tracking, and works seamlessly in the ecosystem, … The Apple Vision Pro is the best consumer headset anyone's ever made”

Yes, they also list a bunch of flaws. But the people trying to make out that the reviews are saying it’s a shittier oculus quest are not being honest.

huytersd
0 replies
12h25m

No one is saying shittier oculus quest. It has a much higher resolution and I presume people will get used to letting their eyes linger a bit longer on what they want to click. We’re so used to a mouse paradigm we try to immediately apply that here.

jsjohnst
10 replies
15h25m

This iPhone trope has gotta die

It’s not a trope if it’s true. Most hard core nerds didn’t get it until they had tried it hands on (including myself, I panned the device hard until I tried it). Then it was the exorbitant price point ($650 at a time when nobody really paid for phones). Then it was the lack of hardware keyboard. No “real” apps. No copy and paste (even my older at the time Symbian S60 devices had that). The list goes on and on.

I get it, if you were at another phone manufacturer, you might’ve been scared, but the reality is the iPhone didn’t really pick up steam in the market until 3G or 3GS.

bnralt
9 replies
15h3m

People thought Apple making a phone was odd. No one thought mobile phones, or even smart phones were odd. Mobile phones were common when the iPhone came out, and even smart phones weren't uncommon. And once the iPhone did come out, there was immediate interest.

AR though, that's something the public hasn't shown much interest in yet. These products are looking more like the Segway (which was once supposedly going to revolutionize transportation) - cool, popular in a few niche markets, but not the revolution that people imagine them to be.

hammyhavoc
4 replies
14h46m

Nobody thought Apple making a phone was odd. Even prior to the announcement of the original iPhone and prior to any rumors about actually making a phone, the internet was full of amateur 3D mockups of what an "iPhone" could be like, including looking like an iPod with a click-wheel. They had conquered the personal media player market, and now people wanted a phone with the design of an iPod to carry less stuff in their pockets.

jc_dc
3 replies
10h14m

Everyone forgets that the nerds had windows ce phones before Apple hit the market. It was the 3GS and 3rd party dev arcade games that converted me. Apples challenge now is how to convince people who hate them to go to work for them.

hammyhavoc
1 replies
9h37m

I was one of those nerds! I equally loved it and loathed it. Some very cool software available, but as a cellphone-like experience, it was neither one thing nor the other. Most of the time I had a feature-phone as a daily-driver alongside the clunky early Windows stuff. Wasn't a bad compromise as I didn't want or need the power of Pocket PC/Windows Mobile 24/7, but it was however a fairly expensive one!

People also forget that using a stylus with a touchscreen made it a pretty crappy phone, and they weren't ergonomic to hold up to your face with a lot of the larger PDA-like ones. The Windows devices with sliding keyboards were pretty decent as a compromise in terms of size and features though. But boy were they expensive in the UK at the time as they were generally imports from the USA.

jc_dc
0 replies
5h36m

I loved my htc with the slide out keyboard! Sure, it would reboot occasionally when you slid the keyboard out and it took 45 minutes to send an email on edge but that was back to the future stuff back then.

jsjohnst
0 replies
5h55m

Windows CE or Nokia N95 or Nokia 9500.

jsjohnst
1 replies
14h52m

To be clear, not disagreeing with your core point, but as a reference comparison, the Meta Quest 2 sold more units in its first 2-2.5 years than Apple sold iPhones (and iPhone 3G) in the equivalent time period.

lmm
0 replies
13h43m

Yep. People forget that the original iphone that could only run built-in apps really was a failure; it was only when they opened up the app store that it exploded (perhaps aided by this Cartmanland marketing strategy).

rchaud
0 replies
4h32m

Nobody thought Apple making a phone was odd. Phone + MP3 players were already in everybody's pockets. Telcos were making money selling ringtones for $2.99 a pop. Apple already had a digital music store. It all lined up. And that was before they tested the waters with the Moto ROKR in 2005.

Back in 2010 there were rumours of Apple building TVs and cars. Those would be weird because they're in areas where Apple had no experience and no software content to provide.

adra
0 replies
12h9m

These AR/VR are definitely a doomed profile unless somehow these things were given away for basically free. IMHO success for any new technology usually comes from: 1. Does it make you look more attractive? NO 2. Does it make you money? NO except for the YouTubers who will surely be pandering about how meme they are. How many streamers us VR? Oh yeah... 3. Does it make me more valuable to others? No? I can't see a mass adoption are where having a computer strapped to your face which enhances your productivity. This may be the area most attackable by some great use cases, but I don't see them today (once again, mass market in a way that Apples of the world would give an F).

IggleSniggle
10 replies
17h46m

I remember being angry that my Moto Razr V3 had the power to run awesome software but as a teenager I didn't have an easy way to boot stuff up on it. IMHO it was a perfect phone, except there was no way to run what I wanted. The best I could do was program text messaging services and use those. They discontinued the phone rather than give consumers the freedom to just use the hardware. I thought the iPhone was dumb, but when the App Store came out that was game over. I really missed the convenience of having buttons and being able to text with my phone in my pocket, but at least it was consumer programmable... even if you had to pay a $100 premium to become a "Developer" in order to do so.

Eventually the Moto X came along. I thought it was the perfect phone. Its voice assist features worked better than most voice assist features even today. You could easily do everything you wanted to do with the phone in your pocket and your earbuds in.

It had the perfect size screen. It had a great ambient-on watch-face screen that looked nice sitting on your desk among clutter. The dimple in the back was a really nice touch, it made it like a worry-stone[0] in your pocket. It had a lower resolution, but I kinda liked that about it. I think Motorola was bought or something, but whatever the reason, the next phone in the series ditched every single thing that made the Moto X special.

Those two devices were both my favorite mobile computing devices, and probably the closest I've come to getting fan-angry about a company screwing up their own magic.

More to the point: you might have been able to see it at Motorola, but even looking back, I don't understand why Razr couldn't have won against the iPhone. The Razr was a surprisingly capable little machine!

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worry_stone

eep_social
5 replies
17h27m

You’re gonna love this — Motorola was bought by Google in an attempt to jumpstart their hardware business but it turned out to be a failed acquisition. They ended up grabbing the patent portfolio and selling off the rest of the biz fairly quickly.

sangnoir
4 replies
16h48m

You’re gonna love this — Motorola was bought by Google in an attempt to jumpstart their hardware business but it turned out to be a failed acquisition.

I wouldn't call Motorola a failed acquisition - Google bought Motorola as a shield in an increasingly litigious environment: this was the age of Apple going "thermonuclear", Microsoft and patent trolls were wantonly shaking down Android vendors, and beginning to circle Google itself.

Motorola (under Google) had the best value-for-money smartphones - their midrange was solid, and reasonably priced while everyone else was continuously shifting to flagships, with each release priced higher than the last.

From the outside looking in, Google appeared to dispose Motorola to make Samsung happy - Samsung had been complaining loudly and widely about the Motorola acquisition, and openly flirted with other mobile platforms as a hedge.

Motorola shareholders got paid, Google got the patents it wanted, Samsung remained the 600 lb gorilla in Androidland, Lenovo got a good brand and keeps making ok phones to this day. So, not a failed acquisition by any reasonable measure

eep_social
1 replies
16h5m

Yeah, I generally agree with that framing. That’s a good detail about samsung that I was not aware of. But I will say that from an ex-insider perspective — what you describe is mostly a failure.

Google was searching desperately for revenue diversity and was acquiring pretty hard at the time. I think the intent with Moto was to acquire a hardware shop and establish a market leading brand to compete directly with Apple. They eventually arrived at Pixel by building it entirely in-house. That Moto got raided for IP and spun out to Lenovo did not meet those (high) expectations. There was no need for anyone to take a loss but I think Google wanted to make a whole lot of money and did not.

sangnoir
0 replies
14h14m

I'll defer to you an insider on the hardware efforts, but the timing of the Motorola acquisition in the immediate aftermath of Google's failed bid[1] on Nortel's patent portfolio made it seem more like a patent-play more than a hardware acquisition. I recall Motorola's then-CEO even threatened to sue Google over patent Android infringement just before the acquisition, so it most certainly wasn't just about building a hardware business.

1. It was a crazy time. The winning consortium - which included Apple and Microsoft - invited Google to join their $4.5B bid; which would have made the patents entirely useless as a defense of Google against Apple or Microsoft. Google wisely declined, but bought Motorola less than a year later for $12B. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jul/02/google-pi...

the-rc
0 replies
15h48m

Soon after the acquisition, Google, really Google X, started working with Motorola on a new watch, prototyping it on existing hardware (Motoactv?). Within a few weeks, the whole thing got cancelled. Not sure if that was because of the Samsungs of this world complaining or because of government agencies.

Source: I was supposed to run the dogfood program in the NYC office. I never got the watches, but somewhere I still have the USB extension cords and the (then quite fancy) chargers with dual USB ports, one for your phone and one for the watch.

orthoxerox
0 replies
7h37m

Motorola (under Google) had the best value-for-money smartphones - their midrange was solid, and reasonably priced while everyone else was continuously shifting to flagships, with each release priced higher than the last.

And they still do under Lenovo. Multiple-day battery, almost stock Android with very useful enhancements.

kevindamm
1 replies
14h7m

IIRC, moto X was the first phone made by the Google-owned Motorola. The devices were made and assembled in the US.

I was hopeful for the post-acquisition Motorola but it didn't quite pan out. The IP salvaged from the purchase was always a big part of the deal so it wasn't really a loss, just not really much of a win either.

IggleSniggle
0 replies
9h36m

Moto X (2013) was the device I intended to describe. You are right on both counts. I think I conflated the second gen closure of the US-based plant with the acquisition in my memory. And I'm now remembering that the real reason I was so disappointed is that the Moto X (2013) was a phone that you could operate the entirety of the screen one handed. With the Moto X (2014) you could not.

I have an iPhone mini now, but it's still not small enough to 100% operate one-handed, at least not without grip adjustments. The Moto X wasn't quite a flagship phone, but it came close enough. I can't even find a properly one-handed phone anymore

vel0city
0 replies
13h10m

Loads of phones could side-load J2ME apps. I never owned a RAZR V3, but I imagine it would have supported J2ME apps as well as I ran them on even crappier phones. The first things I'd install on my dumbphones back in 2005 was Google Maps and Opera Mini. I'd grab all kinds of J2ME games off Zedge and other sites and copy them over back in the day.

davidmurdoch
0 replies
16h51m

Moto X was peak phone.

teekert
2 replies
13h7m

I do think iPhone is often made more mythical than it was. Sure it was good and we could finally use our sausage fingers to navigate it. But I recently heard someone say on Radio that iPhone was the first phone with a touch screen. Meanwhile me an the guys (yeah all guys) we’re rocking Sony Ericsson P800’s and the like in 2003,4,5.

I had an HTC touch when iPhone came out and I was most envious that you could do two finger zooming in Google maps instead of tapping zoom buttons.

Agraillo
1 replies
9h52m

Many things Apple related are very often about applying existing technologies to a novel place. Many forget that the touch screens at the time were resistive [1] that required pressing (small but nevertheless) at the screen and mostly usable with styluses. As long as I recall the novelty was to apply a capacitive touch screen [2] to navigation, it does not require physical force and that's where the fingers shined.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistive_touchscreen

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#Capacitive_touchsc...

teekert
0 replies
7h31m

Sure. But one can argue that capacitive touchscreens were about to happen anyway (like ARM laptops..). And HTC with their touchflow were moving into sausage friendly UIs.

But I agree, Apple is absolutely good at taking all this tech at the right time and making a compelling product. Steve insisted on glass/capacitive and that is just the best choice. Also, the UI didn’t feel like a layer (that you could easily get out off) as with touchflow. I’m also an iPhone user atm. Switched from Android about 3 years ago. The whole experience feels like higher quality to me still now. Although I have friends that would argue against that.

paulkrush
1 replies
15h6m

Peak Blackberry was 2011. It's easy to forgot that that the iPhone takeover took years and many releases.

internet101010
0 replies
13h3m

I kind of find that hard to believe but maybe there were government/enterprise purchases boosting it or something? As far as I'm concerned Blackberry died with the Blackberry Storm 2 in 2009, which was a huge piece of junk.

I used to go back and forth to Shenzhen all the time trading refurbs and by 2010 I straight up would not buy anything other than Android devices because 1) iPhone was actually more expensive in mainland China due to it being a grey market item back then and 2) demand for everything else fell off a cliff.

echelon
1 replies
17h35m

Vision Pro is not earth shaking or category defining.

It's entering a crowded market that isn't even that big. As the premium option.

Climbing that hill is going to be a very tall order.

Apple's brand will not be a moat, either.

Zuck's initial response to Vision Pro [1] was the correct one:

From what I’ve seen initially, I’d say the good news is that there’s no kind of magical solutions that they have to any of the constraints on laws of physics that our teams haven’t already explored and thought of. They went with a higher resolution display, and between that and all the technology they put in there to power it, it costs seven times more and now requires so much energy that now you need a battery and a wire attached to it to use it. They made that design trade-off and it might make sense for the cases that they’re going for.

But look, I think that their announcement really showcases the difference in the values and the vision that our companies bring to this in a way that I think is really important. We innovate to make sure that our products are as accessible and affordable to everyone as possible, and that is a core part of what we do. And we have sold tens of millions of Quests.

[1] https://www.roadtovr.com/apple-vision-pro-zuckerberg-reactio...

echelon
0 replies
9h56m

In retrospect, that was a very negative post, and I wanted to add that I'd like to see {V,A,X,*}R succeed as a sector. In fact, I'd like to see all of the players do well, including Apple. I really want to see a transportive vision of the future pan out.

I don't think this will be an easy market for anyone. It's low attachment, low critical app space.

I want to believe, though.

pjmlp
0 replies
10h35m

I worked at Nokia and we certainly did not had that opinion, specially since we already had a couple of touch based Symbian devices.

If we weren't busy with Symbian vs Linux internal feuds, and the Microsoft deal, things would have turned out much differently.

nightski
11 replies
18h47m

The iPhone was subsidized by mobile carriers and/or interest free payment plans. I don't see that same path for this VR device, but maybe I am missing something.

mbreese
9 replies
18h27m

The original iPhone wasn’t subsidized… it was bought outright. It was only after Apple proved the potential of the iPhone did the carriers get on board (and even then, it was limited support for quite a while).

lapcat
6 replies
18h11m

The original iPhone wasn’t subsidized… it was bought outright. It was only after Apple proved the potential of the iPhone did the carriers get on board (and even then, it was limited support for quite a while).

Completely untrue. The original iPhone required a 2-year contract with AT&T/Cingular. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(1st_generation)#Releas...

mbreese
3 replies
17h57m

The contract was a requirement, but it wasn’t subsidized like you’re thinking. Other phones at the time were cheap and subsidized as part of the contract. The iPhone, by comparison, was freakishly expensive and I don’t think Cingular was subsidizing it. And I don’t remember there being any penalties with cancelling the contract. But I already had an AT&T/Cingular account, so I’m not sure about the contract info.

The contract issue had more to do with how the phone interacted with the network. IIRC, AT&T was an exclusive provider because of the backend requirements (visual voicemail notification maybe?). I assume the contract was in part because they wanted to recoup those expenses.

Here’s a news article from the time that says that AT&T didn’t actually start subsidizing the phone until the 3G arrived.

https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/wireless/phones/2008-07...

Also, the subsidy might have been from Apple, if anyone… Apple got a kickback of $10/month per iPhone user. They might have used that to keep the price lower, but that wasn’t from ATT’s side of the account until the 3G followup.

https://www.wired.com/2008/01/ff-iphone/

lapcat
2 replies
17h18m

You response seems a bit confused/confusing, but the linked articles explain the situation fairly well. The crucial point is that AT&T/Cingular had a 5 year exclusivity deal from the very beginning. They were "on board", and indeed no other carrier could get on board. The initial terms of the deal were that AT&T gave Apple $10 per month for every iPhone user. Then the deal was changed to have AT&T subsidize $300 per iPhone, thereby lowering the iPhone price. In either case, every iPhone sold required an AT&T contract and was locked to the AT&T network.

mbreese
1 replies
15h49m

My only point is that the initial iPhone was an expensive phone that didn’t have typical carrier subsidies. It was successful in spite of this.

The original parent post claimed that it did and implied that this was the reason why it was so successful. They also implied that the new Vision Pro would need similar subsidies to be successful.

I’m not quite sure the killer feature is there yet for VR headsets. But if the usability is better for the Vision Pro than the Quest, et al., it could still be successful, regardless of the cost.

dpkonofa
0 replies
3h7m

It did have subsidies, though. And they were “typical”. AT&T was paying for part of the cost so that people could buy it for $499 initially. Most other phones were that price at retail and unlocked.

hollandheese
1 replies
14h28m

Completely untrue. The original iPhone required a 2-year contract with AT&T/Cingular.

That's completely untrue. The original iPhone DID NOT require a 2 year contract, you could absolutely buy it on a prepaid plan. Yeah, you had to "fail" the credit check to get offered the prepaid plans, but all you had to do was put "999-99-9999" as your SSN in the activation screens to get them.

dpkonofa
0 replies
3h6m

That is not true at all. The original iPhone required a 2 year contract and you could only buy a maximum of 2 phones per account.

martimarkov
0 replies
18h22m

Pretty sure AT&T had exclusivity there for some time and didn’t get that for free..

goodlinks
0 replies
18h3m

It was sold with a subsidy in the uk in a weird way. Iirc you had to buy it from apple but o2 subsidised it as it they were the only ones with edge (so assumed they would also sell you a contract). Worked out £50-100 which was mad as o2 couldnt actually make you get a contract.. quite a few people i knew boight a bunch of them and gave them away as gifts.

Also it was a totally stand out appealing device accessible to everyone with immediate value to everyday people.

ec109685
0 replies
16h29m

Apple was paid a monthly fee by Cigular per user for the iPhone 1, so it was just subsidized weirdly.

diebeforei485
6 replies
18h10m

The first gen iPhone had a much better UX than other phones, so missing a few features like copy and paste was palatable.

I do think future generations of AVP will do well. Iterating and applying learnings and customer feedback will make this a good product.

ActorNightly
2 replies
16h11m

iphone by far did not have a better UX. It looked nice, but it had no more functionality than other devices at the time.

In general, UX design is the argument people used to (and still do sometimes) run to "prove" that the device was better when it was clearly not. Fancy icons dont make a good UX, functionality does. You dont say copy and paste is good UX, you say its a feature.

aniforprez
1 replies
14h26m

Functionality does not make good UX. Good UX makes good UX

Not sure how people don't remember what a revelation the capacitive screen was. It was miles better than most Nokia phones that mostly used resistive screens (not saying that Apple invented capacitive screens but they most certainly made it popular) and the navigation with the simple home button and everything else being instant feedback with the buttons on the screen was better than anything else on the market from what I remember. The keyboard especially was incredible with that light tapping sound and instant keystrokes appearing. While it wasn't functionally better than most phones (famously less functional than a Blackberry), it was very much the leader of the pack in details that ACTUALLY contribute to good UX. Just as the iPod and the clicker wheel was ahead with the instant feedback and usability of rotating the wheel to scroll at high speeds through hundreds of songs

ActorNightly
0 replies
10h43m

I honestly think that people like you experienced smartphones in mid 2010s and just extrapolating back to what they think they were in late 2000s,

When iPhone came out, the mobile internet was so shit and screen was very low res, so the benefit of having a full touchscreen was minimal (mostly being able to select things directly, but that was a very small advantage). Mobile web wasn't a thing. You had to have wifi for any real speed. And if you had wifi, you were likely in a building where you could sit down, and there were things like netbooks and mobile pcs that were just better than the iPhone for doing web stuff. Even people with iPhones still mainly used them as iPods and phones before 3g cellular.

The keyboard on Blackberries was in fact better UX because it was easier to use and faster to type on, without any delay in appearance. The on screen keyboards were all shit until swipe typing became defacto standard.

And then you look at the drawbacks, like no removable battery, no microsd expansion, no shit proprietary cables that would break, no copy/paste, e.t.c, all of them absolutely make the UX horrible.

8note
1 replies
16h45m

The iPhone also came with a great data deal for the time, as I recall.

vel0city
0 replies
13h1m

Not really. I had a cheaper unlimited AT&T unlimited data plan than the original iPhone data plan, and that included 3G data!

The trick was to just buy the smartphone outside of the plan. Then you get unlimited data at half the price. I'd pull gigs of data a month on my "dumbphone".

enos_feedler
0 replies
17h44m

You could say that about literally any product. The most important factor that will determine success is the starting point. Initial conditions matter. I actually believe this a developer tool from start to finish. It will end of life a lot quicker than we expect. The real product is going to be lightweight glasses we wear all day. But when? How many iterations of the AVP to meet the developer needs for seeding this future product that might be 10+ years away?

nedt
4 replies
18h38m

And before that the iPod. CmdrTaco wrote: "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." Couple of years later the Nomad was gone.

throwaway2037
3 replies
17h34m

If anyone does not understand the reference, "CmdrTaco" was the editor of Slashdot many years ago. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Malda

khazhoux
2 replies
16h28m

If anyone does not understand the reference, "Slashdot" is a link-sharing site oriented at tech news, that was popular many years ago as HN is today.

https://slashdot.org

robarr
0 replies
4h52m

Was it not a mailing list before a site?

I let the next guy explain what a mailing list was.

ben_w
0 replies
8h0m

Ah, memories from 20 years ago. How time flies.

I wonder what new site, and what new euphemism, will replace the "hug of death" and "the orange site" in 2044?

(Hopefully not robots that go around actually hugging people to death…)

super256
3 replies
18h13m

Most of the issues listed by @zmmmmm are the same issues plaguing other VR headsets for a decade now: motion blur, pixelation, distortions, fake looking colors.

Apple didn’t fix any of them.

throwaway2037
1 replies
17h33m

fake looking colors

I never heard this complain before. Can you explain more?

Crestwave
0 replies
11h35m

See the video in the OP at timestamp 5:00 to 5:20. The review from The Verge touched on it as well; essentially, at the end of the day, it's still a bunch of displays showing you camera feeds of the real world. And both displays and cameras have a lot of flaws—low field of view, motion blur, pixelation in low lighting, and a much more limited set of colors compared to our actual eyes.

VR avoids this since they just make up their own designed world instead, while most AR glasses avoid this by having actual transparent glasses and reflecting images off them instead. The Vision Pro is more ambitious and tries to pull off both AR and VR, resulting in these compromises.

curiouscavalier
0 replies
17h49m

I think this is the main thing — plenty of other headsets showed how these aspects are problematic. I very much appreciate just how hard a problem things like hand tracking, distortion, etc. are to solve, but I was hoping (perhaps unreasonably) we’d see a break through in at least one of them. It also feels like Apple design choices got in the way somewhat. Two things that surprised me most are the FoV and limited DCI color space coverage — now I get why they didn’t readily share that spec earlier.

starkparker
3 replies
17h59m

And the touch bar, and the magic mouse, and ping, and mobile me, and hi-fi.

They're just a consumer goods company. Sometimes they make good things people don't appreciate at first. Sometimes they make bad things that people don't appreciate ever.

Their track record is better than the mean, but comparing every criticism of a first-gen Apple product to the iPod/iPhone launches is unserious. Of course some people panned any given new thing on Earth.

And this isn't even in response to someone predicting that AVP would fail, but just that the 1st-gen AVP is an immature product. The 1st-gen iPhone was an immature product! It's delusional (and discrediting to Apple!) to think the iPod, iPhone, OS X, Intel Macs, M1 Macs, etc. were as mature at launch as the later iterations we associate those technologies with now.

throwaway2037
2 replies
17h35m

Does "AVP" mean Affordable Viable Product?

rrdharan
1 replies
17h22m

Apple Vision Pro (assuming you were genuinely asking).

throwaway2037
0 replies
8h56m

facepalm Thank you to correct me. Yes, I was asking sincerely!

vikramkr
2 replies
17h31m

I checked a couple of those old reviews and a couple things that seemed to be a common take with the iPhone that definitely aren't holding now:

- incredible amounts of hype

- loving the design

- loving the touchscreen and input (directly contrasting folks worrying about the eye tracking now)

- a sense (at least from cnet and pcmag) that it's really just an overgrown iPod so they keep comparing it to an iPod (compared to the vision where folks get that it's a new category for apple and have good comps outside anyway )

There are definitely similarities in terms of complaining about missing features that apple's probably going to add soon anyway (keyboard showing up in portrait and stuff). Lots of complaints about not supporting flash but we know how that went. Also apparently the headphone jack position was annoying.

What I'm not seeing in the current vision reviews - and maybe it's impossible to see this in real time - is some feature that has the chance to change literally everything that people arent able to comprehend just yet. These reviews being relatively dismissive of this web browsing on your phone thing is absolutely hilarious in hindsight. The only similar thing in the vision is - the passthrough eye thing maybe? Nothing else seems particularly baffling.

I'm glad I read some of those reviews. The vibe I'm getting is - the iPhone was doing something fundamentally weird with this whole smartphone thing that reviewers just didnt get, so they kept reviewing it as an iPod with really bad voice calling and a browser and being confused by all the hype. The vision though? It's a vr/mixed reality headset, we know what those are like, and apple didn't throw any real curveballs.

vikramkr
1 replies
17h19m

An addendum - I'm surprised at how spot on so many of these iPhone 1 reviews are outside of the not getting the browser thing (and even there folks complaining about how web2.0 is taking off and there's no js/java/flash support? Good point!). Keyboard should work in portrait mode, voice calling is bad, 3g support is needed, no multimedia messaging. No replaceable battery and not user servicable enough. Camera is OK but needs dramatic improvement. Typing urls is very hard. And of course, no games, no 3rd party apps, no app store. After hearing all these memes for however long about how the media just didn't get the iPhone or something - yeah no they did pretty well

cwalv
0 replies
11h27m

Before the 3g the web browser thing wasn't really that useful. If you have to be on wifi to get reasonable speeds, it's easier to just use your laptop vs a tiny screen with a slow processor.

nylonstrung
2 replies
18h9m

iPhone 1 was the effectively the first mass market smartphone

This however is coming after a decade of existing AR/VR consumer electronics and still misses the mark

serf
0 replies
15h40m

first mass-market smartphone with mass appeal maybe, but it wasn't the first mass-market smartphone by a long shot.

HatchedLake721
0 replies
17h58m

iPhone 1 was the effectively the first mass market smartphone

... no?

Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Palm, Nokia, Symbian, Maemo?

mgh2
1 replies
18h35m
landswipe
0 replies
16h28m

Fools and their money are quickly departed.

gofreddygo
0 replies
18h14m

Reminds me of Lisa.

ekianjo
0 replies
18h50m

the price is quite different though

bunderbunder
0 replies
18h3m

Can you elaborate on this?

The first iPhone, yeah, it had some detractors, but I don't think the kinds of criticisms the parent poster gave ever really applied to the iPhone. To succeed, the iPhone didn't have to be this utopian product; it just had to be more useful than its main competitor, which was dumbphones. People who complained that it was missing features the Blackberry had were working from an unstated major premise that the iPhone was initially targeted at enterprise users, and I think that everyone who wasn't too busy being a pundit to see how the world works could see that that quite transparently wasn't the case. There was even a time period where I had both an iPhone for personal use and a Blackberry for work.

And I think the criticism about entertainment is spot-on. By contrast, despite being extraordinarily limited compared to even the very next modal, the first iPhone was fantastic for entertainment, precisely because it was good for fostering shared experiences. It didn't take long after the device came out before you'd see groups of people clustered around an iPhone, looking at photos together on that big, vibrant, gorgeous screen. That was something that none of its competitors could do. And you better bet that people saw that happening and started wanting to have one of their own so they could have fun, too.

I do think we're still in the "wait and see" phase for this product, but, unlike some of the original iPhone criticisms or cmdrtaco's original dismissal of the iPod, the criticisms this article points out feel really personally relevant to me.

andrewparker
0 replies
18h2m

iPhone 1 launched without cut/copy/paste

JKCalhoun
0 replies
18h54m

Or the first Newton.

MuffinFlavored
102 replies
19h48m

I wonder given all this... what the expectations are at Apple from a higher up/board/executive standpoint are

Most of Apple offerings are good:

Watch

iPad

Mac

iPhone

services

Are they really expecting this to just be a hard problem initially that they get better at over time? When is the last time they launched a "so so" product?

ChrisMarshallNY
34 replies
19h28m

The first iPhone was pretty terrible. I couldn't get my Marketing peers to take it seriously (which they came to regret).

The first Watch was awful. I love my Series 8.

Don't get me started on the first Mac...

hn_throwaway_99
22 replies
19h21m

The first iPhone was pretty terrible.

I definitely do not think that opinion was widespread. If anything I think that the biggest discussed shortcoming of the first iPhone was that it was only available on AT&T.

ssl-3
6 replies
19h8m

For example:

It didn't multitask, even though other pocket computers for a Long Time had at least the appearance of multitasking. It didn't have the ability to install any additional software, even though other pocket computers for a Long Time handled third-party software just fine. It didn't even have a copy/paste function, even though [WTF? Srsly, Apple?].

All of these things were eventually corrected by Apple, but it was pretty awful until they were corrected: For quite some time, the iPhone was just a rather fancy touchscreen music player with telephone and SMS programs tacked on.

(More damning: All of these things were corrected very quickly by third parties via jailbreaks. Some of us were having a ball with first-gen IOS devices very early on in the game, but Apple wasn't any help in getting that accomplished.)

pazimzadeh
3 replies
18h57m

Yeah, but the first iPod touch was great. It came out only 3 months after the iPhone.

It seems like the Vision Pro 1 has the M2 so that when the Vision, or Vision Air comes out, it will be at least as powerful as the first Pro. And the Pro 2 can have the M3.

ssl-3
2 replies
18h38m

First iPod Touch was even worse: It had all of the limitations of the iPhone, plus it additionally lacked cellular connectivity, messaging, voice, Bluetooth, GPS, speaker, Bluetooth, and camera.

pazimzadeh
1 replies
10h49m

The first iPhone didn't have GPS either. No iPods had speakers back then so that wasn't missed, you just used your earbuds. It was great for browsing the web and media consumption, since you either had WiFi or you didn't (no slow Edge network to tease you). Once the App store came out you had Instapaper for offline reading, and Google Voice for messaging/calls.

ssl-3
0 replies
8h5m

You're right. The first iPhone did not have GPS. But it did have the connectivity to make other geolocation services useful, at least in a "Where the fuck am I at?" sense. (And the iPod Touch also had wifi-based geolocation services that were spooky-good, if it was online somehow.)

But from various PalmOS devices to whatever Android device is in my pocket right now, carrying wired headphones has never been a thing for me for whatever reason.

So as a Google Voice user since it was still called GrandCentral, having Google Voice available on a Wifi-connected touchscreen pocket music player called an iPod Touch was simply never very useful to me: The OG iPod Touch was lousy as a telephone, since it lacked all of the basic parts (like a microphone or an earpiece) that made telephones useful, and SMS was not yet in its heyday back then either.

I got much better use of the service with my dumb phone with T9 text input and transcription of voicemails to SMS, and my dumb phone worked anywhere instead of just where I could find a Wifi network.

Jailbroken, the iPod was an amazing pocket computer with a brilliant display, thin profile, and exceptional responsiveness to touch input, especially with third-party apps and improvements installed. It was fun having a real *nix userland installed on it, and it sure seemed novel to SSH from it.

By default, though? Almost useless except as a music player -- a task that previous iPods did better.

(I mostly used my OG iPod Touch to take offline notes. It did OK at this, but previously-used PalmOS devices did better in terms of input speed and portability of those notes.

Even relatively high-end aftermarket car stereos at the time were afraid of it: "Oh, why sure I can play music with your iPod!

Except.. is that an iPod Touch?"

"shun shun shun")

hollandheese
0 replies
14h19m

For quite some time, the iPhone was just a rather fancy touchscreen music player with telephone and SMS programs tacked on.

It had the only truly usable mobile web browser. Windows Mobile's IE was trash, and the browsers on Palm OS, Blackberry and Symbian were laughable. This was the killer app (especially on Wifi, EDGE was not great).

hn_throwaway_99
0 replies
18h3m

I guess I (and to be honest, reviewers at large at the time) just have a very different definition of "pretty terrible". Sure, it was easy to see how it wasn't "fully complete", but I think that is true of literally every brand new product.

And to take two of your examples, multitasking and 3rd party software, yeah, other pocket computers had them, and they generally sucked hard (see, Windows Mobile). Even the lack of copy/paste - other phones had them, but there was (and honestly still is) considerable debate over how it should be implemented given multitouch was new.

herval
6 replies
19h14m

It was usable on any other network, I had one and it wasn’t AT&T locked

Compared to all the smartphones of the time, it was a slow toy with no apps and a 2G connection that was completely worthless

It looked nice though, and eventually it got an app store (unnoficially first), and the overall UX was a clear winner (nobody believed touch screens would ever replace blackberry style devices!)

lotsofpulp
5 replies
18h57m

https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/05/10/apple_att_origina...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_iPhone

When Apple announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007,[38] it was sold only with AT&T (formerly Cingular) contracts in the United States.[32] After 18 months of negotiations, Steve Jobs reached an agreement with the wireless division of AT&T[39] to be the iPhone's exclusive carrier. Consumers were unable to use any other carrier without unlocking their device.
herval
2 replies
13h42m

I definitely did not use AT&T :) (in fact I didn’t even use my iPhone in the US)

vel0city
1 replies
12h51m

on any other network

I didn’t even use my iPhone in the US

So you can't really describe the experience for the several different US carriers which it didn't work on, and thus can't really say it worked on any other network. Verizon was a network it didn't work on, and thus fails the "any other network" standard you set earlier.

herval
0 replies
7h3m

Pedantic much?

It worked on any GSM network. Tmobile for instance. Verizon and Sprint were the exceptions in the US, since they weren’t GSM.

makeitdouble
0 replies
18h34m

A few people had it in Japan connected to docomo as a GSM phone. I suppose there were workarounds for other carriers as well.

I don't know how they did it, but "life finds a way" ?

hollandheese
0 replies
14h14m

There were apps and hacks to sim unlock the original iPhone. I was using mine on T-Mobile after using it for a couple of months on prepaid AT&T GoPhone.

RattlesnakeJake
2 replies
19h7m

No copy/paste & no apps were the main criticisms, given that Windows, Palm, & other "less-powerful" devices from that era had those features.

makeitdouble
0 replies
18h30m

Bugginess was to me the main criticism.

Albeit not from the computer nerds who knew what they were getting, but the general public who thought they were buying a phone on par with the Motorola, Nokia or Panasonic phones in term of reliability.

draculero
0 replies
18h48m

The lack of Flash support was mentioned a lot of times.

makeitdouble
0 replies
18h39m

We should bear in mind that at the time it launched many early adopters were on the fence and kept a second phone around (most people around me did until basically the iPhone 4). We look back at it as a fun area, but it was in part because we accepted it was flawed and limited.

When trying to use the iPhone seriously, at some point it wouldn't receive calls anymore (just silently crash the deamon receiving it, you'd never know if not told by the caller afterwards), drop active calls when battery was too low (single digit), call quality could be horrible, stuff would crash from time to time.

Memory would leak like a sueve from everywhere so rebooting the phone every now and then was good hygiene. It's only after the 3GS that it stabilized, otherwise antennagate would have been just another tuesday IMO.

It was still a stellar device, but not a fully reliable device in any way shape or form.

kybernetikos
0 replies
9h42m

My memory of it was that when it first came out, it was worse in all ways compared to the best of what already existed, save one, and that was capacitive multi-touch. That was a big enough improvement in itself that nothing else mattered.

chaostheory
0 replies
19h1m

That opinion was so widespread that it was still common for people to dismiss the second iPhone version.

Rapzid
0 replies
19h3m

I remember what I was doing when I first saw it. Eating lunch with a work friend who bought it. I remember what I was eating.

It was incredible and obviously a game changer.

ChrisMarshallNY
0 replies
19h13m

In the case of my company, the camera was bad.

Also, it took over a year to be able to write apps for it.

JS Web apps were not “apps.”

AndrewStephens
7 replies
18h17m

The first iPhone was terribly limited compared to what came after it was not in any way terrible for the time. The demo Steve Jobs did was so good that a lot of people just refused to believe it was possible, only to be proven wrong when the thing went on sale.

You have to put it in context with what passed for a smart phone back then. No web browser (they sort of existed but were extremely cut down and not really usable), small screens with limited software, very limited connectivity that was very expensive.

A valid criticism was the lack of physical keyboard, which phone-jockies found a deal breaker, but in all other ways a phone with decent apps, a large screen, a real web browser designed around and provided with unlimited internet connectivity was always going to be a hit.

It wasn't even that expensive compared to other phones.

rodgerd
2 replies
17h33m

The first iPhone was terribly limited compared to what came after it was not in any way terrible for the time.

At the time my feature phone had much better MMS, video calling, and J2ME apps. The first iPhone was a joke by comparison looked at through that lens, and detractors generally were looking at the fact it was this hobbled 2G device missing features that were common in other, cheaper phones. Oh, and the camera was absolute garbage, too.

elzbardico
0 replies
16h52m

Please don't remember me of J2ME. I felt relieved getting back to develop EJBs with xdoclet after a short stint working in a J2ME project.

AndrewStephens
0 replies
17h17m

You are not wrong but Apple predicted that none of those things mattered and they were proven right.

MMS worked well enough but was/is pretty limited. Video calling existed but postage stamp video at 8 frames per second was not something that anyone wanted to actually use. And don't get me started on J2ME, an ecosystem so vast that Google didn't even bother to include it in Android even though they are both based on Java. Although other phones had better cameras, none took what we would call an acceptable photos today.

What people did use all the time was the browser and only the iPhone had a decent one. That was the only thing that mattered. Heck, the iPhone wasn't even a very good _phone_ and even that didn't matter.

anonymouse008
2 replies
17h14m

We all forgot how awesome inertial scroll was. Scrolling through emails or text messages was absolutely bonkers - it actually allowed us to use the full informational capacity of the screen.

AndrewStephens
1 replies
16h3m

Exactly this. I vividly remember watching that first public demo and thinking "sure, this is OK but touch screens are really annoying to use". When I saw Jobs flick through a list of contacts (or whatever it was) I was blown away. Finally somebody had made touch screens useful.

I am sure someone with quibble that some other product technically had something similar first, and they are probably right. But the iPhone demo was the first time I had seen anything quite like it.

anonymouse008
0 replies
15h36m

Yup. This was what they were supposed to do for 'spatial computing' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c40cxE-dfPg

Turning on a light bulb, ordinary light in the house, meh, ok, then swipe your hands out over the counter and the recipe pulls up. That's the 'oh wow' moment. Then grab and throw a song to a Homepod connection. You know what I mean...

There's a gap someone can shoot, maybe 3 years tops. Honestly though, the developer ecosystem is just so tight, continuity so powerful, doing this solo requires more than what the whole MFi program offers.

83457
0 replies
15h37m

You have to put it in context with what passed for a smart phone back then. No web browser (they sort of existed but were extremely cut down and not really usable)

I based my purchase of phones in the early to mid 00s on whether they came with the full Opera Mobile browser.

I could use just about everything online the same as desktop, that didn't rely on flash of course. The screen size was small but surprisingly wasn't a big issue as everything else was a massive improvement.

Oh Nokia 3660, how I loved thee. I actually chose the 3650 and then 3660 because they seemed to be the best smartphones at a standard sized. I just couldn't justify qwerty.

codeulike
1 replies
19h8m

The first iPhone was pretty terrible

Before Steve stood on that stage in 2007 and demoed the first iPhone, most people had never even seen 'swipe to scroll'. The first iPhone absolutely kicked the arse of everything else. So what if it was 2G that was how most phones were back then. The only objection anyone could think off (e.g. Ballmer) was that it was expensive.

Rapzid
0 replies
18h58m

Agreed. It had limitations but at the time nobody was "this phone sucks" because what it did have was fucking amazeballs and clearly the first glimpse at the future. We were witnessing a paradigm shift and aware of it while it was happening.

nipponese
0 replies
19h2m

For 5 year-old me, the first Mac was pretty amazing.

wahnfrieden
17 replies
19h45m

Tim Apple reportedly overrode the design team on launching it prematurely relative to their typical standards in order to enter the market and begin iterating before waiting too long. It’s the first new product category made under his leadership and he’s eyeing retirement, as context.

Btw, don’t forget visionOS 2.0 is just 18 weeks away. (Source: WWDC is every June and every platform gets a version bump, as we saw with watchOS launching in April then getting a 2.0 immediately after at WWDC.)

Wingy
7 replies
19h42m

The watch is a new product category under his leadership isn't it?

pulisse
3 replies
19h28m

AirPods, too.

wahnfrieden
2 replies
18h35m

AirPods weren't a new product category, they were an iteration of the Apple EarPods which looked the same, had the same remote features, etc.

kstrauser
1 replies
17h56m

I highly disagree about that, especially for the Pros with ANC and spatial audio. EarPods were nice wired earphones. AirPods seem like way more of a leap than just EarPods-but-wireless.

wahnfrieden
0 replies
17h6m

If those features defined new product categories, they wouldn't have replaced existing AirPods with "3rd generation" (non-pro) AirPods that have spatial audio and ANC in the upcoming 4th generation. They're iterative features on an existing product category.

BOOSTERHIDROGEN
2 replies
19h38m

Watch still under Steve, put it in other way, it's last product under his supervision.

george_perez
1 replies
19h32m

Doesn’t look like it.

Ive began dreaming about an Apple watch just after CEO Steve Jobs’ death in October 2011. He soon brought the idea to Dye and a small group of others in the design studio.

https://www.wired.com/2015/04/the-apple-watch/

wahnfrieden
0 replies
18h45m

That is incorrect, or rather, misleading - maybe Ive didn't join the project until 2011, sure, but it began in 2010. Ive didn't lead all design work yet in 2011, he was still just a VP.

zmmmmm
5 replies
19h38m

It’s the first new product category made under his leadership and he’s eyeing retirement, as context

I've been wondering how much this is part of the context here. He may feel some pressure that he hasn't really launched a new major product category from scratch in all his time as CEO and if this has been running 10 years as a project now, that it would be a blemish on his legacy to not get it out the door before he leaves. Perhaps without him there it would even be binned which would be even more pressure to deliver it.

Contrary to all that he really seems a bit ambivalent about the device himself, having never allowed himself to be seen publicly using it.

threeseed
2 replies
19h22m

Apple Watch, HomePod, AppleTV+, Apple News+, AirPods.

And I would argue the M-series CPU are pretty major as well.

wahnfrieden
1 replies
19h19m

Apple Watch began before he became CEO, it wasn't under his direction. He just continued the existing initiative.

Wikipedia's citation that the Watch began in 2011 after Steve's death is incorrect. It began in 2010 under Steve's direction after the acquisition of Bob Messerschmidt's Rare Light, which brought hearth rate monitoring tech to Apple. Messerschmidt was assigned a team by Steve. Don't blindly trust Wikipedia, folks...

As for the others I just meant platform products, none of those have their own OS until homeOS later this year. None of them defined new product categories for Apple - for instance the AirPods were an iteration on EarPods, not a new product category. Apple was already shipping a home speaker product before HomePod, which was an iterative product without its own software platform for developers. M-series is iterative tech, not a new product category. The Motorola ROKR wasn't an Apple product. But sure HomePod is perhaps Tim Apple's one original new product category before Vision if the 2006 Apple Hi-Fi counts as a distinct product category.

threeseed
0 replies
18h52m

Discounting genuinely new products because Apple made them nearly 20 years ago seems a bit ridiculous.

No one would call the iPhone an existing product just because Apple shipped the iTunes collaboration phone with Motorola.

whynotminot
1 replies
18h13m

This all feels like so much projection.

As far as I can tell Tim Cook has never pretended to be a product guy. He seems perfectly comfortable being what he is: a ruthless operations guru bent on efficiency. In every profile I’ve ever read he’s not really the one making hard product decisions, and seems content to leave that to others better suited for it.

wahnfrieden
0 replies
12h5m

The decision to ship Vision Pro before the design team considered it ready/good enough was his decision. That's more a product decision than an operations one. But yeah otherwise he is reportedly hands-off and disengaged from internal product demos including of the Vision Pro.

crooked-v
2 replies
19h24m

don’t forget visionOS 2.0 is just 18 weeks away

Source?

tcmart14
1 replies
12h55m

Its speculation, but probably reasonable speculation. At WWDC, I think almost every OS version gets an announcement of a major version bump. They will announce the next macOS major version, iOS major version, etc. So it is totally reasonable to suspect they will announce the next major version of visionOS.

Edit: But since it is still so new, it could not be until WWDC 2025 that visionOS 2.0 gets announced.

wahnfrieden
0 replies
12h7m

watchOS 1.0 launched in April and got a 2.0 in June that same year

it'll be a beta

epolanski
17 replies
19h41m

The first two iWatches were borderline pointless/bad.

The first two iPhones weren't as innovative as they make them,just more polished than other symbians with cameras and internet, it took off with apps really in third iteration.

I think visionpro has lots of opportunities in the next iterations, early users will provide feedback this gen.

TillE
7 replies
19h28m

The first two iPhones weren't as innovative as they make them

Yes they were. Multi-touch in particular was a revelation. Making a big screen with one physical button is a simple idea, but making it work well was the hard part that nobody else had figured out.

Those first iPhones were dog slow, sure, but they absolutely defined how smartphones work ever since.

epolanski
3 replies
19h12m

Do you remember the first phone that allowed you to play music? No. The first one to take photos? No. The first with internet? No.

Yet we're supposed to give to consider the iphone a revelation because of multi touch. I had the iphone 3g. It was a more polished experience than other phones but that revelation part was just not there. Apps made it big, later.

I swear people treat iPhones like a cult.

mbreese
0 replies
18h11m

I had phones before the iPhone that took pictures and played music (and a Nokia tablet with wifi internet browsing).

The iPhone was the first one that I actually used to take pictures and play music. It wasn’t the first to have those features (and the edge network was super slow), but that polished experience is what made it work. And made it clear to everyone how we would interact with phones for decades to come.

It was a technological inflection point. That’s why it is looked back on the was it is.

atonse
0 replies
18h19m

I think if you find a good, objective history of the first iPhone, you'll find that it was groundbreaking in many meaningful ways.

It was a full unix OS, not some mobile-specific trash like the others (Symbian, Windows Mobile, Blackberry). Capacitive touch wasn't an invention, but a premium form of touchscreens (most were resistive).

Having nearly 60fps high quality 3d accelerated animations on a phone also contributed to a heavily premium feeling for the software. It enabled things like Inertial Scrolling, which among other things (like first class typography afforded by using OS X, and a fully standards compliant web browser), none of which were "innovations" in the sense of "we came up with this first", but more exceptionally good engineering in service of a great experience.

In almost every way (apart from the "traditional phone metrics" like 2G ironically), the iPhone was a huuuuuge leap forward from the status quo.

It might be true that anyone else could've done it. But nobody else did. It wasn't just luck that Apple did.

CamperBob2
0 replies
17h25m

Multitouch was a huge deal because it allowed a usable Web browser to be offered. That was something no other phone came within a light year of providing.

There was a "cult," all right. It consisted of people like Steve Ballmer plugging their ears, shutting their eyes, and denying the obvious.

zmmmmm
0 replies
17h45m

yep ... i'm generally downplaying Apple's "innovations" but I will say, there was huge scepticism that you could have a phone without a physical keyboard and Apple overnight turned that around. That was a real contribution, IMHO much bigger than anything in Vision OS so far.

chasd00
0 replies
19h13m

don't forget pinch to zoom/expand on actual webpages in an actual web browser.

Aeolun
0 replies
17h46m

Those first iPhones were dog slow, sure, but they absolutely defined how smartphones work ever since.

I don’t think this was my experience at all. The first iPhone was always snappy until they started adding random crap everywhere (e.g. by the release of the iPhone 4 the original was near worthless without really old firmware)

checkyoursudo
6 replies
19h30m

Are current watches good? I genuinely don't know and am interested. I hadn't gotten one because I was an early iPhone adopter (Gen 1), but haven't been willing to be an early adopter since then. But I would like a watch, if they are good now.

kaonwarb
1 replies
19h18m

I find them exceptional for a somewhat narrow range of activities (I love going on a run or hike navigating by my Apple Watch while streaming whatever music I want in the world to my AirPods - no phone, nothing to carry), and only slightly useful for a broad range of other things (notifications, weather, etc - conveniences).

Thlom
0 replies
4h41m

What I love best with my Apple Watch is that I can respond to Duo/Okta/BankId directly from my watch and don't have to look for my phone or pull it out of my pocket.

sarlalian
0 replies
18h57m

I'm sure the later ones are also great, but as of Apple Watch 4, they are quite compelling depending on what your needs are. From a fitness / voice assistant button on the wrist, getting notifications without pulling your phone out standpoint the Series 4 and later are all fantastic.

kstrauser
0 replies
17h59m

Yep. They've been great since v7 or so. My S0 watch was... something. Apps took forever to load. Battery life sucked. The UI was still clearly highly experimental. Now even complex apps like OmniFocus launch instantly, and I charge my Ultra every other day. In short, it's a mature product now and works like it's supposed to, without qualifications like "...eventually".

freeone3000
0 replies
19h27m

If you want a very small cell phone on your wrist, they are good at that. I’m nit sure what they’re good for , but they can be that.

atonse
0 replies
18h12m

I think Apple was smart to focus on Fitness and Health monitoring because that's about the only thing I've found immensely useful with my watch.

Apart from that, yesterday I just played Pickleball with a guy who used his apple watch to keep score. It was a little odd at times but seemed like a cool use.

kaonwarb
1 replies
19h20m

To each their own perspective! As for me, as a user at the time of fairly cutting-edge cell phones from other manufacturers, my first hands-on with the first iPhone was one of the most memorable technological experiences of my life. Just using the Maps application with multi-touch was magical. Yes, it was slow, limited, etc., but it felt like an entirely different class of device, and that proved to be true.

herval
0 replies
19h13m

Isn’t that what people are saying about the Vision Pro too?

Clunky and sorta useless, but “a new class of device”… eventually

electroly
16 replies
19h40m

Apple Maps falls in that category. Maps was bad when it came out but after years of effort (and a lot of money), it's pretty good now. That was no small feat given how good Google Maps already was when Apple Maps started.

ChrisMarshallNY
7 replies
19h28m

In my area (Long Island), Apple Maps works great (better than Google Maps). I hear that it falls down, in rural areas, though.

[edit]

Looks like I pissed in someone’s cereal. Didn’t mean to, but different strokes, and all that…

I was just recounting actual personal experience, which, I suppose, isn’t popular, hereabouts.

Just for context, I have been writing Apple programs, since 1986. I am totally committed to their products, and their vision (although I have no opinion, –yet– on their Vision), and have every right to be critical. Those of us that have been on the ride for that long, have seen a very bumpy road.

jsheard
1 replies
18h44m

I just checked my area in Apple Maps out of interest and my own house, which I've lived in for longer than Apple Maps has existed, is listed as belonging to a business I've never heard of. The only actually existing business I can find with that name is at the opposite side of the country.

Not a great first impression. Also while I can view Apple Maps via a third party like DuckDuckGo, you can only report a map issue through an Apple device, so I guess it's staying wrong.

ganoushoreilly
0 replies
16h15m

It's possible a previous tenant used that address or was attached to a business with that name. It happens to offices all the time as well. We had like 8 businesses attached to one of our offices, where only 1 ever existed. They were all tied to the owner and original filings used the address temporarily.

Still weird either way.

geoffmunn
1 replies
18h43m

Apple Maps in New Zealand is really, really good. Travel estimates are nearly perfect.

In smaller countries though, it's total rubbish. Samoa, travel guidance is nearly non-existent. Tahiti, very patchy. In those countries, Google Maps was perfect.

AndrewStephens
0 replies
18h30m

It really is location dependent. I find that Apple Maps has much better driving directions and a better UI that doesn't get in the way. Google Maps on the other hand typically has much more up-to-date information on businesses and restaurants. I am in the habit of using both if I am trying to find an unfamiliar business address.

darkteflon
0 replies
18h13m

I generally find the quality of Apple Maps to be quite good here in Tokyo, although unfortunately Google does still seem to have them beat pretty consistently. The recently completed Azabudai Hills complex, for instance, is correctly rendered on GM, while AM still shows the pre-development layout.

However, one bug that is a showstopper in AM is the dreaded “can’t reach the server now”, which I get probably more than half the time I try to use it, and with apparently no solution other than wait.

As a result, I just removed it from my phone.

YoumuChan
0 replies
18h49m

I gave Apple Map a second chance after hearing good things about it recently.

But it gave me a route where I need to turn left right after taking a right-turn ramp, except that the left turning line are separated by road dividers before the exit of the ramp. So I would need to either go wrong direction and do a 180, or bulldoze the dividers. As a comparison, Google Map never gave me that route in the past.

This happened in a moderately sized town so I guess I will still stick to Google Map for now.

Fomite
0 replies
19h13m

In my particular rural area, Apple Maps knows the street I live on exists. Google Maps still needs a call to delivery people to explain to them that their map is lying to them.

physicsguy
1 replies
6h25m

I live in the UK in a small village next to a large city. Just had a quick look and there are tons of issues within the 1 mile radius, that don't have issues on Google Maps.

* A pub that doesn't exist - there is one about 15 miles with that name, but there's never been one called that here.

* The local church is in the wrong place

* The opening hours of the local cafe are wrong (11:30-3:30 instead of 10:00-3:00)

* Business names aren't correct

mensetmanusman
0 replies
5h57m

Apple Naps has sent me to the middle of cornfields.

Generally, if you are in a city it is fine, but don't use it if you are rural.

Mistletoe
1 replies
19h24m

Apple Maps could be improved with classic hard work on the software etc. Apple Vision Pro is against the same problems of physics and usability that other VR and AR headsets are up against. I’m leaning towards they will never be “solved”, because using a monitor and keyboard or tv and controller works really well.

chaostheory
0 replies
19h3m

Portable monitors do not work as well. Monitors in general could also always be bigger speaking as a programmer.

yellow_postit
0 replies
12h20m

There’s a clear strategic reason for that — reduce dependence on Google for more vertical integration.

I don’t see the VisionOS play here and wonder if it’ll be Tim Apple’s first major fail at the helm. There’s no clear set of competitors or established industry for Apple to just polish like they have with most products. There’s not an obvious large tam for VR headsets and I’m skeptical optical ar is close. I don’t get it but I’m sure the internal Apple and board view it as a strong thesis.

Still glad it’s this and not a car.

Looking forward to how it plays out.

worksonmine
0 replies
19h1m

Duckduckgo uses Apple Maps and it's completely unusable. Might be a Duckduckgo issue but last I tried a few weeks ago I couldn't even pan in Firefox without randomly snapping back to the pin. When I wanted context I'd work around it by just zooming out and be done with it. Still have to turn to the Devil if I want a decent map experience.

Ridiculous.

thelastparadise
0 replies
19h2m

That was no small feat given how good Google Maps already was when Apple Maps started.

Gmaps also helped by enshittifying itself.

bozhark
0 replies
17h11m

Apple Maps still sucks though. Even if it’s better now, recent use is still ridiculous erroneous.

jedberg
9 replies
18h50m

When is the last time they launched a "so so" product?

All of them! The first version of the iPhone, iPad, iPod, watch, AirPods...

They all had similar reviews. "Seems like a tech preview, not really ready for general use, too expensive", etc.

jamespo
7 replies
18h47m

First iPod and iPad were fine.

jedberg
4 replies
18h39m

The first iPod's wheel would break and skip all the time. And so would the hard drive. And the OS was really simple, and the syncing was terrible.

The first iPad was ok only because it truly was "just a bigger iPhone". But they didn't really make features that were unique to the iPad and took advantage of its bigger screen for a few versions afterwards.

jamespo
3 replies
18h37m

The os was simple, it played music, that's it?

jedberg
2 replies
18h33m

It did, but finding your song wasn't easy when you had 1000s on the device.

I would say the main function of an iPod OS is finding what you want to play, not actually playing it.

hollandheese
0 replies
14h11m

It did, but finding your song wasn't easy when you had 1000s on the device.

It was extremely easy if you tagged your mp3s properly.

actionfromafar
0 replies
7h13m

Way back then it also competed against actual cassette and CD Walkmans. So just playing was a big part of it.

fossuser
1 replies
18h43m

The first iPod had a wheel that physically moved and would get dirt and stuff stuck in it/have issues. The HDD would also freeze up. It was better than alternatives at the time, but it wasn't really until the click wheel it got really refined.

The first iPad was similarly expensive, thick and underpowered. It wasn't until a couple generations in that it was good.

jamespo
0 replies
18h41m

They were both significantly better than alternatives and didn't cost 7x as much as this does vs meta quest 3.

fossuser
0 replies
18h44m

Yeah - the first one is always at the edge of what's possible with the hardware capabilities at the time of launch at the quality level Apple demands. Then usually they refine it and end up defining the category.

The idea of 'spatial computing' or a heads up display that augments your vision and gives you eye tracking input to manipulate UIs in your visual field seems clearer superior to looking at little glass displays (meta agrees). If you can project out a future where that hardware becomes better and better it's a pretty powerful interface paradigm.

Eye tracking as an interface for this can get pretty close to telepathy if done well.

I ordered one - it's the sort of thing you really have to play with yourself imo.

outofpaper
0 replies
19h34m

Newton and to a much much lesser extent the first iPod and iPhone. But really the Newton while a product that I love and a super profitable line was the last time Apple created something that had so many rough edges.

leoc
0 replies
18h13m

Watch was cute but fussy and a little pointless when it first came out, and only gradually became really compelling.

lambdasquirrel
0 replies
19h33m

So-so in what way? This product is clearly a toy. Which is to say that it is genuinely new. Maybe like how the Apple II was when it first came out. PCs were quite expensive back then too, if I remember correctly. This really will take time. All the important technological things were toys before they became tools.

Twisell
0 replies
19h40m

The watch first 1-3 generations were clearly "so so".

al_borland
59 replies
17h10m

The biggest thing for me, from the Verge review, was the limited field of view. Apple sold it as filling the users entire field of view and it sounds like that isn’t the case. When I first saw the reality of the Microsoft HoloLens, that was my disappointment there as well… Google Glass as well. I don’t want to feel like I’m wearing an AR device, as so far, that’s what everything has looked like. Limits of the technology, sure, but until that is solved I’ll have a lot of trouble throwing money at it. I still plan to head to an Apple Store at some point to try it out for myself.

As far as viewing with other people, this doesn’t seem like an insurmountable challenge. They have the theaters, they have Personas, they have spacial audio, and other Apple devices have features for watching content together with friends. Put them all together and it seems like if several friends had Vision Pro they could feel like they were sitting in a theater room together while watching a movie. I’m not saying this will be easy, but it seems like all the building blocks are there. The Personas are probably the big weak point, especially looking at someone next to you, but with the focus on the movie, I that’s probably the least important part.

mvkel
32 replies
15h45m

That was the surprise to me too. Lower FOV than a Quest 3? Inexcusable.

volemo
16 replies
13h14m

That’s a double edge sword though. Were they to make it 180°, we would critique it for spreading the precious pixels. “With those 4K your virtual monitor is 1080p at most!”

tsunamifury
14 replies
12h59m

Apple used to excel at making the right trade off here. Choosing what feels right over numbers.

gpxyz
6 replies
10h39m

I remember when the first Android phones with 4-inch screens hit the market, I saw someone comment online that if a 4-inch screen was better Apple would have figured that out during R&D for the iPhone and made the original iPhone 4 inches.

ben_w
4 replies
8h18m

I hope somebody at the time replied with a picture of the original iMac's hockey puck mouse.

Apple can do amazing things, but they do also fairly regularly make terrible things.

4ggr0
3 replies
6h17m

I mean, the current Apple Magic Mouse which has its charging port on the underside is interesting as well.

ben_w
2 replies
5h56m

Sure, but wasn't cockroach charging introduced in 2015, vs. c. 2010 for 4-inch Android phones?

4ggr0
1 replies
3h52m

What's 'cockroach charging'?

ben_w
0 replies
3h50m
al_borland
0 replies
2h38m

I still think the original iPhone was the best size. I use the iPhone mini today, and I wouldn't mind it being a bit smaller still.

It really lends itself to the phone being a tool, rather than a device for endless entertainment. It also suggests it is an accessory, with the desktop/laptop being the home base, rather than the phone being a primary device.

It really bothers me that the phone is now at the center of the ecosystem. It seems like the hub should be something that isn't as vulnerable (to theft, loss, or drops) as a phone.

redsoundbanner
2 replies
12h25m

Idgi. What feels right has always been very high numbers.

whatusername
0 replies
10h33m

yeah. But a high number of pixels and a high number of minutes of battery life work against each other here.

tsimionescu
0 replies
11h19m

There is a fundamntal tradeoff between FOV and image quality at any given pixel density (and there are other tradeoffs between pixel density and cost and compute power needed).

wahnfrieden
1 replies
5h50m

They were and are good at this. But the decision to ship this in this state before their typical quality bar was Tim Apple’s. He reportedly overrode the design team and demanded it ship now to enter the market and iterate in public. Even though he’s otherwise hands off with the product itself. This was all widely reported but has been missing from recent reporting now that it’s out.

seunosewa
0 replies
3h58m

It was a good call. It needs to get to early adopters and establish the existence of an alternative to facebook's metaverse vision.

SirHound
0 replies
12h34m

And they probably have

ChristianGeek
0 replies
12h43m

Steve used to excel at it.

orthoxerox
0 replies
7h44m

They certainly could do something clever, like having a screen with gradually decreasing pixel density and quickly moving it around so its center is always where you're looking it.

jojobas
10 replies
13h13m

Even with that FOV and the highest resolution display they could get, it still can only emulate a 15" display comfy 70cm from your eye at a whopping resolution of 940x540.

It's a gimmick priced as 2.5 monitor stands.

saagarjha
9 replies
10h23m

How did you get those numbers? They seem quite low, considering that they do 4K mirroring and all.

jojobas
8 replies
10h5m

They don't do 4k mirroring. A 4k monitor has 8 million pixels while the googles have about 11 million pixels per eye. True 4k is only possible if you use 85% of vertical and 85% of horizontal FoV, like when staring at a 24" monitor from 15cm.

saagarjha
2 replies
9h45m

I would expect most people to pick a natural size for their windows, perhaps 24-30" half a meter away?

numpad0
0 replies
4h13m

It's a VR headset, angular resolution is fixed at 3800 px / 90 deg = 42px/deg. For a 27.5" virtual display half a meter away, let chord length = 700mm, radius ~ 600mm, distance to virtual display will be 488mm, and diagonal angle it occupies within view will be 71.4deg. with 42px/deg, resolution is ~3000px diagonal, or from (16x)^2+(9x)^2 = (3000)^2, x = 163.4, therefore resolution for that virtual monitor will be 2608x1470.

Other combinations of distances and virtual sizes can be calculated in the same manner.

al_borland
0 replies
3h56m

How much of that “natural size” has been dictated by common monitor sizes, the limits of desk size/setup, and aesthetics?

My work setup as a 43” monitor set about 1 arm’s length away. I can just touch it when my fingertip if I stretch slightly. In a virtual space, I’d probably go slightly larger, maybe 45-48”, pushed a little further back.

fouc
2 replies
9h10m

8/11 = 73% not 85%. so should be a lot more comfortable distance than 15cm/5.9 inches.

jojobas
1 replies
9h6m

Nope.

0.85*0.85 => 0.73

fouc
0 replies
8h38m

Ah, gotcha. But what if you factor in the limited FOV of the display itself? this 11 million pixel calculation doesn't apply to the full FOV of the eye after all.

dwaite
0 replies
1h58m

Even if they were double the resolution per eye, you aren't going to have "native" 4k reproduction because you are looking at a projection of a screen rather than an actual screen. What is the value of achieving one "accurate" pixel if it is surrounded by eight bilinear-interpolated ones?

But then, you usually don't buy a 4k screen because you can perceive the individual pixels either, unless you are creating content that requires that.

I suspect it aligns easier with the quality concerns of reality and not with virtual components - if I can use a monitor through the screen with no noticeable loss of quality or additional eye strain, there's no reason to think a virtualized monitor won't be at least as good.

Damogran6
0 replies
2h48m

I don't think it's an apples to apples comparison (heh), I think at this point 'good enough' is going to be better than anything my eyes can resolve. On a Quest 3 with Zenni lenses, pixel visibilty as a concern is way down on my list. It works REALLY well.

vunderba
2 replies
15h34m

Agreed. 8 years out from the original Oculus rift which had 110' FOV and we're still somehow staring through the AR/VR equivalent of a submarine periscope.

hackernewds
1 replies
11h57m

a whole eight years???

sigmoid10
0 replies
11h7m

I still have one of the Oculus Devkits at home from their initial campaign. It's more than 10 years old now. I've noticed the biggest improvements to VR over the last decade were in useability - not the screen. Once they figured out low latency by switching the screen to black after every frame every device upgrade felt like a tiny improvement in resolution at best. Size 12 font text on a 2m screen wasn't really readable yet, but I still don't use VR for text work today (even though I could) so it also doesn't matter. Right now it's still a question of usability rather than the screen.

fouc
0 replies
8h40m

Not when text is vastly sharper than Quest 3.

Civitello
10 replies
17h0m

field of view...Limits of the technology

It really isn't though, at least not for long, as of mid 2023 there are publicly showcased compact lightweight prototypes with 240° FoV.

zmmmmm
5 replies
15h12m

they are paying the price for their obsession with super high resolution. I think it's a mistake, from my perception Quest 3 at 25ppd is nearly good enough, and its panels are nearly half the resolution. They should have traded 20% resolution for 10 deg FOV either side. In fact, with appropriate optics the effective resolutions sacrifice could be even less than that.

saagarjha
3 replies
10h22m

How is it to read text on the Quest 3? How would you compare it to a high-density display (such as what is on your phone)?

sph
2 replies
9h20m

Well, it's no Retina screen. I'd say it's bit like reading text on a 1080p CRT at 96 dpi.

It's perfectly doable, but there's still a hint of fuzziness and we're still a couple generations away from crisp LCD text.

I care about my eyes, so I use a 4k screen at 2x scaling for coding, and will not use the Quest 3 for work, unless that involves playing games and watching videos.

canadianfella
1 replies
6h31m

Is there any evidence of pixelated text damaging eyes?

frompom
0 replies
4h53m
deanishe
0 replies
5h39m

They only need hi-res where the user is looking, don't they?

We can't see what's in our peripheral vision clearly, so they should be able to get away with most of the FoV being blocky af, shouldn't they?

TaylorAlexander
3 replies
16h24m

Well there’s FOV and there’s pixel density which are both too low right now and antagonistic to one another feature wise. There’s also display brightness which is an issue and I’m not sure how that fits in to the FOV/density spectrum. And then more pixels means more compute… That prototypes exist doesn’t necessarily mean much in a space that is full of prototypes showing off one particular feature. The very hard thing is to combine all of the desired features in to one consumer ready headset.

Roark66
2 replies
11h13m

Well there’s FOV and there’s pixel density which are both too low right now.

Exactly. You know what is the best "goggle" type display I ever saw (and I tried quite a few)? Recent FPV goggles (hdzero) that have 1930*1080 OLED displays at approximately 46 degrees fov. I'm very glad the manufacturer decided to use the his low fov instead of increasing it to 55deg and more like others. The picture is insanely crisp, and looks better than looking at a 4k display. Another huge benefit is that entire picture fits within your "focus cone" so there is no need to gaze around. It is not a VR display, it's purpose is different, but it shows us what visual quality is possible.

I'd love if manufacturers, if they can't make 16k displays that fill the entire fov, create variable pixel density displays. Best quality in the center. Deteriorating towards the edges. That would be much cheaper, but then for good illusion one would need eye tracking and motorised optics which would probably be more expensive in the end...

Oh, well, I'm pretty happy with my fpv goggles (for fpv) I just wish there was a way for them to display different picture for each eye. They already have head tracking, I wonder what VR would be like with this huge ppi narrow fov goggles. Would it be more or less immersive?

fouc
0 replies
9h6m

for those who don't know: FPV = first person view. Used for drone racing and things like that.

Xirgil
0 replies
2h2m

motorized displays also sounds HEAVY which is a big issue for a device intended to be used for long periods of time

bjacobel
5 replies
3h54m

The end goal here - multiple people who are isolated by the technology they're wearing experiencing a simulacrum of human interaction mediated by that technology - is not only unbelievably depressing but also honestly just really boring. We've already built this. It was called the "metaverse" and it sucked. Everyone left.

Solvency
2 replies
3h6m

The idea of wearing a VR headset so I can "enjoy photos with friends" is absolutely hilarious and so deeply disconnected from what human beings want and need as a species.

al_borland
1 replies
2h42m

Every time I see the spatial photos and spatial videos, I always view it as someone putting on their VR headset to reliving a memory of someone who died. Then they take the headset off and realize they are alone and the loss broke them. I have a lot of trouble not seeing those videos from a very depressing place.

dwaite
0 replies
2h8m

People are totally allowed to watch videos of their children without their children being dead.

squigz
0 replies
49m

Maybe not everyone shares this viewpoint.

adrianN
0 replies
2h49m

The people could also be isolated by being a few time zones away from each other.

hackernewds
3 replies
11h57m

in some ways even the reviews seem to be placed by Apple (same as they provided the exact photos of the device the media printed). all of them seem to present a full view with floating widgets, when there's really no way to photograph them

swores
2 replies
6h7m

Surely the device just has a screenshot function?

fudged71
1 replies
1h15m

Two interesting and unrelated facts:

A screenshot would be blurry because of the foveated rendering

The device doesn't even have a power button

swores
0 replies
1h7m

Given Apple have complete control with their OS of how the dynamic foveated rendering system works, if they particularly wanted a screenshot feature to be included - reasonably likely for marketing purposes, it seems to me - then surely it wouldn't be too hard to code it such that it renders a second version of the GPU's output to generate the screenshot, when asked to by user, which has even pixel density. (Or perhaps screenshots getting some sort of "bokeh" for the first time, highlighting whatever the user was looking at when taking the screenshot, will turn out to be a desirable feature.)

Not having buttons obviously doesn't prevent there being a screenshot function, just as lack of screenshot button on iPhone hasn't prevented it from taking screenshots, and just as the VP's lack of buttons doesn't prevent users from interacting with it at all...

chaostheory
3 replies
16h21m

As far as viewing with other people, this doesn’t seem like an insurmountable challenge.

This can also be achieved with 3rd party apps. On Quest, this is already a reality with Big Screen.

aenis
2 replies
10h38m

I wonder who would actually do that. The only reason I watch tv is to socialize with my family. I think if we were just sitting on the couch all wearing VR googles it would ruin the entire use case for watching stuff together. Surely, some geeks, once or twice.

NineStarPoint
1 replies
3h27m

The use case is watching something with people who are half a world away I think, not with people who are physically present with you.

LeonenTheDK
0 replies
2h34m

I wonder if that "theatre experience" would be a significant improvement for most people. I already do this with friends remotely by jumping on discord and hitting play on whatever service we're using at the same time. There more more automatically in-sync solutions out there for sure, but I can't see doing this in VR being more than a novelty that wears out after a few sessions.

starky
0 replies
1h20m

I've been telling people this for awhile, the biggest issue I have with the available VR headsets is the limited FoV. It causes unneccesary neck strain having to move your head as much as you do to look at things.

steveBK123
47 replies
14h45m

if you want to use your actual Mac it can't do multiple monitors

lol, literally the only use case I could convince myself to spend this money on (hey its cheaper than an XDR ).

Even then I was having trouble convincing myself since.. all indications were you wouldn't want to wear this more than a few hours at a time, so ultimately you still need the real physical monitors for the other 80% of your workday.

wkat4242
44 replies
14h9m

Instead of having multiple virtual screens I would prefer a lot more if I could simply spread individual Mac windows around my virtual space. In mixed reality the whole concept of a virtual monitor makes no sense, it's just an unnecessarily limiting abstraction you could easily do without. The whole room is your "desktop".

It's basically what the SimulaVR guys are aiming at, and I'm surprised Apple didn't go this way with their Mac integration. Especially because the native visionOS apps do seem to behave just that way.

klausa
19 replies
12h56m

I imagine it's mostly a CPU/battery/bandwidth concern at this point — having one wireless 4.5k/60 (or is it 90?) stream from your Mac is difficult enough; having a potentially unbound number of them (for arbitrary number of Mac windows open) is a different problem altogether.

But there are 3rd party solutions that will let you do just that though: https://github.com/saagarjha/Ensemble

huytersd
18 replies
12h31m

This is it exactly. I’m surprised the HN crowd isn’t immediately picking up the bandwidth issues with streaming unlimited 4k screens from your MacBook.

deutschepost
13 replies
11h19m

Noted that this would be a non issue if you could just connect a cable between your Mac and the Vision. You already have the huge battery pack dangling off the side. This is an apple issue, not a technical one.

klausa
9 replies
11h2m

Not really?

Do the math of how much bandwidth like three windows/screens (because with this model each window is basically its own screen) at 4K/100hz/10bit color each would take.

You're at limits of TB4 _very quickly_.

You can compress the image, try to do something smart with foveated rendering (only stream the windows that users are looking at; but that breaks if you want to keep a window with logs in your peripheral vision), use chroma subsampling, etc; but those all are varying trade-offs with relation to image quality.

byteware
3 replies
10h43m

why would foveated rendering break down? it does not stop rendering where you are not looking just lowers the resolution

klausa
1 replies
10h26m

It'd break if you wanted to do the dumbest thing and just not stream the windows users aren't looking at; but lowering the stream resolution on the fly could work but now involves more complexity (on both sides to communicate when to adjust the resolution) and because it's not handled entirely on-device breaks the illusion of it being invisible.

I can also imagine it having some weird privacy implications; like Mac apps somehow monitoring this and tracking whether you're actually looking at them, etc.

saagarjha
0 replies
10h19m

If you're OK with rendering everything at high resolution (and then choosing what quality to send over) then you shouldn't have any privacy issues, assuming that this part is done by the OS.

numpad0
0 replies
3h42m

Foveated rendering don't work but not the way described in GP; human eyes are too fast against current latency and frame intervals for it to work.

deutschepost
1 replies
10h20m

Foveated rendering doesn’t stop streaming if the user isn’t looking at the window. Just streams in lower quality.

If you would just trivially stream all windows to the vision of course it will at some point be at the limit of current technology. But I would assume a company like apple has the means to push the state of transmission media (rather than just using a now 4 year old standard) and be able to think of something smarter than „just stream all windows in maximum quality even if the user doesn’t look at them“

huytersd
0 replies
2h10m

I may be wrong but it honestly doesn’t seem realistic to expect seamless, latency free foveated rendering switching at those speeds while coordinating between two devices.

wkat4242
0 replies
9h20m

You're at limits of TB4 _very quickly_.

You don't need to send every pixel for every frame uncompressed.

It would be more like VLC, not sending pixels that aren't changing. And you don't really need 100Hz either. You can't read that fast anyway, the content could refresh lower than that as long as the actual window is moved at 100Hz to avoid nausea.

I really doubt the Mac display functionality as-is is refreshed at 100Hz with full pixel fidelity without compression. WiFi can't handle those kinds of speeds reliably.

frompom
0 replies
4h44m

Since foveated rendering would only send the resolution required for what the user could perceive then even logs in the peripheral space would be ok since they would be sent in much lower resolution. I think the challenge with some smart foveated rendering would likely be latency.

Another option would be handling rendering on the Vision Pro rather than the MacBook so pixels don't need to be streamed at all.

_kb
0 replies
5h16m

Exactly. Current systems that work with large channel counts of high res deep colour real-time compositing are also around 6U 19" rack mount units and pull half a kilowatt of power. Not exactly ergonomic for strapping to one's face.

saagarjha
1 replies
10h20m

I think Apple sees a device that doesn't have any cables in the near future; they just weren't able to pull it off this time.

wahnfrieden
0 replies
5h45m

It’s the product vision. But progress is slow reportedly because of physical and current scientific tech limits. Their product vision could take another 10-30 years.

huytersd
0 replies
10h55m

No, it’s a processor and graphics card issue as well. You have to actually render a potentially unlimited number of 4K screens (at least the ones in your direct view) on the Mac Pro. It was never built to do that.

hexomancer
1 replies
10h25m

AVP knows exactly which monitor you are looking at. The mac doesn't need to render all monitors at full resolution, just the one being looked at.

huytersd
0 replies
21m

That sort of seamless render switching doesn’t sound technologically doable if you include that the render is happening on a different machine. I could be wrong.

matsemann
0 replies
9h15m

Because I don't care about the technical limitations. I care about if it's a useful gadget for me or not. It doesn't matter why a feature isn't there, that just becomes a "you're holding it wrong" thing.

frompom
0 replies
4h48m

AVP already has foveated rendering so if MacOS had some awareness of what is being rendered it could potentially render unlimited windows since it would only need to render and stream enough to handle what is being looked at.

The primary problem I would guess here would be latency though so maybe not feasible. The other possibility is if the actual rendering happens on device instead of streaming pixels. It would dramatically decrease bandwidth required.

I think there's a solution somewhere for this.

kalleboo
9 replies
13h46m

I don't think Apple wants you to use Mac apps. They want developers to make Vision Pro apps. That's why the Mac integration is the minimum they could get away with.

jc_dc
6 replies
10h30m

Good luck with that. Devs made the iPhone a hit and Apple demonized them over it. Can’t imagine too many are eager to make the same mistake twice.

freedomben
4 replies
10h18m

There are enough devs that love Apple and have a burning loyalty toward them, that this is not something I would worry about. Even if it started to become a problem, Apple has enough cash to make a lot of apps, and could subsidize this for an eternity if necessary to make it work. Apps will not be a problem.

jc_dc
3 replies
9h56m

Depends on what they want it to be.

For sure there will be some hardcore indies that just love developing for vr.

There will probably be some game studios ready to go.

TikTok will probably be there.

But, why would Netflix, Spotify, every productivity tool…go out of their way to work on this thing at a time where most are diving deeper into PWA’s?

For spatial computing, they’re going to need to improve the dev situation or accept that safari is the star of the show.

freedomben
2 replies
8h51m

Do you think Netflix and Spotify are really needed (genuinely wondering)? Netflix maybe because of exclusives, but I would think most people with Vision Pro are also going to have Apple Music. With their TV and Music offerings, it might actually be better not to have Netflix/Spotify etc.

wahnfrieden
0 replies
5h43m

Obviously many people use Spotify over Apple Music and want to use it.

jc_dc
0 replies
5h43m

Yep, I’d say if this thing can’t sell beyond the Apple services subscribers, it won’t exist in 5 years.

saagarjha
0 replies
10h18m

Have you been paying attention to everything Apple has been doing in, say, the last week?

yellow_postit
0 replies
12h24m

VisionOS is pretty limited right now and seems like a much larger leap to justify that iPad vs iOS was.

whywhywhywhy
0 replies
4h1m

Hope they are not really betting on that, think it's clear to everyone that OS fatigue hit when they had 3 OSes and lots of companies stopped bothering after that didn't pan out as worth it now this would make 6 OSes...

slg
6 replies
13h49m

But what is your actual physical work environment like then? Are you standing in the middle of the room and typing into air? I always imagined productivity minded people would still at least use a physical keyboard which limits mobility.

SirHound
5 replies
12h33m

No you’d be sitting at a desk with a mouse and keyboard, like today

slg
4 replies
12h4m

But that isn't 'The whole room is your "desktop".' If you are restricted to having your desk in front of you, you might as well be looking at virtual screen(s) on your desk.

wahnfrieden
2 replies
5h41m

I’d be sitting on my couch with my wireless Glove80 split keyboard at my sides. Or lying down with the keyboard flanking me. No desk. And I’d move the keyboard to my counter to stand when I feel like it.

Bedon292
1 replies
3h30m

I was thinking something similar. Split ergonomic keyboard wherever you are. Could possibly do something to stick them to legs wherever it comfortable for standing.

I had not seen the Glove80 before, it does look pretty nice. Though I would prefer a bit smaller. I don't really use F keys, and use layers for things like arrow keys.

wahnfrieden
0 replies
18m

Glove80 is smaller than the only alternative that suits me, Kinesis Advantage. Agree even smaller would be nice. There are many options if you don’t require the key well shape or if more DIY kits/production quality are up your alley

wkat4242
0 replies
9h16m

Of course you could hang the displays freely into space as you can now with the existing Vision Pro apps. You'd hang the productivity ones close to your desk but some of them you could hang in other places and use a virtual keyboard.

nox101
5 replies
12h53m

I know the implementation needs a lot to be desired but just in case you were not aware, the Oculus Rift shipped with this feature and it still exists via the link on Quest AFAIK. You pick the last icon on the UI bar that appears and it lets you select any window to pop out separately

Here's a screenshot of 4 windows plus the deskop.

https://pasteboard.co/hPKLrKgp5vjy.jpg

This features has been there for nearly 9 years?

(note: In my view there was passthrough and I could see my room but the screenshot function didn't include that).

It seems limited to desktop + 4 popout windows but I know it used to support more because when I first got the Rift I tried to see if I could get 6 videos running + desktop all at once. It worked.

There are issues though

(1) it's just showing the desktop's image, that means it can't adjust the resolution of the window. Ideally you'd pick a devicePixelRatio and a resolution and it would re-render but no desktop OS is designed to do that.

(2) It's Microsoft Windows, not an OS that Facebook controls which means they're at Microsoft's mercy and whatever features Windows supports. No easy way to add better VR controls. For example, IIRC, you can't size a window directly. Instead you need go to the window showing the full desktop, size it there, that will then be reflected in the popout window. If that's not clear, there are 2 size. The size in VR. The resolution of the window. If the window is a tiny 320x240 pixel window on your desktop and you make it 5x3 meters in your virtual space, all Oculus can do is draw those 320x240 pixels. You can go back to your desktop, size the window to 1237x841, now Oculus can draw those 1237x841 to your 5x3 meter VR pane. But, since Oculus doesn't control windows (or maybe they're lazy), there is no way change from 320x240 to 1237x841 by directly manipulating the pane in VR. Instead you need to do that in the desktop pane in VR.

(3) IIRC it's got some weird issues with the active window. Since it's really just grabbing the textures of the Windows OS compositor and showing then in different spaces, that's separate from Windows' itself's concept of which window is the foreground window. So, as you select windows, you can see on the floating window of the "desktop" the front window keeps changing.

These are all really just a function of (2), that Facebook doesn't own the desktop OS.

The same problem would exist with the Mac. Apple, since they control Mac, could maybe make it work but it would be a huge change to MacOS. They'd effectively need each app to run on its own screen and each screen to be a different resolution and device pixel ratio. Plus they'd need to map in all of the other features to mac MacOS to be usable in AR

redsoundbanner
2 replies
12h20m

I think people know about that but aren't interested because the resolution is obviously too low on current headsets.

wkat4242
0 replies
9h8m

Yeah that's why I never used the whole desktop either, only if I need to change a setting during VR gaming like the audio output device that doesn't always auto-switch to the Oculus Audio output. I never noticed you could show apps separately like this, cool!

michaelbuckbee
0 replies
11h10m

Too low and all the surrounding UI is an impedance mismatch.

wkat4242
0 replies
9h10m

Huh cool, thank you! I had no idea this existed. And I actually have had a Rift since the start (I was an original Oculus Kickstarter backer so I got one for free). But to be honest I never really used it for productivity as the Rift's resolution was too low anyway. Even with the Quest 2 I didn't think it was high enough to use comfortably. But now with the Quest 3 it might be worth it.

But I'll give it a try, thanks!

And yeah Apple would need to do some changes to macOS to make this work well, but as you say they control it. If they really view this as the future of computing they should really make it work.

The idea of SimulaVR is that it replaces your window manager so they avoid some of these issues by taking direct control. But that's something that only works on Linux.

saagarjha
0 replies
10h15m

For 2, does Microsoft not have accessibility APIs to control window size and layout? On Apple platforms at least if you were doing this "right" you would probably create a new software virtual display and move all windows bridged into VR to that, and move and resize them as appropriate. I believe the actual implementation turns off the Mac screen (through a "curtain" I think, so idk if it's actually moving the windows around below that or what) but like there are many things you can try doing here to make it better.

azulster
0 replies
1m

this is how microsoft's remote desktop protocol works (RDP) but apple never invested in their implementation of something similar, relying on vnc to just send images of the entire screen.

the way RDP works is the code to actually render a window or desktop gets sent over the network and is ONLY rendered on the remote client.

this is not only more efficient but also allows for fun things like rendering remote apps directly on your local desktop mixed in with your normal local windows

verdverm
0 replies
14h20m

Keep an eye on Immersed.com, they have an app that does this with a slew of VR devices, and I expect they will support Vision Pro if they can. They also have the Visor.com that is supposed to release later this year

derefr
0 replies
9h53m

all indications were you wouldn't want to wear this more than a few hours at a time

I think all the wear comes if you’re sitting up wearing it, though. For passive consumption (or thinking between moments of work), you can just lean back or even lay down, which will take the pressure off your head/face.

ravenstine
17 replies
16h36m

Wow, I remember when it was announced, to press materials gave the impression that it would be closely integrable with macOS. I was picturing using VS Code from within it. Which I guess I could do if I set up VNC... but I'm not paying thousands for that.

Is an AR productivity tool really so hard? Apple owns the whole stack here. Nintendo can do Mario Kart AR in your living room with an RC car, but I can't get unlimited AR desktops for software development etc?

tsimionescu
5 replies
11h8m

but I can't get unlimited AR desktops for software development etc?

You can't because it's computationally impossible. There is simply no computing device that can render unlimited high-res desktops at 60Hz per eye.

Not to mention the need to stream all that data to the headset - since you're not going to put a high-end graphics card needed to even attempt this in anything approaching a wearable form factor. Good luck getting multiple 4k or even just HD streams between your laptop and your AR headset over Wi-Fi.

ravenstine
1 replies
5h12m

To clarify, I should have said virtual "desktops" instead of monitors. I don't even need all desktops to be active at once, but be available in physical spaces for me to access in a way that is more intuitive and customizable than pressing the F2 button on my Macbook keyboard and then hovering my cursor over the desktops bar. That would totally suffice. Also, somehow that bar can show what's on each virtual desktop, and in real time, so I know that's at least possible.

tsimionescu
0 replies
1h43m

Also, somehow that bar can show what's on each virtual desktop, and in real time, so I know that's at least possible.

That bar shows a small lower-res preview of each of the desktops, it is not rendering all the desktops at full 4K res. Essentially the smaller a window appears on the screen, the lower effort is needed to draw it.

AuryGlenz
1 replies
10h45m

True, but apart from video/games/possibly a browser they absolutely don’t need to refresh at 60hz. I’m surprised they couldn’t somehow work in a “one nice screen, the rest refresh when needed” solution - though maybe that’s just too clunky for Apple.

whywhywhywhy
0 replies
3h51m

Rest of the VR industry already systems that only really put the rendering hardware to use where you're looking it's called Foveated rendering, because essentially your eyes can't even see the detail in the edges of vision even if it were rendered there. Handles this all very fast and seamlessly.

Not a stretch the same thing could be applied to a virtual desktop environment especially when you have eye tracking.

hexomancer
0 replies
10h21m

AVP knows exactly which monitor you are looking at. The mac doesn't need to render all monitors at full resolution, just the one being looked at.

parentheses
5 replies
11h37m

I'm surprised we still don't have an X-like "render on the drawing device" model. Rather than sending pixel, you send a higher abstraction model from which the UI can be drawn.

saagarjha
0 replies
10h13m

You can theoretically serialize draw calls, but that's significantly more complicated than sending over a video stream.

huytersd
0 replies
10h46m

Then you lose the power of a second computing device if all view rendering happens on the AVP.

bdavbdav
0 replies
1h47m

I suspect as hardware encode gets better and wireless bandwidth gets greater there’s less and less merit in this.

ashildr
0 replies
2h16m

We still had this (--NSDisplay ?) in the first Developer Previews of MacOSX.

14u2c
0 replies
7h30m

Absolutely. This is how RDP works as well. It's one the few areas where I think the Windows ecosystem has a better approach.

danpalmer
3 replies
15h32m

It does Airplay from a Mac to the headset. You look at the Mac and then tap the "connect" button that appears in mid air above it. Apparently it's very seamless and has good latency.

What you don't get is Mac windows intermingled with AVP windows, it's just your Mac screen as one window that you can move about. It sounds good though, and there has been a fair amount of movement in screen sharing over the last few macOS releases which suggests more could be coming here (like multi-screen support).

ravenstine
2 replies
4h59m

Yeah, that's not great. I guess that's slightly useful, but what I'm looking for is the ability is more like virtual desktops but being able to place each desktop into physical space. Being able to do that with individual windows would be even better, but I'd be fine with the virtual desktops. If Vision Pro can do Airplay, then I don't know why Apple decided not to do an integration with virtual desktops from macOS. Maybe they will, but not having that at day one is puzzling to me. Without that, it seems we've got yet another AR/VR device that is a glorified tech demo. I really hope that it gets better (and less expensive) than what we are currently seeing.

The5thElephant
0 replies
44m

I'm sure this will be possible in future Vision Pro devices, main issue right now is probably performance. Macbook Pros already can only push to 2-3 monitors (albeit at higher resolution) and the Vision Pro is also running its own apps simultaneously alongside the Mac window (curious if it is the Mac or Vision Pro doing compression and other processing work for streaming to the headset). Apple being obsessive about frame rates and performance are likely erring on the side of caution before allowing too much. For example the recent downgrade from 1080p to 720p when it comes to streaming the Vision Pro screen to other devices.

LeonenTheDK
0 replies
2h24m

I've been keeping an eye on the Simula One for some time, it does what I think you're looking for[1]. I have to assume outside of the Apple ecosystem this type of this is already possible with existing VR headsets, but the closest I've seen is Virtual Desktop[2].

I guess for the Apple ecosystem we've gotta wait for some software updates to make it more useful. Not that I can justify paying my own money for the Vision Pro or Simula One.

[1] https://youtu.be/a3uN7d51Cco?t=16 [2] https://www.vrdesktop.net/

TaylorAlexander
0 replies
16h23m

Yeah I’d love to use one for PCB design at a cafe, but I don’t even own a Mac. I’m not going to drop $5k for an experience I can already do with my old laptop just a little bit fancier.

spaceman_2020
8 replies
11h37m

I can’t get over how goofy and stupid it looks, and how awkward those gestures are.

There’s a video circulating of someone cooking while wearing it and gingerly pinching a virtual timer and placing it on a pot of boiling pasta.

It looks so stupid that I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.

Maybe younger people might think differently but for me, this stuff is dead on arrival because of simply how uncool and stupid it makes you look when you use it.

habitue
3 replies
11h28m

I'm not really an Apple fan nor am I going to buy this thing, but this seems like a criticism that goes away as soon as everyone does it.

We all look stupid staring at our black rectangles, with notches at the top, with little headphone stems sticking out of our ears. It looks stupid at first and then you get over it

theK
0 replies
9h5m

Yeah, new things will look weird until culturally appropriated. Two things that seem to differentiate AR/VR stuff from previous tech

1. They are more "worn" than "used"

2. They conceal your face while wearing

So maybe cultural acceptance might take a while...

EDIT: typos

sumedh
0 replies
6h6m

We all look stupid staring at our black rectangles

Do we really though? Reading a newspaper or book would be stupid as well

Thlom
0 replies
4h34m

People said this about voice assistants as well, we would get used to talking to them in public after a little while. I've still not seen anyone speaking to Siri or Google in public. The only thing most people use them for is setting timers when cooking ...

ugh123
0 replies
11h12m

I think thats the author of the wsj article

theshrike79
0 replies
11h23m

It looks so stupid that I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.

I'm so old I remember the N-Gage 1st gen being ridiculed for the "sidetalking" feature.

Now we have millionaires on TV talking to their phones like it's piece of bread they are about to take a bite of and nobody bats an eye.

mns
0 replies
9h8m

Yeah, saw the WSJ review with that video, but in all fairness, I think only someone who doesn't cook would think that cooking with this thing on your head might be a good idea.

me_me_me
0 replies
35m

Maybe, but if you had an app that allows you to define kitchen + appliances. You could eaily made a game/app that tells you what to do. Take stuff out off fridge, cut it up... ping your virtual pot needs stirring, go back to cutting, ping turn off the oven... and so on.

Sort of virtual assistant.

That could be useful to people to avoid burning or forgetting stuff.

JacobThreeThree
8 replies
19h44m

The eye tracking driven input method which was seen as holy grail turns out to be annoying after a while because people don't naturally always look at what they want to click on.

This has always been the case and this technology has been around for a while. I'm surprised Apple would have chosen to use it for user input.

askonomm
7 replies
16h42m

I was curious about this so I tried surfing the web and seeing how I click on things. I am literally unable to click on buttons or text inputs without actually looking at them. If I try to only use a corner of my eye, I miss the buttons 90% of the time. How do people not look at what they are clicking?

hamburglar
4 replies
16h29m

My guess is that people actually do look in order to aim their mouse but by the time they click, their eyes have already moved onto wherever they’re looking next.

huytersd
2 replies
12h28m

Yep, focused on the play button on a YouTube video to get my mouse there and then my eyes immediately went back to the center of the video a fraction before I clicked the mouse button.

Lendal
1 replies
2h43m

Maybe they could "remember" where your eyes were looking at a few milliseconds ago and click on that, but then they wouldn't know the difference between that or maybe you actually did mean to click in the center of the content area.

The problem is the Vision OS has no cursor. Cursor position is critical. Your eyes move around a lot more than your cursor moves, but in Vision OS, cursor position and eye position are the same. Very annoying. Maybe they could put a little cursor in the center of the screen that you could move around with another gesture.

huytersd
0 replies
22m

If you want to stick with the old mouse paradigm. I rather think people are going to get used to looking at what they want to click on for slightly longer very quickly.

zmmmmm
0 replies
15h22m

yep this is it

one reviewer said they kept hitting "No" and "cancel" when they meant "Yes" because their natural progression was to look at the buttons in order, pick out the one they want to press but actually click it after they finish scanning all of them with their "mouse" paused on the one they want to hit. It's kind of fascinating that the VisionPro's input method works so well when it does work that it tricks people into doing this, because they really do just expect it to work like magic.

bnralt
1 replies
15h12m

From when I've used them in the past, the issue is the difference between looking in the general direction of something and using your eye like a joystick that jumps around if you happen to glance a little to the left or right.

djur
0 replies
12h37m

Just now I moved the mouse to hover over "Reply" while I was still reading the comment. It was close enough to where my eyes were focusing that I could put the pointer over it, but I never looked at it directly. I've noticed this kind of cueing behavior in screen recordings many, many times over the years. I'm sure most people do it without thinking.

deadbabe
7 replies
19h41m

It’s my understanding that eye tracking isn’t great as an input method, it should be used more for stuff like rendering or NPC interactions.

TeMPOraL
4 replies
19h17m

It's going to be a great, sneaky way of installing an ad blocker onto wetware - users will train themselves to not even gaze at anything resembling an ad, lest they look at it long enough for the headset to register it as a click.

dieortin
3 replies
18h41m

Apps are not able to register where you’re looking. Only the headset itself does.

adkaplan
1 replies
14h4m

Does ios not rely on hovering/mouse over for alt text or similar? Im mostly on windows but i wonder if theyll eventually concede a second gesture for "put cursor here"

saagarjha
0 replies
9h55m

On visionOS the APIs essentially ask all UI elements for "alt text" and the system display is it when appropriate.

TeMPOraL
0 replies
9h39m

Sure, but the proof of looking is in the clicking. The threat scenario I'm describing here is "looked at the ad long enough for the headset to interpret it as wanting to click on it".

Findecanor
1 replies
18h28m

I think that eye tracking perhaps could be used to enhance gesture-based input methods though. It could provide a hint at which object a gesture is directed at in cases where that would be ambiguous.

I have tried eye tracking as primary input method some years ago in another setting, and I very much did not like the experience.

__m
0 replies
11h5m

I think that eye tracking perhaps could be used to enhance gesture-based input methods

That's how it works on the Vision Pro. I didn't really feel annoyed by it, but make sure the device is calibrated to your eyes, or the results might not be that great.

brtkdotse
7 replies
10h8m

The eye tracking driven input method which was seen as holy grail turns out to be annoying after a while because people don't naturally always look at what they want to click on.

This has been know for at least 30 years in the eye tracking business and it even has a name - The Midas Touch problem.

mcny
3 replies
9h37m

This has been know for at least 30 years in the eye tracking business and it even has a name - The Midas Touch problem.

I wanted to see how it is possible but sure enough, I found a paper from 1995 that cited even older research about this.

https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~jacob/papers/barfield.pdf

fouc
2 replies
8h40m

from the paper, the definition of The Midas Touch problem is:

They expect to be able to look at an item without having the look cause an action to occur.

So this doesn't seem to be a problem that Vision Pro has?

Geee
1 replies
7h23m

"At first it is helpful to be able simply to look at what you want and have it occur without further action; soon, though, it becomes like the Midas Touch. Everywhere you look, another command is activated; you cannot look anywhere without issuing a command."

Yeah, Apple Vision doesn't have this problem, because eye tracking is used just for pointing; not for clicking on items.

svnt
0 replies
52m

Whether it has this problem or not seems to really depend on how they use “OnEyesOver” events in practice.

ragazzina
0 replies
8h54m

But decoupling hand gesture from eye tracking should not be that hard: the external cameras could just follow the hand and put a pointer on the screen.

Lendal
0 replies
2h50m

Seems like you could just implement a simple delay to solve this.

Let's say I want to click on the "reply" button below this text box. If I'm perfectly honest, I DO look at the button for a moment, then I move the mouse pointer over to it. But then right before clicking, my eyes switch back to the content I've created to observe that my click is having the desired effect on it.

I'm not actually looking at the button at the moment I click on it, but I DID look at it just a few milliseconds prior to the click. Why can't the UI just keep track of what I looked at a few milliseconds ago, to figure out that I actually wanted to click on the button, and not in the center of some text box?

One issue could be maybe I thought for a moment about replying but then changed my mind and decided to edit the content some more. But the UI has decided that I meant to click the "reply" button and so now it's been submitted prematurely. Yeah, I can see the problem now. The position of the mouse cursor is meaningful when clicking, and the Vision OS doesn't have a cursor. Cursors are important.

AdamN
0 replies
9h26m

It doesn't seem like a 'problem'. For new tech, the emphasis should always be on pro users first (even if they don't initially adopt it because of the long lead times for those industries). So if you're designing an oil rig with these, a pro user would probably want to be able to independently interact with an element while looking for the next element since that's more time-efficient. Seems like a better term might be the 'Midas Touch Axiom'.

abaymado
7 replies
18h58m

"Want it for entertainment? people want to enjoy photos, videos, movies with other people and it can't include them. Even if they have a Vision Pro, I haven't yet seen any sign of ability for multiple people to do these things together."

This is not accurate, FaceTime has Share Play. Any app that leverages it can build a synced entertainment. Example out of the box, Apple TV, Freeform, Apple Music.

I wish the SDK for Share Play was not tied with FaceTime, since it limits you to only people you have their iCloud email or phone number to. Big Screen on Quest was a great app that leveraged the idea of multiple users in the same VR session, based on interest, Quest just lacked the quality.

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/shareplay-watch-liste...

bastawhiz
5 replies
18h54m

I think OP meant you can't include other people _in the same room_. If I want to watch Netflix (well, Apple TV, since Netflix doesn't have an app yet), my partner is completely out of luck if I do it on an Apple Vision. Unless he too has the money for one and we FaceTime each other to sync up our watching experience.

chaostheory
1 replies
16h5m

1. This problem has already been solved on the Meta Quest by a 3rd party app called Big Screen. I would imagine that they or someone else will attempt to do the same for VisionOS. Otherwise, I can see Apple fixing this later.

2. 52% of media viewing in the US is done alone.

bastawhiz
0 replies
3h25m

1. The problem isn't solved, because nobody has the patience or money to set up and sync multiple headsets when you already have a perfectly good TV.

I know zero people who have eliminated their TVs for a headset. Apple isn't going to change that.

2. And so the vision pro isn't even viable for 48% of watching. That's a huge percentage, and shows that nobody is getting rid of their TVs for this.

bigiain
1 replies
18h18m

That seems to be an odd requirement/desire to have a head mounted display do?

bastawhiz
0 replies
3h22m

That's the point. Watching TV with other people is a thing that most folks do. At least in my house, it's nice to walk into the room to see what someone else is watching and join. Unless they become comfortable and universally ubiquitous, watching media isn't something Apple Vision is going to be particularly good for.

abaymado
0 replies
18h1m

I once had a roommate who stopped playing video games a decade ago. We bought a PS5, and he kept trying to find games like 'Gears of War' and 'Lord of the Rings' with a multiplayer split-screen campaign in the same room. Aside from classic 1v1 fighting and sports games, the new games being released did not offer that. They were all built for high-quality solo gaming or optimized online gaming. Expecting a VisionOS experience with people in the same room reminds me of that. I'm not saying there won't be apps for it, but it would be niche.

makeitdouble
0 replies
18h49m

A note on the sharing part: the number of people living alone is double digits percentage [0] in the markets Apple care about.

That might not be their primary goal, but the device could appeal to that demographic either way if the other features are appealing enough.

[0] https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4085828-a-record-share...

derefr
5 replies
10h0m

Want it for entertainment? people want to enjoy photos, videos, movies with other people and it can't include them.

Not on a plane they don’t. Not in a hotel room on a business trip.

IMHo, the Vision Pro is for being somewhere when you’re nowhere; not for being somewhere when you’re already somewhere.

wahnfrieden
2 replies
5h38m

I want to watch stuff or collaborate on projects with my wife on a plane or in a hotel, you just haven’t seen these use cases from Apple yet because the product lacks it in 1.0

derefr
1 replies
1h37m

I think you're conflating two things.

The hypothetical use-case that the GP is talking about here, is AR -facilitated collaboration — people in your "see-through" view of the world being able to interact with the AR objects in your field of view, or vice-versa. Being able to AirDrop something to someone's iPhone by dragging a file from a window over to their body that you can see through the lens. You and your SO on the same flight, next to each-other and both wearing headsets, able to see the same set of shared/synced AR objects, and therefore watch the same movie. That kind of thing.

While this is an intended use-case for the Vision "platform" as a whole — it's an implicit promise of the whole "spatial computing paradigm" phrasing — I don't think this kind of AR-facilitated collaboration was ever intended to ship with the Vision Pro.

Why? Because, nobody in the Vision Pro's target market — at least as Apple would have it — wants or cares about AR-facilitated collaboration. I'll get to why in a moment, but in short — it's because it's the Vision Pro. And like Apple's other Pro products, it's mostly intended to be something possessed by an individual but owned and managed by their employer.

Now, Apple clearly intends to build VR -facilitated collaboration — but hasn't yet. That's what all the reviews mean when they say "the collaboration" is half-baked in the Vision Pro. The people in Apple's target market for this thing, expected VR collaboration, and it's not there. But that's an entirely different thing from AR-facilitated collaboration.

The Vision Pro as a specific product offering, almost certainly came out of Apple employees doing pandemic WFH, and realizing that all current "remoting" solutions sucked. Especially if you're a hardware engineer and trying to get a good look at a 3D real-world prototype of a thing. The people who are actually there in the office could just come in and stare at a real 3D-printed prototype. But the WFH people had to settle for looking at a 3D model on a screen... or maybe setting up a Windows machine, connected to an Oculus Quest, and using special compatible CAD software, in order to be able to do a walkaround. And that CAD software definitely didn't let them just paw at the 3D object with their hands.

The Vision Pro is clearly aimed at the "high-fidelity sensory feedback" half of the remoting problem. It's thus the complement to the companies who build telepresence robots — those robots solve the high-fidelity presence and interaction half of the remoting problem. (And you could really do some clever things by combining them!)

But note what else Apple released during the pandemic: Freeform, a piece of collaboration software. In fact, Apple added collaboration features to many of their first-party software offerings during the pandemic.

Apple never thought they'd extract their best work from their WFH (or now, travelling) employees by having them "show up to the office" with a telepresence robot. They rather expect that the best platform for all their engineers — in-office or otherwise — will be a digital office: one made of collaborative apps. And specifically, "level-of-immersion responsive" collaborative apps — apps that can switch between (or be compiled for) both lower-fidelity 2D screen-based UX, and higher-fidelity 3D spatial UX, on the same codebase.

It's this sort of 3D spatial collaboration-app UI experiences that the Vision Pro lacks in 1.0 but will clearly add later. (Which is why Apple cancelled WFH as soon as they could: their "solution to the remoting problem" isn't baked enough for them to usefully dogfood yet!)

But this is effectively VR-facilitated collaboration — working with other people who could be in arbitrary places, in VR or just interacting through a screen, where you see their VR avatars (personas) instead of seeing them. It's "Metaverse stuff" — but don't let Tim Cook catch you calling it that.

But AR-facilitated collaboration — i.e. having other people who are part of your work, present in the room with you, with some or all people in the room wearing Vision headsets with the see-through turned up, and where people wearing the headsets are interacting both with shared AR objects and with others present in physical space (rather than their VR simulacras in VR space)... this all has zero relevance to the remoting use-case. If you're in the office, then you're not going to be wearing a Vision Pro... because you can collaborate by just getting people in a room, and using various screens (AirPlay on an AppleTV display for shared viewing; your Macbooks for running collaboration tools; etc.)

Now, AR-facilitated collaboration is likely a use-case for the "Vision platform" as a whole. (Otherwise, why bother with the AR OS features?) AR-facilitated collaboration, is what a self-employed / freelance creative professional — someone who isn't remoting into some [idea of an] office, but who does have people [e.g. clients] physically present around them who they need to interact with them and with their work — would want. AR-facilitated collaboration would therefore be the defining use-case for a later "Vision Studio": a "prosumer" model targeted at such creative professionals — the same sort of people who buy themselves a Mac Studio. It would match the Vision Pro's targeting (which, if you haven't considered it, will almost certainly end up squarely on "businesses buying these for their remoting employees" — even if the early adopters are individual tech nerds.)

wahnfrieden
0 replies
19m

Hmm a lot to disagree with there

fouc
0 replies
8h54m

a hotel room on a business trip is pretty much "nowhere", so absolutely yes.

Thlom
0 replies
4h56m

So the use case is porn for people on business trips?

mikenew
4 replies
19h21m

My launch day Apple Watch was unbelievably bad. Not even good for telling time as the raise-to-wake feature was so flaky. So by the sound of it, the Vision Pro might be starting in a better position than the watch.

raydev
2 replies
19h5m

My job at the time gave me a brand new Series 2 and it was annoying to interact with... when it was new. Dropped frames, missed touches, etc. There was still a little bit of lingering hope there would be "killer apps" outside notifications and exercise.

But nope, nothing more interesting came, and OS updates ruined performance so badly that I happily returned it to my employer 2 years later and opted not to buy my own until 2021 (for exercise and notifications only).

mikenew
0 replies
17h14m

I had the watch they launched with, which Apple pretends didn't exist as they named the next model the Series 1 and this model never got a name. The watch improved considerably in the next generations, so you can do the math back from your Series 2 to get a sense of how truly bad it was.

dieortin
0 replies
18h42m

As a counterpoint, I had a Series 2 for years and it worked really well. It was slow, so third party apps were not really usable, but the core functionality of the watch was perfectly fine. That is, until an unfortunate incident broke its screen while in the sea.

herval
0 replies
19h17m

Watch v1 was just awful. Those laptops with butterfly keyboards and the first gen Air were also completely broken in their own ways. If Apple manages to keep iterating on this device, they might eventually have a winner

Or maybe it’ll be another homepod

oomun
3 replies
18h18m

genuine curiosity, how often are you clicking something without looking at it at least for a moment?

or, how often do we believe other people are clicking something with out looking at it?

im examining this for myself...hard to feel organic while im actively focusing on it, but i at least glance at my mouse pointer target while traversing the pointer towards the target across my screens

makeitdouble
1 replies
17h58m

A lot.

I also started thinking about it reading the reviews, and the main cases to me are:

- checking something before commiting an action: for instance reread the product name before pushing the purchase button. The pointer is already on the button, I keep it there while checking the order, so I just need to click.

- focus switch: pushing another window to the forefront doesn't need a super accurate click. I assume most people eye ball it like me and will click on a emptyish part of the window from the corner of their eye. Same for moving the focus away.

- scroll and type like situation: mostly when using a document on the side while taking notes. My eyes and focus will be primarily on one side (with quick glances on the other), while the mouse/trackpad movement will be on another.

I think we'll discover a lot more instances of this.

oomun
0 replies
17h40m

your first example is p solid, i agree there will be a micro-tedium related to re-focusing on a confirmation button in that type of scenario

assuming that, in the AVP UX, the user could not linger hand-gesture focus on the button then immediately click after verifying whatever info they are reading as they will have to move the eyes up (to read lol) then back down to focus the hand-gesture control back onto the button

penneyd
0 replies
18h6m

Often times I'll look to position the mouse and then look at something else when I actually hit the button.

risho
2 replies
19h35m

i generally agree with the sentiment of this post. it does appear to be a beta/dev kit. i will say that the productivity criticism is a BIT unfair. It may be the case that you can only have 1 MACOS display, but you can have many non macos apps running right alongside the 1 macos display. You could have your macos display doing things that only macos can do, and then run the vision pro version of discord or teams or safari or whatever else you would use that has an ipad/vision version as floating windows separate from the macos display.

zmmmmm
0 replies
19h10m

yes true - a lot depends on the integration in that scenario though. Can I seamlessly copy and paste rich content between the, drag and drop, does the mouse seamlessly move from my Mac desktop to the safari window next to it, etc.

At a deeper level it depends a lot on the question of does Apple want this? If they do then all these will be solved over time. But if they actually see MacOS as a legacy integration then they simply aren't going to invest in encouraging people to use it. I'm waiting to see indications on which way they are going to play it.

madeofpalk
0 replies
18h43m

iOS/visionOS lacks good window management tools for this though and since macOS Apple has not demonstrated they can build them for new platforms. Maybe visionOS will motivate them to actually get it right, but that hasn't been shown off yet.

I think about all the apps I'm running and switching between on my computer now, using shortcuts and toolbars and docks to arrange, hide, and switch between them. Everyone using multiple apps on visionOS just looks chaotic.

I once had a second portrait monitor next to my ultrawide. I had to get rid of it because it was just too tiring to be constantly turning my head so far to look at it. It didn't work out.

I cannot imagine how uncomfortable it would be if each app needed to be in a different physical space that required turning my head to use. Painful.

posix86
2 replies
18h46m

What do you mean, it can't run multiple monitors? I thought it lets you pop out windows free standing, no concept of monitor at all.

valgaze
0 replies
18h41m

This tool evidently overcomes the display limitation: https://github.com/saagarjha/Ensemble

"Ensemble (formerly MacCast, before the lawyers had something to say about it) bridges windows from your Mac directly into visionOS, letting you move, resize, and interact with them just like you would with any other native app. It's wireless, like Mac Virtual Display, but without the limitations of resolution or working in a flat plane."

tsimionescu
0 replies
9h22m

It does for apps running on the goggles themselves, but the Mac integration feature just shows the Mac's screen as one window, kinda like Remote Desktop on Windows.

And this is a quite hard limitation, since the Mac has to actually render those windows and then stream them to the goggles over radio. So, without quite a bit of magic, you have a limited amount of pixels the Mac can draw and send.

naravara
2 replies
18h6m

Want it for productivity? it can't run MacOS applications and if you want to use your actual Mac it can't do multiple monitors.

I don’t know why, but while I feel multiple monitors helps my productivity a lot in Windows and Linux I find myself not caring as much in MacOS as long as the screen is big enough. I think it has to do with my habits around how I use the windowing in each. I tend to teasselate and arrange them in MacOS while I tend to maximize or lock to screed edges in Windows.

zecg
1 replies
6h40m

Unpopular opinion: multiple monitors are a meme for most uses and almost everyone is better off having a single screen and using their fingers to move the viewport accross virtual desktop spaces.

whynotminot
0 replies
4h57m

Not just an unpopular opinion, it’s also not supported by data. There are a decent number of studies that show that multiple monitors increases productivity.

Iirc though, there are diminishing returns fairly quickly beyond dual monitors.

Me personally, the sweet spot is three total screens.

mbreese
2 replies
18h2m

> Want it for entertainment? people want to enjoy photos, videos, movies with other people and it can't include them

This is a disingenuous argument. Your other points are much more valid than this one. You don’t have a VR headset to interact with other people in the same room. If you want to watch a movie with other people around you, there are many other (cheaper) ways to do that (and Apple can sell you a nice AppleTV to do it).

thuuuomas
0 replies
17h40m

What does disingenuous mean

FireBeyond
0 replies
16h25m

And yet you literally have early access reviewers regurgitating talking points about how this will redefine the television-watching and movie-going experience.

ls612
2 replies
18h17m

This was always going to happen. The human eye has a field of view and dynamic range no display technology can hope to match anytime soon. The future of AR is not reprojecting the outside world on a screen; it is screens which can become transparent.

singularity2001
0 replies
8h36m

Dynamic transparency is the path to the future, and it's physically perfectly doable. Any news from the ray ben smart glasses?

__m
0 replies
10h53m

For that to happen we would need a transparent display that can block light. Seeing content on an additive display will always look somewhat transparent, with no hope of displaying blacks. The augmentation on the vision pro look so much better than on a HoloLens2, it's like looking at 3d printed objects.

landswipe
2 replies
16h35m

Expecting the same, this is going to be a MASSIVE flop. VR is not for the masses until the goggles go away.

TaylorAlexander
0 replies
16h9m

I think this product will be a slow burn. They are getting developers engaged now and subsequent generations will bring broader appeal while the software will get more refined and apps will expand in availability. I don’t think it will be a flop it will just take a while to get going. And they must absolutely know this given the current pricing.

ActorNightly
0 replies
16h7m

Its not gonna flop, for the same reason that Apple desktops dont flop. Anyone educated in basic modern technology can easily see that for the price, you can build a custom desktop that blows any Mac one out the water, but people still buy them because of 2 things: styling and ecosystem.

Vision has both of those. People will conveniently ignore all the downsides of it, like they do with current Apple products.

anonymouse008
1 replies
17h32m

We just got the 'larger iPod' version of Spatial Computing. If your primary interface is a screen, it's still screen computing, not spatial computing. They literally had everything teed up to do some wild proximity things (AirTags, Homepods, etc) - and they gave us a strap on iPad.

Whatever, it at least gives a startup an opportunity to build something unique - it's just sad to see your old friend start going senile.

catchnear4321
0 replies
16h51m

“ok zoomer” - your old “friend” next month as you pay for your subscriptions through their payment processing.

youssefabdelm
0 replies
12h20m

people want to enjoy photos, videos, movies with other people and it can't include them

Eh... I prefer empty cinemas

No loud babies, no popcorn sounds, no people explaining the plot to people not paying attention, just me and the world of the film. Bliss.

whiteboardr
0 replies
8h59m

No surprise at all i’d say - as Nilay Patel on the Verge review put it correctly:

cameras are still cameras, and displays are still displays.

Anyone remotely familiar with the state of development in those areas would be aware that “even Apple” can’t cheat Reality (punintentionally).

Those left still raving about and/or hoping for a game changer will be greatly dissapointed - or only in it for the line go up.

The whole concept will be a niche product for many years to come and will stay an isolating experience.

ugh123
0 replies
11h8m

Want it for productivity? it can't run MacOS applications and if you want to use your actual Mac it can't do multiple monitors.

Do you mean a Mac's external monitor visible through the vision pro AR view?

stevage
0 replies
14h45m

Even if they have a Vision Pro, I haven't yet seen any sign of ability for multiple people to do these things together.

No idea if it does this, but the obvious use case is for people who aren't physically present - but letting them somehow share a physical space. It could potentially be awesome for friends/partners who live far apart.

russellbeattie
0 replies
18h29m

The eye tracking driven input method which was seen as holy grail turns out to be annoying after a while because people don't naturally always look at what they want to click on.

I wrote a long comment [1] months ago when the Vision was first announced expressing my skepticism about the use of eye tracking based on my person experience with the tech. At the end I said, "maybe I'm wrong." Turns out I wasn't.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36220097

marricks
0 replies
19h20m

Every hit from Apple had lots of initial (VALID) gripes, but the experience was worth it to advance the core product and eventually eliminate or accept those limitations.

iPod was the size of a beefy wallet, but was good enough.

iPhone was glorified plastic and websites looked like crap, no app store. But hey, it worked well enough.

That said... this isn't accessibly priced and what's the hook? Like if this launched the same time as Pokemon Go or WoW were taking off alongside it it'd get the social momentum all the other options had.

Also it's better than the competition in key was, but differentiable ways...? AR/VR could very well take off but it's not this year.

j45
0 replies
8h22m

It’s first generation

First Gen is usually awful

This is not awful and maybe even closer to 2nd gen

Everything starts somewhere

Most things are ready for the masses by the 3rd or 4th gen.

ethbr1
0 replies
15h58m

To me, 3D home recording playback is a huge use case.

Why would you want presence in an action movie? Cool, in an exciting sort of way.

But presence in recording of your family? That's powerful stuff, for everyone!

That feels like the long-term hook. iCloud to handle obscene storage amounts as a service. iPhone to generate new recordings. Vision to play back recordings.

And the dastardly brilliant part is... the more 3D video you record... the more valuable a Vision is to you.

> Capturing -- One of the more remarkable things to watch? Your own home 3-D movies. Apple introduced “spatial video” for the iPhone 15 Pro a few months ago, and I started recording my sons with it. Watching the videos in 3-D in the headset now is almost like reliving the moment. The Vision Pro also captures these videos and photos—you just hold down a button on the top left.
crooked-v
0 replies
19h51m

I haven't yet seen any sign of ability for multiple people to do these things together.

The reviews haven't mentioned it, but SharePlay [1] is OS-level functionality and the press releases mention using it with movies, music, and games.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10087/

chii
0 replies
14h21m

people want to enjoy photos, videos, movies with other people and it can't include them

may be apple expect every person to buy one. Didn't facebook recently try something similar?

XorNot
0 replies
16h51m

The eye-tracking thing doesn't surprise me at all, but I am surprised anyone thought this was a holy-grail sort of interface, in particular that Apple didn't rule it out themselves fairly quickly. Eye-tracking data is always a gigantic mess - it's why it's presented as gaze averages rather then direct replays.

Damogran6
0 replies
2h51m

AR Passthrough is the big v 1.0 feature for this generation of headsets...I'm sure Apple and Meta were developing in tandem without knowing what the competition was doing. It's a really need addition that brings significant improvements...and I could see Apple developing it as 'this is streets ahead' where Meta was just improving tech they already had.

At the end of the day, this is Apple testing the waters and trying to get a positive cash flow to help offset significant R&D...what they're showing is pretty impressive in a number of ways, even as it's lacking in others.

spogbiper
77 replies
22h59m

What's the killer app? Quest headsets have been out for years and haven't seemed to find one. Well.. besides 3d porn

willio58
26 replies
22h49m

I've seen a few ideas that seem really interesting, just not at the price point Apple is offering. And honestly I'm just going to wait for these headsets to be smaller and lighter too before buying one. I don't think anyone at Apple is under the impression this device is going to be a money maker, but more of a gen-1 device to provide a place to start from for further work.

- Learning instruments in a guitar-hero way (Piano, guitar, drums)

- Cooking with timers and recipes right in front of you (will be even more doable with better internal displays in the future)

- Coding with virtual displays on-demand. This is another thing where we still need more resolution to make it really doable.

- Watching movies. Obviously a solo way of doing this but I could see it being big.

- (once these are much lighter and less intrusive) I could see these being huge for virtual workouts like Yoga, weight lifting, etc.

Also regarding your question, I'm trying to think of the "killer app" is for a currently successful device - iPhone. I mean, camera? Texting? Most people use tiktok a ton but I wouldn't consider that a killer app. I think it's more of the device providing a home for a bunch of different apps.

patchorang
9 replies
22h13m

Cooking sounds like a nice application, but as soon as the headset steams up/get condensation on the glass it will be quite annoying. I can't imagine cooking in ski goggles.

MegaDeKay
8 replies
21h33m

Worse than that would be when you fry something and the front of your $3500 headset gets splattered in grease. No thanks.

theshackleford
7 replies
20h46m

It’s called a cloth and they cost almost nothing.

Sohcahtoa82
3 replies
19h7m

Cloth doesn't really absorb grease that well. It just kind of spreads it around.

theshackleford
2 replies
17h4m

Ah yeah, you'd need a little bit of dish soap too I suppose. (I used to work in a kitchen and my glasses would end up covered in grease somehow.)

spiderice
0 replies
14h8m

For some reason everyone is pretending that cleaning up grease is an impossible task

Sohcahtoa82
0 replies
59m

And I wouldn't want to use dish soap on my $500+ device that isn't designed to be waterproof.

Sodman
1 replies
19h52m

IDK they're like $19 these days and that's without even knowing if they'll officially list the Vision Pro as a supported device yet or not!

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MM6F3AM/A/polishing-cloth

theshackleford
0 replies
17h5m

Why would you buy a cloth from Apple but? Lol 19 dollars, I could get a meal for that. It would want to be made out of unicorn hair or something.

saagarjha
0 replies
9h26m

In fact the box comes with one.

oriolid
8 replies
21h49m

Learning instruments in a guitar-hero way (Piano, guitar, drums)

What would VR add here? For guitar-hero style instrument learning, there are already Yousician, Simply Piano / Guitar, Gibson and Fender apps, and quite a few others.

crtified
3 replies
19h43m

What would VR add here?

I'm imagining an AI VR tutor - heck, with some legal deepfake+AI style evolution, perhaps that tutor could actually be a famous player, talking to you.

The 3D view gives, well, a 3D view, and all the advantages it entails. For example, when you are with a physical real world teacher, you don't have a fixed view. You can observe from any angle, the teacher can observe and correct micro errors. And the senses of scale and proportion are intact, unlike viewing on a 2D screen of arbitrary size at arbitrary distance.

Even the simple POV of VR means that you get to see the techniques in-situ - e.g. seeing the expert's hands on your guitar, and how the technique is supposed to look from POV - rather than the standard teacher-student limitation of e.g. guitar, where the student sits opposite the teacher and sees a reversed image.

But to be clear, my vision of how this would be game changing relies upon a level of interplay between hardware and software that is not yet developed. But I expect it will be, in time, because virtualising real world experiences is arguably the core goal of VR, and (correct me if I'm wrong) but nothing in the music tuition world has yet proven superior to having an extremely skilled one-on-one mentor who can personally guide your every step, "in person" - and this is what VR would seek to achieve here.

rwalle
2 replies
15h3m

May I ask if you play any instruments and taken music lessons for a serious amount of time?

My guess is not, because to me it is obvious you don't understand how this works and are just imagining things.

Speaking as someone who takes private piano lessons and have been practicing daily for the past 8 years:

If this were possible, music teachers would have already been replaced to some extent. But that has not happened yet. AI is not new. VR is not that new. Even without this, just talking about non-personalized, non-VR instructions. Have you seen those websites that "teaches" you piano just by connecting your keyboard to a computer and following instructions? Where are they now? It does not work like that. Maybe for an absolute beginner who has trouble finding a key or fret, but as soon as you get a little bit better it won't work.

Music learning is an extremely personalized experience. People pay 1-1 private lessons because it needs to be done that way. A teacher, especially a good teacher, can tell you exactly what you did wrong and what you should do to get better at it. Plus different teachers often have different opinions of music -- how a piece of music should be interpreted or played. As you get more advanced, you spend even less time on technique itself. Theoretically you could train an AI tutor that does the same thing. But no, it hasn't happen yet and will not happen. Did I mention hallucination? Do you want a teacher that hallucinates?

Plus you need lots of practice -- routines, repetitions, all those scales. AI or VR is just useless. Effective practice strategy is important, but you don't need AI for that.

crtified
1 replies
13h4m

My guess is not, because to me it is obvious you don't understand how this works and are just imagining things.

That's great! I'm glad to hear that your 8 years of music practice has given you some firm opinions, and I'm sure you'll continue learning over time. Speaking as a player and composer of 25 years, former music teacher, and maker of the instruments I play - for whatever such things are worth - I believe my ideas have some merit. But only time and technology will show whether-or-not such AR (and AI) musician overlaps eventuate.

justneedaname
0 replies
4h3m

crickets

willio58
2 replies
20h28m

For piano it lines up the keys with the notes on your physical keyboard, so you don't need to look at a separate representation of a keyboard, you can literally see the notes fall onto your piano at the right times. Same thing with the other instruments.

oriolid
1 replies
20h9m

The problem is that once you get past the very initial stage, you want to read ahead of what you play at the moment. At that moment Synthesia-style falling blocks notation becomes difficult to read because the blocks don't have any position reference besides the keys and no time values. Even the scrolling sheet music or tab is distracting compared stationary black and white. With guitar there's the additional problem that you can't see both hands at the same time, and usually you won't be looking at your hands at all. And if you ever want to play without help from the app, you need to learn to find the notes anyway.

This is by the way a great explanation of all the attempts to make music easier to read and how they fail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3bUFgEcb4

rwalle
0 replies
15h2m

exactly. Those who think VR headsets are good music teachers probably have never taken any serious music lessons or master any instruments themselves. If you have just taken one month of lesson and have been practicing daily, these things will start to prevent you from making progress, not help you.

(coming from someone who has been taking piano lessons for the past 8 years and have a Quest 3)

bnolsen
0 replies
21h14m

rocksmith is the big player here. It's awesome with a big screen TV. VR only gets in the way.

karaterobot
3 replies
20h51m

Working out with a VR headset on seems like a great way to get the whole thing disgusting. Hope I can put this $3500 face computer through the washing machine.

mrguyorama
1 replies
19h13m

Unless Apple has truly screwed the pooch, this has been a solved problem. Sometimes, if you are purposely trying to work out with a VR headset, you just wear a headband to catch the sweat. Most headsets also have cheaply replaceable or even machine washable face "gaskets". If the idea of any sweat in your poor device saddens you, just point a fan at yourself while you work out.

crooked-v
0 replies
18h24m

Also, since the gaskets just stick on with magnets, I'm sure there will be third-party ones with included fans or whatever available within a couple of weeks.

lelandfe
0 replies
2h29m

I’m imagining trying to do burpees with this on my face. Or attempting to press a barbell up and shattering the device. No thanks!

riversflow
1 replies
19h58m

virtual workouts

Or real workouts. I want to be able to have floating text to read on my runs, and real time biometric data directly in my field of view rather than on my watch would be cool too.

wraptile
0 replies
12h20m

I'm not sure if this satire that I'm missing but some people consider running with a kilogram of sweat on their brow?

spogbiper
0 replies
22h44m

killer app for the iphone was a truly usable portable web browser. everything else early iphones did had been done many times before, but a web browser that actually worked pretty well on a portable device was new

JumpCrisscross
17 replies
22h50m

What's the killer app?

Movies on airplanes. I’m guessing these will become virtually ubiquitous in the front cabin within a few years.

ghaff
7 replies
22h44m

You mean the front cabin where they have big screens for every seat?

I couldn't see carrying one of these instead of just an iPad for movies. (But then I'm a very light packer.)

whartung
2 replies
21h52m

Back in the day I was flying back east and had some movies loaded on my iPod Touch.

And I was casually watching one in my seat, the movie was “Blackhawk Down”. And it occurred to me how a neighbor might not enjoy watching blood, guns, and violence out of the corner of their eye.

So, I can absolutely see value in a headset style movie experience in public places.

saagarjha
0 replies
9h24m

Thankfully, most newer planes have those polarizing privacy filters on their screens that make it hard to see what the person next to you is watching.

ghaff
0 replies
21h46m

I am perhaps slightly selective about what I watch on a plane--depending somewhat on who is sitting beside me. But my observation is that US airlines have gotten quite a bit less editing-heavy in that regard and, at some level, it's not my problem. (Although I'll be reasonable if someone cares enough to ask me to not watch something.)

hwbehrens
2 replies
22h31m

I think it will be more like the proliferation of noise-cancelling headphones; it's not about what it brings (music, dialog, etc) but about what it blocks out (the ambient sounds). Yes, you can watch a movie on a plane now, but with a headset you remove the depressing, crowded, and claustrophobic visual environment.

prawn
0 replies
16h28m

And watching content on a plane's built-in screens is a miserable experience: poor interface, lag, constant forced interruptions for even the most boring announcements (captain, donating foreign coins, meal schedule).

ghaff
0 replies
22h6m

Although I'm not sure I want to be that isolated from the environment. (I do use noise canceling devices but they're in-ear.)

bemmu
0 replies
9h2m

Those screens don't show 3D movies though.

amlib
3 replies
22h21m

Wouldn't just about any available headset that costs 10x to 20x less suffice for this?

spogbiper
1 replies
22h2m

Pretty much, but I haven't seen anyone on a plane watching movies with a Quest or similar headset

astrange
0 replies
19h12m

I met someone at a party once who claimed to do this. He turned out to be a cofounder of Twitch. There may be something to conclude here, not sure.

filleokus
0 replies
21h59m

XReal's glasses seem like they could be enough for this: https://www.xreal.com/air2

bnolsen
2 replies
21h11m

For international flights they have may have a screen on the back of the seat in front of you. Using a tablet or small laptop works just as well without the discomfort of a headset.

JumpCrisscross
0 replies
17h0m

they have may have a screen on the back of the seat in front of you

They always have a screen in front of me. And I always have my laptop or iPad. There are still advantages to this, from immersiveness to privacy.

AlexandrB
0 replies
21h8m

A tablet also takes up less luggage space and probably has better battery life.

coolspot
1 replies
19h20m

Currently you can’t use Quest/Vision Pro in any moving vehicle, as they rely on accelerometers to capture head movements.

JumpCrisscross
0 replies
19h6m

you can’t use Quest/Vision Pro in any moving vehicle

You aren’t unpredictably accelerating most of the time in a plane. It makes sense Facebook would have fucked this up. I’d be surprised if Apple has.

MichaelNolan
7 replies
22h26m

For me, I think the killer app would have to be something that interacts with the real world. Watching movies, FaceTime, or browsing the internet won’t be enough for me to ever buy this. But maybe if there was something like a home repair or car repair app that could in real time identify and inspect the objects, give me visual and audio instructions on how to perform the repair, that could be a killer app. But I’m not sure the AI/ML side is good enough yet to enable that.

spogbiper
5 replies
22h18m

The Microsoft Hololens demos included some examples of this. It certainly looked interesting

example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIsjVaqdNpc

vaylian
4 replies
22h2m

Speaking of the MS Hololens: Is it still a thing and is there a community of 3rd-party developers around it? It showed a lot of promise when it was released.

spogbiper
0 replies
21h25m

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/13/23871859/us-army-microsof...

Apparently they are still making them for military purposes

pjmlp
0 replies
21h45m

Lets say I predict the same future for Apple's device.

ephemeral-life
0 replies
21h27m

They pivoted to military applications and I haven't seen much news about it. It looks like something out of the futuristic call of duty games. It looks super cool, but apparently soldiers didn't like it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Visual_Augmentati...

bikson
0 replies
21h40m

Hololens are dead. Even their github is not updatel if i remember well 2 years.

yunwal
0 replies
22h13m

I think even if it were good enough to place some static instructions over a non-disruptive part of your field of vision, with a pleasant way to display embedded images or video, and a hands free control mechanism, I would find that incredibly useful for DIY projects and stuff.

danso
6 replies
22h12m

For me it’s movies. But the fact that Netflix and Amazon haven’t updated their Quest apps in years — nor has Meta bothered building its own movie streaming solution (e.g. making the Quest Browser compatible with streaming services) leads me to think that the active user base might be slim.

Can’t imagine doing work is the killer app, not while wearing a headset is more cumbersome than opening a laptop.

spogbiper
4 replies
22h6m

I'm not sure how Apple can make watching movies in VR that much better than they are already on the Quest series and other existing VR headsets. And as you noted it doesn't seem to be a popular use for those devices. Maybe the higher resolution on Apple's headset will win people over?

GeekyBear
1 replies
21h48m

I'm not sure how Apple can make watching movies in VR that much better than they are

Apple is already making it's own 3D content.

For instance watching a concert shot in 3D with spatial audio may be something that people find compelling. Certain artists, for example Taylor Swift, have fans who are well known to be willing to spend a fortune to attend her shows in person with high end tickets running $750.

spogbiper
0 replies
21h31m

I tried some of the 3d concerts that Quest recorded a few years ago.. it's a neat trick but Apple will definitely need to do something different to make it compelling

wombat-man
0 replies
21h35m

I haven't tried them personally but I think current quest headsets still have visible pixels. The vision pro is Micro OLED with no visible pixels. So it should feel like watching an actual IRL screen.

theshackleford
0 replies
20h44m

It’s an incredibly popular use for the quest, Amazon and Netflix just don’t own the market, people are watching content elsewhere like big screen/vrchat/various vr players.

Almost NOBODY uses the Netflix app because it’s terrible, terrible software.

zmmmmm
0 replies
17h20m

do you really watch that many movies all by yourself? that's the problem for me .... if I'm carving out 2.5 hours to watch a good movie I am wanting to spend that quality time and share the experience with someone else as well.

GeekyBear
5 replies
22h13m

Watching sports in 3D with spatial audio.

According to an exclusive report from The New York Post, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver “said the league is working with Apple to bring a tech-enhanced viewing experience” to its upcoming headset.

When asked about it, he told the outlet: “We’re working very closely with Apple.”

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/nba-games-could-be-apple-visi...

If there is one group that has a track record for laying down piles of money for hardware like giant televisions and expensive streaming services, it's sports aficionados.

spogbiper
2 replies
21h36m

With standard coverage of sports, they cut between cameras and zoom in/out, pan to follow the action etc. Even people attending the game will be watching big screens showing this content some of the time.

I'm wondering how that translates to VR.. do they just teleport you around the arena? That seems like it would be a bit jarring if not altogether sickening.

curiouscats
0 replies
20h16m

It could offer a couple options. One being the main view is like you are there. You see the court in a huge view in your main view. Then, similar, but way better than in person, you have several big views off to the side, for replays, stats, maybe following a view of your favorite player... I would think they we have a way to make it so your view (switches as the action on the court switches to the other basket). That will have to be a good design but just the idea of something like teleporting from your seat with a great view of this half of the court to now having it on the other half.

And for other sports even better I think. With say soccer/football and football (USA) you can have a big overview (like you are sitting at midfield) but then camera angles for closer view of the action...

I think sports viewing could really be incredible. Figuring out exactly how to do it well will take awhile. But it seems to me the kind of thing Apple could do very well.

crooked-v
0 replies
18h21m

I imagine some combination of a single location environment view, floating 3D panels that follow players the same as TV broadcasts, and a miniature arena where you can watch everything at once from a top-down perspective.

matwood
0 replies
21h48m

Meta already has a deal with the nba for select games. Not sure what the usage is like.

dpflan
0 replies
21h52m

Floor seats will be less desirable...or floor seat patrons are wearing Apple Vision/goggles for the AR (joking! but maybe serious)...

I do agree, just watching a sporting event on a projector where the athletes are life-sized is excellent, on-field cameras already provide a better view of the game then any seat.

Now make it more immersive, and the trick of immersion is very cool. Like The Sphere, that immersion is next level.

Add sports-betting to the Vision experience, that is a great side-car app for this. (I am not pro-bet but see the usage).

jasonsb
2 replies
22h53m

It looks like there's no killer app this time. They just bet on the fact that people will buy it because it's expensive and it's designed by Apple.

joezydeco
1 replies
22h52m

Macintosh '84 didn't have a killer app until 1985-1986. And it was a laser printer.

microtherion
0 replies
22h35m

Not sure about the social acceptance of people walking around with a laser printer strapped to their face…

baby
2 replies
21h58m

Video games are the killer apps and Quest definitely found it.

The other one that could be huge IMO is attending real-life events like sport, concerts, shows, etc.

bnolsen
0 replies
21h9m

Games like doom3 in VR are just freakin' awesome. blasting some monster coming up behind you by firing over the shoulder takes the cake.

AlexandrB
0 replies
21h10m

Both of these suffer from the fact that a good portion of the target audience is going to want to barf as soon as the camera moves. So games are limited in what kind of gameplay they can offer and real life events are stuck with either a fixed location or "jumping" from camera to camera.

ENGNR
1 replies
22h32m

I think the killer app will be remote work. The social interaction in VR chat is pretty good, if they can bring your work environment in with lots of monitors, and then share parts of it seamlessly and on demand but also have ample 100% focus time, I can see it being better than an office in some ways

bnolsen
0 replies
21h12m

I thought so too but it doesn't take much time for a headset to become uncomfortable. Taking one off and putting it back on is cumbersome.

theshackleford
0 replies
20h47m

Sure they have, it’s funny how often this is repeated. It’s anything social. It absolutely destroys every other technology for interacting with others over distance. There is nothing else like it and when the hardware catches up it will do a lot to shrink the distance you feel between those who live an ocean away from you.

macrolocal
0 replies
10h37m

A killer app for me would be proper Blender integration, say with VR viewports.

TulliusCicero
0 replies
22h5m

Quest headsets are already pretty compelling for some use cases, but the tech still needs more advancement (at a reasonable price point) to go fully mainstream.

For a lot of people, Beat Saber and similar games are a killer app for the Quest. It can be good for making exercise fun and accessible at the same time.

patapong
54 replies
22h51m

I think we are now at a stage where VR hardware has surpassed software. Between this and the Quest 3, we have powerful, polished and consumer friendly devices, but beyond a few niches (fitness, simulation, gaming to some extent), there is nothing to convince users to put the headsets on.

I am hoping we will see a lot of experimentation in the coming years, and I am excited for what the Apple ecosystem will bring to the table. That said, from what I have seen so far this does not seem to be a revolution compared to the current offerings, but an evolution on various fronts, without addressing the killer app question.

lysecret
18 replies
22h22m

Im curious what do you have in mind related to fitness?

TulliusCicero
7 replies
22h10m

There's a bunch of VR games/apps that are notable for fitness. Beat Saber is the most well known one that's explicitly a game, Supernatural is maybe the most famous one that's framed as more of a fitness app/service.

But other notable ones include Synth Riders, FitXR, OhShape, Pistol Whip, Thrill of the Fight, and (maybe) Gorilla Tag. And this list is far from exhaustive.

VR is pretty good for fitness just because it can make exercising more interesting, comparable to sports without the need to coordinate with other people (and it's easy to do inside your house, if you have at least a 2m x 2m open space). Major downsides would be having that space available and sweat inside the headset.

mr_toad
6 replies
20h39m

I’d be too worried about sweat damage to use it for serious exercise.

tsimionescu
0 replies
6h42m

I think the discomfort of sweaty eyes is a much bigger problem than damaging the device. It's extremely easy toake the device sweatproof compared to fixing the sweaty eyes issue.

rpmisms
0 replies
20h15m

They're built around that.

pteraspidomorph
0 replies
20h3m

You don't need to worry with most headsets (don't know about AVP). I've been sweating in VR headsets for years and it never did any harm. I saw in the AVP reviews that it has a removable and swappable facial interface, so it should be easy to clean; the same is true of other modern headsets, and before that you had third party face covers or disposable absorbant stickers you could put on the facial interface to keep the sweat away.

pquki4
0 replies
15h42m

used a Quest 2 for 2 years, and I sweat a lot when doing intensive exercises. No issue so far. And it is $300, cheaper than the base iPad. What else can you ask for.

jdietrich
0 replies
20h6m

Meta (and many third-party manufacturers) offer a wipe-clean silicone facial interface designed for fitness-oriented users. The hardware isn't waterproof, but it's quite well protected and I'd be perfectly confident to work up a sweat. Quest has calorie tracking, can sync with the fitness tracking features on iOS and Android and can pair with heart rate monitors. Fitness is one of the key segments in VR, because fitness apps and fitness-oriented users have vastly above-average engagement and retention rates.

https://www.meta.com/us/quest/accessories/quest-3-silicone-f...

https://www.meta.com/en-us/help/quest/articles/in-vr-experie...

TulliusCicero
0 replies
19h23m

That's not really an issue imo, the downside is mostly just getting part of the headset gross (you don't want to use it right after someone else has sweated up a storm in there, believe me).

espositocode
6 replies
21h4m

I’m surprised Apple dropped the ball on fitness here given they already have a fitness platform. Imagine rowing in VR and feeling like you’re actually on the water. It would make exercising so much more motivating and interesting.

It turned out the killer Apple Watch feature was fitness, and I don’t see why it couldn’t have been here.

progbits
4 replies
20h54m

I've used a rowing machine with a VR headset (I don't recall which model, it was a few years ago, but probably some Oculus).

It was fun for a few minutes but not really usable for serious exercise:

- It's heavy and annoying (and this apple product seems even bulkier and heavier). The cable situation is also not great, you need a lightweight cable and ceiling suspension to keep it out of the way, but this is solvable.

- Exercise means you get sweaty. Can't wipe your brow and you have a wet headset on your face.

- You can't see your body and maintain proper form. The VR environment itself is also distracting if you turn your head around to look at stuff moving there.

I much prefer just to have my phone or tablet in fixed place in front of me to watch youtube or some movie.

jdietrich
3 replies
19h54m

>I've used a rowing machine with a VR headset

I really don't think that's the best use-case for VR - if you're doing some kind of virtual rowing, a flat screen is going to offer most of the experience with none of the downsides. VR fitness is really about games that are fun in their own right and happen to be physically active. There's a big cohort of people who hate exercise and would never set foot in a gym, but who will happily spend an hour at their aerobic threshold because they're playing a fun game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=291LZGxZS5Q

HDThoreaun
2 replies
18h54m

Heavily disagree. Just like running outside is generally more enjoyable than on the treadmil, so is rowing. VR rowing would allow you to row through basically every major city on earth, over Niagara falls, and all sorts of other scenic spots.

tsimionescu
1 replies
6h35m

No, it would allow you to row in a gym/at home while looking at a pseudo-realistic version of every major city or Niagara falls.

The reason running outside is nicer than on the treadmill is not that you get to look at nicer images. You get to smell fresh air and feel the wind on your body, you get to sometimes interact with people, you get to feel various textures under your feet, you get to move your bodies in more ways as you turn left and right etc.

Rowing outside is even more different, as you get the feel of the water currents and water splashes as well.

VR can mimic none of these things, and it comes with the massive downside of a sweaty face that you can't wipe away.

xw39011
0 replies
5m

On the other hand, row fast or you fall down virtual Niagara falls sounds like an entertaining game and might make the rowing interesting... to me anyway.

rimeice
0 replies
20h40m

Yeh I just can’t see it working well. Surely it would be so uncomfortable to work up even a minor sweat with this thing strapped to your face.

remedan
1 replies
22h6m

Not gp but I have multiple friends who got the Quest just to play Beat Saber as a form of cardio exercise.

rpmisms
0 replies
20h25m

Beat Saber is an insanely good game, too. Easy to learn, but the high-level play is just nuts. There's even maps that teach you dances.

patapong
0 replies
21h43m

To add to the suggestions by the sibling comments, Eleven Table Tennis and Racket NX are both great racket-based games with multiplayer and a high skill ceilings. Depending on your personality I think applications like this are much more motivating than going to the gym as a workout.

AlexandrB
12 replies
21h17m

Underlying a lot of these discussions is the assumption that there is a future where this is an actually useful, mass-market device. I'm still not convinced this is true.

For example, "killer apps/content" never arrived for 3D TVs and they have largely disappeared from the market. Same with various "waggling" input technologies like the Wiimote and Kinect. There were some compelling uses, like Wii Sports, but these were pretty limited and many other uses of these in games was a case of Nintendo shoehorning the technology into the game.

I think the best pessimist argument is the one offered by Folding Ideas in his metaverse video[1]: Text is really, really useful, and a virtual 3D space is not a good environment for either creating or consuming textual content.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiZhdpLXZ8Q

Vegenoid
5 replies
20h46m

I see headsets like this as a way to have multiple, large, monitors that go away as soon as you aren't using them. After having a big dual-monitor setup for years, about a year and a half ago I got rid of them and work with just my laptop's display. I do this so that my desk doesn't have to have monitors on it, and is more conducive to artistic work and mechanical tinkering.

I don't miss multiple monitors so much, but I do often wish for a larger screen. Not enough to put one in my space, though. That's where my interest in the Vision Pro lies - simply a way to project large, high-fidelity, 2d screens.

cruano
1 replies
17h32m

Have you considered monitor arms to just kinda chuck your monitors out of the way after you are done using them ?

I'm on the same boat as you, but ended up just getting a long table so I can move to the empty side when I need it.

Vegenoid
0 replies
15h29m

Yes, my monitors when I had them were on arms - they wouldn't work great in my current setup due to its density, and the things I've put around the desk.

I certainly could make adjustments to accommodate a monitor - I just don't want to, and would love for there to be a way to not have to and still get to use a large display.

solardev
0 replies
2h32m

Wouldn't it be simpler to just wall mount (or edge of desk mount) the monitors on pivoting arms so you can have desk space when you need it, with the monitors floating out of the way? VR seems like such an unnecessarily complicated way to do multi monitors.

pquki4
0 replies
15h49m

I used to think the same, but now I don't see these headsets replacing monitors/TVs any time soon.

I don't have a TV at my small apartment but do have two 27 in monitors. Sometimes I wish I had enough space for a sofa and 55+ in TV for movies and shows. And maybe headsets will solve the problem, maybe I don't even need those monitors any more.

Now? I realize I don't need multiple monitors, 2 is enough. (4k is definitely better than 1080p and 2 is better than 1, but I don't think I can properly utilize a third monitor.) And these are good monitors -- not Pro Display XDR good but still premium 4k monitors -- that have been around for years and I'll keep using them until they die. And about movies -- I have tried using the Quest 2/3 to watch movies. It is usable, and apps even provide "scenes" that make you feel you are in a theater. Do I want to wear them and watch movies on a fake 100" screen? No, for obvious reasons (comfort).

If the day comes when they are light, comfortable to wear, allow very good passthrough and actually do a better job than my 4k screens, I'll take another look.

nkrisc
0 replies
19h54m

I’d rather have small monitors than wear a headset while working.

For less than this headset, I can buy an Ergotron arm and some monitors and have multiple large monitors that have zero footprint on my desk.

No, I can’t take my setup with me when I go somewhere, but I don’t want to.

I have a hard time seeing this become a mass market device. It’ll have its adherents and enthusiasts, but personally find it difficult to imagine even wanting one, let alone using it.

But what do I know, I thought the iPad was goofy. Though I never did end up replacing my gen 2 iPad. Realized I didn’t need it.

crooked-v
2 replies
19h20m

The "killer app" here is to have an infinity-sized 'screen' for anything the average user was already going to do with an iPad or Apple TV. The hardware's just not good enough yet, in terms of lightness and comfort, for the average user to put up with as more than a novelty.

tsimionescu
0 replies
6h50m

Do you think it's plausible the hardware will ever be good enough?

People aren't really that happy wearing even vision eyeglasses, and I don't see any realistic chance we will ever be able to have something with the capabilities of the Vision Pro in a form factor as small and light as eyeglasses.

iLoveOncall
0 replies
17h33m

The extreme majority of users is perfectly happy with two 24" monitors (actually, the extreme majority is happy with a single 13" monitor). "Infinite monitor space" isn't something that will sell a large enough numbers of headsets to prevent the cancellation of the next iteration.

jayd16
1 replies
20h20m

Same with various "waggling" input technologies like the Wiimote and Kinect.

Hasn't VR taken over waggle? I don't think you can say its disappeared when the VR install base is in the 10s of millions.

dougmwne
0 replies
19h56m

Yeah, the Quest seems to be the spiritual successor to Wii sports. It’s the closest thing you can buy to that 2006 experience. The long dream of wielding a lightsaber on the Wii was finally realized on the Quest, to a quite satisfactory level.

And yet, from a gaming perspective, we still have to crack force feedback and natural locomotion before we have a holodeck. Maybe in 20 more years.

fennecbutt
0 replies
5h32m

I mean it's the same problem for a lot of stuff, build it and they will come. Apple is super naive to think that they can just jump into this space and yet end up with a polished product (ie Apple's selling point).

I see on scifi all the time where someone flicks/flings a video playing on a device to move it to a larger display surface and it kills me that we actually have the technology to do stuff like this right now...but because every company works in their own interests/don't work together to create standards we don't get to have fun use of tech like that.

pavlov
4 replies
22h35m

It wouldn't be the first time that hardware gets ahead of software.

In 1988-94, the CPUs available in desktop computers were substantially more advanced than the widely used operating systems. Windows 3 and Mac System 6/7 didn't support pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection, or many other features that define a modern OS.

Maybe we'll look back at today's Quest and Vision Pro as similar transitional devices with one foot stuck in the old paradigm, running old-style software.

pvg
2 replies
21h48m

The Apple headset is maybe more akin to the expensive workstations of the time which did make fuller use of their CPU facilities but were neither priced nor aimed at consumers. The headset is not nearly as expensive (especially inflation adjusted) and is ostensibly a consumer device but it's current incarnation seems unlikely to have the kind of mass adoption for the analogy to work out.

pavlov
0 replies
20h57m

The fact that the Vision Pro today mostly runs legacy iPad and web software in 2D rectangles kind of makes it feel like Windows/386 which most people just used to run text mode MS-DOS programs inside GUI windows.

cgk
0 replies
20h2m

Visiting a certain urban area on the east coast, dm me on X if possible to meet up

aidenn0
0 replies
19h14m

In 1988-94, the CPUs available in desktop computers were substantially more advanced than the widely used operating systems. Windows 3 and Mac System 6/7 didn't support pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection, or many other features that define a modern OS.

That was partly because RAM was over $100/MB (Nominal; ~$230 inflation adjusted) in 1990. Additionally, in the IBM compatible world, many people didn't have a 386 at that point.

Also, minor nitpick on the dates; 1993 saw OS/2 2.1 and NT 3.1, both of which had preemptive multitasking and memory protection.

baby
3 replies
22h1m

People like to say this but my friend just sent me a recording of “drop dead home invasion” with the Quest 3 and my jaw was on the floor. He says it’s amazing too.

I’ve also heard about players spending a lot of time in counter strike games like pavlov.

At this point it seems like there’s a TON of things to do in VR (and I’m gonna be honest, there were a ton of experiences too on the Quest 1 when I had it).

I’m just waiting for more live shows and concerts that I can attend from the Quest personally.

patapong
1 replies
21h45m

Oh I agree - I loved my experience with Drop Dead Home Invasion, and there are a lot of amazing experiences overall. But, I do think that most of these have more potential as a "demo", that you do a few times but would not motivate you to use a headset every day, beyond a relatively small group of people.

It is like VR is currently stuck being Kinect in terms of sales and stickiness, while Meta and Apple would both like it to be at least like the Wii, or ideally the iPad.

Personally I have found social experiences to have the best long-term appeal (i.e. Racket NX or Drop Dead with friends), but even there I am not these apps have sufficient mainstream appeal.

acdha
0 replies
1h36m

But, I do think that most of these have more potential as a "demo", that you do a few times but would not motivate you to use a headset every day, beyond a relatively small group of people.

This matches everyone I’ve heard talk about it, too. It was fun, they enjoyed a few things and then at some point they realized that their headset had multiple months of dust on it.

I think the big question is when costs come down to the point where it’d be reasonable for a non-rich family to have enough headsets to use together. Most people mention technical limits (resolution, latency) but the thing which everyone mentioned as a dealbreaker was that putting the headset on was shutting out everyone around them.

grumbel
0 replies
21h32m

The major problem VR has isn't the games, but all the boring and basic stuff, like using 2D apps in VR or running multiple VR apps at the same time.

The discontinued WMR Portal, essentially the Window's desktop in VR, was so far the only software that tried to be a full workspace in VR. But even that was missing a lot of important features and Microsoft gave up on it years ago and never made it accessible to non-Microsoft headsets. It's currently scheduled for removal from Windows.

VisionPro seems very similar to WMRPortal so far, with a few key improvements like allowing apps do add 3D objects into a shared space.

treprinum
1 replies
20h5m

I personally think MSFS 2020 and Automobilista 2 are killer VR apps. All (wannabe or pro) pilots could learn how to operate any given aircraft in MSFS and relive past glorious racing in A2 on current or historic tracks/cars. Senua and Alyx showed what is possible in gaming as well and why it's so much better than 2D. Elder Scrolls looks great in VR just the controllers make it a joke when fighting (too easy and weird). I still think 4k is too low and 8k will be needed to feel like a 1080p phone.

pquki4
0 replies
15h44m

they are killer apps, but how many people are going to spend $3500, no, just $1500 or $1000 for just for these things? Well, that is almost the entire market of Quest 3 which Apple does not want to be in. Which is why I feel Quest 3 is a product that makes much more sense than Vision Pro.

quonn
1 replies
20h45m

there is nothing to convince users to put the headsets on.

So the hardware is not good enough yet. It will be good enough when I basically don‘t care, just like I don‘t care with glasses.

SoftTalker
0 replies
20h7m

Anything goggle-like is a non-starter for me. I'm not even interested in trying it. I don't even like glasses, and I need corrective lenses to be able to see clearly (I wear contacts almost exclusively).

jdietrich
1 replies
20h17m

I'm not sure I've ever liked the term "killer app", because I don't think it's particularly useful in describing real user thinking and behaviour. There was a very long journey from VisiCalc and Wordstar to the modern-day ubiquity of office computing. Different user groups have complex, diverse and overlapping sets of needs and wants that can rarely be distilled into a single application. I'm more inclined to think in terms of Bezos's one-way doors - changes in user behaviour that are sufficiently compelling to be largely irreversible.

I agree that progress has been slow in the consumer space and meaningful long-term adoption of VR has been confined to a few niches; that isn't necessarily an indictment of the long-term prospects for VR, because desktop computers spent much longer in that stage than most people remember.

In enterprise, I think things are more advanced and some user groups have decisively gone through the one-way door for some applications. I think the best example is architecture. If you've done a couple of client presentations in VR, you just aren't going back to showing renders on a flat screen, because immersing the client in a physical space is that powerful. It's not just a sales tool, but a communications tool - clients can understand and respond to the environment intuitively and give much better feedback as a result.

Industrial and clinical training is less clearly one-way, but I think we're very close in a lot of areas. AR is still less developed than VR, but I do think we're on the cusp of something significant - a sufficiently comfortable standalone AR headset with sufficiently high-quality passthrough can deliver training experiences that can't practically be replicated through other means.

I think one of the most interesting areas of development is in psychiatry. It's still early days, but we're starting to see real, meaningful benefits in RCTs for VR-based therapy of disorders like phobia and PTSD. Some of the most compelling results have been in the very sickest patients - people with psychosis, who often find it impossible to engage with conventional psychotherapy.

https://www.psy.ox.ac.uk/research/oxford-cognitive-approache...

I don't think it's remotely likely that VR will ever replace flat screens, but I do think that VR is slowly growing into a niche but durable HCI platform. Tablets are a reasonable analogy - a lot of people see them as a failure, but they still sell in serious volume and they're often a much better form-factor for specific applications than either a phone or a laptop, especially in industry. Tablets didn't change the world, but nor are they likely to go away.

adfm
0 replies
19h22m

Everyone is looking for the "killer app" so they have something to anchor the concept. Put simply, the Web fits the bill. Apple has invested in the space because they can't afford not to. Their App Store model starts to show its limitations when you stop staring at the screen and start looking through it.

WebGPU and WebXR are the two big enablers going forward. With WebGPU, developers have a common way to access hardware and that's a big deal across all your devices. A common way to access the hardware that gets you real-time 3D graphics, machine learning, crypto, etc. that works on your phone, tablet, laptop, headset, whatever is a big deal. And it's not just for anyone with Apple gear, but anyone with a compatible browser. Think generative AI/ML streaming Gaussian splats to your retinas via a browser. That's where we're headed.

Need an OR to explore a phobia of surgery? Sketchfab has you covered: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/charite-university-hospital-...

RajT88
1 replies
22h2m

I think we are now at a stage where VR hardware has surpassed software.

Totally agree. I'm waiting for a usable Virtual Desktop app to come out. All the ones I have tried which work on my cheap WMR headset fall short of having floating app windows in view.

I guess there is one of those which works on Meta Quest, but not PC headsets. That's really what you need to be effective working in VR. Just like is mentioned the Apple headset supports.

crooked-v
0 replies
19h17m

I feel like the killer combination here would be a Virtual Desktop-like app for visionOS where the desktop VR passes through as an environment, but full local app layering is still available in the foreground.

stcredzero
0 replies
19h59m

I think we are now at a stage where VR hardware has surpassed software.

How about enabling AIs to create layouts of information on behalf of the user? Like, what if an AI could arrange all of your information for you in a scheme derived from Archy?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software)

rpmisms
0 replies
10h55m

But at the same time, the hardware is not where it needs to be for ubiquity. We need ~60PPD, great FOV, and lighter hardware to really break the barrier. Vision Pro is at the limits, but still not quite there, and we all know the 90/10 rule.

makeitdouble
0 replies
17h45m

I think we are now at a stage where VR hardware has surpassed software.

It's a 600+ grams headset with a battery on a leash for $3500. I wouldn't say the hardware is mainstream ready or fulfilling it's side of the contract yet.

antoniuschan99
0 replies
13h23m

I think if it was an iphone accessory then it would have convinced more users because it would be $1000 since it’s just the display and sensors where iphone would drive all the compute

IshKebab
0 replies
20h2m

I think you've got it backwards. There are plenty of reasons you'd want to put on a VR headset if it weighed as much as a pair of glasses, had a 180 degree field of view and like 5x the resolution of current headsets.

The reason the software doesn't exist is because compelling hardware doesn't exist for it to run on, so nobody bothers to write it.

Apple is imagining this device will be used for productivity but it's still painful to actually wear for long periods. We're a long way from being limited by software instead of hardware.

aloer
40 replies
21h41m

It is interesting how many here are excited about this for productive computer work. It’s also what Apple advertises with.

But what is the account situation like?

For years I’ve been complaining that I can’t easily use my private iPad with my company Mac because they have separate Apple IDs. Things like sidecar for a quick virtual whiteboard are basically impossible.

AirPods have gotten better over the years where today I can freely switch between devices belonging to different Apple IDs with the same AirPods.

But is the Vision Pro like that as well? It would seem weird to exclude the not-so-small group of people working from home but with company MacBooks

travem
5 replies
21h0m

For years I’ve been complaining that I can’t easily use my private iPad with my company Mac because they have separate Apple IDs.

I have a similar complaint with my Apple Watch and my corporate issued laptop. When I am using my own computer (mac mini) I love how easy it is to use my watch to login, use it to approve actions, etc. However when it comes to my company laptop I have to type my password in repeatedly. It would be awesome if the watch could be linked to both IDs to make this much more seamless.

miohtama
2 replies
20h45m

Apple’s solution is that your corporate should buy you a second watch.

crooked-v
1 replies
20h26m

On the upside, once somebody figures out how to use smartwatches for VR haptic feedback, nerds will have a reason to wear six watches.

rideontime
0 replies
20h15m

Four limbs, two nipples. Math checks out.

kccqzy
1 replies
20h34m

No security-conscious corporation is going to allow you to approve any actions with security implications using an Apple Watch secured by a four-digit passcode, rather than an alphanumeric password on a Mac.

fishpen0
0 replies
19h9m

MDM is supported by the watch. My organization requires a 10 digit code for watches plus requires biometrics to be resolved on the primary device prior to the watch being able to control that device or interact with apps on that device

38
5 replies
20h32m

AirPods have gotten better over the years where today I can freely switch between devices belonging to different Apple IDs with the same AirPods.

What the fuck. The fact that an apple ID is even involved is absurd. Should be able to just Bluetooth to any device.

dwaite
3 replies
20h27m

You can just bluetooth to any device.

However, pairing an audio device is an exchange of settings and encryption keys, and Apple will sync that pairing that to your entire account. Hold your AirPods near your Phone and tap the button to create the initial pairing, and they start working with your Mac and Apple TV.

38
2 replies
19h33m

that doesn't explain the previous status quo, which appears to be that previous (and maybe current) incarnations cant Bluetooth pair without an apple ID.

klabb3
0 replies
18h58m

I have many fights to pick with Apple. Pairing of accessories is not one of them. Honestly, if I stop using iPhone in the future, it’s likely I’ll stop using my AirPods as well. There’s in either case very little point paying premium for Apple accessories and pairing them over Bluetooth.

Bluetooth is one of the worst protocols to work with. That goes for both implementers and users. It’s one of the key selling points of Apple devices - they just work together.

Troubleshooting which device is hijacking the Bluetooth speaker is not how I want to spend my relax time. And don’t get me started on anything IoT. Solving the pairing issue is a massive selling point.

As for Apple ID specifically, I know that it’s used for tracking lost devices, and connecting with other devices that you may not have paired individually in a n^2 fashion. It could be, for instance, that Bluetooth pairing would conflict with apples own discovery/ownership protocol - say you only use BT (no account) and then an iPhone with temp access to your AirPods could “take over” your AirPods since they didn’t have a logical owner before.

evan_
0 replies
19h14m

This just is not true, you can pair any model of airpods to any device that supports bluetooth. (Maybe there are exceptions but I'm not aware of them.)

I use my airpods with my Nintendo Switch and Samsung TV all the time. No Apple IDs on there.

crooked-v
0 replies
20h22m

You can.

The "freely switch" here is referring to the W-chip multi-device support that will on the fly switch between any number of Apple devices based on what's actively being used at the time, without needing to do any manual connection stuff.

Other non-proprietary Bluetooth devices will generally do 2 devices at most, and getting that to work right with microphone input settings can be kind of a nightmare.

threeseed
4 replies
19h55m

But what is the account situation like?

These devices are going to have your sweat, makeup, odours etc on them.

So you're really not going to want to share a device with anyone else.

skeaker
0 replies
19h41m

Sure you will. Plenty of families share a single VR headset.

jsheard
0 replies
19h33m

The facial interfaces are just held on with magnets, so it's not unrealistic to think that people might swap them out regularly depending on who's using it. The interface is sized for the user so hygiene aside you'd probably want to swap it for a different one anyway.

Unfortunately Apple is charging $200 per extra facial interface though.

jedberg
0 replies
18h43m

OP is talking about the reverse. Using one Vision attached to two different laptops with two different iCloud accounts, so they can use it with both their work and personal computer.

astrange
0 replies
19h26m

The part that touches you comes off and is personally fitted anyway, so you just don't share that.

ehsankia
3 replies
20h47m

But is the Vision Pro like that as well?

It's actually far worse. There's a single user and a "guest mode", but for AR/VR to work with, there's a calibration step, which means that the guest has to go through that step every single time they want to use the device. It might be fine for a real guest using it once, but it would be basically impossible to share the device with someone else. Having to setup the device every single time you use it sounds absolutely terrible.

tsimionescu
0 replies
8h55m

I don't think the question was about multiple people sharing a VP device, but about the same person using a single VP device with multiple Apple devices on multiple Apple accounts - can you easily switch between viewing your personal Mac's screen and then switching to your work Mac?

layer8
0 replies
20h0m

The only reason the guest mode exists is to incite the “guest” to also purchase an AVP after having experienced it.

SoftTalker
0 replies
20h20m

Of course. They want to sell them locked to a user so that every employee or family member needs their own, and can't use the same one at work and at home.

Fauntleroy
3 replies
21h36m

The entire screen sharing setup they demo'd in the original Vision Pro demo reels always made me laugh. They've had years to get Sidecar right, and have failed miserably every time. How am I going to believe that they'll get wireless display transmission to work perfectly for this thing?

kemayo
1 replies
19h55m

I haven't used the Vision Pro, so I can't say how well it works in practice... but with macOS 14 this year they redid their screen sharing app to, presumably, use whatever technology is underlying the Vision Pro display-sharing. It's really good. Vast improvement over the previous tech (presumably VNC?).

Assuming the Vision Pro screen sharing works using the same stuff, I have high hopes.

saagarjha
0 replies
9h33m

It does use the same stack; I assume it was redone precisely to support this feature.

mthoms
0 replies
21h0m

I haven't used it in quite a while so I'm wondering what the current issues with Sidecar are?

pmarreck
2 replies
21h15m

If your company Mac is locked down to the point where you couldn't just create a separate account on it that is tied to your iCloud account, then it is also unlikely that they would allow you to hook up another device to their network and your work computer in order to have this convenience.

(My partner is corpo; I'm startup, but have worked at corpos. No thanks.)

Better to keep it all owned by the company, in my opinion, and have them issue you an iPad for this express purpose.

kccqzy
0 replies
20h2m

Sure you can create a separate account on your company Mac. But there's no assurance that whatever work resources needed would be available on that second separate account.

If your work is on the traditional model of perimeter protection and trusted intranet, a non-work device can't join the network as you have correctly pointed out. If your work is on the newer BeyondCorp style model, switching to a second account on your computer is going to invalidate the device trust needed to access work resources.

aloer
0 replies
20h53m

There’s plenty of reasons why you would want to have a separate Apple ID for a company Mac that have nothing to do with overly restrictive permissions from IT.

The main one being a complete separation of calls, messages, calendar, notes and reminders. For my own sake more than for my employers sake.

And many employees with company phones already have that separation. iPhone and Mac is not that uncommon to provide for employees. But an iPad on top? I think that’s gonna be much harder to find

And edit: a Vision Pro on top…

dwaite
2 replies
20h36m

For years I’ve been complaining that I can’t easily use my private iPad with my company Mac because they have separate Apple IDs. Things like sidecar for a quick virtual whiteboard are basically impossible.

This is kinda what Managed Apple IDs are for - the work 'owns' the Apple ID it puts into its management profile and can set policy. Apps write into a separate storage container which the company could remote wipe, without affecting the rest of your personal data. If they want to disable things like sidecar, they can do it.. for the corporate apps/accounts/web domains.

I'd' generally assume the multi-user aspect is worse (because face shields and prescriptive inserts) so generalized multi-account is pretty low on the priority list.

rocketbop
0 replies
5h14m

I suspect multi account support is not ‘down the priority list’ but purposefully not implemented at least when it comes to iOS. Why make it easier for customers to share iPads at home when they can buy multiple iPads.

I use my iPad so sporadically that it could easily be the house iPad, but I’m signed in with my email and so on it can’t be.

Domenic_S
0 replies
18h19m

Things like sidecar for a quick virtual whiteboard are basically impossible.

Zoom has a good Airplay sharing feature that works well in this situation.

But I get what GP means -- I do have a corporate profile, and I made my own @corporation.com Apple ID, but what do I do to use sidecar? Either log out of my personal iCloud on the iPad (gross) or log in to my personal iCloud on my work computer (grosser)

vismwasm
1 replies
21h13m

I thought I was the only one bothered by that! I'd love to use my private iPad with my work Macbook. And at least in my case preventing that definitely won't increase iPad sales: My company won't provide me a work iPad and even if it did it wouldn't work as there are no iCloud accounts attached to our work Macbooks.

Locking you customers into your ecosystem? Fine, whatever. But even within the ecosystem restricting usage in such a way!?

It's been said for years but the iPad could be so much more than a mere media consumption device if it weren't for short-term-profit driven design decisions.

Maybe they do better with the Vision Pro.

dwaite
0 replies
20h29m

Basically the business and education group is about selling to businesses and schools, so they give them the tools they say they need. This means you wind up having configuration options which sound good to operations, but which break ecosystem support - and on BYOD break personal usage.

Literally the only cloud drive product I know of which doesn't work on my corporate laptop is iCloud Drive, because the EMM gave a checkbox to set a flag. As a result, a huge portion of built-in collaborative features and apps just don't work. I have paid seats in other products only to regain functionality lost by that checkbox.

ildjarn
1 replies
21h38m

I think Apple want to discourage sharing to increase device sales. It’s a great question though.

wharvle
0 replies
21h16m

Its wireless operation seems to depend on Hand Off in some capacity. Most companies probably wouldn’t want to grant a personal device access to that on a work laptop, and I bet there are some thorny questions about what to do with incoming Hand Off data from multiple accounts.

fumar
1 replies
17h47m

Using Vision Pro with my work Mac while traveling would be ideal, but work locks down my Mac limiting most of the Apple device interplay.

daemonologist
0 replies
12h36m

I maintain that the Vision Pro/its battery pack should have at least one displayport input. It wouldn't support keyboard+mouse sharing, true, but latency would be improved and you'd sidestep all the problems with accounts and locked-down work devices.

parhamn
0 replies
21h19m

I have this issue in a consumer single tenant setting too. I couldn't figure out how to remove photo access from AppleTV.

Ended up creating a new account that was part of my family.

bkfh
0 replies
14h24m

You are so right.

The moment you use different Apple IDs you lose a lot of nice features of Apple‘s products

015a
0 replies
13h21m

Man I've felt this for YEARS and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills with all the youtubers and influencers proclaiming Apple's Connected Ecosystem as such as productivity advantage.

Either you can't sign in with your personal Apple account, or you shouldn't (because MDM). So the only way to access anything associated with iCloud is what is available on the iCloud web portal; which is a horrible experience. You can't do sidecar. You can't do airdrop, copy-paste, continuity camera, nothing.

I've only ever used Macs in a professional environment. I've, also, always had a Mac and iPhone as personal devices. But I've never made the jump toward saying "Ok I'm actually using iCloud Seriously now" for this single reason. The best Google Cloud experience is available in a web browser, which I can be signed-in to on everything. Google Drive is everywhere. The list goes on.

Its such a crystalline example of why Apple's walled garden actually hurts themselves.

devit
22 replies
21h53m

It seems that a lot of basic information is missing in the review:

1. How does it compare to an high-end monitor for text editing/programming, web browsing, watching non-VR video, playing non-VR games? Is it better or not?

2. Is the resolution, latency, FoV and lack of color fringing good enough for it to be indistinguishable from reality in both passthrough and VR modes? If not, how exactly far is it?

3. Can you run VR games on a PC with multiple desktop GPUs and stream to it? How does it compare to current high-end and ultra-high-end VR headsets?

jhatax
11 replies
21h48m

This review from TheVerge answers some of your questions: https://www.theverge.com/24054862/apple-vision-pro-review-vr...

I recommend the video review as well. Seeing the video call between Nilay, Joanna, and MKB shows how much the tech has advanced but also how much it still needs to evolve to be at the level of FaceTime Video.

MBCook
6 replies
21h38m

I’m excited about the Vision Pro but I now see why some reviewers called the FaceTime “Personas” creepy.

They’re like talking paintings in the Haunted Mansion ride with bunch of blur and depth of field. It’s way too weird. Joanna’s looks a bit like she’s been stuck as the replacement person in the Mona Lisa.

A static picture of you or maybe your Memoji (remember those?) would be far preferable.

I’m surprised Apple is shipping Personas.

willis936
1 replies
20h2m

They've also shipped memojis.

Facebook has also shipped meta.

All the money in the world can't buy you an understanding of your market.

MBCook
0 replies
18h34m

Memojis work. They not be a style you like, I’m meh, but they work.

This seems alpha. I’m sure it’s a hard problem but I feel like waiting a bit longer would have done them a better service.

crooked-v
1 replies
20h7m

I'd rather have just a VRChat avatar. Hook up the eye tracking and the mouth visemes and it'll probably be more likable than the Personas are.

zmmmmm
0 replies
17h30m

yeah ... i regularly do Workrooms meetings with avatars and i have to say it looks and feels much less creepy - safely outside the uncanny valley but still conveying all our natural expressions. It's actually quite weird when I think about how much I forget we are avatars and just talk to the other person as if it is really them.

threeseed
0 replies
18h39m

I’m surprised Apple is shipping Personas.

They do make it clear that it's in Beta so they know there is work to do.

But if you're having a Zoom meeting with a divorce lawyer or negotiating an M&A a Memoji is the last thing you want.

layer8
0 replies
19h51m

They look like the 3D version of police drawings.

whycome
2 replies
21h11m

"Apple sent zeiss lens inserts for reading glasses, but I just used my soft contacts and it was fine."

lol what kind of review says that. It would be like someone who doesn't even use any kind of vision correction saying "I just used it without glasses and it was fine."

(edit: the review is actually quite good. but that line was bizarre)

layer8
1 replies
19h42m

Apple said that contact lenses might interfere with eye tracking (or maybe with the iris scanning). So it’s a data point if he says he had no problems with soft contacts.

astrange
0 replies
19h20m

Only some kinds do (mostly cosmetics). If you go through the purchase process there's a questionnaire on if you actually need the inserts.

Also, I don't think people with only near/far vision issues or prism correction know how this interacts with VR. IIRC in general you always use your far prescription and there is no support for prism.

billiam
0 replies
20h40m

Nilay's video review is just fantastic-one of the best consumer technology reviews in written or multmedia form ever. Walt would be proud.

jsheard
4 replies
21h46m

For #3 the question is how you're going to control the games, when the overwhelming majority of existing VR games are built for dedicated VR controllers rather than hand tracking.

Streaming games from a PC to a standalone headset over WiFi has been proven to work with the Quest, but that has proper controllers.

crooked-v
3 replies
20h49m

I feel like the simple hacky solution there is to use Joycons connected directly to the PC for the buttons/thumbsticks. Attach the control inputs to whatever virtual tracking points the vOS app is supplying and voila.

jsheard
2 replies
20h45m

Joycons don't have absolute positioning, only relative, they're not good enough for VR. There is one way you could do it, if you have a Valve Lighthouse setup then you could use Index or Vive controllers, but that would require manually calibrating the two independent tracking systems to align with each other and it's not exactly a cheap solution if you don't already have the gear.

It's a very niche setup, but a few people already use it in order to combine Lighthouse-based body trackers with a non-Lighthouse headset.

crooked-v
1 replies
20h31m

Joycons don't have absolute positioning, only relative, they're not good enough for VR.

The point would be that you don't use them for positioning at all, just buttons/thumbsticks. If you've using a Virtual Desktop-like app on the headset then it's already got positioning from the hand tracking.

jsheard
0 replies
20h28m

Oh right, I get you. Yeah that could kinda work but it's putting a lot of faith in the accuracy of the hand tracking.

I suppose an ambitious implementation could try to fuse the hand tracking data with the IMU data from the Joycons for better resolution.

robin_reala
3 replies
21h49m

On number 3, definitely not.

zeusk
2 replies
21h36m

You can always make an app to stream H265 content from any device :)

Windows even has support for IndirectDisplayDevices - I'm not sure how openXR or SteamVR handles those, however.

robin_reala
1 replies
21h24m

That gives you a flat video presumably, not a VR game.

zeusk
0 replies
10h42m

Huh, you think VR is some special non-flat surface? All render target surfaces are a 2D texture

ericmcer
0 replies
21h6m

It does read well as a non-technical review though, where a user would only make note of those things if they were lacking. If the passthrough looked artificial and weird you would imagine that would have come up.

KolmogorovComp
21 replies
21h25m

For me the two takeways from the various reviews are that:

- The Vision Pro is the best VR set that can be done today, with massive investment (rumoured 5e9 USD) and competent staff, and hefty price. It is miles ahead of the competition.

- It’s still not enough for most if any practical use, apart from films maybe. The technical requirements for a really useful VR are still largely out-of-reach, and will be for at least the next 5-10 years.

GeorgeTirebiter
7 replies
21h15m

what does "5md USD" mean? I assume USD = US Dollars but "5md" ?

Thank you.

ghc
2 replies
20h54m

I was confused as well, so I checked various European languages for what their word for billion is. I suspect they are french, using an abbreviation for milliard, the French word for billion.

H8crilA
1 replies
19h40m

Not just French, also for example German and Polish.

Milion, Miliard, Bilion, Biliard = Million, Billion, Trillion, Quadrillion

(neither are justified because neither start at the beginning, that is at a thousand :) )

schmorptron
0 replies
18h56m

This is one of the places where the US has a better naming standard than us in the EU imo. Just feels much more intuitive to count up with Bi, Tri without doubling them up every time.

spaer
0 replies
21h0m

Maybe milliard (billion)

guybedo
0 replies
21h0m

probably billions. "md" would be "milliard" and "milliard" is french for billions.

KolmogorovComp
0 replies
21h6m

Oops, fixed. I meant 5 billions (5e9), USD is indeed US Dollars.

Bluecobra
0 replies
21h3m

My guess is that the OP meant to say "5bn USD". I frequently see billion abbreviated to "bn" in UK newspapers such as the Financial Times.

kevinak
6 replies
20h58m

It really isn't 'miles' ahead of the competition. If anything it is way behind. For example, look at Varjo: https://varjo.com/products/xr-4/

crooked-v
3 replies
20h4m

The XR-4 is already 665g as a tethered headset. I imagine it would be (literally) painfully heavy as a standalone device.

makeitdouble
2 replies
17h38m

To set a comparison point, a bike helmet is around 3 times that weight.

Less weight would be better, but there's ways to embrace that and aleviate the issues ("have the product be true to its nature" to channel my inner Jony Ive).

This time Apple chose not to, while Varjo tends to care a lot more about these ergonomic aspects. Looking at the XR-4 strap, it looks like a solid design to me.

nicbou
1 replies
9h43m

A bike helmet is around 400 grams. I just bought one.

A motorbike helmet is heavier (3kg), but the weight is wrapped around your head, not hanging in front of it.

makeitdouble
0 replies
7h58m

the weight is wrapped around your head, not hanging in front of it

Yes, that's what makes the weight bearable.

Same way the Quest Pro for instance splits the weight around the head to achieve a good balance. Better bands will also help.

At this point we have none of that for the Vision Pro, which is a choice Apple made.

Eric_WVGG
1 replies
20h41m

is that page supposed to scroll or have clickable links or basically anything?

kevinak
0 replies
20h8m

Yes? Not seeing any issues on Safari, Chrome or Firefox on MacOS. Maybe you have some extension that's acting up?

WheatMillington
4 replies
15h41m

It is miles ahead of the competition

I really don't think this is correct. It's a bit better at some things than any of its competition, and it's a little worse in some ways too. Other than the displays I don't think you can say it's substantially ahead at all.

lelandfe
3 replies
12h22m

Quotes from The Verge’s review:

the Vision Pro has the best video passthrough I’ve ever seen on the sharpest VR displays any normal person will ever come across

the eye and hand tracking control system… is light years beyond any other consumer hand or eye tracking systems

It calls out other aspects similarly.

theferalrobot
2 replies
10h50m

It can't even play games. You can do everything the Vision Pro can do and more on a quest 3 for 1/7th the price. The screen is not as sharp but the FOV is better on the quest (which they mention in the verge article), it has no battery dongle and it has actual tracked controllers if you want to use them (but you can fall back to hand tracking where it makes sense).

peebeebee
1 replies
9h54m

"That's the same as guys going, my 1000$ Ubuntu laptop can do everything your Mac does guys" That's great if that works for you, but most people would agree that Apple just has that finishing touch that 99% of other brands do not achieve. It's all in the details. Apple is luxury tech.

aniforprez
0 replies
6h0m

What does this even do better that has any "Apple" finishing touches? There's no games, there's some content but lots missing, what it is supposed to be able to do, it does worse than the competition and it's more than 6x the Quest's price

wilg
0 replies
20h59m

Except its the worst VR set if you want to play games.

ahmedfromtunis
13 replies
22h48m

I can't wait what the Vision Pro 4S-equivalent would look like and what capabilities it would have.

I already imagine how people from 5 years in the future will be sharing photos of the current Vision Pro asking "Remember when this was the best VR headset hhh??"

Sure, VR headsets existed before Apple's foray into that segment, but also did laptops, smartphones, tables computers, smart watches and bluetooth headsets.

And if one to learn from history, all these products categories were significantly improved after Apple entered their respective markets.

monkeynotes
12 replies
22h22m

It's not VR though. The AR angle of this device is why it's compelling. VR is completely blind to your surroundings, Apple Pro could in principle make your public park look like Jurassic Park with full size dinosaurs etc. Blending our reality with an overlayed real time rendering is a massive benefit over straight VR.

pests
6 replies
22h11m

Its not true AR though. Its "record reality then display in VR". You're never looking at the world. Always through screens.

losvedir
1 replies
22h8m

That could just be an initial limitation of technology, though. The Apple Vision "spatial computing" line could move to glasses eventually.

That said, I think the "you're looking at a digital reconstruction of the world" aspect pretty interesting since it means, in principle, everything can be changed as you'd like. Why not turn day to night, night to day, redecorate, block out ads on billboards, re-paint your house, hang paintings, add an extra window to your wall, etc?

cyberax
0 replies
20h35m

To completely reproduce the reality you need to be able to manipulate the phase of light of individual pixels. Basically, make a dynamic hologram.

Without that, you'll be looking at an artificially "crisp" version of the world.

ThatMedicIsASpy
1 replies
21h56m

You're looking at reality with half of the colors your eyes can see, a reality with a limited field of view, a reality which looks much worse as the surroundings become darker. Nothing I've seen is impressive. I'm impressed by the lack of things more than what this thing actually offers.

pests
0 replies
21h54m

Yeah, but that's our reality we know and love.

Why not just get a few projectors or more screens if you want digital environments?

monkeynotes
0 replies
4h29m

I've defined this elsewhere in the comments. Please provide a common definition that aligns with yours

matwood
0 replies
21h50m

It's clear from the commercials I saw that AR is Apple's vision. How long the hardware takes to match that vision is an open question.

ahmedfromtunis
4 replies
22h7m

It is VR, though.

Sure, Apple built the headset so that it mimics AR devices, but it definitely is not one itself.

The technology to build an AR device with the capabilities that Apple boasted is simply not here yet. I'm sure that Apple top-talent is hard at work trying to break the barrier (if it didn't yet), but that'll be for a future version, just not this one.

CharlesW
2 replies
21h15m

When you say "AR devices" I think you specifically mean AR devices that do optical compositing vs. AVP's digital compositing, yes?

I'm sure that Apple top-talent is hard at work trying to break the barrier (if it didn't yet), but that'll be for a future version, just not this one.

To me, it feels like AVP is the final nail in the coffin of the optical compositing evolutionary branch of HMDs. Even if it's someday possible to do well, devices would still need the same realtime subsystem necessary for digital compositing in order to do 3D mapping, object detection, environmental lighting integration, etc.

I understand that in the short-term, camera sensors and displays don't exceed what the human eye can perceive, but those seem straightforward (if not easy) to address.

monkeynotes
0 replies
4h30m

When I say AR I mean exactly what it's defined as. Put this in the previous comment, it's the Wikipedia definition:

"AR can be defined as a system that incorporates three basic features: a combination of real and virtual worlds, real-time interaction, and accurate 3D registration of virtual and real objects"

There is nowhere in there that says the output has to have pure optical through. Digital composition seems to fit into the definition.

crooked-v
0 replies
20h1m

Same here. If there's some breakthrough they're not going to ignore it, but I would bet anything that current Apple far-forecasting plans for the "Vision 10" amount to current Vision Pro functionality in oversized wraparound shades, relying entirely on the camera passthrough for vision.

monkeynotes
0 replies
4h31m

I don't understand, every definition of AR I can find conforms to what Apple has made. This one from Wikipedia for instance:

"AR can be defined as a system that incorporates three basic features: a combination of real and virtual worlds, real-time interaction, and accurate 3D registration of virtual and real objects"

What is it missing?

oflannabhra
11 replies
21h33m

I really like Joanna Stern, and how she approaches reviews like this. I’ve watched her review, The Verge’s, and MKBHD’s unboxing video.

However, the best review I’ve found that actually transmits what is possible and what it is like to use is Brian Tong’s 55 minute review video: https://youtu.be/GkPw6ScHyb4

I’m not familiar with him, but unlike other reviews I’ve seen, he spends less time evaluating or summarizing, and more time trying to actually use the device. I didn’t even realize that you can seamlessly use your Mac to control your visionOS apps, for example.

npunt
9 replies
20h44m

Good review. Most interesting part was at 43:00 discussing the ergonomics and weight, which is the real question for everyone hoping to make this a daily driver.

He said he could wear it 45 mins before needing to take it off, that it was overstimulating so you need to slow down how quickly you use apps and move things on screen, and that gestures also were fatiguing. You could tell he was trying to be fair but positive.

Headsets just haven’t cracked this nut yet, and tho tech may advance somewhat, they may be limitations inherent to the form factor. Even if it gets really light weight, the issues of overstimulation, headaches, and the amount of neck movement implied may keep these products in a niche. (I say this as someone super excited about AVP)

For everyone used to using their computers all day long wanting to do it in a headset, don’t throw your macbooks away just yet.

crooked-v
2 replies
20h12m

I've regularly done 2+ hours of light activity (e.g. mini golf, social hangouts) with my Quest 3 without issues, though I will note this is with a third-party head strap specifically designed to be way more ergonomic and comfortable than anything first-party from Meta or Apple [1].

[1]: https://www.bobovr.com/products/bobovr-m3-pro

A lot of the physical downsides here are basically self-inflicted by companies trying really hard to hide the "nerd factor" necessary for comfort, to the detriment of the actual user experience.

npunt
0 replies
19h43m

Yeah industrial design and ergonomics tend not to have the same goals. Personally I was able to use a Quest 2 for ~1hr without too much issue, but it's not something I'd want to do on the regular.

The big product marketing question is what niche do headsets fit in, and thus whats the ideal single session and daily usage goal for a headset?

If it's about replacing laptops or another high usage scenario, that's a pretty high bar, definitely too high for the next 1-2yrs. I imagine some people at Apple wore dummy see-through goggle ergo tester units of varying weights around all day to get at these numbers :) Wonder what they came back with. Even still, that only gets at weight vs the perceptual ergonomics, skin-feel, etc.

The issue I see with headsets is that there may not be a lot of improvement possible without compromising durability or other factors necessary when going to market. E.g. what if they can't get it below ~400g (making AVP ~40% lighter), but to make the headset comfortable for most people for the usage scenario that makes them mass market (e.g. 2h+ sessions daily) requires ~250-300g?

gmadsen
0 replies
5h23m

its not really self inflicted when it literally determines how many sales you will have. Plenty of people are put off of VR because of the form factor. Quest looks like a nerdy toy, which does indeed influence who buys and/or uses it

Rapzid
2 replies
18h46m

Everyone I know even those who are into VR and even those who WORK in VR have zero interest in working with a headset of any kind on.

And those who work in VR report their coworkers and just about everyone they talk to customer wise feels the same way.

I know there are people who really want to, or think they do, but most would rather just use screens until maybe such a time the form factor becomes a pair of eye glasses.

crooked-v
1 replies
17h50m

Is the problem "working in VR" or is it "with a headset on", though?

I think it's completely reasonable to say that this stuff is only going to continue to get lighter and more comfortable every generation. What's that balance of interest going to look like when a headset's eventually got the same weight and form factor as, for example, big ski goggles?

Rapzid
0 replies
17h26m

Is the problem "working in VR" or is it "with a headset on", though?

IMHO both. As for form factor lots of people already opt for contacts over glasses for comfort. I think ski googles are right out for anything that's not recreation or industry/application specific.

As for being in VR people really do like the real word lol. Going in and out of VR is a bit of an ordeal. Anecdotally I like taking small breaks from looking on my screen during the work day. Frequently. I look outside at the trees, at my cats, stuff on my desk, and etc when I'm thinking. If I have to "go in and out of VR" to do that or just not be in VR I'm going to just not be in VR.

For it to catch on mainstream for productivity and day-to-day it's gonna have to be like eye or sunglasses with seamless AR. Via something like retinal projection perhaps. I feel like Google was onto all this hence the Google Glass.

zmmmmm
0 replies
17h38m

I think the "overstimulation" thing is a bit of a sleeper issue.

At first people think "wow it's so awesome I can be sitting on the moon while I browse the web". But after a bit of time you just get tired, and I think it's precisely because your whole brain is working in overdrive to understand the unnatural environment you are in. None of this manifests explicitly but at the end of it, when people are faced with the choice of putting the headset on or not, they just "feel" like it's a lot of effort.

I say all this as someone who does regularly spend 1-2 hours working in Immersed with multiple giant screens up. And I love it as a break, a way to focus or just relieve the boredom of working in the same space day in day out. But even I feel this effect of it being tiring and not keen to do it for 8 hours a day. And the minute you say that, you lost the use case of this being your "only" computer / replacing your laptop, so it's actually kind of crucial to its central justification as a replacement for a computer or a 'new kind' of computer.

wlll
0 replies
16h11m

This is headset, app and person dependent. I've done 8 hours in Elite: Dangerous (sat down, can't remember the headset) and well over 4 hours in Fallout 4 VR (stood up and moving around, Valve Index).

Having demoed VR at my old office I can tell you that the range of reactions varies from an immediate "nope" and having to take the headset off to being able to stay in it for a significant amount of time with no discomfort.

landswipe
0 replies
16h12m

The fatigue will morph into buyer's fatigue.

shilgapira
0 replies
18h55m

I started watching the video, and at 0:40 he asked Siri to "close all my apps". At that point my own iPhone's Siri enthusiastically explained to me how I can close all the apps on my phone.

joshstrange
10 replies
21h53m

I know it's v1, I know it's expensive, I know it's limited but I cannot wait to get my hands on it this Friday.

Even with just 1 4k floating screen I think it would be a winner for me but I'm also really excited to see what people come up with in VisionOS itself. I think for a while the sweet spot (for me) with be using a virtual monitor and a handful of VisionOS apps as well. Eventually I hope to be able to pull macOS windows out of a fixed box and arrange them wherever I want but I'm fully aware that might not be this year or even next year.

wombat-man
7 replies
21h38m

Well it's QHD not 4k.

I don't think you'll be able to pull windows out of the mac screen, but apps you might need are in vision OS anyway like safari or messages.

I think my dream would be dual 4k monitors, or maybe a double wide?

jojobas
3 replies
19h5m

It's a far cry. This thing is a little more that 4k for the entire field of view. Resolution required to render two 4k monitors at comfy distance is more than an order of magnitude away.

joshstrange
1 replies
18h45m

An important other aspect though is how much is visible. With foveated rendering does it matter if I have 50 4k monitors? As long as they aren't all in-focus and in-view at the same time?

I'm not sure where the limitation is right now (if it's purely a software limitation) but my MBP runs 4 monitors right now and I'd put up with a cord (or two) plugged from my MBP to my AVP if I could have all my monitors in VR. I believe they are using AirPlay to give you the virtual desktop but 3-4 AP streams doesn't seem too crazy, but I don't know much about that.

jojobas
0 replies
18h16m

There's foveated rendering, but there isn't foveated physical resolution. With this cutting edge display resolution you can expect a 1-2 monitors QHD of comfortable angular size and that's it. You could have more out of view but that's your virtual displays. Then again, why exactly? Getting used to some heavy steamy gadget on your head at home/at work so you can also do that on a train? Get real. VR goggles always were a gimmick and will be a gimmick on coming decades. I'd bet we'll have non-visual brain datalink before we have non-gimmick VR.

MikusR
0 replies
10h42m

This thing is less than 4k for the entire fov.

matt3210
1 replies
13h22m

It’s 5k with normal Mac scaling for ui similar to a Mac display… also, there is a proof of concept for bringing mac windows into the space

zaptrem
0 replies
13h9m

Can you link the PoC? I'm suprised someone hasn't built an app for this yet.

joshstrange
0 replies
21h36m

Yeah, I think long-term I'd want a "confluence mode" (a la Parallels) or a large curved screen. Dual/Tri-screens would be fine too but I feel like we can do better with an infinite canvas (though "monitors" might make macOS apps play nicer).

dmix
1 replies
21h45m

Its coming out on Friday?

joshstrange
0 replies
21h45m

Yes, February 2nd, this Friday.

joshstrange
9 replies
21h45m

Q: What if I wear glasses?

A: The Vision Pro wasn’t designed to be worn with glasses. Instead you have to order prescription Zeiss optical inserts for $99. The two monocle-looking pieces snap right into place.

It's $99 for readers (non-prescription) and $149 for a prescription. Very odd that she would have gotten that detail wrong since it's so easy to check and it's been repeated so often in coverage of the AVP.

jsheard
5 replies
21h38m

Not to excuse that mistake but FWIW there are third party manufacturers which sell prescription lenses for various headsets for as little as $50, so there will probably be cheaper options once they start making them for the Vision Pro. The cost to actually manufacture the lenses depends on the strength of the prescription, and most VR lens manufacturers reflect that in their pricing, but Apple appears to be charging everyone the worst-case price and pocketing the difference when you order a weaker prescription.

delfinom
3 replies
21h12m

I await the day that Apple adds authentication chips to lenses and locks out 3rd parties.

Basically it wouldn't be them to pass up a accessory sell opportunity.

wharvle
1 replies
20h37m

Looks around desk at non-Apple monitor, keyboard, mouse, USB hub, and cables

Yeah, uh, they definitely always do that. It "wouldn't be them" to ever not.

(Hell, the monitor even supports True Tone—and it didn't at first, that arrived in an OS update, from Apple)

ragazzina
0 replies
8h15m

You know there's already a QR code-based way of authenticating your lenses?

csmiller
0 replies
19h32m

Sounded in Gruber's review like they have something that sort of incidentally does that https://arc.net/l/quote/wgcwgxod

sgt
0 replies
21h34m

Also, you might be able to take your previous pair of glasses, remove the lenses and grind until they fit. I did something similar to make my own prescription sunglasses (glued in the lenses).

miohtama
2 replies
20h43m

Can you use Vision Pro with contact lenses?

astrange
0 replies
19h8m

Depends on your prescription and if they're cosmetic/colored. If you go through the purchase flow it'll tell you if yours work.

SoftTalker
0 replies
20h4m

Sounds like only if you don't also need readers for close focus.

mvkel
5 replies
15h46m

Wild that the Quest 3 sounds like a better device.

Call me crazy, but if Apple can't figure this out, maybe the concept itself is flawed.

makeitdouble
2 replies
15h30m

That's giving way too much credit to a corporation.

As an anchoring point, Apple couldn't figure out a better solution for movie watching than Google's or Amazon's offering (cheaper yet better than the Apple TV), and I don't think the concept is flawed in any way.

If anything, it's probably healthy to see Apple stretch and hit some walls, try new ideas that might or might not succeed, and overall experiment in the open instead of always assuming they've got the perfect solution.

mvkel
1 replies
15h26m

disagree. Apple TV is fine albeit solving boring problems.

This is a solution that creates 20 new problems.

too much credit to a corporation

What does this mean? Are indie developers supposed to do a better job than a corp (see: a group of people) with billions in R&D?

makeitdouble
0 replies
11h49m

Apple TV is fine, but for instance it took them such a long time to get a remote with buttons that can be recognized in the dark. And that weird push for games when there's no first party controller. The storage tiers that made no sense. All in all it has been such a weird product.

too much credit

Sorry for the weird turn of phrase. I just think Apple is a company like any other, with sometimes good ideas, sometimes bad idea, sometimes they'll hit the jackpot and sometimes they battle the EU.

Apple not figuring a good approach to a problem doesn't feel like any further indication of how hard the problem is. I mean, we could say they haven't figured out how to charge a wireless mouse either.

pquki4
1 replies
15h34m

agreed.

Reading these reviews, I just keep thinking -- yes Apple does this better, and that is interesting, but... the Quest 3 can almost do all of these at a fraction of the price.

And the biggest investments -- screen and cameras -- need to see real use cases yet. I am not convinced that people are actually going to replace their monitors or TVs with Vision Pro and wearing this for many hours straight at this point.

mvkel
0 replies
15h24m

Exactly. Marginally better (or worse!) in virtually everything.

And Apple is supposed to be the master at taking a bit longer to nail it.

If anything they just inadvertently demonstrated how flawed strapping a screen to your face is if you're trying to do something.

orenlindsey
4 replies
18h22m

Anyone remember when Memoji came out? It was pretty mid. Lots of problems with it. Now it's really good. It works really well now. Personas are like that. Same thing with eye tracking.

This whole product is 90% of the way there. But the next 9% is just as hard as that original 90%. Apple is releasing it now to push it to 99%. It'll get better.

siva7
1 replies
15h4m

I've never seen people (particularly young people) use memojis and i wish there was an option to disable it entirely from my phone.

timothyduong
0 replies
6h38m

Only see older folk use it, I respect that, gives people different ways to express themselves

FPGAhacker
1 replies
16h1m

wait, Memoji is still a thing?

presentation
0 replies
11h38m

I have literally never had anybody I know ever send me a Memoji. Maybe there's a different community that uses it, but I don't know who that is.

dottjt
4 replies
22h9m

The thing I don't get about spacial computing is: why?

I feel like being able to see everything open at once would be incredibly distracting. I like how I can swipe between app screens on my desktop so that I'm only focusing on one app at a time.

Of course I imagine there are some applications where it's useful, but to me it just feels like the Apple Vision Pro is just a very large screen and they haven't quite figured out what to do with it.

zmmmmm
0 replies
17h22m

It is interesting, I do regularly use Immersed in which I have total freedom to place windows any size anywhere I want in 3d space. Do you know what I end up doing mostly? Snapping them into the fixed 3 monitor layout in front of me just like they are physical monitors. It turns out, the way we set up physical monitors is actually how we want the virtual ones too .... what a surprise!

tomjakubowski
0 replies
20h14m

I like how I can swipe between app screens on my desktop so that I'm only focusing on one app at a time.

You can shove the app into a corner of your room, out of your view, and it will be there when you walk over to that corner later. That's part of the idea of "spatial computing" - if we can associate computer objects with real locations in space, maybe we can better harness spatial memory and stuff like that when we interact with them.

joshstrange
0 replies
21h49m

It's the same reason (some) people love multiple monitors and don't find it distracting. In fact, I feel extremely limited on just 1 or even 2 monitors. I'm hoping that the 4k virtual monitor in AVP will suffice and with windowing tools I think it will since it can be so much larger.

jccalhoun
0 replies
20h37m

I've been a skeptic of VR/AR since Occulus launched. I'm still skeptical after reading the reviews.

subsubzero
3 replies
20h2m

I could see this taking the place of a TV screen in some households, (smaller ones of course unless you want to spend $15k for the whole family to all watch TV in a living room!). I think a killer feature for this is to pair it with a treadmill and project trails and famous city scapes while you run. That last bit for me might be a reason to buy it as if its winter and icy where you live running on the thread mill is a forced indoor exercise.

graypegg
1 replies
19h59m

The weight would be a major problem there, and needs to be improved before they can honestly pitch cardio with it on.

GlickWick
0 replies
19h45m

With a good head strap i have no issues pushing 165 bpm for 45 minutes or so on the Quest 3. It works well for cardio already.

Honestly headset weight is more of an issue for 4+ hour working sessions than exercise.

Erratic6576
0 replies
19h59m

I’m looking forward to learning about geography from a huge atlas

matsemann
3 replies
22h10m

Still, there’s something great about capturing photos and videos without using your hands, and that means connected eyewear.

Does it? What about gopros or similar action cams, being used for over a decade, and for less than a tenth of the price?

gfodor
1 replies
22h7m

People don't wear those all day. A scenario where people have cameras on their face all day yields a totally different kind of ability to capture serendipitious moments, etc. That's not to say this value proposition is high enough to warrant it, or that we should expect this technology to actually succeed mass adoption, but it is not the same value proposition as what you're talking about.

matsemann
0 replies
21h13m

True, but the quote I'm discussing was in context of filming while being in the slopes.

baby
0 replies
21h59m

I think the rayban meta glasses are a better example

guptaneil
3 replies
18h3m

Does it live up to the stratospheric hype? Not so much.

Oh sorry, that's from CNET's review of the first iPhone in 2007: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/original-iphone-review/

It's way too early to tell if this product line will succeed in the long term. Will the first gen Vision Pro be a runaway success? Of course not! Will later generations look as obvious as the iPhone does now? I sure hope so!

For comparison, Apple sold 1.4 million iPhones in 2007. Supposedly Apple is expecting to sell around 500k Vision Pro units this year. Given the 3x price difference (in 2024 dollars), that effectively means the first gen Vision Pro is expected to bring the same revenue as the first gen iPhone.

We all have rosy retrospection about how great and obvious the first iPhone or first iPod was, but honestly nobody had any idea if Apple's crazy bet would pay off. We all agreed it was magical tech, but it was expensive, had tons of limitations, and nobody really needed it. Sound familiar?

All I know is betting against Apple has rarely paid off. They do have failures too though and this is clearly technologically more ambitious than any other launch, so who knows! And honestly that's what makes this launch most exciting.

It's been so long since I've had child-like wonder about some new technology that I'm just glad Apple took a chance on launching such a crazy device, even if I don't know what to do with it... yet.

zmmmmm
0 replies
17h24m

I'm just glad Apple took a chance on launching such a crazy device

Probably a dozen other companies launched similar devices already. Apple is hardly going out on a crazy limb here. This is their classic iterative refinement of what other people already did.

But I do agree with the first point - the flaws in this gen 1 has very little bearing on the long term success of it as a product category. But I would argue it works both ways, in that to the extent it is successful in the niche that buys it, you can't tell yet if it will break out to mass appeal. We just don't know.

saurik
0 replies
11h40m

None of these articles are reviewing the future product line: they are merely reviewing the one product you can buy today. Of that product sucks but its successors in a year or two will be great--or even if this product with some major software update becomes awesome--that is entirely irrelevant. The original reviews of the iPhone weren't wrong just because some different later thing that was part the same product line earned a better review.

_gabe_
0 replies
16h51m

The difference is that in that review there were plenty of remarks like:

Fortunately, we can report that on the whole, the touchscreen and software interface are easier to use than expected. What's more, we didn't miss a stylus in the least. Despite a lack of tactile feedback on the keypad, we had no trouble tapping our fingers to activate functions and interact with the main menu.

What I’m seeing in the reviews of AVP say the opposite about many aspects:

There is a built-in virtual keyboard so you can type in thin air. But it will drive you mad for anything longer than a short message. And selecting smaller buttons with a pinch should be a carnival game. I started getting real work done once I paired the Vision Pro with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.

I agree it’s still too early to tell, but the best thing that I see being mentioned is movie watching which is something all the other headsets already do as well. The AR aspect seems to be a unique aspect, but I wonder if there will be safety issues that prevent things like cooking and doing other tasks assisted with AR from truly taking off.

camgunz
3 replies
7h24m

My feeling is that Apple went entirely the wrong way here. They made an expensive device that doesn't meaningfully move the needle on AR/VR or AR/VR UX. As a result, they've narrowed the market so much that they can't convince app developers (who they've spent the last few years alienating) to develop for it, and are cannibalizing future sales (to Nilay Patel's point) by convincing people that a lot of these technologies (vision tracking, passthrough) are cul-de-sacs.

If they'd made something like "Vision Air" that was essentially Meta's Ray-Ban Smart Glasses plus AR for $999 they'd sell millions, they'd have a market for app developers, they'd convince people there was a point to having them. That's an actual interesting product and it's closer to where they want to be anyway.

This feels broadly like a staff retention project, or some kind of market positioning strategy or supply chain capture strategy or something. I just can't believe this product was the point of all the time, effort, and money Apple spent on it.

sudhirj
1 replies
7h17m

This is generally true of most of the product line... the iPod Nano / Shuffle were very popular but not the first iPod, the Watch is popular now, but the first one wasn't a all that, same with AirPods, and of course the iPhone itself. Apple has visibility into the Vision Air, and the Pro 2 & 3 and maybe 4 as well, so I'm curious to see where in are in 3 years or iterations.

camgunz
0 replies
4h1m

TL;DR: I'll be super surprised if this thing makes any dent in tech/culture whatsoever. It's way too expensive (we're not too far out from used car territory here [0]) and breaks no meaningful new ground.

Eh I think there are a couple of important differences.

The first difference is that the iPhone wasn't 300% the price of the contemporary Nokia N95. It was actually around 30% cheaper ($500 vs. $730). The Vision Pro is $3,500 and its closest competition is the Quest Pro at $1,200. I don't think anyone would argue that the experience justifies the price difference.

The second difference is that the iPhone foretold how people were going to use phones in the future. The technology was good and convincing enough that it--to my sorrow--killed other ideas instantly. The Vision Pro obviously hasn't done this. People are buying the state of the art when they buy the Vision Pro, but people were buying the future when they bought the iPhone, and everyone knows it.

And I mean, inventing the future is a bonkers high bar. I admit we shouldn't be holding any company--including Apple--to that standard. It was a confluence of a talented, experienced team, world events, and technological progress. I'm saying I find it hard to square the fact that buying the future (the iPhone) cost less than the then state of the art, whereas Apple's clearly not created the future here, and priced it way out of bounds. It would be like if the iPhone ran the best version of Symbian and had the best resisitive touch screen or physical keyboard that could possibly be made, and then they sold it for $2k. We wouldn't even be talking about this product as a real product if it weren't Apple selling it. We'd assume only rich people would buy it and it would impact the culture not at all.

Also, that's what's happening! Well, that's the best case. The probable actual outcome is people not only get used to the idea that AR/VR has hit a ceiling and is really expensive, but a few really obnoxious people wear the Vision Pro to cafes and everyone gets the idea that it's extremely uncool. This thing is at best a dev kit and at worst a bauble.

[0]: https://indianapolis.craigslist.org/search/cta?hasPic=1&max_...

fennecbutt
0 replies
5h35m

Oh, but it's not VR/AR/XR, it's "spatial computing©®™"

"What's a computer©®™"

arctac
3 replies
20h18m

7x the price of Quest 3 which does exactly the same, no thank you.

hu3
0 replies
18h14m

Quest 3 has better FOV and a battery.

So some might argue it is better even.

crooked-v
0 replies
18h13m

exactly the same

Nah. I've tried using the Quest 3 for various things, and at the OS level it just fundamentally sucks for anything but fully immersive games. Multitasking support is close to nonexistent, the hand tracking is crap, the UX is mediocre for even basic things like "sit on the couch and watch a movie", the system is end-to-end filled with small annoyances every time you use it, and there are no signs that Meta has even recognized these problems, let alone have any plans to improve on them.

The difference in functionality is night and day, even including the downsides noted by reviewers.

Sohcahtoa82
0 replies
18h37m

Yeah but the Quest 3 doesn't have an Apple logo on it.

wkirby
2 replies
19h40m

This seems like a prank. I simply cannot fathom wanting this even if it were free --- and I own and have used multiple VR headsets. The idea that I'd want to live any significant portion of my day in one seems like absolutely madness.

abletonlive
1 replies
17h47m

I don't think apple is expecting for normal consumers to buy this product. It seems like a dev kit for a future where AR glasses are possible

wkirby
0 replies
2h35m

Even that future seems massively unappealing as a consumer.

Plus a $3500 dev kit that lets me set a kitchen timer, while simultaneously recommending I not wear the device while cooking, seems crazy to me.

throwaway71271
2 replies
20h38m

The complexity of our systems has increased a lot, and I dont think the tooling has caught up yet.

Its sad that the fastest thing we have now is log.Printf("asdasdf") and grep the logs on the pod :)

Debugging multithreaded application is as difficult as it was 50 years ago, maybe VR debuggers will allow us to debug complex interconnected systems or models in a more intuitive environment.

Also I think having hundreds of chats with some llms to investigate specific part of the code/docs fits very nicely with infinite screen space, and using your eyes to focus instead of alt+tabbing

I have my fingers crossed for some insane tooling advancements in the next years.

Does anyone know of any re-inventing the IDE in VR projects that are worth following?

ninkendo
1 replies
18h41m

Apple can’t even get lldb to not crash trying to show me the values of variables in the current stack frame… the intuitiveness of the UI is far from the top of my priority list.

throwaway71271
0 replies
10h28m

:) apple doesnt even let you gdb -p unless you disable the system integrity protection

stephc_int13
2 replies
20h17m

I quite often have buyer impulse when seeing the newest high-end Apple products. Even if I don't like the brand monopoly, even if I find their design language mostly boring and bland, there is often something weirdly appealing in their marketing.

But in this case, I would probably try this device during half a day if someone gave it to me, but I feel zero desire to own or use one.

It does not enable anything that I can't do better with a real computer, a TV or a smartphone.

Sohcahtoa82
1 replies
19h8m

I quite often have buyer impulse when seeing the newest high-end Apple products. Even if I don't like the brand monopoly, even if I find their design language mostly boring and bland, there is often something weirdly appealing in their marketing.

This is an utterly bizarre stance.

I can't possibly imagine buying a product, any product, let alone a $1,000+ product, purely based on their marketing, when you admit that you don't even like the product.

Most people, when marketing convinces them to buy something, aren't really consciously aware of it. Not only are you consciously aware of it, but you acknowledge that you don't like it, and buy it anyways.

stephc_int13
0 replies
8h7m

Buyer impulse, a feeling, not an action, I don’t own Apple products except for an old iPhone ES.

nomilk
2 replies
19h7m

Nevermind cooking, TV, and timers, I'd consider this solely to serve as a portable monitor. With remote work, that could be very handy. When I travel I never take an external monitor, so all work gets done on a 16 or 14 inch screen. This could be a game changer, like adding a large display.

Could also be very handy when working on planes, and for working from outdoor locations like parks (which I love to do). I find I'm most productive working from planes, but if there's a seat in front (non exit row), looking down at a laptop for several hours at a sharp angle can cause some neck pain. This would allow me to look straight ahead.

pzo
1 replies
12h33m

the problem with using this in plane is you cannot have your macbook in your carry on bag. You have to remove it from your bag and open the screen lid and see it with your vision pro headset to connect to it. This is not maybe an issue if you are flying business class and with economy class I don't find it comfortable - plane tables are too small and macbook pro 16'' too big and heavy for such environment.

nomilk
0 replies
11h37m

I agree using a macbook is not comfortable in economy, but it’s what I do as my default, the only difference in using the headset is I won’t have to look down at a sharp angle (which is usually fine for a while but can hurt if done for too long).

masfoobar
2 replies
9h24m

The technology of what we see with Meta/Vive/etc VR headsets, as well as what with see with Apple Vision, will be nothing more than a pair of glasses so light you will hardly notice it

This is what it will be like in 10 years. The current generation (teens and adulets) wondering around the streets with their head sinked to their phones, will be replaced wearing "specs" 24/7.

In the next 20-25, I would not be surprised if it becomes no more than contact lenses.

Monitors will likely be a thing of the past.. even giant TVs in the living room. Same for (physical) keyboard and mouse, being replaced by IR equiverlants being as good/responsive.

The technology is not there, yet. This is a glimpse of what our everyday will be, and in the working office.

Interesting to see where it goes.

Gazoche
1 replies
9h8m

In the next 20-25, I would not be surprised if it becomes no more than contact lenses.

I can see the current XR headsets shrinking down to the size of a pair of glasses within a couple decades, but contact lenses would require a giant leap forward in technology.

You'd need displays, electronics, sensors and batteries that can all fit together inside a paper-thin plane, and also, somehow, be invisible. Not saying it will never happen but we are really talking sci-fi tech at this point.

masfoobar
0 replies
3h16m

If I went back in time (say... 1991) and told people my predictions of the future, I will likely be laughed at for being sci-fi tech. For example, let suggest I predict that by 2011 most people in developed Countries will have a PDA allowing you to make calls or connect with people all over the world. Sure many will laugh at me.

I continue to say that these PDA's will be a 5" touchscreen, allowing you to play games. Games far more powerful than the Mega Drive and can play with your friends from anywhere in the world. The PDA has a far superior, higher resolution screen beyond 640x480 and can render much faster 3D images than the supercomputers of today (ie SGI workstations)

All of these claims.. alongside explaining what a PDA is, which you can fit in your pocket that wont need charging for 5+ hours, etc...

Even people who do see the possibility will likely spend most of their efforts explaining that their RC Cars don't last 30 mins without recharding the batteries, so this wont work, either!

Of course by PDA (Personal Data Assistant) - I refer to what we call Smartphones today.

Point is - I try to be realistic about future tech even in the next 20-25 years.. but I leave some areas open to being more "advanced" than we anticipate.

Yes.. contact lenses is a stretch for "next 20-25 years" but lets not ignore the suggestion. Young kids in 2040 will laugh at how we managed to wear these "heavy" VR headsets. Who knows how this type of tech will evolve and mix with other tech.

hendersoon
2 replies
19h59m

Apple failed to make a compelling argument for purchasing their device. Where's the "killer app"? The original iPhone was a better phone, and a general computing device with a web browser to boot.

Is it to watch movies on a 100" screen on an airplane? The xReal weighs 75 grams and does that for four hundred dollars. It has a HDMI port too, so I can play my steam deck or switch.

Where are the cool AR apps? Where is the contextual data popping up as I drive my car? None of that exists!

saurik
0 replies
11h26m

The original iPhone was a better phone...

?!? The audio quality wasn't somehow different, but the feature set surrounding the phone sucked: it didn't have ring tone profiles / called groups and so was pretty infuriating versus a basic Nokia phone in addition to having a fraction of the battery life, a worse form factor to hold up to your ear, and a fundamentally more fragile construction. It also was pretty pathetic at text messages, as it didn't have any support for MMS (which was already shipping on competing devices). Notably and critically, even a cheap Nokia candy bar phone could do the most basic texting feature of sending a single message to multiple people at once... somehow the iPhone shipped without that? Even the most basic things like "at least you will be able to store a ton of text messages finally as the device had a LOT of storage" somehow were thwarted: Apple implemented some stupid arbitrary limit of I think it was only 1000 messages before it started deleting old ones!! I just can't believe you think the original iPhone was a better phone than it's contemporary competitors.

hackstack
0 replies
17h9m

Do people really watch movies on xreals? I tried the Air Pro 2 and found them borderline unusable.

Also, AR glasses being used by someone operating a motor vehicle sounds like a recipe for an entirely different kind of “killer” app.

Nifty3929
2 replies
18h10m

My main objection to these type of technologies (I feel similarly about voice control) - is that I don't WANT to use large hand gestures (or verbal expression) to control my device. It's exhausting, and too much interference with the ambient experience. I can control my whole desktop experience with very little wrist motion using my speedy mouse. I have a bunch of extra buttons under my thumb for a variety of tasks as well.

Reaching out with my whole arm to click, or pinch to zoom, is a HORRIBLE user experience. (For most things - clearly VR games and such will be fine).

It seems I can connect an ordinary keyboard and mouse to it though, so I could see using it as essentially a really large monitor. As long as I can point and click with my mouse independent of my eyes or head position, and my text-entry focus doesn't move without permission.

wraptile
0 replies
12h23m

That has been my biggest pet peeve with scifi depiction of futuristic inputs. Why would anyone want to move _more_ not less? Better tech should be more sensitive and accurate allowing us to do more with less not the other way around.

That's also the main reason nobody uses Quest 3's hand tracking despite it being really good. Why would I wave my hands around when I can achieve this with micro movements of my thumb.

oomun
0 replies
17h51m

fwiw, I agree with you (same reason i stopped using a Leap Motion controller) and users do not need to reach their arm out

just look with their eyes and then gesture with the hand

lots of reviewers discuss how the hands can be in low, resting positions

theoretically, as i dont have primary experience to draw from, this UX could potentially be even a smaller amount of wrist motion

Geee
2 replies
6h39m

I see a minor complaint about eye tracking, but people conveniently forget about the status quo. The status quo is holding large objects which are strapped on your hands and using point-and-shoot to click on items. You literally have to shoot items like on a shooting range, and hope that you hit. It's ridiculous. You can't use standard UIs with that kind of interaction, because everything is way too small.

And while you're strapped to those items you can't use keyboard or anything else with your hands. You can't scratch an itch or put something in your mouth. Your hands are occupied and you feel like you're in jail. Surprisingly you actually want to have hands.

This is the single most important innovation in Apple Vision. It gives you hands.

bdemirkir
1 replies
6h33m

Only if it already wasn't available in other VR/AR platforms. Hand tracking is available on Meta Quest platform (albeit not very reliable, I admit) since December 2019.

Geee
0 replies
6h17m

It's a combination of eye tracking and hand gestures. You use eyes as the primary pointing device on Vision Pro. Hands are used for clicking, scrolling etc.

Animats
2 replies
15h50m

It's a good review.

Basically, the thing gives you some screens fixed in world space. You have to be mostly stationary for the effect to work. So it won't replace walking around staring at your cell phone. A lot of thought has gone into the interface for this sort of thing. That's the real achievement here, and that matters.

Workplace of the near future - a room full of people, crammed together as on an airplane or in a theater, each wearing a headset. No more desks!

It's still too heavy, though. If it's tethered to a belt-mounted unit, why isn't the electronics down there, instead of in a brick on the back of your head? The headgear part needs to drop to no worse than swim goggles.

mvkel
1 replies
15h46m

I think your description is the absolute best case scenario.

In reality, it will collect dust.

It needs to "do work" faster, or at least more conveniently, than a computer can.

Just needing to put the thing on is a massive hurdle for regular adoption.

Animats
0 replies
13h30m

I think your description is the absolute best case scenario.

I tend to agree, but Apple has a big fan base. If anybody else shipped this thing, it would be a very niche product. We know, because others have shipped such things and gone nowhere.

zemo
1 replies
21h54m

am I hearing things or at 6:28 does she call her dog "Browser"

jkubicek
0 replies
20h23m

Yeah, that's her dog's name. In addition to being a dog, he's also a published author: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-dumb-delightful-world-of-pe...

phelm
1 replies
19h51m

Seems fun that most of the huge engineering effort seems to have gone into making the device feel as if its not there, Passthrough, Persona, EyeSight, and most of the downsides in the review comes from the fact that the device is still there.

The device is a simulation of the dream device that can overlay UI on top of your vision without you looking any different to those around you, I wonder how far away that is.

mattigames
0 replies
19h39m

I don't think it needs to be 100% not-there to reach full popularity, in the shape of glasses or a hat would be good enough, or perhaps something you can put on top of your regular glasses.

perryizgr8
1 replies
20h26m

Is the vision pro like iphone or like mac when it comes to device ownership? Can you be root on the system? Can you compile and run programs on it? Or do all apps have to be installed via an app store?

wraptile
0 replies
12h16m

Unsurprisingly, it's completely locked down.

nmstoker
1 replies
18h39m

I don't wish to imply any insult to the reviewer but the Persona image seemed fairly well aligned with how she looked when she did the scan. The poor lighting may have contributed to her slightly pallid colouring in the Persona.

Presumably the main concern is the uncanny not-very-lifelike nature that's putting people off and the rest is self-consciousness. Maybe they need longer scanning to build a more accurate facial movement model?

I still find it very odd when the eyes the device displays to others have such a raised position compared to the true eye position. If I had one, I would rather something static went there or nothing, and maybe overlay that with a gaze direction indicator "spot" instead of faux eyes.

crooked-v
0 replies
18h25m

I'd rather just have a VRChat avatar, for simple animated eye/face tracking and no uncanny valley effect.

jackschultz
1 replies
20h26m

How much talk is there about how these headsets are going to be used to talk to AI models? I don't see comments about that, but that's what I imagine they'll be used for. Models will be quicker, more efficient, and be able to capture audio, and able to be run on self owned GPUs. Take a google thing, throw a fake looking person and some type of voice on top and presto, you're talking to models.

I feel like that _has_ to be why all major companies are pushing hard on vision products like this. They know AI is coming and need to be there first so their glasses are efficient and adopted where models will be easy additions.

astrange
0 replies
19h5m

That's not how development cycles work. Conversational AI being any good is a 1-2 year old thing, and VR development of this quality is 5+ years.

ilrwbwrkhv
1 replies
19h15m

This device isn't it. The iPhone had issues when it launched, but it was magical. The Vision Pro isn't magical. It has the same issues as the Oculus. The weight in front of the face is felt after using it for a while so definitely not something that can be used for long hours. And the dinosaurs and stuff are nice gimmicks, and really cool but wear off after a while.

What is required is a device as thin as sunglasses, which basically does AR things. That will be the gamechanger and I think that will be done by another company because it feels Apple forced this one and that's sad.

peebeebee
0 replies
7h52m

It wasn't magical. Technically, it couldn't do a lot of things that other smartphones could. I had a Windows smartphone that could run Excel, with a slide-out keyboard for fast input. 1st gen iPhone was a bare-bones consumer device with the best touchscreen technology and a good (but very basic) UI. That is all it took to redefine the market.

It could not even copy-paste. It had horrible internet.

Vision Pro may be the first OS that does things "the right way" in AR/VR too. Big difference is that iPhone was a real consumer device, this seems more like a development device. Which may be a smart move, because after all: (Phone) Apps made Apple win, and not enough apps made Windows lose.

antoniuschan99
1 replies
14h4m

Was thinking they should have made it an accessory to the iphone instead. Have the iphone do all the compute and glasses just have sensors. It’s already wired because of the battery: it would weigh much less, iphone has magsafe portable battery for that extra juice, and would cost less (more adoption too)

Won’t be surprised if some android manufacturer like xiaomi release something like this.

Also, makes sense why Meta kept the form factor because they never had their own mobile device!

zaptrem
0 replies
12h44m

Given that this has an M2 and a dedicated sensor processing chip the size of an M2 I have a feeling the power draw and heat generated would be unusable with a phone in a pocket. I bet they'll go in this direction with a non-Pro version in four years or so when chips catch up.

andy_ppp
1 replies
20h40m

I haven’t heard much about motion sickness yet, how long can we expect to be in AR before this happens?

jsheard
0 replies
19h7m

The main driver of motion sickness in VR is "moving without moving", where your virtual viewpoint moves independently of your actual head position and confuses your brain. That's a common issue in VR games where practical space limitations mean that some kind of artificial locomotion is usually required, but Apple seems to be purposely avoiding that kind of experience by keeping the viewpoint locked to your head at all times.

Third party immersive apps might break that rule, of course.

alchemist1e9
1 replies
14h4m

It’s not realistic to strap a computer to your head and walk around and pass through is a bad idea generally. In my mind EDITH glasses are what should be real today and that’s where my focus has turned. I recently bought a Viture Glasses and their Neckband, they are actually pretty neat but still not viable for walking around in an AR sense. However their Neckband is onto something imho, it’s a good location for wearing computing power. I’m now personally going towards the BLE HUD style glasses for investigating ideas, bought several developer and enterprise kits to tinker with.

daemonologist
0 replies
12h16m

Viture Glasses

Holy moly that website (https://www.viture.com/). It looks like a huge amount of development effort went into it but it's almost completely useless. I went looking for detailed information about the product and was relieved to find the "learn more" button (which I'd initially mentally dismissed as a GDPR cookie compliance button), but it just opens an autoplaying marketing video with all the controls disabled.

(If you do want to read about the product their Kickstarter page was a bit more digestible/normal for me: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/viture/viture-game-and-... .)

TealMyEal
1 replies
11h6m

Does anyone know if this can connect to an External HDD via USB C?

saagarjha
0 replies
9h2m

There's no USB-C port on the device.

Flatcircle
1 replies
19h9m

Apple seems to do well with products that are essential. Phones, computers, iPads, airpods, even iPods were essential to walk around the city and listen to music.

The Vision Pro is like Google Glass, a none essential luxury item that seems cumbersome.

I don't think this will make it TBH. But perhaps it does. And if so, seems a bit dystopian.

ggrelet
0 replies
2h51m

I think your comment is pure hindsight. I don’t get how you’d tag the iPad as essential when we already had the iPhone?

You also seem to forget the huge success of not-so-essential AirPods and to a lesser extent, Apple Watches.

wolframhempel
0 replies
9h56m

I work from home with my family and pets jumping around. Having a device that isolates you to some extend while giving you effectively unlimited screen space (and hopefully individual floaty windows in a future update) is quite attractive to me.

w10-1
0 replies
11h21m

Joanna Stern: Maestro!

I cannot imagine having to do this review. It's:

- Likely to be read and seen by a substantial number of people

- On the highest of high-tech devices

- From a company that splits the world into Fans and Haters

- Where the real question is how does it feel, and how do I look?

- And for heaven's sake should I spend $3,500+?

So much potential for embarassment!

She did a great job, and identified its killer app: home 3D movies.

Selfies are so passe, when you can actually re-experience something, and perhaps notice what you missed before, and reinforce memories. It's ideal oldsters to experience trips that their grandchildren take.

Gating factors: My concern is mainly that this will need another generation of chip miniaturization to get the headset lighter AND more performant AND using less power -- and may require a faster bus between the chips.

Win/lose factors: Probably enough people will buy it to make it not a financial mistake. But the big win is that developers will have to start solving the problems with this device, and only those using this device will have solutions under their belt. To get to VR + 3D media, go through Apple?

tyiz
0 replies
11h54m

The Wokeness disease destroyed Apple‘s engineering culture. It’s dead.

trzeci
0 replies
8h36m

What's the device model (in Apple signature, like iPhone14,4) when Vision Pro is used?

throwanem
0 replies
20h5m

Living room a stress-inducing mess? Go full virtual reality

Or, I dunno. Clean the living room? You can even watch a movie while you do that!

testmasterflex
0 replies
21h20m

Just give me MacOS in goggles so I can work on a plane with a wireless keyboard and intermittently watch something. I could pay 3k for that.

stevage
0 replies
14h46m

I love the tone this writer strikes. It's just perfect.

One thing I really notice about this stuff is that unlike mobile phones and TVs, this will not be for everyone. There's a big chunk of society that does not want home automation, VR/AR, fitbits, smartwatches, etc etc. Me included.

Seems like kind of fun if you're into that sort of thing, though.

rubyn00bie
0 replies
20h8m

It's definitely a bit niche, given the price of the Vision Pro, but I really think Apple needs to invest in first-party "gaming" simulators along with allowing the corresponding hardware support to easily connect to it (likely via a Mac or dock).

From my experience with VR, the only thing I've been absolutely and definitively blown away by was sim racing. Before getting a PSVR2 I had played roughly 70 hours of Gran Turismo 7, now I'm at over 500 hours in the five months I've had a PSVR2. I want to buy a PC-compatible headset to get access to better pedals, wheels, and simulators (games) than I can get on the PS5. It's quite easy to sink many thousands of dollars into the experience. I believe the margin requirements are there for Apple (eventually) when considering the potential for professional training solutions.

But! Without taking ownership of something, creating some IP (intellectual property) to provide a killer app, and inspire other segments, they're going to be hard pressed to make inroads and get this to scale.

robg
0 replies
5h9m

Why put so much emphasis on FaceTime and other video calls? Seems like that’s a great opportunity to take the thing off and have a conversation. EyeSight too could be marketed more like glances than a full on experience.

righthand
0 replies
14h31m

I was able to try Apple’s VR headset and I just didn’t see any advantage. Overly simple to use to the point where it was annoying in the day-to-day. Heavy on the head.

I went back to my Arch laptop instead.

rfwhyte
0 replies
18h57m

I find it somewhat feckless how basically every review I've read so far of the Vision Pro seems focused more on the "Potential" of the device than on the current reality of the device itself. Every fault is seemingly boot-licked away with promises of how it'll all be "Better" in the future. A fancy VR headset that costs more money than the majority of humans on earth earn in an entire year of their lives should honestly be arriving a lot more fully baked than it seems the Vision Pro is. But hey, just keep giving Apple your money, cause if you give them enough of it they'll have to eventually make a version of this thing that actually delivers on their BS promises right?

racl101
0 replies
18h44m

Cool.

propmaster
0 replies
16h55m

I think Apple's war to replaceable / serviceable batteries reached pathological levels: ok, for some technological limitations you have to use that unpractical umbellical-corded battery, for god sake, transform it in a feature, permitting the use of pluggable power banks, people can reuse those they have around without having to be "plugged into the wall with the 5-foot cord". Maybe they could add a little buffer battery with, let's say 5 minute autonomy, permitting "hot swap" features, hopefully user replaceable. About the weight : is that (IMHO disturbing) external-eye-reproduction feature necessary ? I find it useless and I think a screen reproducing my eyes externally consumes an important amount of energy , that for a 2 hour autonomy device could be important. About the applications, reading this article I'm sure: the object lacks of any "killer app" and friends, cooking with the visor on make me laugh : it's like you are about to solder the food pretending it's carbon steel ! In my day-to-day tech needs, I have instead space for some good AR glasses, like the old Google glasses: for example, live translation, being in a foreign country could be valuable something able to translate at command what I have in front of me, being a biker, could be valuable be able to read data from motorbike without having to move the eye from the street, same for navigator directions, etc. Other ideas? An app that suggest me places around worth to visit. I use oscilloscopes and other lab equipment, could be priceless to have the data accessible without moving the sight from the PCB, etc, etc, etc.

pjmlp
0 replies
10h37m

Lovely it feels like seeing a demo for Holo Lens, how things change the more they stay the same.

pedalpete
0 replies
20h56m

I'd like to understand how this compares to something like XReal with better UX (I'm assuming the software for XReal isn't great, I've never tried it).

password54321
0 replies
17h49m

If they can get near the form factor of Google Glass with good battery that will almost certainly be revolutionary. Just being able to have maps in AR, and not having to keep looking at your phone and look at buildings and immediately see rating/menu, train arrival times and so on. Probably many use cases with current AI as well.

oglop
0 replies
19h30m

I thought my watch was overpriced and sold under a lie, which then cost me serious money to basically buy the same product again. It works fine, but I will always hate it since I had to buy it twice.

The Macbook went from an amazing piece of tech to a useless piece of RSI inducing crap. You have to buy from system 76 to get anything like the old macbooks.

The phone, well, I was forced into an upgrade this year (as part of the watch fiasco above) and was amazed how underwhelmed I was. I went from an X to a 15 and as far as I can tell, the camera is better and it's a little lighter. That's not enough for the money I had to shell out.

All in all, the company has seemed to be going downhill to me for at least 5-8 years. But, I'm just one consumer of many. Other people seem very amazed by these things which just do nothing for me.

nojvek
0 replies
3h34m

I’ve heard Meta is going full throttle to make their Ray Ban form factor glasses have an AR display.

Very much like the XReal glasses but with resolution of Quest line.

I loved my XReals. The biggest issue with them was it had no head/position tracking to keep the screens in one place.

The technology I’d throw my money is glasses that:

- look like fashionable glasses. Not that glasshole crap from Google. Or VisionPro goggles weighing a kilo. XReal are fashionable enough that most people didn’t notice it when I was using it in public.

- Add an unobtrusive display only visible to you, not to bystanders. Text display ought to be crisp and readable.

- Built in speakers audible only to you, not to bystanders.

- track head position so windows can stay floated in space instead of moving with head. The immersion of virtual object.

- some form of finger tracking to select and tap on things. Again private, shouldn’t need to put them infront of my face.

- pretty darn good contextual AI that has understanding of world around me. Show me gps directions. When I meet someone, recall their notes so I can have a meaningful conversations. Fact check my conversations on the fly. Be the bicyle of my mind.

mvkel
0 replies
14h59m

Just saw that the hand tracker continues to interpret input if you're typing on a Bluetooth keyboard.

That's... embarrassing.

This should have been a dev kit.

mring33621
0 replies
1h29m

Apple's new thing is gonna sell a lot of Meta Quest 3s.

meindnoch
0 replies
7h24m

Is there a prediction market for "the Vision Pro is going to flop"?

mch82
0 replies
10h29m

Unexpected that it’s possible to ski while wearing a Vision Pro (demonstrated close to the end of the WSJ video review). That’s the first time I’ve seen that Vision Pro works outside. Skiing is pretty complicated, so that implies a pretty solid display.

matt3210
0 replies
13h39m

They’re headphones for you’re eyes

mariuz
0 replies
15h53m

Related video : Vision Pro Review: 24 Hours With Apple’s Mixed-Reality Headset | WSJ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xI10SFgzQ8

llm_nerd
0 replies
20h51m

The most disappointing aspect to the reviews I've seen is that the cameras -- the things that facilitate the AR -- are not great. They're good, but far from great. In this the example video of a low light situation is terribly noisy, and she complains that she can't read small print because of pixelation. Given that the display itself is very high resolution, this has to fall on subpar cameras.

And the battery life is brutal. Extremely first generation.

layer8
0 replies
19h55m

I found the details interesting, like how she couldn’t really see if pepper was coming out of the pepper mill. Or the cooking app recommending not to actually wear the AVP during cooking due to (presumably) safety reasons.

The spatially placed timers are one of the most compelling use cases I’ve seen so far, but I wouldn’t want to wear 1.3+ pound goggles plus battery for that.

kplex
0 replies
20h48m

Have been waiting on Norman Chans review over at Tested, he's been a consistent and reliable reviewer of VR/AR for years now. That plus Adam Savage++

karim79
0 replies
19h52m

I'm a bit puzzled as to why they did not include at least one HDMI output. Given that it has a fairly impressive hardware spec, it's not hard to imagine someone buying this as a device which could be an face computer when desired, and also for it to double as something like a Mac Mini.

I'm sure it supports Airplay, but being able to plug it in to a real monitor with a wire, wouldn't that make the purchase a bit more appealing?

justanotherjoe
0 replies
5h36m

i never done it, but i imagine making ui for a vr app is going to be a nightmare. So much real estate to fill, and how in your face everything is.

jfoster
0 replies
16h29m

Apple should've called this a dev kit to save face, hedge bets, explain the price tag, and most accurately represent what this is. It clearly does not belong in prime position on apple.com yet.

jack_riminton
0 replies
5h8m

I really hope this product fails. Our lives are already being ruined by screens, having one strapped to your eyes is a retrograde step

iteratethis
0 replies
18h9m

My hot take:

VR enthusiasts, which I guess now includes Apple, assume there's some natural, obvious mass market demand for such a solution if only the tech is good enough.

I'm telling you that this mass appeal doesn't exist. Nobody cares about AR/VR. We've had AR on iOS for a decade and other than navigation and Pokemon, there's no killer apps, no ecosystem.

I took my colleagues to a VR center, where they could experiment with lots of setups, try out games and experiences. They had a great time but nobody spoke about it ever again and nobody bought any device. And these people work in tech.

The tech isn't the problem. The entire interaction simply isn't a fit.

irusensei
0 replies
5h46m

I'd buy it if it have advantages over a monitor. Assuming of course the Airplay capability is spotless and very low latency. AV1 encoding on the Mac side would be a must.

ijhuygft776
0 replies
21h32m

Why is it so expensive? is it that much better than Meta's devices?

hoistbypetard
0 replies
20h11m

I find it interesting that they include the archive.ph link on the front page.

Also, it's hard not to enjoy any review that includes the word "bejeezus."

The thing I most want to know about this device that went totally unmentioned is:

how sharp is the text? Or, how many windows of code can I comfortably see at once and is it more or less than my 30-something-inch monitor?

TBH, that's what will sway me one way or the other on this... my current monitor might have been $3500 nearly 20 years ago. It was $1000+ when I bought it in 2012. If this (or one of its near term successors) could replace it in a way that is better, I'm kind of interested.

gigatexal
0 replies
13h0m

It’s a first gen product. It’ll get better with software updates and better hardware. The original iPhone was a barely useful soap shaped thing that didn’t even have copy and paste. Of course this thing is supposed to be the future of computing but it is still very much a first iteration. It’ll get better.

genman
0 replies
20h4m

The question is - can you run Linux on it?

enson110
0 replies
10h37m

After watching the video, I have two conclusions:

1. Vision Pro will definitely replace all kind of monitors, such as TV, projectors, etc., because it provides a completely immersive watching experience

2. Besides that, due to the limitations of latency and noise issues in the low light situations, it will still be an entertainment toy instead of a productive tool

elzbardico
0 replies
16h58m

If you are already tethered to an external battery, why not move the bulk of circuitry to an external box to make this contraption lighter?

diebeforei485
0 replies
18h14m

Apple will invest in making future hardware generations of this product better (and to some extent deliver improvements to current hardware via software updates) but it seems they cheaped out on the chip. Why does it have an M2, when the 5nm M3 is already available?

As with most Apple products, just like the Apple Watch and the iPhone, I don't think this first gen product is a good buy. Wait for the 2nd gen unless you just want to play with the tech.

danielscrubs
0 replies
10h54m

Steve Jobs is gone. I’ve prophesied that the Apple stock will go up like crazy (the OS is in a near duopoly after all), but the magic spark (it just works/delight/polish factor) will be worse and worse as more and more employees and processes change.

Journalists are the easiest to delight so if they can’t even do that…

All that said, I do think they will succeed eventually with this product, with years of using us as beta testers and shrinking the size of it.

dang
0 replies
21h44m

Also: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it's not - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39190506 - Jan 2024 (226 comments)

cortexa4
0 replies
19h41m

One of the most mind-blowing use cases of spatial computing was using the Vision Pro while cooking. You could create timers for different activities and place them in the locality of the object that you are tracking. This way you can track the recipe throughout its different stages with these virtual timers over different pots, pans, ovens etc.

calini
0 replies
9h24m

I'm incredibly excited for the software that will inevitably get cloned onto the Quest!

beanjuiceII
0 replies
21h51m

what i am wondering about these devices is, my eyes get tired and strained from VR. I can only game on VR for limited amounts of time, I am a pretty fit person but i sweat a TON, de-fogging these devices has been a gigantic pain point.. does apple vision pro innovate in these areas ? I just felt the occulus devices as oppressive 30+ minutes of use.

andrewljohnson
0 replies
12h35m

It seems like such a device _could_ be amazing for skiing.

Pilots use AR and skiing is a lot like flying. I hope this sort of technology gets so common in my lifetime that companies can bother to build it into legit ski goggles.

aenis
0 replies
19h26m

It'll be a flop. Noone with a pretty face would be caught dead wearing this, and fashion trends are set by pretty people. Its creepy.

VikingCoder
0 replies
13h6m

I remember people laughing that the iPod had less storage, less features, didn't sound as good, and was more expensive than other mp3 players already on the market.

People forget that the brand Apple carries so much freaking weight.

People buy the Apple lifestyle. Which now includes AR goggles.

Razengan
0 replies
9h23m

@dang: Why was the "The Best Headset Yet" removed from the title of this post, but the other review post still has the "Magic, until it's not" in the title?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39195419

OrvalWintermute
0 replies
22h36m

I'm going to be much more buy these AFTER they announce the virtual slim & fit function on personas

OOPMan
0 replies
4h51m

Another solution in search of a problem...

Unless the problem is Apple fans having too much disposable income, in which case I guess this is an excellent solution XD