This is a very in-depth, informative and factual review. My hats off to the Verge; great job.
I have racked up hours upon hours of actual, productive work in my Quest 2 and 3, so to say that I am a big proponent of the ideas that Apple is trying to advance would be an understatement. This makes me all the more disheartened to read that, for all their efforts, this release is mired by the same drawbacks that I have encountered across numerous headsets over the last decade:
[..] there’s a little bit of distortion and vignetting around the edges of the lenses, and you’ll see some green and pink color fringing at the edges as well, especially in bright environments. [..] If you’re looking at something bright or otherwise high contrast [..] you’ll see highlights reflecting in the lenses.
Prior to this review, I was actually willing to understand certain seemingly odd decisions, such as the concept of putting an OLED display on the outside, the potential for weight distribution issues, and an external battery, as I was hopeful that, similar to the iPhone, there'd be a cohesive whole in the end that wasn't fully understandable until reviewers got to use it.
I also was, somewhat naive, I admit that, under the impression that their handling of vignetting, etc. would be less noticable then what seems to be the case and, again naively following their marketing videos, had higher FOV expectations.
To draw a parallel, the initial iPhone made some major tradeoffs and at the time odd choices, to say the least, many of which were laughed at for arguably justifiable reasons at the time, but I could see something in that that went beyond then-available touch-only smartphones and PDAs in terms of usability and cohesiveness.
I fail to see the same in this review. Neither as an actual user nor as an enthusiast, do I see anything here that has not been done before. While your then-PDA may have supported 3G and came with many other capabilities the first iPhone lacked, there were certain things in regard to build, design, usability and intuitiveness that were unparalleled in the products at the time. Comparing an iPhone and an iPAQ Pocket PC made the latter seem ancient, even though it could do a lot the iPhone couldn't. Compare a Vision Pro to a Quest 3, I am saddened to say I don't see the same.
The whole thing feels very ... "original xbox" to me. Hear me out.
It was argued that a big part of the original xbox for Microsoft was making sure they had a toehold in the gaming console market because that market had a change of disrupting the personal computer - and if that happened, they wanted to be there for it and have something ready to go.
They did something similar with phones, and we can see how it spectacularly failed - they have zero say or relevance in the massive smartphone market.
I almost feel the Vision Pro is Apple's attempt to put a toe in the water just in case this VR stuff takes off and destroys the smartphone market.
Good analysis.
Part of it too is that Apple feels pressure to do something innovative. They made some big bets in the 2000s that paid off very well but a company that has a hit like the iPhone becomes profoundly conservative. The trouble is that there aren't many market opportunities bigger than smartphones, there's a possible iCar and an iHouse and that's about it.
Apple's worst fear might be being successful as a niche product: what if every seat of Dassault 3Dexperience ends up with an Apple Vision Pro? Apple might be left with the maintenance burden forever but no real prospects for a mainstream product.
I wonder if an iTV would sell. All mondern smart tvs are covered in ads and spying. monitors of similar sizes cost 3x to 4x. so to me there might be a market for a non spying iTV with bultin Apple TV for say 1.5x. Or not, not sure enough people care about those issues.
What I do is buy a smart TV, never connect it to the network (thus making it a dumb TV), and plug an Apple TV (or other devices) into it. So far, this has worked - I haven't seen any ads from the TV itself (the apps running on the Apple TV are another story), and it can't phone home about what I'm watching or otherwise doing with the TV.
Are you sure?
The old idea of giving TVs built-in cellular backup connection is probably still too risky/expensive - dealing with people extracting and repurposing the SIM card with a free (for them) data plan is a hassle. But what about eSIM?
put a faraday cage around your house lol
Mark my words: one of these days, there will be a huge national security scandal involving data stolen from a SCIF, possibly with loss of life as a consequence, and it'll turn out there wasn't any intelligence op or treason involved - just adtech fuckery getting out of hand. Think disposable microphone and eSIM in a popcorn bag, sending telemetry to a publicly-readable S3 bucket, or something, because it's superbowl and they HAVE TO know if you're watching.
Honestly the privacy stuff isn’t even the value proposition, it’s that Apple TVs have great processors that run fast.
Using a typical smart TV or Chromecast is astoundingly slow in comparison. I have no idea how people tolerate it.
Let’s not forget that Apple and apps on the App Store gather plenty of information about you, especially if you aren’t vigilant about settings.
Intriguing and possible I suppose; Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. However, I imagine the numbers would show it's unnecessary these days. My humble estimation is that most people, at least in the developed world, connect the TV to wifi for the convenience if available.
Why bother with an esim, when you can use something like Amazon Sidewalk, just use whatever nearby Echo or other device to send whatever small data packets
Probably best to just connect TVs to some box (Apple TV, Roku, etc) via plain HDMI and leave it that. There's no technical reason to connect TVs to an IP directly anymore IMHO: what would that actually provide over and above what you get with some box/stick?
I like wall-mounting TVs but it sure is a mess to have a power cable and two or three HDMI cables and a composite cable (got a VCR, rubbish Denon receiver won't convert composite to HDMI) and an Ethernet cable and who knows what else hanging below it.
Now that I think about it it wouldn't be hard to cut a few holes and route the cables through the wall and have them come out in a spot that's not too conspicuous but who's going to do that?
People who believe in aesthetics uber alles (Apple fans?) might appreciate a TV that has just a power cable and connects through WiFi but you could mostly accomplish that with the right kind of stick. You might say in 2024 who needs a cable box or Blu Ray but game consoles are still a reason to have HDMI. (Though somehow I think Apple would think plugging a Playstation into an Apple TV is as unthinkable as plugging a phonograph into an iPod.)
With drywall, it is pretty simple to move a wall outlet up the wall.
Ethernet over HDMI exists, luckily it hasn't taken off ...
Apple TV already exists as a set-top box.
And even something similar embedded in some TVs.
What I could see Apple doing is some kind of "Made for Apple TV" feature that combines eArc, HDMI, etc, and makes the TV turn into a "dumb TV" for the Apple TV when it is connected and detected.
That's not the point. That is what I have now and my tv starts up in a big ugly display with an ad for Google TV and an admonition to enable it.
I've read online some smart tvs will complain, often, to please connect them.
I'd like a tv that works for me, not for the tv manufacturer.
It's also got a remote with way too many buttons like "Netflix" "Disney+" etc. Touch them by accident and it immediately goes to "setup your tv account"
to be honest, even AppleTV has per app ads I wish I could turn off. Whatever app is highlighted gets to show ads on the top half of the screen. I'd prefer no ads unless I launch the app
I don't believe there is an "tvOS Embedded". "Apple TV+" is just an app within the OS; there isn't really any similarity between the embedded app and tvOS.
I think a problem with TVs for Apple is that they’d be under pressure to build them in a zillion different sizes. That’s not in their DNA.
A good beamer might be more fitting for them; they would only have to build them in ‘small’, ‘medium’ and ‘large’.
In either case, like you I’m not sure the market is large enough for a company of Apple’s size and DNA (it’s unlikely that they’ll try to find not one huge next big hit, but lots and lots of smaller ones. They’re not Ikea)
Not really. The vast majority of modern TVs are 43, 55 or 65 inch sizes. That's three sizes.
Apple won't even make a consumer-targeted dedicated monitor, I can't see them doing a TV.
Definitely not if Apple takes a 30% cut lol
10 years ago I thought Apple would fail if they tried it because they'd have a chauvinistic attitude about having HDMI or any other ports that aren't Ethernet. (You can't plug your phonograph into an iPod) For that matter I'd expect them to have a chauvinistic attitude about connecting to my home theater.
Back then you were just going to have to deal with the rubbish cable box but I think Apple wasn't going to stand for it.
Today Blu Ray seems to be on the way out and so is the cable box (now we have the spectacle of seemingly competitive vMVPDs that are all priced the same within a few dollars), it now is going to be a fight over game consoles.
TVs though have a serious race to the bottom and the TV with an Amazon Fire TV built in is going to be attractive to a lot of people.
(Also already Apple makes a "TV" removes the tuner and replaces the HDMI ports w/ something else and calls it a "monitor" and charges 5x. No way are they going to cannibalize that market to sell something that only costs 1.5x)
Do you not feel Apple has been successful with the Watch and AirPods? Their wearables revenue dwarfs the revnue of most top tech companies.
Both of those are accessories to the phone.
Actually, I find airpods to be very usable as bluetooth earbuds for all kinds of devices, these days I mostly use them behind my desktop PC when playing games and they work just fine. When I pop them out of the case they automatically connect to my PC just like they would an iPhone or other apple device. They won't automatically switch to the PC like they would for apple devices but they also won't just switch from the PC so I don't mind. Taking them out doesn't pause media but the play/pause controls do work.
I do think that most people without an iPhone won't buy them so they're essentially still bought as iPhone accessories, but they don't have to be!
I agree about the watch though, that's definitely an iPhone accessory.
> Apple might be left with the maintenance burden forever but no real prospects for a mainstream product.
This seems unlikely. Apple has not hesitated in the past to exit market segments they felt did not suit them. To name a few: servers, displays, routers.
And to be fair to Apple, on those sunsetted products, they supported them quite well during the sunset and even after, especially the Xserve.
No way will this tech destroy phones as you know them today. What is going to destroy phones is natural language. Maybe, maybe in the distant future this tech will be mature enough to provide the visual support to a natural language first device.
xBox addressed a very well defined product sector with a couple of big players doing stuff that is well understood. xBox wasn't a toe in the water, they planned a whole strategy around it using known facts about the industry, how people play, what kind of games work, they didn't break much new ground with the xBox. All they had to do was make a compelling, affordable gaming device that had amazing games on it. The rest takes care of itself. Apple Vision Pro is nothing like that. There is no existing market to put your toe in, there are no real competitors, we haven't even found a killer use case for these devices.
No one really knows how these AR/VR devices can fit into everyday life. Currently Apple is working on finding the water to put their toe in. Right now they are at an exclusive oasis when they really need an ocean.
Hard disagree. Phones and computers do text/images/video. Voice input and audio output is a poor substitute for text and not at all a replacement for images/video.
Right. And there are too many scenarios where audio I/O isn't usable (quiet libraries, loud streets) so you always need an alternative.
I didn't say there wouldn't be a screen. But natural conversations will be much more fluid and efficient than a keyboard and google search. Having a conversation is so much better for all sorts of applications.
Today's smartphones have to evolve this way, imo. I don't know what the most efficient hardware realization would look like but I imagine it's something that isn't in your pocket most of the time, more of a sleek wearable. It will need to be able to hear and see what you do.
I kind of disagree with this. They made networking and online gaming on consoles finally a thing most home consumers were interested in. Sure, there were some earlier forays into online gaming/networking on previous consoles (SegaNet, for example), but those were generally pretty niche. Sega only included a dial-up adapter by default, while the Xbox shipped with an Ethernet adapter. Shipping the Xbox with Ethernet made networking on the box pretty simple right at the time when people started buying home routers and broadband internet and opened up the console to easy LAN gaming.
Microsoft made Xbox Live a pretty massive feature of the console a year after launch. While Xbox Live launched a year after the console shipped, I'd still say the planning of it and including the Ethernet port was something nobody else in the console gaming world was doing and ended up defining the console gaming future.
A big part of the success of the Xbox (and maybe it's not the Japan destroyer the fanboys wanted it to be) was that they really really let it be its own product, and develop an ecosystem. They not only made it a "PC for your TV" which was widely what it was held as on release, but also expanded the capabilities of what a console was expected to do.
Sadly they also popularized and solidified the "pay to play games online" feature of consoles, vs the "online play is free except for MMOs" that PCs normally have.
Natural language is even worse than video for quick content consumption: you can’t quickly skip through content that way the can fast scroll through a blog post.
Natural language in place of other inputs, the command can result in summoning up a video for you, or a blog post to view.
If I am cooking and can hold a whole conversation with my virtual chef,that beats a video though. Talking through ideas at my desk would be great. Talking for navigation while I drive, yes please. Shopping with my headphones on and the device seeing everything I see and making suggestions about deals, recipe options, what's low in your pantry, and so on. I'll take that. I see technology becoming more and more transparent in our life. User interfaces will feel awkward when all you need to do is say "show me a video of cats" and it serves it to your companion screen without ever needing to touch tap any UI. No need to even have a web UI for youtube. Just an API and your device does the rest. It can show you a list of related videos without YouTube themselves providing anything more than the data model.
The cost cutting of not needing sophisticated front ends will be a big driving factor if this is as effective as I think it could be.
Anyways, my head is full of ideas like this.
Making interfaces natural language is like making all buttons touch screen. Versatile, yea, but in practice it can be less efficient than dedicated controls or more tactile interfaces.
Bare in mind I am not anticipating the Google Home level of interaction, I am talking full sophisticated natural language. And there is no reason touch cannot play a role, I'm just saying these devices will be unlike our current phones. I've listed some use cases that I think beat out touch easily elsewhere in the comments.
Then the Watch is the future.
Dick Tracy will have his revenge, in this model or the next.
This device? No, absolutely not. I see it as a speculative play by Apple: release a very capable device with a bare-bones ecosystem at a high price.
"Early adopters" will buy it because that's what they do.
"Influencers" will buy it, because that's what they do. Their social media posts about it will give Apple all the data they need to nail down the size of the potential market.
Finally, developers will buy it, because it's cool tech. We'll tell ourselves that it's an emerging market, and we can get it early. The launch of the iOS App Store spawned a gold rush for app developers; I expect that the launch of the AVP and its visionOS App Store will do the same. The size and profitability of that opportunity will be determined by how well Apple develops and popularizes the product.
This is where I'm at on it. I expect the AVP to be best-in-class in terms of hardware and OS-level integration (though, to be fair, I expect the latter will be limited at first in odd ways, in the grand Apple tradition).
I'll get one. I plan to use it for productivity, and as long as that justifies the cost I'll be happy with it. I'll also work on some minimal apps for visionOS. The purpose there will be to "skill up". If Apple releases a more consumer-focus headset that gains adoption, I'll be in a good position to take advantage of that by selling paid apps that are already mature by the time the general public are getting on the bandwagon.
Maybe?
We've heard about "wearable computing" and "personal area networks" for decades at this point. While it still feels like something in the near future, the truth of the matter is that for a large segment of the population, it's already here. I already have an iPhone with me whenever I'm away from home, and usually an iPad as well. If I'm going to be away from home for a while, I've got an MBP in my backpack. All of those devices can hand off tasks between each other to an increasingly large degree - it's not uncommon for me to pull out my phone to show someone a website I had open on my laptop before I left home, then pull out my iPad if they're interested in it so they can interact with it more easily. Until recently, I had an Apple Watch surfacing an integrated notification stream from all of the above.
Today, smartphones are the central "wearable computing" device that ties everything together. They act as a hub for a computing experience. There's no guarantee in my mind that it will continue in that role forever. Maybe the hub will end up being the descendant of the AVP. Maybe it will be something more akin to a Humane AI Pin, or a Rabbit R1.
In other words... phones have already destroyed phones. Smartphones are really wearable computing hubs that we just happen to still _call_ "phones", because that's what they used to be. They're very rarely used for telephony, and many other devices are capable of doing so.
My hope is that it ends up being a "spatial" interface that provides a generic interface so it can be used by pretty much anything.
This is a really important distinction. And if you calculate your phone bill by actual minutes used for talking, it's an insane number of dollars per minute.
I'd be completely unsurprised if the amount of "talking on Zoom/Teams/voice chat" is soon to surpass the total number of minutes talking on phones.
You can talk today to your phone in natural language. They don't seem very destroyed.
There seems something fairly fundamental about smartphone like devices at the moment in that people want a screen where they can see pictures, text messages and so on. A smartphone is a fairly minimal implementation of that. I don't think people want goggles / glasses stuck on their heads especially, at least I don't, regardless of how advanced the tech is. I mean looking around the cafe I'm in it's roughly 100% of people have smartphones, zero have google glass like things. Although the tech has been with us longer than you might think. I first tried a wearable computer with a small eye level display in the 90s and thought hey cool but they never caught on. https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-pc-goes-readytowear
Mobile phones and VR are different non competing markets. AR might eventually compete with phones once you can wear an AR device all day everywhere you go. AR and VR should be treated as distinct; a good VR headset is bad for most AR usecases and vice versa. Maybe at some distant time there will be hardware capable of doing both really well but not for many years. VR fits into daily life as a social experience and will be obvious once eye, face and full body tracking are included with the headset. Even before that if someone solves the network problems with concurrent users and delivers an experience that handles audio well enough to work with multiple people having conversations within earshot of each other. AR is really just putting screens and overlays everywhere, conversational interfaces will have more and better impact than that.
So when a group of people meet, instead of all sitting quiet and typing in their phones, they will all talk to their phones at the same time?
Natural language really sucks as a UI because a lot of things can be done faster than when you speak it. Like volume control as a tip of the iceberg example
I'm extremely skeptical of this, just because of the vast number of situations where speaking-out-loud isn't going to be desirable. It'll have a place, for sure, but I think it'll be more of a supplement to our current phone paradigm.
Natural language wont work as the main control until we have a nueralink type product. I dont want to be talking at my computer constantly.
I could imagine that might have been why it came about originally but that line of thinking doesn't seem to justify the R&D spend alone. I'd imagine they have some belief in it being able to make new business of its own.
If I'm not mistaken this is the first properly post-Steve product?
I think AirPods were post-Steve? And they were both widely mocked at launch and wildly successful.
Like so many Apple things, I thought AirPods were dumb until I got some (as a gift). I'd tried some Logitech wireless earbuds just a couple months before first trying AirPods. Those were dumb. God they sucked.
I've avoided the Watch for that reason. The little conveniences of various Apple-thingies are the sort of stuff you can't un-experience, and then you're stuck buying the damn things forever.
I got an Apple Watch in 2019, and I don't wear it anymore. It was just another thing that needed to get charged every day, and none of the apps are very useful, and most of them are buggy and poorly supported.
I'm surprised people put up with daily charging in a watch where sleep tracking is a core feature.
Why is that surprising? I just charge mine while I’m getting ready in the morning and it last all day and does sleep tracking. My Ultra lasts multiple days on a single charge.
Mine is used for pretty much only the following:
- controlling Spotify - telling time - monitoring my health stuff - an easy to wear timer - getting filtered notifications of things I want to see without grabbing my phone to check - counting rows for knitting
I think about this frequently while using my AirPods. It's annoying that we're all becoming accustomed to spending anywhere from like $130 to $250 on in-ear headphones that aren't guaranteed a particularly long lifespan, to replace wired headphones that an acceptable quality pair can be had for like $15.
But I'll be damned if the AirPods experience isn't far more convenient, and has me using them more than I ever did with wired headphones because they're so quick and easy to use. I can pop one in an ear and immediately I'm listening to a podcast while doing laundry. No cord tethering my head to my pocket, nothing to get snagged on a doorknob, it just works. When I pull one out of my ear it pauses, and resumes when I put it back in. When you only have one AirPod in, it knows and automatically converts the audio stream to mono so you still hear everything.
Still would be nice to have the 3.5mm jack back, but I certainly haven't felt a desire to go back to wired headphones since I got AirPods.
If it makes you feel any better, I think the watch is more of a "pickup or put down" device, especially if you do not usually use a watch. I sometimes wear it religiously, meaning all the time, and sometimes religiously, meaning only for an hour on Sundays and holy days ;).
The Apple watch was 100% post-Steve, conception to delivery [0]. This is definitely the first post-Jony Ive product though. (Rumors are that Ive was against the idea of doing a headset from the start, so it happened either without him, or after he left, depending on when it started.)
- [0] https://www.wired.com/2015/04/the-apple-watch/
Nah, Ive is cited on a bunch of the patents for Vision Pro core technologies, including the first inventor listed on the EyeSight display patent, filed in 2018, 6 years ago:
https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...
Ironic considering, if there is a product whose design arguably should be driven by an obsession with reducing weight and thickness, the AVP is it.
Jobs publicly bemoaned the lack of, and presumably thought a lot about, "headphones for video". I think it's a safe bet that he set the stage for Apple Vision (and probably sketched out a 50 year plan) with current Apple leaders before his death.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO0OGmNDKVg
Yeah, I honestly hadn't thought about those statements in quite a while. Thanks for bringing them back to mind. It makes me ponder whether they had a very rough, early prototype of an FPV display device at that time, and if so, what that looked like. The interviewer briefly mentions what was available at the time, which Steve calls "lousy", so it could also be that he was more fascinated by the inherent concept.
As is often the case, I'd give a lot for companies such as Apple to be more open with their ancient prototypes once a new device gets launched. Sometimes brands, such as Microsoft[0] in the console field showcase iterative prototypes or even produce full-on documentaries of their history, but rarely for new device categories.
I understand why that's not possible, but still, one can dream.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJYsA1jXf60
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/15z92if/apple_won_a_...
I'm sure they're also looking to use the technologies they develop for this in other products, too.
I think the last few years have pretty conclusively proven that there is no VR train to miss. It remains mainly a novelty (with some niche uses) and none of its fundamental issues have been resolved.
I think it's pretty great already tbh. I use it almost daily.
I’m curious to know how long you’ve been using it, and what your primary use cases are
But VR has been going on for a while now. I have a VR headset, I use it occasionally and I love it because it allows things that wouldn't be possible in any other platform. But strapping something on my face is not something I'd want to ever use as my main system. It's like a racing wheel, you use it for some games but it doesn't replace a controller so it's just a very niche product.
It’s not about that. It’s about if some new fundamental discovery shatters all barriers leaving VR in an uncontested position of technological supremacy. You know, the arguable position of the “smartphone” which apple leads in.
The transition from the PC/laptop has been brutal to the prior entrenched players. I’m inclined to agree with OP that this is a play that is about more about creating options now. Might be that Apple executes the winner and happily cannibalizes itself but it does not want to be in a position where it is 5 years behind in terms of R&D if another company breaks through first.
Uh I guess you aren't respecting the NDA then?
Apple's approach to both AR/VR and ML/AI is giving me big "Microsoft missing the boat on mobile" vibes.
Originall XBox was also a money sink for Microsoft, bleeding money, bringing everyone on board to develop for it.
Modern Apple is anything like that.
it feels like theyve been doing RnD on VR/AR, bleeding cash, and theyre making a product to "justify" this cash burn to me. That plus shipping a product is the only way you can iterate, and a common mentality in tech companies is "to ship". IMO theyre late to the game, and excited to see if they can offer anything new
But it isn’t hard to see that people who are constantly glued to their phones scrolling wouldn’t want to just have the screen on their faces instead of holding it. To me it’s the natural evolution of the way we absorb digital info/entertainment
Microsoft failed to disrupt the smartphone market because they tried doing it at a period of all time low Microsoft sentiment, especially in the developer community. If they tried it again today, it might actually work.
Apple putting a toe in the water is roughly equivalent to Microsoft's HoloLens effort. I wouldn't compare it to Xbox or even the Windows Phone. Ironically Apple might fail here because they're developer relations isn't exactly great right now and they might lose this the same way Microsoft lost mobile.
Now do Microsoft and the HoloLens.
I also wonder whether it's an attempt to normalize certain aspects of the form factor to ease people into what Apple sees as the future of this technology.
Namely, I wonder if the tethered battery and lack of dedicated controller exists to prepare people for a future where their headset plugs into an iPhone (or iPad or Mac), which then serves as a battery, co-processor, and input device.
Sorry for the slight tangent, but: What's the current state of VR&AR Headset friction / boot time? This is what I expected Apple to solve first.
With VR/AR headsets, the friction to 'boot in' seems to be one of the biggest problems in adoption, and one that I feel Meta et al don't openly talk about. (Note, I am ignorant of this field in general).
How close are we to seamless, quick boot, such that one puts on a headset and are 'immediately' immersed? (Compare to my phone, which unlocks before my eyes even have time to focus on the screen).
(My admittedly poor) web searching of this question just tends to offer webpages on common boot issues (e.g. 'Quest boot time'/'Vive startup time' just leads to complaints and support forums.)
I suspect this also to be a primary issue with the true 'metaverse' taking hold. GTA6 will, in my opinion, be the luxury 'hang-out' metaverse, but will likely take many minutes to access. I feel that Microsoft could have made Minecraft the de facto metaverse (by implementing certain features), but will never quite get there. Perhaps a WebGL game that can take you to a bookmarked 'spacial' lobby within 3000ms can get real traction.
What's booting?
Nothing I use with any frequency gets rebooted except for updates, more or less.
Exception: non-Apple stuff. Because those things tend to die while "sleeping" and unplugged, very quickly (my secondary work Windows laptop, which burns almost half its battery per 12 hours in "sleep mode"; my Steamdeck, which is barely better than that; the Switch though it's almost always on the dock anyway so that's rarely an issue)
I agree that we should pretend that my question said "from standby" instead of "boot"
If it's like iOS devices, I'd assume less than a second to interactive, potentially so fast that most people don't notice it isn't instant.
If it's like macOS, maybe 2-3 seconds to interactive.
It shuts down completely when the battery is unplugged / swapped. Very different from other Apple products. Boot time is 37 seconds according to https://youtube.com/watch?v=GkPw6ScHyb4&t=40m38s
It is an iOS device. It's essentially an iPad Pro (with a lot of obvious other hardware) running a modified iPadOS.
Having used a Quest 2 and owning a Quest 3 personally I can tell you the delay is essentially zero. It takes 2-3 sec to get the headset fully secured around your head, and the Quest will wake up the very moment it starts to get moved. That's part of the reason it annoys me so much-- just moving the controllers will wake it up, even if it's sitting on my desk.
You can turn that feature off, at least on the Quest 3
Odd that it doesn't work that way for me with controllers, maybe it's a setting you chose? For me no amount of moving the controllers or even pushing the buttons or triggers will wake the headset, it only wakes up if I put it on or through the power button.
This is a pretty strange complaint to me. When you use a VR headset you don't really put it on and take it off frequently during a session. When you take it off you can plug it in and it'll stay in standby, which is similar to phone standby. Its also not any slower than Playstation standby.
It's not a complaint (from me or my acquaintances), it's something that I thought (possibly incorrectly, but as mentioned I am ignorant hence me asking) was a hindrance to the success of the market. I.e. when I speak to most people re: VR/AR, they say something like "It sounds like a lot of faff", or "I have one gathering dust, I can't be bothered to use it".
I have no skin in the game and no intention of buying anything for another couple of years at least, FWIW.
Anyway: Sibling post says ~5 seconds from standby - Which seems very reasonable to me, so I suppose it's just lack of compelling features (subjectively to the people in question, not regular users) that result in the 'gathering dust'... Which means the people I have spoken to haven't wanted to bother keeping it on standby (thus increasing the barriers further).
It takes substantially more effort to put it on than it does to "boot up"
And while it may sound weird that putting it on is such an ordeal, keep in mind that there's a lot of inherently fiddly bits and many have compromises. Like the PSVR2 requires me to go turn the lights on, because it uses inside-out tracking which doesn't work well in a dark room. But also you have to fiddle around with the position of it, get it in a comfortable spot, wiggle it a bit so the lenses line up with your eyes as you had it last configured, etc... Then realize that you smudged the lens with your forehead so take it off and clean it and do it again but more carefully this time.
I have a MQ3 I haven't used in a few weeks sitting on the charger. I picked it up, spent 10 seconds finding the power button, hit button, put it on, waited 25 at the meta logo then was in VR. Didn't test opening a game but for a big one it's probably the same 10-45 seconds to start I'd imagine.
It's not something I ever really thought about, you boot it once a session and it goes idle/wake, not hibernate if you just put it on your desk for a minute.
The MQ3 is WAY better than my Vive and better even than the MQ2 at being a "throw on and gun" quick device. It's way lighter, less work to get going with.
The MQ3 is an awesome device, I love it.
boot time is not nearly as relevant as with a phone where you're constantly turning it off.
One Apple Vision review mentioned that there is no "hot swapping" of the battery. Which means the headset shuts down when you swap the battery pack (which lasts 2 to 3 hours). They said booting it up again takes 30 to 40 seconds, if I remember correctly.
Cold boot time on a Quest is roughly half a minute, though most of the time, you'll just wake it up from standby. For testing, I just put my Quest 3 on my head, and without pressing the power button, I counted five mississippis (seconds) before I was fully in their heavily customized version of Android with hand tracking recognizing my digits.
Out of curiosity, what are you using for work on your Quest? I also have a Q2 and have tried, maybe not too seriously, several of the screen sharing apps to do work but couldn't quite get past the resolution and lag. Perhaps that has gotten better since, it's been some time.
Instead now I use it for entertainment and very much like it, but if I could make that next leap it would be great!
For that purpose, the difference between the Q2 and Q3 was so vast that I cannot oversell it. While it's still not perfect due to the resolution, the switch to pancake lenses made screencasting to the Q3 something I could do for many hours at a time and enjoy it, whereas on the Q2 with the limited sweet spot in the center, it was really only for very specific use cases. On the Q2, even slightly off center becomes unreadable; on the Q3, you can move your eyes right to the panel border and still read text at the edge. The main use case is heavy multitasking with Confluence, Jira and an IDE in full-sized windows.
Thank you. Your experience with the Quest 2 mirrors my own. I'm undecided if I will try a Q3 or skip a generation. It definitely seems like things are moving in the right direction and I'm excited about that!
I'd advice you to skip another generation. I can give my experience with it.
I have Q3 and try to use it for work from time to time and it is still not enough to replace an actual monitor, at least for me.
FOV of 110 degress is too narrow, maybe 140 degress would solve it, but I'm not sure. The thing is that apparently I glance to content without turning my head a lot and I discovered it when I tried to use Q3 for actual work. Even though the lenses and POV are much better than on Q2 and other wired VR glasses it's not enough for me still. Also sometimes reflections in the lenses are too bright and distracting and I don't know how to fix this.
Resolution is much much better than Q2 and Quest S that I also have, but it's still not enough. And IPS panel is the biggest downside of it. That should've use OLED instead.
But the main problem that stops me from using it is the smoothness of the whole process of starting to work. You can't just sit behind you desk, put on the glasses and start working. The whole process reminds me of preflight preparation: you need to ensure that the software is running and correctly setup on you PC and that's not always the case. You always need to ensure that you have controllers by your side, because hand tracking often fails, and Q3 often struggles to find my hands at all. Basically, software wise it's not there for a 100% smooth ride like with screens where you just sit at your desk and start to work without a single hitch.
In short, it's like a death by thousand cuts. Some people can tolerate some of them and can use Q3 for work, but in my case I wasn't able to tolerate any of them and that kills it for me for now. I hope for Q4 or maybe Quest Pro 2 after seeing a slim prototype that Mark showed some time ago.
Same. I find it useless for work stuff. I have a large screen at home and in the office. I don't need to look at a large screen through a heavy headset on my face that I feel bad after wearing for more than 30 min. I also don't find the VR meeting experience better than a zoom call.
Virtual Desktop for desktop work
You captured my feeling perfectly. In particular
I too was hoping for the sum of the parts to be something special.
I’m picking my AVP up on Saturday. I’ll give it an honest go but expect to return it within a week. I’ve owned most VR headsets and they sit in a drawer, rarely used. For a few hundred dollars I’m ok with that. For a few thousand I am not.
I got a Hololens 1 that turned out to be a white elephant and I read a lot of stories about people buying VR headsets and abandoning them so when I got an MQ3 I was quite deliberate about getting a variety of games and apps and spending enough time with VR to succeed at it.
I co-founded a (failed) vr startup so I’ve got my 100 hours in the Oculus and Vive
What makes you continue to try all the VR headsets if they keep sitting in a drawer at the end of the day (honest question)?
When I see comments like this, and there seem to be many, I can’t help but think VR is a technology in search of a problem. With every platform Apple has launched they show the problem it will solve for customers and I just don’t see that here, and really haven’t seen it with any VR headset, at least not enough to overcome the downsides.
I can’t help but think of this video of Steve Jobs… “you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try and sell it.”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o
I have a lot of questions. Would you recommend them? Do you work primarily in VR? I haven't tried VR but the use-case I envision is to put on a VR headset and be "at work".
Yes, no, maybe. Thing is, I've never used a device or software that I haven't found faults with. Overall, the Quest has turned into a solid, though still imperfect, platform, with Meta pushing updates at a consistent, but also breakneck pace, sometimes at the expense of addressing existing issues. Hand tracking from the early days of the Q2 has made massive leaps and has become my preferred method of navigation for its reliability and ease, yet at the same time, the changes in camera placement between the Q2 and Q3 lead to a decrease in controller tracking performance in very specific scenarios. Essentially, they are constantly experimenting, both on the hard- and software front, trying to optimize what they can within their very low price point. Still, if you are interested and have an idea what you'd like to use the headset for, I'd recommend trying one within the return window, though I'd strongly suggest adding a "halo-style" strap (BoboVR is my current favorite) for comfort.
No, a more healthy mix between a single 27" JOLED and the Quest 3 for workloads that require more screen real estate but can go without as much overall resolution. About 60/40 in favor of the regular panel.
I use my xreal air as my airplane display. I would love the Quest 3's higher resolution but my understanding is that compared to the XA the Q3
- Requires controllers - Requires wifi instead of plugging in the cable and it just works* - Has fairly limited battery life
Am I mistaken on these points / do you think it would work on an airplane despite them?
* To be fair, the XA only "just works" in vanilla display mode, the fancy xreal multiple virtual monitors feature called Nebula doesn't work well enough to be worth the hassle.
Tried my hand at a Viture One for two weeks, but the diopters did not work with my specific vision, perhaps I'll give the new XA2 a shot now that they are more available in the EU.
Concerning your question, it's very different. While VR content can be cast both over USB or wireless, for flat-screen casting, wireless is the preferred and most comprehensively supported way, which, whilst tether-free, can be less seamless when out-and-about than just plugging in a cable. Note that wireless does not require a local WiFi router or internet connection but can also be handeled directly from a host device, still, less reliable than a plain cable carrying video signal. Furthermore, as the Quest has its own full on operating system based on Android, rather than receiving an HDMI signal like the Viture or XA, there is an additional point of complexity to consider, and it looks a lot less inconspicuous than the XA. Lastly, tracking via the cameras is a great advantage in general use, though a very inclosed, darkish space such as an aeroplane may push the small sensors to their limit and yes, battery life can be a limit as well, though I do hot-swap BoboVR battery at the back of my skull for that. Still not as convenient as just using your phones power and having that charged.
Quest does not require an controller at this point, hand tracking is currently my prefered way of navigating the system day-to-day.
Overall, I'd agree, on an airplane I'd consider the Quest to be of marginal usability.
Never buy version 1 I guess (unless the company is fighting for survival and has to deliver, with 100% focus).
I have a Quest 2 right now and attempting to use it for desktop computing just doesn't work all that well for me (their Quest Link app with desktop windows, or SteamVR desktop feature; might also have to use the Meta Workspace app or whatever it was called in the future). All of the text feels a bit blurry and it's like the resolution just isn't there.
I don't even have that high of a resolution dev setup outside of VR, just four 21.5" monitors running at 1080p. I do catch myself squinting a little bit at them sometimes, but 10, 11 and 12 font sizes (in JetBrains IDEs and VS Code) seem too small in VR and going bigger decreases the lines of code per screen to an annoying degree.
Best I can do in VR for that ends up being one huge monitor in front of me, two on each side, as well as a huge overhead one, but that leads to a lot of turning my head, maybe just a bit more than I'd like to.
I'm not sure whether it's the headset with the lenses that's messed up, whether it's my eyes that are just bad, or the fact that the distance between the lenses should be a little higher than the headset allows for (at least based on what an IPD test I read online suggests), but the end result is that the experience isn't very good... yet.