Their sales pitch was "it makes it amazing to read articles in safari"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYkq9Rgoj8E&t=5410s
$3500 to... look at a floating web browser? Surely they can come up with something. Give me UV/IR vision, let me see the pipes under the ground, show me how to assemble the furniture I'm looking at, give me a template to paint by numbers of a real canvas -- why is this basic concept of "a $3500 novelty device should enable me to do something _new_" so hard for a 3 trillion dollar company to grasp?
Are they just hoping someone comes up with all the above in the next 6 months? If they did, would anyone care? $3500 is relatively a lot of money if you're already giving them iPhone and Macbook money. The supermajority of the world doesn't make more then 60k a year, pre-tax. Actually, the supermajority makes vastly less than that.
I guess I'll wait and watch and see if they prove me wrong, but I suspect no matter how good it is, it'll flop.
There is no doubt that AR will eventually get good enough that the devices are paper thin, weigh nothing, and have no external battery (of course). Everyone wants _that_ device, but you have to start somewhere. Apple can afford to be patient in this space and their considerable moat of intellectual property will allow them to carve out the high end of the AR market and then work down as they did with iPhone.
It would not surprise me if they are earning 90% of the gross margins in the AR device space within three years.
Just not the same scenario and game plan. Brilliant design is one thing, but Apple has landed at the intersection of Hardware & Software in a developed field. Right? Steve Jobs pulled back from running OS on clone hardware, because Apple’s winning scenario was to do both to make great designed products.
At 3k+ this is classic early adopter scenario. Maybe there are enough people with stupid money who will work out issues for the later ~1k version…provided another company doesn’t sweep in and eat Apple’s lunch
Holy sht. Can people really* stop comparing launch of VR and with Iphone?
I have been reading tons of comments here and only to see the OP, and folks with similar post here to be proven wrong. Again after again, proven wrong!
The fundamentals question is where is the killer app! Like original poster, this shouldn't be hard for a three trillion dollar company!
Only if there was a way to filter out post that go along the lines of
"....The first iPhone was pretty crappy.... "
The difference here is of course that VR/AR has been thriving already. Apple is late to the game as they are most of the time, but the reactions I have seen so far in YT/Twit comments are the amazed reactions of the tech illiterate general public, they don't care what it does, but it does have an Apple logo!
Apple is not bringing anything new to the table. No virtual objects, no 3d anything, just 2d planes showing video/photos which non-Apple VR/AR has had for the longest time.
This is just from the briefest search: https://www.vrdesktop.net/. Already exists and looks more fully featured than Apple's stuff.
Apple is a 1T company, the "richest and most technologically advanced company in the world", so why don't they act like it?
They do seem to have an impressive resolution on the thing, but only Apple can ask for 3.5k, no other headset bothers to have as high a resolution atm because they know consumers will balk at such a high price...
Apple's press release shows it as if some rando people are using the thing at home as if it's not going to be art studios, etc that buy the headset and a couple of hardcore Apple fans. No regular person is buying a 3.5k VR/AR set to look at a crappy 2d photo gallery app.
Other VR/AR software for existing headsets like the Vive/Oculus etc already do actual virtual objects/interaction as baseline and Apple couldn't even be bothered to include something like that for their press release. Because they don't need to, I suppose. People will eat it up anyway.
Yep it iterated and yep app store really rocket charged it beyond where it was envisaged on day one. But it was also an existing market, albeit one that was at the foothills of its potential.
AR/VR too is at the foothills of its potential. But the fundamental problem is: even when its potential is realised, it'll still just be relatively niche and relatively fringe. This stuff simply is not going to be mainstream in a serious way. And without being mainstream, there is no real revenue stream of utility for a company of Apple's size.
I have no idea why people are doing such backflips to come up with potential use cases but most of them just aren't runners. This will sell to an extent for Apple but it'll be a rounding error on their balance sheet at best - even in future versions - though I imagine a lot of the tech will end up elsewhere, so it won't be a complete lost cause for Apple.
This... judging by extremely careful wording of a web which needs to play very very nice with vendors to get these early access peeks, seems to not have it. More like nicely polished hammer looking for nails everywhere. Yes, many aspects fine tuned above competition, but competition is not asleep and the gap is not that big. In some aspects, it will be objectively worse (constant powerbank cable which lasts barely 2 hours, realistically a bit above 1 hour breaks immersion very effectively compared to ie Quest, plus you want to have 4 powerbanks and furiously swapping over one longer evening? Not even going into sharing ultra expensive device with rest of household).
Phones are absolute must in modern world, they were already 90% there when first iphone arrived. VR/AR goggles are still considered idiotic by majority of population, maybe Apple can change that but it will take few years at least.
It had some must have killer features for the time. Blackberry and feature phones had some pathetic "mobile web" while the original iPhone would load real websites.
…anyways, arguable. What’s inarguable is that the iPhone 4, which came along only 3 years later, was a damned miracle. Beautiful design, Retina screen, something approaching a “real” camera—just remarkable progress in that time.
I’m unsure if Apple is going to be able to pull off that hyperspeed progression this time. The Vision Pro seems to have truly wild capabilities, but for a lot of money and with very little battery life. Are we going to have a big leap in price/performance soon? I dunno.
Just think what Vision will be after 10 iterations and a decade of time.
It was my first iOS device and I even paid the 14.99$ for the update to get mail, calendar and contacts. I played way more games back then than I do now since I was often without a Wi-Fi network.
This particular song has gotten pretty familiar.
No Wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
The Vision is about the 50th VR device, in a market that's already quite busy with the Vives, Indexes and Quests. It brings nothing new, and is just one more high resolution VR device (which existed before for cheaper).
Even if Apple made a similar price cut here, the device would still cost over $2000.
Assembling furniture
- 1d written description : 1 person half a day
- 2d illustration : ~2 people and a 3 days
- 3d animation : ~3 people and 2 weeks
- 3d interactive thing : a small team and a month.. At least ?
Is it really going to yield a ton more sales?
You can see it in other media. Zillions of creative people write books, a lot fewer shoot movies, and fewer still make interactive narrative video games
All the 3D experiences you end up having are quite simplistic bc no one wants to invest in it. Could you make an Avatar level narrative in VR? It'd be super tricky, but maybe with enough money you could. (arguably there aren't enough people at the moment who know how to make compelling 3d interactive experiences). Will it be worth the extra cost ? Unlikely. It's hard to imagine it being more than marginally better at best
Maybe AI will somehow help speed up the process substantially (and lower the costs), but I'm a bit skeptical it'll help enough
The only thing I can think of where VR would make a huge difference is maybe horror. I'm not into horror, but I could see VR being a huge step up in terms of spookyness
of course still a gimmick
I’m more exciting about a new version of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmFk0AKbXlQ
Given the design already in CAD, how about 1 person in a day.
It takes more work, but also (hopefully) provides an additional value. At sufficient scale it might make sense to do this (something like IKEA).
There was someone on here some time ago who showed and talked about his setup, he had been doing his job as a software developer reclined in VR for years at that point.
Here's the thing though: smartphones didn't have "a" killer app per sè I don't think, but they became part of everyone's daily lives in a really short timeframe. PCs and laptops didn't have "a" killer app, but pretty much everyone here has it as their day job.
I don't think it's about whether it has a killer app or not, I think it's whether it can become normalized and mainstream, and be listed alongside the TV, PC, smartphone, the car, etc; something everyone will have in one way or another.
That said, I'm cynical myself; modern-day VR and AR has been tried for a decade now or thereabouts; Google wasted billions on Google Glass, Facebook bet their whole company on the metaverse / AR / VR and has had to backtrack, Magic Leap was a mystery company that raised billions and failed to deliver, Oculus and Vive have their place now as a somewhat niche and pricey gaming implement - popular as arcade / events (I went to one for a birthday party this weekend) and middle class households that have the money and space for it.
So there's a market, mostly in gaming, but it's not become as mainstream yet as e.g. the smartphone. I don't personally believe it will, but if anyone can take an existing concept, iterate on it and make it mainstream, it's Apple.
The touch interface elegantly solved the problem of not having a full keyboard and mouse.
The ultimate vision for these headsets is not yet realized: to unintrusively overlay enriched visual information over our surroundings. This doesn't hit the unintrusively piece by a longshot, nor are the apps that realize this vision even announced.
Vision Pro does, however, provide a first step platform to develop those apps when the tech does shrink to an everyday wearer.
The smartphone's killer apps were messages, phone, email and calendar. By the time the iphone came around it was just to eat Blackberry's lunch because it gave us multitouch as the killer interface.
And this is WWDC. They’re getting this in front of developers to build the first third-party apps. Years ago, we applied to get Apple TVs for $1 and then came up with an app to launch on it. If you’re early, you have limited competition and can rank in the charts relatively easily (obviously at the risk of fighting over a smaller market).
When they launched the firs iMac, the paradigm shift was personal computers are for everyone, and belong to every home and should fit into your surroundings. There were a lot of things you could not do with your iMac that you could do with a lot of much cheaper PCs, especially outside the US. You could do a lot more with your BlackBerry than you could with the iPhone, but here we are.
This seems like a similar strategy. They are trying to win the space by changing the paradigm and moving xr from metaverses to visual computing.
That said, they have had a lot of flops with this strategz as well (Pippin, Newton, eWorld, iTunes Ping) so it's not a given that this approach will work.
But I'm definitely happy to see this strategy reemerging, as opposed a gazillion versions of iphone with a slightly better battery, one more camera, and less or less periphery in the box.
They didn't really find a unique selling point, and they didn't really nail the implementation. Few versions later they refined the product and their messaging for it, and carved out a decent market for it. I actually think the original iPhone announcement was pretty close to this VR headset. It's only selling point was that it did everything nicer and better than the competition, and then it relentlessly iterated. iPhone was an easier sell though than expensive ski goggles - barrier is much lower with it.
It's clear(ish) they have some impressive tech in it, and are 'best in market'. I wouldn't be surprised if "Vision Pro" became a lot more of a compelling device in 5 years time. But right now it doesn't really seem to give me $3500 worth of benefit.
They should be bursting at the seams with out of this world ideas that this amazing hardware could support. And yet, nothing.
Looking for a killer app you are looking at this to be a traditional VR or even AR device, that is not what this is.
This is about having a screen anywhere, multiple screens and turning anything into a screen and any environment into one, hence the name Vision Pro, that is how Apple are trying to sell it.
If you watched the keynote I think that was clear, everyone else seems to missing the point and comparing this to traditional headsets.
The fact when they showed gaming, it wasn't a VR or AR game, it was a traditional game on an AR screen says it all.
I can already do all that traditional stuff on a macbook or ipad, and "have a screen anywhere", and those things are more portable because I can just sit it on the table instead of having to untangle A CABLE from my clothing and then find somewhere to place a headset that doesnt sit flat like an ipad or macbook.
Then there's the fact that ipads and macbooks have keyboards.
With no killer app, this is a boondoggle, I think.
I think most people are trying to find better value in the product.
Headsets focused on providing a screen already exists, NReal is a decently selling product. Sure the Vision Pro has way better resolution, but we're also assuming that NReal and co will have better resolution in their next iterations.
To jest, if a VR screen dedicated device comes to market in 2024 with a tad lower resolution than the Vision Pro at half or a third of the price, will the Vision Pro still have a market as a virtual screen ? At that point it will need to justify the price with all the other things, the hand tracking, the surroundings integration etc. All the stuff people are trying to find value in outside of it being a screen.
It's Project Looking Glass 2.0
Which is what traditional VR and AR devices offer. Being able to use apps in VR or AR isn't new.
It could have had a killer app: games. Most VR headsets suck in one way or another, Apple could make one that's actually nice to use.
Sadly, for some bizarre reason Apple still don't understand games. They even have pretty good GPUs now and they're still not making an Apple TV Pro to compete with the PS5.
Even just the Vision could've been announced along with a couple exclusives, but instead they have an offhand mention of Arcade.
Could they really not have given some units to some game devs and tell them to come up with some cool ideas?
This thing just feels incredibly rushed. It's like Apple felt left out of the all the AI hype the last couple months, so they were forced to show this thing before it was really ready.
Because if you go outside wearing this you're going to get instantly mugged. If they were to release something like Pokemon Go before the price comes down, that would likely just result in a bunch of kids getting murdered on the subway or whatever. Much better to drive down the costs by first selling it to people who are excited to use it for coding or whatever.
Perhaps they can find application is e-commerce. Sites could start building virtual stores and you get a feeling that you’re browsing wardrobes. I don’t know if that’s a thing but it kind of makes sense as a use case.
Early adopters first, of course. Maybe it really is too early? Depends on the response.
Oops.
At this point, floating pages and waypoints are the "Hello World" of AR platforms.
Being able to stand side by side with people to work on something rather than broadcast my face into their face. It's just... so much more natural. All of the social cues like concentration, wandering away to think, nodding your head along with a group conversation you stumble upon and are now actively engaged in. If I can bring my data/apps in but keep them private - sold
Interacting digitally with the environment - this is a new one but I think it's going to be huge. Anything involving maps or layouts, you can plan it prior, and then overlay it on the day when you get on site. AR on a phone is meh because you have to hold it up, but when it's just a gesture I think it's going to open up whole new use cases that were just out of reach (pun intended)
It could be great, but productivity will likely need over 4k per eye to be anything beyond a novelty.
Depending on how the hardware develops, it could become something great for sure. most people calling it a novelty are taking about the device as it's been announced, not the theoretical future it could potentially have if it was different.
This is a general purpose computing device, so seeing it have a great browser setup is a big deal.
Apple in contrast? They deliver a whole different game in terms of quality and capability, and now others will take up developing stuff for the platform, just like it happened with every new class of device Apple pushed out. And financially, Apple doesn't have to take care of anything, they have more cash on hand than the GDP of entire countries (165 billion $ [1], more than Kuwait, Ukraine or Venezuela [2]).
And even if there don't appear any VR apps - movie addicts will love it.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/05/how-markets-biggest-companie...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
But it's okay, I think. It has the browser, Unity integration, okay visual passthrough, etc. Ticks all boxes.
It's a platform. It'll get cheaper, it'll get better, and developers and the market will do the rest. There's a lot of time between now and "early next year" for 3rd party devs to come up with a lot of apps and ideas.
As someone else said, this is the first release of something that'll end up the size and weight as a pair of sunglasses; at that point, I think it will be as ubiquitous as iPhones are.
When I travel this is a game changer for me. Right now I lug a small second screen so I can work. I will happily drop $5k to fix this problem and just travel with this plus a small laptop.
They did show a few third party apps interacting with real world objects (the train moving on a table) but I wonder what amount of that was concept and what was real.
Connecting the virtual objects to those in the real world I feel is a killer feature that will open up a huge set of opportunities. If this doesn’t have that yet, it’s still more VR than AR in my book.
And think about the mainstream industry. It's been years and the peak of AR is still Pokemon Go and VR is Beat Saber. Apple Vision looks to be twice as good as the Meta Quest for 10x the price.
I don't necessarily know the answer here, but my gut feeling is that defining this device based on a "killer app" is like trying to define the original iPhone as needing a "killer app". It didn't necessarily have such a thing but it did end up being pretty big.
The Maps app was so much better than printing MapQuest maps or trying to use the flip phone version of MapQuest.
Being able to access the real internet from anywhere was futuristic.
You could use iMessage without paying $0.10 per text?!?! Can you even imagine paying $0.10 per text (and $0.25 for every text after the first 100 per month?)
Visual voice mail was also a game changer at the time.
And you got an ipod along with all that. (The iphone was my first "big" ipod device)
Very literally Excel, for business users. That's what most laptop users were running in the 90s.
Then Word for personal use, typically students writing their thesis/homework.
The original iPhone's killer app was an affordable data plan. At the time, data was stupid expense, priced almost as a velben good. But by 2007, AT&T launched a $60 unlimited data plan for their iPhones. Feature phones have been using the web since the turn of the millennium, but nobody could afford it. Nobody bought the smart phones that existed because nobody could afford it. The Motorola Sidekiq was an unattainable toy for most families, but that unlimited data plan suddenly made smart phones viable to most of the population.
For reference, that plan with unlimited data still had a limited number of calling minutes and texts per month!
Those form factors were massive improvements in portability and accessibility, without necessarily having a killer app compared to its predecessor (laptop not doing anything a desktop didn't do, iphone didn't do much new at first but now has translator apps and GPS and stuff)
The headset, though, seems clunkier (awkward non-flat shape, has cables, no keyboard) and you trade that off for... a bigger, 3D screen that shows you mostly the same thing.
I could be wrong, but it feels like an expensive regression in portability.
If it has no killer app and isn't a revolutionary form factor in terms of portability and ease of access, can it win? Maybe it's easier to access than I'm imagining. Maybe I'm wrong. We'll have to wait and see, I guess.
I'd love to work comfortably lying in a hammock, couch or bed. The monitor part is solved, it seems, I just need one of those split keyboards where each half attaches to one hand.
I'd also love to feel like I'm in a colossal movie theater without all the viruses, noise and popcorn from other people.
I'll pay good money for either.
Walk into a physical store and stand in an aisle. How many products can you see in a 360 field of vision?
Visit any webstore. How many products can you see on your screen at once?
To me this is the completely obvious application for VR. But in order for it to be actually useful you would need an online shopping experience that worked with it. At the very least you would have to 3D model every product.
Nobody wants that. People shop online to avoid the annoyance of a physical location. I can shop for things while I squeeze out turds, why would I ever exchange that for strapping an overpriced screen to my face? The average person favors convenience and cheapness above all else, to a huge extent.
Melee in VR feels awful. It feels like swatting flies.
Shooting in VR is amazing. There are multiple games that let you play Star Wars battlefront knockoffs so you can cosplay the droid army.
Go look at the VR porn subreddit. It's really not impressive. Also the story that VHS won because of porn is a lie. Porn doesn't drive innovation like most people claim.
Spending $3500 just to wank at VR videos is crazy.
This has no killer app and is being sold at full price.
I think it may be positioned more for professional use and then, "oh yeah, you can have a great movie and game experience, too."
Yes.
> If they did, would anyone care?
Also yes.
This is the same problem we saw with the metaverse. It's all hype and no substance. Their best ideas to put into the presentation were looking at web sites.
Why would web sites be better to look at in VR?
same goes to vx effects in movies.
what about designing App UI / UX where you're completely in the flow and don't want to be disturbed.
how about complex data anylsis ?
If the price was not an issue and apps are mature, I could defenitly imagine lots of use cases around immersive work tasks ...
By that logic, Tesla shouldn’t be the top selling car, why would you buy them instead of a 25k Corolla? Many are willing to pay a premium for a best-in class-experience, which is what this headset is.
There’s a lot, lot of disposable income in the world, but not held by the supermajority.
Other headsets highlighted gaming, metaverse, industrial/medical applications,....
With iphones you suddenly had a multipurpose device for relative little.
With this, we know the market and it's not strong by any means
It was mentionned in the keynote as well...should Apple really brag about their patent minefield in a field that is in need of more players and more efforts to push it forward ?
> In many cases it literally hurt to do so. Not with the Apple Vision Pro – text is super crisp and legible at all sizes and at far “distances” within your space.
That's the part I was most intrigued with, and on one size given the 4K resolution per eye, text being readable was expected, but I can't wait to have more details on how "crisp and legible at all sizes" it is. I have no idea of what's M.Panzerino's threshold is for "crisp", hope it's better than just Full HD level.
> It was mentionned in the keynote as well...should Apple really brag about their patent minefield in a field that is in need of more players and more efforts to push it forward ?
That I didn't understood. Should that be a message to the competition? What should that tell me as a developer? What should that message tell me as a consumer?
As a consumer may I don't care how many patents are there. Because I don't have a benefit at all.
As a developer may it means, that a develop for a consumer base, but it is hard to predict how big that will be. Competition needs to work around those patents or will not exists at all because of possible licensing fees. So, should I start development or not?
(It makes me sick to the stomach personally)
And the 4K is across your whole FOV, I would like to see a comparison with some standard monitors (4K at 27" and 32") at particular distances from your eyes.
I suppose because they didn't publish anything it is still significantly worse than hi-res monitors (just better than all previous headsets).
There are a lot of other factors like fill factor (screen door effect) and there are definitely some optical designs that can increase PPD as well. Apple bought Limbak recently, btw, it's possible they use a similar design as what is described here: https://simulavr.com/blog/ppd-optics/
Once those virtual displays show text at any sort of angle the aliasing effects will be much higher too.
I think the tech might need to get to 8k+ before it starts feeling as good as "retina display" did when Apple launched that.
The Quest 2 has about 4 million, which is undoubtedly more than 0.24 million. Has "order of magnitude" joined "exponential" as another math expression stolen as a synonym for "rilly rilly rilly"?
Even the Wikipedia page makes reference to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude
"Similarly, if the reference value is one of some powers of 2, since computers store data in a binary format, the magnitude can be understood in terms of the amount of computer memory needed to store that value. "
int(log2(n)) is a perfectly acceptable order of magnitude, especially when considering computers, at least to me.
More seriously the repeated quote-the-marketing in this article was annoying. You’re explaining your use of it, and your experience is the only thing that matters. Everyone has read the specs at this point.
Well, Apple was the first 1T company. I don't know which grade they were learning me that companies maximize profits and minimize expenses. Until it works for Apple, they will happily put whatever price tag. It makes no sense to complain. People will either complain with wallet (not able to buy it) or Apple will just continue to be a behemot.
The Macbooks look expensive too until you compare them to similar Windows laptops with equivalent screens, trackpads, and battery life.
For example, I have an iPhone 11. I got it the day it came out, and I really don't need another phone. I will continue to use this one until it breaks, or probably for another 5 years, whichever comes first.
Maybe for some people, it's beneath them to buy an older, even if it's professionally refurbished and warranted, but to me that says something about the quality.
Last example. My brother in law was once complaining to me about how Apple is trash and that they purposely slow down their phones and that it's all a conspiracy. I asked him what phone he had and he told me an iPhone 5s! I was so impressed that he didn't even notice how outrageous this was.
Vision Pro is supposed to be 23Mpx so let's assume it's evenly distributed per eye, making it 11.5Mpx per eye, and with a square resolution per eye, so that's approximately 3391x3391, i.e. 1.65x denser than Reverb.
Apple isn't playing, though. They're targeting all use cases--entertainment, socializing, and working, even collaboratively. They don't want this just in the office, they want it in the home. If they succeed (on the second generation, mind you) then Microsoft and PC makers will be in the same position phone makers were when the iPhone took hold. They'll have to work together if they want to catch up, and they'll have to work fast, which means working openly.
So I'm hoping. But I ain't betting.
Except for the one use case where there has actually been demand for VR: gaming. Apple's plan is to eat Meta's lunch. Meta's lunch consists of two peas and a leaf of wilted lettuce.
I want it hackable, not because I myself is gonna do anything with it, but because I want that kind of innovation. Not the boring, polished, exec-vision thingy. Let other people invent new ways of doing stuff!
1. Seems quite cool in the demo but dorky in the real world.
2. Solves a problem no one really has.
3. Costs 10x more than most people are willing to spend.
4. Actual use case: Mall cops and tourists.
5. Some rich fanboy will buy out the entire inventory, use it outdoors, and fall off a cliff.
The concept of augmented reality also appeals to me when it comes to recipes. I've been considering investing in a Thermomix device, which costs around $1500, because I appreciate the convenience of their on-screen guided instructions rather than attempting to figure out the correct temperature, cooking time, slice size. If augmented reality can guide me through cooking two or three dishes simultaneously, that would be a very convenient time saver. For example, while the onions are sautéing for 5 mins, the software knows that I have enough time to prepare a 2nd dish like chopping romaine leaves for a salad. I’d end my subscription to Soylent pretty quick for something like that.
OTOH these also sound like things a remote teacher could help you with if they could talk to you in an earpiece provided they could immerse themselves in your environment. So the remote teacher would be wearing the AR headset. But now maybe you'd need a robot avatar in your kitchen.
Just brainstorming here but these might be business opportunities.
How would this, which has the hardware of two iPhones in it and stands in for a 100" screen and Dolby Atmos surround system, cost less than an iPhone Pro Max?
It was obvious as soon as they listed the cameras involved, the M2 chip, and the micro-OLED screens (plural), this was going to cost 2x a single top of line iPhone plus headset, so $3000+.
My bigger concern is comfort. Ski mask style HMDs went the way of the dinosaur for a good reason: they’re nightmarishly awful to use for extended periods of time. I did see an image of an attachable side-to-side head strap, which implies Apple is aware of the problem but prioritized aesthetics.
Also for anyone interested in FoV: this guy on Twitter mentioned that it’s similar to the Quest Pro [1]. Lower than I’d like for that price, especially with an enclosed face gasket.
1. https://twitter.com/benz145/status/1665894522658910213?s=20
It doesn't sound like prior efforts work well for that use case at all.
> The resolution means that text is actually readable. Apple’s positioning of this as a full on computing device only makes sense if you can actually read text in it. All of the previous iterations of ‘virtual desktop’ setups have relied on panels and lenses that present too blurry a view to reliably read fine text at length. In many cases it literally hurt to do so. Not with the Apple Vision Pro – text is super crisp and legible at all sizes and at far ‘distances’ within your space.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/05/first-impressions-yes-appl...
Fwiw, this is essentially correct for all consumer grade HMDs prior to the end of 2022. Fresnel lenses meant you could only achieve (relative) text clarity inside a small sweet spot.
Pancake optics made this more of a question of panel resolution due to their nearly edge-to-edge clarity. The problem is that the two currently available pancake lens devices are the Pico 4 and the Quest Pro: neither of which have quite enough underlying pixels to make the “working in headset” dream viable.
I absolutely DON’T recommend the Quest Pro as a replacement monitor for that very reason. It CAN reasonably approximate a 1080p monitor, but not at a visual distance most people would be comfortable with using for extended times. Similar experience to using a large TV as a monitor (though not quite THAT bad). When you’re that up close and personal with your virtual display, adding extra desktops doesn’t really help much.
“Vision Pro” has pancake optics and a very dense display panel so the “sitting in front of a TV” thing shouldn’t be an issue. I’m very excited to try one out.
I never wear wristwatches or smart watches unless I have to (hiking, running etc) because I dislike any trinkets that touch the skin 24/7, regardless of the material. This thing is almost like a diving mask, just not airtight. How about wearing it several hours straight?
And most people can wear glasses, wedding rings and watches all day without issue.
And who will develop software for something with such a small user base?
this is literally how every single thing has worked in this industry for like 50 years now. are there really people on this site so young that they don't remember how this works beyond a single product hype cycle? is it that hard to remember how compact discs, dial-up internet, laptops, multi-CPU/cores, DVDs, mp3 players, broadband, smartphones, bluetooth, wifi, flash, SSDs, GPUs, plasma, lcd, led, smartwatches, EVs took 5-10 years to hit mass market? "well, that's different, those were obviously going to be hits" -- no. wrong. all of this stuff was atrocious and atrociously expensive when it first came out. anyone remember the first orinoco wifi cards? or bluetooth? the shit didn't even work.
here are some current things that sort of suck but will probably also continue get better: satellite internet, smart home tech, solar tech, LLMs. this stuff will get better. it's the housing, education, healthcare, financial services that are going to get worse and worse because all of the money flows to the people making the tech. talk about missing the forest for the trees.
i mean is it REALLY that hard to remember this stuff? am i REALLY that old? am i taking crazy pills?
What you are, is snarky.
The only times Apple ever did this in the past, the product flopped because it was too expensive.
Maybe other companies have been leading with expensive tech waiting for the market to catch up, but Apple hasn't - not since the Lisa anyway.
And yes I am on old fogey - ol enough to remember that the industry has been waiting for consumers to "catch up" to VR for many many years. It's not happening - VR is a niche. Ordinary people don't want to put a VR headset on - they just don't - there's no catching up because 99% of the people I know would never put on a headset except for one impressive demo and never again.
This thing will at best do "okay" - it's too expensive - there won't be a critical mass of software for it, and VR is a niche.
I think significant questions remain at this point about their actual go-to-market strategy (unsurprisingly considering they have only been given a short keynote presentation) which make people suspicious if not sceptical when you take into account the other notorious failures in this market.
Zoomers don’t remember a time before any of those things. Hell, they don’t even remember some of those things.
The reason it is priced at $3500 is because Apple does not have the supply chain to build more of these things. There is simply no point pricing this at $300 and being perpetually Out of Stock which would devalue their brand for no benefit. Hence the Pro tag and release at WWDC.
Eventually there will be a non-Pro version that everyone can buy.
Everyone. It's a laptop replacement.
Realistically this "Pro" version is for early adopters. There will surely be a regular/SE/Lite version in a couple of years for the price of a MacBook Air.
> And who will develop software for something with such a small user base?
Everyone will, if they're smart. Being first to market on a new platform is huge, even if it will take a few years to have significant market penetration.
Angry Birds became a multi-billion dollar franchise for being one of the first iPhone games. Who knows what the equivalent will be for XR.
It's sobering to think this has now been so long ago but still: this is absolutely not true. Angry Birds came out end of 2009 and games were available for more than a year by then. See top 2008 here https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/12/apple-reveals-most-do... and top 2009 here https://www.ign.com/articles/2009/12/09/the-most-popular-iph...
Respectfully, even the iPad hasn't fully evolved into a laptop replacement, so why should we think this device will fit all the multitude of use cases that necessitate the computing power represented by a laptop / desktop device?
It is? As in it acts like a normal Mac OS machine that happens to be attached to your head, holds all your files and stuff without communicating to another PC?
Can I just run IntelliJ on it and write code?
Or does it just replace your monitor(s) ?
I'm one of those people who wants that day to arrive while I am still working, so I follow this space with interest and buy some of these devices.
So far, no headset has gotten close. The Quest Pro is probably the closest, but still very far from the goal.
This Apple device looks like it will get closer still, but it likely will fall short -- at least for a few product generations.
So I think the big question is will this product achieve enough traction to keep existing until the tech gets better and the price gets lower.
A VR headset that focuses on being really good at web apps (including complex ones like GitHub codespaces) would get a lot of the way there.
And the new VisionOS (or whatever Apple will decide to call it) will have to be even more restricted than iPadOS was compared to MacOS just because of the tighter coupling to your body.
When you take it off, your laptop, phone, whatever will still work great as normal.
It's a caveat because for a lot of people, I don't think laptops will be necessary in the future. My mom doesn't have one but is obsessed with her phone. Probably one day laptops will mostly be for pros.
But yeah, in general I agree with everything you said.
I thought it would be absurd to be wearing these goggles in the street. Then I thought that at home it would also be strange being with the family with those things on the top of your head. I thought "This is perfect for people who live alone". And then it dawned on me: the killer app for this is p0rn.
The cheaper mass market consumer version comes later. They've been iterating for years now on something in a thick framed glasses form factor, and haven't gotten anything they think is worth shipping so far.
Sure the product exists and people buy them, but it's no earth shaker - in contrast, a success for Apple is iPad, iPhone, Macintosh - products that if you ask some random person in an affluent country, there's a pretty good chance they own one, two three or more of these products.
The Apple VR headset will not be a flop in the sense that Apple probably won't kill the product, but it also won't be any huge success by the measures above. It will at best be a niche, which is a flop for Apple.
But so far, that is the only app category I can think of that would justify me quitting my job and trying to bootstrap a business based solely on an app for Vision OS. I feel like I am probably overlooking a couple, though... :-D
Brand loyalty, consumerism, platform lock in. It's the reason why Apple is so wealthy.
People will defend the investment of their time and money by investing more.
At least on the phone market, iphones have much longer lifetime and can often be used second-third time as well (I also use a used iphone, which I plan on passing down to my mother when I upgrade). Their M-series laptops are unbiasedly the best and it is not even funny by how far. There is simply no competitor that would be anywhere near on the performance-battery life plot, and for that its price is really not high (especially an M1 air, used or new).
Android’s wearables are toys compared to an apple watch also.
There's gonna be Android for Eyeballs eventually and anyone will be able to make their app have virtual space widgets or something.
Of course that doesn't guarantee anyone will actually do anything cool with it, but they'll be able to.
How many Android for eyeballs has Google released already? I count at least 3.
- Whatever Cardboard was using (2013ish)
- Daydream platform (2016ish)
- Whatever Samsung Gear VR used (2018ish)
All of them nice gimmicks, but also commercial failures and abandoned.
Your comparison of OSS developers as tinkerers who can't reach the Megacorp scale is totally absurd. I've worked at these corporations, and out of 10 only 1 or 2 would reach a scale of a great developer. But, OSS developers innovations, contributions and impact surpasses any company out there.
Also, nobody in their right mind wants to work 80 hours a week competing with a team who's trying to better you, if you pit the developers against each other it doesn't matter how much you get paid, your time is owned by the large corp at the end of the day. Easy to undermine the work of OSS developers who go unappreciated and hail the rat racing corporations.
One of the things that shocked me most from the keynote, was the Persona avatar demo. Meta has demoed what they call codec avatars[1] which are super impressive, but still very much in development and not anywhere on the horizon yet.
To see Apple demonstrate realistic avatars was honestly super impressive and will be imo one of the features that you just need experience to truly realize the world of a difference it makes to talk to someone on a flat video screen or feel like you're in the same space together thanks to these avatars and spatial audio.
Immersion is so powerful in VR, I can't wait to hang out with friends and family abroad, play tabletop games, watch a show together, or just shoot the sht.
This makes for some ~800x600 resolution for a focus area such a page of text in the middle of the field. How can it be sharp enough?
Does it use some sort of uneven pixel distribution?
Most of Apple’s other successful products are part of the former. Music players were a proven market. Headphones were a proven market. Cell phones were a proven market. Watches, fitness trackers, and jewelry were a proven market.
VR and AR are really not that. That market has sold an impressive amount of units mostly on the back of a cheap $300 device that its owners consider to be a toy, but the volume is nothing compared to all the other devices I mentioned.
This could very easily be the next HomePod (1st generation): an over-engineered niche product with a price that is too high to be palatable.
One thing is certain: people are getting fired over at Meta.
While they're not directly competing (given that the Varjo is entirely wired and lacks the key attraction of Apple's software and ecosystem), they do seem to be somewhat comparable in terms of price and resolution.
The central 70ppd feels like a pretty solid number. Funnily enough it's price not that far from Apple's headset.
Or did I miss here something?
Since these studies, it has become harder to experiment on small kids as it would be unethical, but on the other hand there's no specific report on kids older than 13 if I remember well.
Then a decent number of adults have been using the headsets for prolonged periods without anything critical reported at this point. It should still be used with awareness of potential risks, but I don't think there's any strong evidence of long term effects.
The same problem exists with monitors. The recommendation is take breaks to focus at different distances.
I wear glasses myself. And sometimes I forget to take them off because they become part of my perception. That doesn't happen to me with my monitors :-D
HOWEVER, I still believe it will be very niche. It’s still putting on a sizable headset and placing two screens right up your eye balls. We don’t yet know the health effects from doing that for an extended period. I imagine it is not good at all.
Maybe it’s the inner ear that is going to get hurt after prolonged disorientation, but astronauts should surely have that worse and I haven’t heard of any studies about it. Maybe something will show up about it.
I don’t see an obvious mechanism where this is harmful and VR headsets have been around long enough that this should be a well-understood safety space.
But:
- Why are no of the other people in the meeting using a Vision? :P https://www.youtube.com/live/GYkq9Rgoj8E?feature=share&t=560...
- The see-through of your eyes from the outside looks super creepy.
Check out Marques Brownlee's video on this - they probably _were_, it renders your face using the internal cameras in real time and displays that.
Do you mean the avatar thingy?
> I’ve used essentially every major VR headset and AR device since 2013’s Oculus DK1 right up through the latest generations of Quest and Vive headsets. I’ve tried all of the experiences and stabs at making fetch happen when it comes to XR.
Here’s what Apple got right that other headsets just couldn’t nail down:
The eye tracking and gesture control is near perfect.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/05/first-impressions-yes-appl...
But it’s going to take time. The uptake on this particular device will be small due to the price (very small by Apple’s standards).
For V2 maybe they can save a chunk of money by dropping the wearer pass-through display, and just indicate the wearer’s status with some LEDs (You’ve got a big headset on. People around you being able to see a representation of your eyes isn’t going to make them feel more comfortable/connected to you.)
Washington Post negative review.[1]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/05/apple-gog...
The author carefully avoids saying they haven’t actually used it.
Personally, I'm still skeptical. They announced 2 hours of battery life, which basically means this needs to always be plugged in. And while this is much more useful and technologically superior to everything that came before, it suffers in other ways. It looks goofier and more dystopian than Google Glass (though maybe Apple's brand status can carry it through this), and is heavier and has a weaker exclusive value prop than Meta's Quest headsets.
For all the hate it gets, Meta at least has a core use case for its Quest headsets - VR gaming. If you want to play VR games, get a Quest. If you want to ??? get a Vision Pro. Still not sure what belongs there. Watch a movie in VR instead of on your TV? See your monitors in VR instead of on your desk? Record precious memories that you want to relive over and over with a huge chunk of tech strapped over your face instead of living and enjoying the moment with those around you?
I guess it's the HomePod strategy on steroids - release an ultra-premium device, then release the mass market version later, once you figure out what people actually want from it.
Either way, there's only so much that speculation can cover. Right now, no one can speak to very basic factors like comfort over extended periods of time, which can make or break this product.
I think any other company would get roasted on that.
Since for my use case it's the most direct competitor (using VR as working tool, not gaming), anybody got a comparison of the early test devices for both?
I don't think SimulaVR counts, since all they have so far is a few prototypes and a single pre-release build sent to an external reviewer (https://simulavr.com/blog/review-unit-in-transit/). And unless the author is that reviewer (or works for SimulaVR), he can't have used it.
Those conspiracy theories about chemicals in American tapwater must be onto something if people are genuinely (aka not obvious shills) excited about this clownery.
Some of the use cases people are espousing and the timelines are.. ambitious.
So far, this product looks like it was made for stockholders to go try to sell to the general public lol.
To me, it looks like a somewhat coordinated effort to give positive vibes to a relatively pointless (in its current state) product that likely nobody in this thread has had a chance to use.
Maybe it's not even coordinated - just a lot of like minded simps.
I don't want to spend time arranging windows around me at ideal viewing angles. I wanted the device or windowing system to align windows (at least vertically), perpendicular to my view. Straight up and down. I wanted to walk around them like phantom objects in this space, with silly stuff like the memory/resource usage and metadata about the window on the back of it.
What I really wanted to see here was a virtual workspace augmented by the physical space around you. I want to snap or 'throw' a window to a wall or a ceiling or tile them across my floor and walk around like I'm touring miniature golf. I'm sure the gestures and virtual anchors or snaps to do this will appear over time. 1st-generation woes I suppose.
As an alternative I wanted to create a series of nesting-doll-like orbs around myself, where windows fix themselves with equal gaps at optimum viewing angles around this orb and I'm only moving them around inside this sphere-layer, and up/down layers to inner/outer spheres. "Move to back" / "Move to front", etc.
Apple's probably further than any OS on preserving application state. Not just window geometry/placement, but application state. I want to put on these goggles and see 10+ windows "surface" from beneath the physical world around my room. I love the idea of my house/office being like the movie "Her" where it looks minimal and devoid of technology and putting on these goggles brings the virtual world out. Even just having dynamic art persist on the walls when virtual.
Further thought: I want to see 2+ of these goggles in action viewing the same content and applications and allowing for simultaneous/group/mesh controlling. Can I get 2 of these and have my boyfriend and I watch the same movie? Play the same game? I really hope it's something like wifi-direct or mesh networking for local AR stuff.
I think this is the start of something really pivotal and done with enough polish to launch the industry - finally. I just want more sooner, and I'm puzzled why they announced it so early if it's marketed next year.
Asahi Linux for Vision Pro soon? In at least 1 of the Apple videos I saw a window fixed to a wall. Linux needs devs that can build this AR/gesture/interface/compositor stuff.
I actually love the oddly buggy/bubbly design of the goggles. I like how they hid the cameras, and try to reproduce the face of the person, and the fade-in effect to show someone outside the goggles interacting with you. I'm really hoping the downward-facing cameras + sensors allow for speedy typing on a table surface with a virtual keyboard. I was so shocked I could type 80wpm on an iPad virtual keyboard when those were new. I love keyboards, but I want the movie Her with minimal/no tech visible.
They've got my purchase if I can play some reasonable percentage of Steam games on this thing. Vampire Survivors <3
Apple Watch 7 and SE 2022 scored on the top for tracking sleep data[0]. So it's very far from useless, we bought it for this functionality alone.
Target market : rich people (again...)
Enterprise market : military / financial services & trading / cyber defence
I think that they will hit the intersection of rich and young; and they will also get traction from their enterprise niches. This will create a beach head for developers and an onramp that doens't rely on someone just pouring money into it all endlessly.
If the market doesn't grow and evolve then it'll be clear that consumers don't want this, there will be no excuses like "wait for better kit, better designs, a functioning market"...
