Even if Apple is right, why shoehorn the future into the present on devices unsuitable for its new paradigms? The iOSification also only worsened the macOS UX. It's one of the reasons I moved to Linux with KDE which I can configure as I like.
If they want make the AR OS of the future then make it on the vision pro where it belongs.
I'd buy one if I could use it with my Linux (KDE) workstation, but there's no chance I'm going to be using it via a mac.
All of them immediately hate that it’s bulky, it’s heavy, it messes with your hair, messes with your makeup, doesn’t play well with your glasses, it feels hot and sweaty. Everyone wants to take it off after 5-10 minutes at most, and never asks to try it again (even tho the more impressive 3D content does get a “that’s kinda cool” acknowledgment).
The headset form factor is just a complete dud, and it’s 100% clear that Apple knew that but pushed it anyway to show that they were doing “something”.
Wearable products, outside of headphones, have a decade-long dismal sales record and even more abysmal user retention story. No board is going to approve significant investment in the space unless there's a viable story. 4x resolution and battery life alone is not enough to resuscitate VR/AR for mass adoption.
Outside of headphones and watches
In recent weeks, I’ve been getting push notifications about VP.
They hired Alex Lindsay for a position in Developer Relations.
And there’s the M5 update.
Just remember, it’s a lot cheaper than the original Mac(inflation adjusted). Give it 40 years – hell, given the speed of change in tech these days, it won’t even take 10.
Not to mention the fact that first, you have to get to a point where AR wearables are commercially viable, and we don't seem to have hit that point yet.
(Apologies to @cyberge99 if my tone comes off intense, this is not to come at you but rather is just me venting my frustrations with Apple. I think you are correct in your assessment of the idea here.)
All people I know describe this usecase first: “Will be awesome when it replaces my 2x34" screens”. I described it to the salesman when he asked me why I wanted to try it. He never showed it. Gave him 0/5, he complained, I explained this is specifically what I asked. You can emulate one screen in VisionPro but it’s absolutely obnoxious about making it about apps and iPhotos 3D whatever. Users desire it. Apple is hell-bent in not addressing that usecase, and addressing family usecases first.
Imagine they find a proper UI to visualize an infinite Typescript file. Something like flinch and you find yourself in a method, look elsewhere and you immediately see the other method. Make it viral by making it possible to write files in a way that is not practical to normal-screen users, like the old “max 1 screen height” limit. View your team in the corners of your vision. THE tool for remote working.
Workplaces would look futuristic. Your experience at the workplace would be renewed thanks to Apple.
And then, reuse the desktop’s UI on VisionPro instead of the desktop using VP’s concepts.
But no, Apple prefers killing off VisionPro and imposing LiquidGlass to everyone. (In waiting for my threat letter from Steve Jobs for suggesting ideas now).
Ummm, you know he died yeah?
No, this is the fault of a company and industry with way too much money and not knowing what to do with it.
So they hired a bunch of artists who would otherwise be carving wood in a decrepit loft somewhere after taking half a mushroom cap. These people now decide how computers should operate.
I remember watching a documentary from the 80s where Susan Kare explained how every pixel in the Macintosh UI was deliberately put there to help the user in some way. One lady did the whole thing, the whole OS.
Now we have entire teams of people trying to turn your computer into an avant-garde art piece.
…brother, you’ve just described the history of the personal computer and the Internet. It’s not the hippie artists causing this problem, I promise you that.
https://www.mondo2000.com/the-inspiration-for-hypercard/
The last decade or so of Apple designers have been as out of their minds on ego and cocaine as Donald Trump Jr.
It seems much more likely that the driver here was to produce a UI that was resource intensive and hard to replicate unless you control the processors that go into your devices as well as the entire graphics processing stack that sits above that as well. It seems created to flaunt the concept of "go ahead and try to copy this" to Google and Microsoft.
VisionPro was meant to literally overlay its interface over your field of vision. That's a very different context and interaction paradigm. Trying to shoehorn the adaptations they made for it into their other, far more popular interfaces for the sake of consistency? It's absurd.
Things like “human interface guidelines” get written by nerds who dive deep into user studies to make graphs about how target size correlates to error rate when clicking an item on screen.
Things like Liquid Glass get designed by people who salivate over a button rendering a shader backed gradient while muttering to themselves “did I cook bro???”
They’re just two very orthogonal cultures. The latter is what passes for interface design in software these days.
