No. But it's an outrageous price for a redundant product that most people will not purchase. I don't see any meaningful market leverage for Apple here relative to Meta - if the selling point for this is "experiences, plus iPhone apps" then everyone with an iPhone will get a Quest or similar and save a few thousand bucks.
It might be, but you still need the MacBook Pro if you want to use this as a Mac. So this is just the display, that can access some iPad apps.
Although I still think it's pretty awesome, need to give it a few years and see the price come down and a few versions later, this tech will be very interesting in the 5-10 year time space, what a crazy time that is going to be with AI and all this stuff.
A high end VR/XR display like Varjo does feel like a new ux paradigm if the device has low latency and high resolution and good software. Given how long Apple has been at this I would bet they’ve come up with something that is of expected quality.
Some of the stuff on display felt gimmicky, but I would imagine as bare minimum there are lot of people who are happy to have a private huge 4k screen they can move anywhere.
Into an ecosystem where people buy a $1000 watch, $1000 phone, $200 earphones, and a $2000 computer.
There is absolutely a market for this, the demo experiences are extraordinary.
I have no idea what the Meta experience is like, but even in ignorance, it's not like what this thing is doing.
They were correct in saying this is something only Apple can do.
There are a lot of isolated technophiles with money to burn to put into something like this. The idea of lifting your mac into space with nothing but a keyboard and mouse in front of you alone is enough for many to pop for this. Talk about bringing your office into the local Starbucks, this moves it to the next level.
It’s effectively a nonstarter. $3499 USD prices this way beyond the grasp of everyone but a small minority of enthusiasts and professionals.
And considering Apple isn’t really known for dropping product prices as the years go by, all this really does is tell us that the tech just isn’t ready for mass production yet.
I’m considering this, like Google Glass, to be a neat proof-of-concept.
$3499 USD prices this way beyond the grasp of everyone but a small minority of enthusiasts and professionals.
In a world of $1000 cellphones, $2000 computers and $40k cars, I wouldn't be so sure. I suspect if the prices do stay this high, it'll get priced on a monthly like how many people pay for their phones or cars.
Presumably, they would go the SE route where the Pro model retains highest performance and price while the SE model inherits the tech from past generations.
I’ll go out on a limb and say it will be far more popular than people think. I’m ready to preorder one (although perhaps I fall into the enthusiast & early adopter category).
This can’t be compared to other headsets out there, and is rather in an entirely different product category.
Compared to what you are (potentially) getting for the price it's not that high - especially when viewed as a work tool or business expense. You can easily pay more for tech it could replace, like monitors, headphones, speakers, lower-end laptops and desktops even.
The only drawback I can see is the 2h battery and potential fatigue from wearing something on your head, near the eyes for longer periods of time. Maybe that'll be a non-issue? Will have to wait and see.
1977 Apple ][ Introductory price US$1,298 (equivalent to $6,270 in 2022)
I think folks are missing the point that this is the first Pro version. Likely targeted at developers and early adopters. I’m sure there will be an Air/Lite/etc version that cost reduces overtime.
I will happily go on the record as saying that this will be as revolutionary as the iPhone, perhaps even more so.
---
EDIT: To clarify this statement...
- For personal/entertainment use it largely replaces the need for a TV, soundbar, or home cinema.
- For business use, the days of multiple displays and screen management seem set to be a relic of the past. I look forward to coding in an IDE which isn't constrained to a physical device sat on my desk, or replying to emails "on the beach" versus under fluorescent lighting. My work environment will soon become consistent, without relying on the realities of my real-world physical environment. Think about people working from home with little-to-no desk space: this solves that problem.
- In response to the obvious criticisms (high price, battery life, form factor, weird eyeball thing)... this is Gen 1. Look how quickly the iPhone and Apple Watch evolved between generations 1 to 3, and look how the price changed as production capabilities and economies of scale evolved.
- Personally, I've been using Apple devices for 20 years. This is the first novel Apple device I've felt genuinely excited about since first joining the ecosystem. Will I use it for everything? No. Will the first version be perfect? No. Does it offer a whole new paradigm to any one of the physical devices I already own...? Yes! If Apple's reputation for growth and improvement in other product categories historically is anything to go by, I look forward to seeing how ubiquitous this becomes in 5 or 10 years from now.
The running time of the CD-ROM was designed to play Beethoven's 9th symphony in its entirety. You would have thought Apple would plan the battery life to allow you to watch all of Avengers: Endgame, or maybe Oppenheimer, without pausing to swap the battery.
If you look at the historical ratio of income to the price of computers we're literally orders of magnitude wealthier. You can't just pick one data point and blast off.
You're ignoring interest rates which allow the overall price to go up while keeping the monthly payment the same and the fact that houses have gotten a lot bigger over the decades [0].
True, but the price will come down. The early MacBook Air's were also super-expensive, rich-early-adopter-only pricing, and now they're the mainstream product.
...that fits in your bag. This is huge for folks like me that want to travel without lugging around a large display. If the visual integrity is there, it's gonna be worth it for me.
Yeah, the resolution will make it or break it for me. I tried working in a valve index using Simula and couldn't really get into it. Despite technically having much more screen space and screens, it felt like I was much more constrained.
Si senior. Same experience with quest 2. It has to be perfectly executed. In the Apple demo the guy was hitting virtual keyboard? If vr misses two keys, I am done with it and back to gaming only.
exactly I don't know how many like 4k monitor is just sat in front of you and that physical device is only I don't know smaller than a 10 inch iPad so that's it's incredible
maintain.... competition will catch up and/or will do it better for a lower cost. It took years for other companies to get close to iphone performance. But now Apple is entering an established market already where fb is throwing big bucks.
Maintain a relative compute power advantage yeah. Maintain doesn't imply the device will be static. I also don't expect Apple to sit at this $3500 base price for long. Honestly a little surprised they launched with it at all but makes sense if they want it to be completely stealth, they need the apps out there so it got apps for consumers to use when they get the cheaper consumer/non-Pro version out.
Also a lot of FBs efforts seemed to be around their whole Metaverse play which is a step beyond just making a good VR/MR headset. The Quest headset seems to be doing pretty well if not the explosive world eating unicorn that companies are always reaching for.
well apple could use vr + ar to enhance your experience, provided that your partner agrees to that, and that could potentially be a winner's recipe. But you know what's the limitation? You won't see p*rn on apple store, or vision os whatever it will be called.
No clue, but I'd assume this is like any other pro Apple device that will have a bluetooth or some external device SDK and 3rd parties will make controllers for games.
Quest-style controllers are something that Apple would have to faciliate. They are tracked using a combination of motion sensors (high resolution but prone to drift) and detection by the headsets cameras (low resolution but doesn't drift) and the Vision Pros raw camera data is only visible to the operating system.
You can connect a traditional controller of course, they showed it working with a Playstation controller in one of the clips, but that's mainly useful for playing traditional flat-screen games on a virtual big screen and not so much for games which actually explore the possibilities of VR and AR.
6dof tracked controllers usually need to be tightly integrated with the headset.
Even if they are self tracking (like the Quest Pro controllers and therefore expensive) there's still a bunch of things that need to work smoothly together.
It's not just like making a Bluetooth gamepad.
And one thing we know about expensive, optional peripherals is that lack of developer support is usually it's death knell
What's different about it compared to Occulus or Samsung Gear or any other existing attempts at this?
Virtual movie theaters and virtual monitors haven't really been compelling use cases for putting an ugly sweat box on your face so far. What about slapping an Apple logo on it and pricing it even further out of reach changes that in your mind?
Not that weird of a spot. That's what it costs for the most premium experience they can launch with. They'd rather it be good than something everyone buys on day one. They can get costs down in future models as they scale and progress pushes down some of the costs. As iPhones become even more performant in the future they can also eventually offer a version that offloads more compute to that and bring costs down even more. Their goal is to show this is a new type of product that works at the level people expect for a completely new Apple product. They can probably afford to wait for a much lower priced mass consumer product.
It's also the "entry point" price for a HoloLens (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens/buy). Businesses will spend that on an AR/VR device that adds value to their use-cases. It seems pretty clear this is not intended for "mass market consumer adoption" at this point in time.
> ... bring the powerful capabilities of their Mac into Vision Pro wirelessly, creating an enormous, private, and portable 4K display with incredibly crisp text.
If this "incredibly crisp text" is true, then I want it. Nobody has done this yet.
With a resolution of slightly over 4k resolution per eye for the entire view, on top of lenses and warping when rendering it into the space, I just can't see how this is actually possible. It may be better than many previous solutions but they were all so far off in text clarity that's not saying much. Of course, they could just set the zoom way up on Safari/the UI and say "look, it's so clear!" and be technically correct.
People are going to reply to you and say "what made the iPod different from the Nomad"... inarguably the iPod was hugely successful where the Nomad wasn't.
I don't think it's a great comparison. The MP3 players in the pre-iPod era were all made by tiny players no-one had heard of. The Oculus in particular has absolutely massive backing and still hasn't amounted to a lot.
I suspect the differentiator will be software, not hardware. In particular the willingness of third parties to create software. Apple has a good record there at least.
IIRC Sony were an absolute mess at the time. Didn't want to cannibalise their Minidisc sales, had weird DRM... even in the geeky crowds I ran in (where Nomads definitely were seen) Sony MP3 players were a rarity.
At the time early media players were relevant, and to the community they were relevant (people very into music tech), Sony was known as "that company that installs rootkits on your computer if you buy their CD"
Sony was known as one of the big several well respected Japanese electronics manufacturers. The Sony Walkman was huge as a cassette and then CD player.
Oculus is accessible by targeting itself as a fun gadget. You buy it to play immersive games when you're at home alone, bored. It's also affordable and that is extremely important. You won't feel nearly as bad dropping a wad of cash on this if it turns out to be a dud.
Apple's product, on the other hand, is extremely wonky. Who is this thing actually for? Based on the demos, it just looks like a second screen for my phone. It's also outrageously expensive. So Apple is asking me to seriously buy into the ecosystem and have confidence that this will be an important device in my collection.
I don't know, to me this isn't like any previous Apple take on a well defined market. In fact, this is Apple's take on a very undefined market with an unknown trajectory. It kind of feels more like when Apple went off the beaten path and added a touch bar to the MacBook Pro. It was an interesting idea and a lot of very long man hours went into making it work, but at what cost? In the end, it turns out, people just wanted simple tactile keys.
>Apple's product, on the other hand, is extremely wonky. Who is this thing actually for? Based on the demos, it just looks like a second screen for my phone. It's also outrageously expensive. So Apple is asking me to seriously buy into the ecosystem and have confidence that this will be an important device in my collection.
that's actually the playbook for new product launches for Apple. That was the same issue with Apple watch - they had no idea who it was for when they launched the first generation. It was just a watch with a screen that told time and gave you notifications. Then, they realized people loved using it for tracking health, and each generation they keep coming up with more and more ways to use it as an all-around health tracker. Now, Apple watch is as ubiquitous on people's wrists as iPhones are in people's hands
How so? The Watch was launched as a FitBit killer at the 1.0 keynote. There was a small segment from Jony Ives touting a ridiculously priced gold variant which was a complete mis-read of the market. I could see how Apple was nervous that their core audience was fashion conscious and smart watches were the domain of the biggest nerds out there.
However, point still stands, they knew they wanted an iPod shuffle with health and personal safety device at launch. They even went all out with a Nike partnership to help promote it.
It didn’t flop. It just didn’t sell as much as later versions. Apple made the market for its own product. It’s like saying the Apple II flopped because it sold way less than the current Macintoshes. Of course it did: the market was way smaller.
The sweat box is actively cooled this time. I'm concerned about the price as well though, even if it is fantastic beyond all expectations of what was presented that's a really hard price for most to justify for the feature set shown. Showing things like true and proper Disney+ integration day 1 gives hope for big name support vs just special one off demos for headsets of the past though. At the same time, they are going to need a lot more properly integrated apps for it to reach success status.
Most VR so far has been designed to isolate you from your surrounding environment, and is the opposite. Also the ability to use it without controllers makes the whole thing feel less intrusive/burdensome to use.
- the fact that this looks far more AR focused than the VR focused stuff I've currently seen;
- the public's perception of the Apple brand and its build quality (questionable if real, but an undeniable public perception nonetheless) could get around the "ugly sweat box" vibe you've described;
- the willingness for app-makers to build for the ecosystem;
- the 4k and (apparent) visual quality;
...could make this successful, or at least iPad-like in terms of dominating a market.
Hard to know for sure though until we get some actual reviews and footage of people wearing it.
I have an Oculus2 and a PSVR2, and the Apple headset seems like an entirely different thing. It's meant to replace your mac computer and your tv.
Yes with the headsets I have, you can surf the web and technically try to write code, but it's not a good experience. And those displays basically still suck. You can see the pixels, and the lenses create weird effects. If Apple has solved this, and the presence of the screen and lenses is just "forgotten", it's going to be a huge step forward. It'll be a device to actually be productive on, let alone watch movies and play games, IMO.
IMHO this really is what's gonna make or break this product. Will the screens have good enough fidelity and not strain my eyes in such a way that I will want to wear the headset for my entire work day.
People always drag out this line but how much time in VR do you actually have?
I have hundreds of hours in VR, doing fiddly simulator things, and it's not an enjoyable experience, but rather something you put up with to get to experience something you wouldn't otherwise get to experience, like flying a real as it gets plane.
A couple really nice monitors are $500. A laptop with a really nice built in screen is $2000, even if you want the apple logo on it.
Having infinite floating windows in VR is actually pretty useless. Either they are all tiny and unreadable because you need INSANE resolution to get 1080p quality at normal viewing distance, or you have one giant screen pressed against your face and your eyes find that very uncomfortable. VR is tiring on your eyes, worse than looking at a screen all day.
I wish rich kids would stop trying to attain a minority report style dream of computation and focus on making actual, usable, good UIs that are enjoyable, easy, and productive to work with. This is none of those.
>Having infinite floating windows in VR is actually pretty useless. Either they are all tiny and unreadable because you need INSANE resolution to get 1080p quality at normal viewing distance, or you have one giant screen pressed against your face and your eyes find that very uncomfortable. VR is tiring on your eyes, worse than looking at a screen all day.
Apple seem to think they have solved these issues. We'll see.
The difference is the AR, which will eventually make it wearable in everyday life. When setting the perimeter, the Oculus already shows the surrounding using it's integrated cameras. This will be the future. I don't think the first version of Apple's AR mask will be a huge success, because it still looks too dorky. But in a few years you will see many people wearing sunglasses that double as phone screens all the time.
I don’t think the dorky mask look will change any time soon. There’s just too much electronics to fit into the system for it to shrink down to a pair of regular glasses.
When the Apple Watch was introduced, I thought that the form factor would change after a few years. It’s almost been ten years and it doesn’t seem like Apple will be making any big form factor changes to the product.
Apple will just have to make it fashionable to wear dorky scuba masks everywhere. Maybe the price tag will be sufficient…
You may be right. Remember when they used someone with extra large hands for presenting the first iPhone in order to make it look small? Now you can get the iPhone 14 is large and very large. We may get used to this if the product is sufficiently useful.
I mean, nice ski goggles don't look uncool on the mountain, I don't see how it's impossible for people to get used to Vision goggles on people's faces.
Context is important. Ski googles look OK because they make functional sense, because everyone needs some kind of eye protection while skiing. You'd look ridiculous wearing them anywhere but at a ski resort.
It's an open question whether these will fit into their intended social contexts, whether that's the office, home, or public. If anywhere, I'd guess they wouldn't look weird in an office or on a single person at home (since there is nobody to look at them), but not in public or in a family setting.
> The difference is the AR, which will eventually make it wearable in everyday life
In Apple's 10 minute video about this device the "AR" part came up exactly twice:
1) When the lady was interrupted by a friend to talk about sushi or something. This is literally Occulus' passthrough mode. It was a temporary "see around me" mode switch in practical usage.
2) The dad filming his kids. This was just depressing.
All the other examples had the room around them, so the "AR" part, as a glorifed skybox. The person was isolated & alone.
Like maybe Apple will figure out something that Microsoft's Hololens didn't. That's certainly possible. But they also didn't showcase any such examples, either.
Ok, I had the impression that those things are translucent, because the eyes were visible. I did not fully watch it, but I just found out that Apple is using a lentricular and OLED screen on the outside to display a 3D image of your face to make it look like the mask is transparent. This is some dystopian stuff.
My take would be that it would be Apples track record of making software work well with the hardware, more seamlessly than either Samsung or Meta.
Just look at the virtual avatar they demoed compared with Meta’s. Apple went with a more professional looking avatar instead of a cartoony one.
Another app that was shown was a Birds Eye view of a basketball game. I’d love to be able to watch a sporting event live from that perspective (if I could stomach the entry fee for the experience).
I was on the fence about this product, thinking that there wouldn’t be many good use cases, but their presentation gave some activities that I’d want to try on the hardware. Whereas Meta’s presentation didn’t show anything I was interested in.
Apple is giving developers 6+ months to make even more interesting apps. I think there’s a good chance that this could be a successful product. But I should hold my judgement until I’ve seen the caveats of this device (ie comfort, battery life, display quality, etc). I’m sure we’ll see more in-depth looks in the coming months. We can judge it more fairly when these reviews come out.
When you watch live TV, you watch what one person decides you should be watching.
With eye and head tracking in the headset, you can watch what you want to watch during live events and eventually in interactive motion pictures/motion environments.
This is already a reality with esports and yet most people prefer to watch someone else drive the camera. Someone who is really good at doing that and who can "predict the future" to never miss a key moment (aka, the broadcast is on a slight delay).
I don't see any reason live sports would be different here, do you? It'd be cool but it hardly seems "revolutionary", more like something you do once or twice for the novelty before going back to just not doing that.
> Is there anything specific to the Vision Pro in that feature? Couldn’t they just offer that as something that you could choose to watch on TV?
A TV wouldn’t be apt at creating a 3D-ish AR viewing experience. It also doesn’t have the controls to navigate such a scene easily. What I’m looking for is like a holographic 3D display of the game on my table top.
In order for this to be successful, Apple needs to do X things.
1) Have a compelling halo use case that most people in their target purchasing demographic can relate to (Hint: most people don't code)
2) Sell enough units to attract app developers
3) Have an easy-to-use SDK that polished apps are built
2 & 3, I have faith in Apple being fairly good at. Or at least, using 2 to overcome deficiencies in 3.
1... that's the rub.
The iWatch is probably the best analogy, because it was evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Watches that told time on your wrist existed. Smart watches existed. Apple did that, but better.
With the Vision Pro, they face the same battle. Televisions exist. Screens exist. Laptops exist. They need to do those, but better.
And that's the requirement to get them to the starting line, which is a financially self-sustaining ecosystem.
If they can get there, they'll win via their relentless invocation and Apple platform interoperability.
I missed that it was part of the Disney presentation. In that case it may be just vaporware. Truthfully it would require a lot of infrastructure at the arena/stadium before it could even be realized. I’m not sure the sports team owners would be willing to pay for this expenditure without knowing the potential revenue it could generate. It’d also cannibalise some ticket sales, so it’s not necessarily a profitable move for pro sports.
I've said this before, but Apple's attention to detail might finally bridge the uncanny valley to actually good AR. I can elaborate a bit more when I get on my computer.
No controllers, no waving your arms about. Eye tracking and hand gestures for navigation. Screen on the front that shows your face to make it feel less isolating. I don't know that it'll be a success but it's a lot more than just putting an Apple logo on it.
Thr fact that the battery is separate should be a huge improvement for comfort because one of the biggest problems with most existing devices is their weight. Another thing to check is how much heat the device transfers to the user. Or in general the comfort. Also the fact that you can easily see you surroundings should help.
What compelling use cases did the average consumer see for carrying around a computer in their pocket before Apple released the iPhone? There were a bunch of devices on the market all kinda doing what iPhone did, but Apple made it make sense for the average consumer.
Gaming could be much be better on a VR/AR device, and a reason to put on a "ugly sweat box" initially. Apple did not go deep into that, only a brief segment about the Unity collab. Maybe gaming is not their forte right now.
Apple Vision v3 will not be a sweat box. And even right now, Occulus interface has to evolve to match this. Controller has to be optional. It has to be AR.
> What about slapping an Apple logo on it and pricing it even further out of reach changes that in your mind?
Probably the fact that Apple has an excellent track record of entering nascent consumer electronics markets late (e.g. iPod, iPhone, Apple Watch) at high price points, nailing the execution, and eventually dominating said markets with arguably superior products.
It's the same story again and again. If you've already decided Apple is charging $3000 for "slapping an Apple logo on it" and nothing else, you may as well have been one of the people back in ~2001 who swore up and down that the iPod was just an overpriced late entry in a market full of mature, attractive offerings like the Archos Jukebox line. In retrospect, to be clear, you would have looked quite silly.
I'm not saying this thing is absolutely going to be a success, but the problem with previous attempts at virtual displays has been that the execution is always shit, and Apple's greatest strength is nailing the execution. I don't think betting against them here is a good bet.
Do you think people will enjoy living with a headset strapped to their face? The shots of that dad playing with his daughters while wearing the device seemed like a stretch that I'm surprised Apple took. This is the company that takes its "Human Interface Guidelines" seriously.
Like 1984, Black Mirror isn't a dystopia because of technology, but because it's in England. If you leave I expect everything's fine. Also solves being converted into Cybermen for the 100th time.
This is the funniest comment I've ever read on HN. After 3 months I've spent in London a year ago, I can never understand while people online hate England so much.
Ah! So the solution to that problem is to have a mask strapped to your face with 2 hour battery life. Makes sense. Yeah that sounds better than my iPhone that fits in my pocket and lasts all day. I can deal with the occasional fumble to find the record button.
I agree. This was more amazing than I had expected upfront. I can envision myself using this for developing code as well, but I think I will have a hard time convincing my boss…
It's sort of evolved to the "What's that Chromecast thing again?" for me. (Which I thought was super-underrated.) And I guess I could maybe upgrade my big TV which would be an absolute hassle and is perfectly good for my purposes--and might not even be better at this point. Not a frequently in my hand thing but for ~$100 and really nice, perfectly good.
Apple TV is inexpensive and you hide it close to the TV. This one costs more than $3000 and you have to wear it on your face all the time. Masks work well only when we're alone or if everybody is wearing one. If not, they use to cancel the wearer from social interactions.
And most importantly, they're not selling you with tracking or ads. You bought a thing, you get a thing. No BS. besides that, the apps all work and have fewer bugs, unlike everything else I've used like it.
You are high as a kite. AppleTV is one of the greatest things in my househould. The UI is world's beyond whatever ad-filled garbage "smartOS" my TV uses.
Apple TV is easily my favourite Apple product. Of all the Apple products it's the one that works flawlessly and gets out of my way. I could give up my Mac and switch to Windows before I would switch to an Apple TV competitor.
Can you use Netflix, Hulu, etc with it through Android? Or are you stuck with that wimpy remote that looks like a 1st gen ipod shuffle? If that's true, I'll admit you can use it, but that is a painful, dated experience. "click left, click up, click up, click left"
You should try the remote, it’s blazingly fast and makes any other TV feel like junk. You just swipe no clicking needed. If you need to type there’s voice to text built in to the remote to either say or spell what you want.
Yes you can use all of those with the included remote which is easy to use and quite responsive. And all of them (minus Netflix) surface the shows you're watching up to "watch now" so you don't have to dig into any of them to continue watch your shows. I'm not aware of any use of an iphone which makes using the Apple TV easier.
There was an issue where you couldn't accept accept an updated iCloud TOS without an iPhone. You could dismiss the prompt but it would keep nagging you whenever you turned the device on. I think it's fixed now.
In general, using the Apple TV I get the impression that Apple PMs are probably deep in the Apple bubble and the idea that someone might not have an iPhone is inconceivable to them.
> Of all the Apple products it's the one that works flawlessly and gets out of my way.
You probably didn't experience the Atmos bug. For about a year, Atmos audio on the last Apple TV model would just drop out randomly every couple of minutes for like 10 seconds. In some cases it would make a big noise sound blasting through your speakers. They finally solved it in the last big TvOS version but it was painful to experience.
For streaming of Netflix, Disney, etc it's a great device but for Plex it sucks that it doesn't have HDMI audio passthrough.
I used to think Apple TV was unimpressive. I had an Android TV which turned to shit after like 3 years. Apple TV though? Runs like a dream, still gets updates, has nice integrations with my iPhone. It's one of the best "plug and play" Apple devices there is. It "just works".
I went from finding it unimpressive to it being my first recommendation for anyone getting a TV. Screw regular smart TV software, just get the TV with the best panel and use Apple TV. So long as the TV doesn't break, you won't need to upgrade for a long long time.
We have a two month old high-end Sony TV with Google TV and a second gen 4k Apple TV. They are not really comparable. The Apple TV is super smooth and has great apps. The Google TV, in comparison, is clunky, the apps are meh, and you have to wait ages for major OS updates (while investing TVs, I looked at historical OS updates). Heck even a new TV is on a two year old OS with months old security updates.
But the Apple TV really shines with the integration in the Apple ecosystem. AirPlay, SharePlay, AirPods, HomePod, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, etc. the integration is fantastic.
That's still a bad comparison. You should be comparing a comparably priced stand alone device to the AppleTV. The built-in OS is never as good as decent stand alone devices even on $3000 TVs.
Have you tried Chromecast 4k, though? I’ve bought one, as my LG TV’s webOS became so sluggish that it became pretty much unusable.
I have an Apple TV 4k in the living room and it’s great, but I find myself drawn to the Chromecast experience way more. Apple TV is more refined, but Chromecast’s remote is far better than ATV’s (1st gen, at least) and Google’s voice assistant is obviously far smarter (especially if you’re multilingual).
Are you talking about Google TV? I haven't used that one, but I've used Chromecast 4k and was not impressed. It doesn't have a remote - or really a TV UI at all - which was my biggest gripe.
My family is all-Google so we have 5 Google TV devices. We're not dissatisfied enough to get rid of them, but it's pretty shocking to me how poorly it integrates with other Google services. I just keep finding ways in which it's clear that Google TV was developed in a silo relative to other Google services. Plus, Google's "Family Link" parental controls are so poorly designed it makes me wonder if anyone at Google actually has kids.
Granted, I am not an Apple user at all, so it's possible there would be similar frustrations on that side, but anecdotally I hear that Apple is way better about these sorts of things.
The original Apple TV remote was awful. It was the achilles heel of the product. The newer silver Apple TV remote with the round click/touch surface is what it should have been; it's worth trying if that's your primary pain point.
I have a 2019 Shield Pro (so 4 years old) and the 2023 AppleTV 4k. I've had issues with both. My AppleTV definitely does not just work. Apps crash all the time and occasionally requires a restart. I have different issues on the Shield which also occasionally requires restart
I wouldn't really make a statement like the above, and I can't say I necessarily agree with it... that being said, other folks on this thread are kinda missing the point OP made: it's not that Apple TV isn't good. It's that it isn't, and never really was, revolutionary.
It's an arguably best-in-class app-based TV watching experience. But its market share is pretty small years after launch, it hasn't caused much change/adaptation in the market as a whole as a result of existing, and it's not really at the center of any kind of cultural conversation.
I am really curious to learn more details about Vision Pro (like... how much does it weigh?), and would be even more curious to learn about the market fit research Apple must have done to believe there's a place for this device, especially at this price point. The biggest omission for me was the placement of the headset as device on which to view movies, and see pictures of your kids, while at the same time completely sidestepping the question of how you'd do that together with your family, which is how these activities are typically performed in a household with children.
Agreed, I think this is going to be big, but it does very much have the feel of a first apple product. Especially wearing it to record 3d videos, I am sure now that there will be a 3d camera on the next iPhone pro.
And I will go on record saying this is nice and all, but fundamentally just some incremental progress. Absolutely not an iPhone moment.
The idea of having a fully immersive 3D environment around you is cool, but I haven’t had any VR experience that didn’t turn out to be eventually a headache let alone actually productive. Even with gaming I can only name a few titles that actually benefit, but for the ones that do the effect is quite something, I’ll admit that.
That's definitely a big concern about the physical pen. If it's too heavy or if it's too hot, it will overperform or perform some CPU intense work. Also the fitting using your eye with such a close contact with the digital device is another issue.
It's a jump from what we've seen in the consumer space. It isn't priced like other consumer VR hardware though, it's 4-8x the price; much closer to enterprise pricing. If you include the wider space with things like the Varjo XR3 (which released 2 years ago at only 2x the price) then it looks a lot less impressive of a jump. Plus there's things like the Bigscreen Beyond which actually manage a slim form factor. Really the only thing Apple has a chance to differentiate on is software, and they've got a lot of catching up to do there.
But they do have a huge head start in apps, movies, tv, games, sports rights compared to the makers of any other device. They are well positioned or make this work by integrating tightly to their own eco-system
2D content in 3D is a gimmick; it's nice to have, but it's not going to sell consoles. And even beyond that it's not a "head start"; almost all of that content is already available on other platforms, even other VR platforms. Just owning the content doesn't get Apple much if anything here.
>apps, games
...I don't know how you can possibly spin it as them having a head start here. Meta has a multi-year lead on them, and PC is even further, in games. Apps will need a lot of work as well - just throwing a 2D app in 3D space doesn't provide a compelling use case. You may as well just use a tablet.
Despite spending a lot of time pushing for AR apps on iPhone, Apple is still way behind on the VR/AR race. They need to get developers working on novel applications that utilize the full possibilities of a headset like this, and they need it yesterday if they don't want Meta to own the space.
Which brings us to the real reason that they released this $3.5k device: it's not actually for consumers, it's ultimately just a fancy, overly-polished dev kit.
Sorry, what I meant was, they have the whole App Store, plus the games in the App Store, plus Apple Arcade etc. These things are packed with games and apps that people care about and use every day.
Those are a few reasons that people will find this device compelling.
Absolutely none of which are a compelling reason to pick the $3.5k headset over an iPad or laptop for a fifth the price (or hell, a tenth the price used). Like I said, 2D content just floating in a 3D space is more of a gimmick than a real selling point.
Also, keep in mind, Meta's headsets have full access to all of Windows' apps and games through link or Virtual Desktop, which absolutely dwarfs Apple's lineup.
The Apple device is an "AR" device, it still projects artificle video to your eyes rather than letting you see the real world.
I haven't seen anything the apple device does better than the hololens 2, other than the field of view, which is only possible because they are mock AR, not real AR
The idea of hybrid AR/VR - adjusted by a dial (crown) - is very clever. As is a high-resolution display.
But the form factor is a problem.
If it had all of the capabilities announced but combined with the Google Glass form factor of ultra thin & light - then it would be a device more revolutionary than the iPhone.
But the form factor makes it much more niche.
And the tech just doesn't exist in the year 2023 to make a device with that sweet-spot combination of high capability and tiny form factor.
(My two cents, which I am hoping ages better than the infamous HN Dropbox comment.)
But I (perhaps naïvely) think this is being approached from the wrong direction.
To me, if Apple had launched a new highly limited device but with the Google Glass form factor - then I could see the path to incrementally improve (keep the form factor, and add features over time as hardware progresses).
It's much harder for me to see the opposite - of starting out with the clunky form factor, even if it is 100x more capable.
EDIT: Or I may be thinking from the wrong direction. I could see this device as overtaking existing VR devices like the Rift by far.
It depends on whether "success" here is defined as surpassing the previous best-selling VR headset (very plausible), or as matching the iPhone (much less plausible).
You do recall that when the iPhone came out we already had Blackberry, HTC, Windows Mobile, Nokia already making smart phones with touch screens and apps right?
Sure the experience was terrible, but that's the same play here. Apple generally takes a technology space which is a little early and poorly done by others, and ships a great experience across hardware, software, and ecosystem to capture a market.
The elephant in the room is that by the time Apple came out with iPhone, everyone else had a mobile phone because there are clear benefits of ownining a mobile phone. Those phones as you say were not great, and iPhone was absolutely revolutionary in that case so we agree here.
But pretty much nobody has a VR headset right now (or at least IRL people that I know), so not sure if a normal person will see a benefit of owning this kind of device.
Strongly disagree that this will be as revolutionary as the iphone. The iphone, and smart phones as a platform were revolutionary largely because of how portable they are.
This is much more comparable to a laptop than a phone, and it doesn't introduce new communications technology like the iphone did with there now being near universal real time access to people's cameras and gps location.
This feels like what the apple watch was to the iphone but instead to the MacBook pro.
Unfortunately, I strongly disagree with this comment as well. It is because how portable this device is, you have to think about the... Imagine you have an infinite amount of screen just in your pocket. What you say causes what you do, and that's a huge thing.
Except even regular sunglasses are often inconvenient to carry around. So this will never get in your pocket.
The rear revolution will be when the info goes directly to our brain, bypassing the eyes. VR headsets looks to me like half assed interim "what if" devices.
Good point. Remember, they demonstrate that they put these devices as a module, so I'm not sure it is possible to make it a portable device. You can easily get rid of part of the panel part and put it into a very small bag, and the rest of things can just like a rope, something similar to those things, you can easily fold them into small spaces. I'm actually thinking the same thing as you. The real revolution is going to be directly connecting our brains, so we don't bother using our eyes to kind of sensor our physical world, that's kind of like the matrix. I'm not sure that's going to be in the near future or in the life we have, but I'm really looking forward to that kind of scenario.
Loved it. It’s exactly how I imagined it. People didn’t have high expectations because they thought this was going to be a gaming device. I posted quite a few comments in the past months telling people vr glasses like this had so much potential for broader applications. I’m glad Apple is making this a reality. It’s going to be a wild success.
I'm one of the weird people who tried out the Google Glass. It was finnicky, 0 actual interaction with the modern world, lasted a good 45 minutes, melted your face, and had terrible audio.
But the thing is, if you could peak THROUGH the shortcomings, it was abundantly clear how an eyesight driven, glass form factor is the destination for computing. Smartphones were even less advanced at the time, but even then, we I tried for a few weeks making more extensive use of it, I would catch many glimpses of how "neat" this technology would be... even doing simple things like effortlessly capturing a picture on the spot, or videoconferencing with my gf (now wife!) showing her stuff in the grocery store and asking her what to get.
The AR capabilities, mixed with the essentially VR potential for movies/games, will totally be a thing and it'll totally live on our face as glasses. There can be details as to when exactly, price points ,etc., but the ubiquity of this sort of computing device will eclipse the iPhone when it comes time, and until then, slowly but surely change the nature of "working on a screen."
Yes, Google Glass was fun, and geeky, but was SO bad.
This seems to be an actual well thought out product. The resolution is a lot higher than the meta quest 3, and delays will be super small.
They're marketing this for productivity, which for me is the main selling point for VR at this point. I want a more spatial desktop, and I want multiple screens on the go.
Only if it‘s comfortable to wear and not sickening. It must be a huge improvement over current devices like PS VR2, which I can physically not tolerate for long.
> For personal/entertainment use it completely replaces the need for a TV, soundbar, or home cinema.
You're making a bold assumption, that someone wants to wear this headset when relaxing. Also, a TV can be watched by multiple people, and a home cinema will obviously deliver better sound.
> For business use, the days of multiple displays and screen management seem set to be a relic of the past. I look forward to coding in an IDE which isn't constrained to a physical device sat on my desk, or replying to emails "on the beach" versus under fluorescent lighting.
The IDE is an interesting perspective I too as a developer am thinking about. But there's a reason you can be as productive in 2023 as in 1983 using emacs or vim. Because it's insanely hard to replace the simplicity of text buffers and a keyboard.
> In response to the obvious criticisms (high price, battery life, form factor)... this is Gen 1. Look how quickly the iPhone and Apple Watch evolved between generations 1 to 3, and look how the price changed as production capabilities and economies of scale evolved.
Smart watches have been anything but a groundbreaking technological revolution.
> You're making a bold assumption, that someone wants to wear this headset when relaxing.
Well Apple showed someone using the headset while lying down in bed. I’d say that Apple is making a bold statement about the comfort of their product. We’ll need to wait for hands on reviews to determine if it indeed is as comfortable as Apple implies it is.
> Well Apple showed someone using the headset while lying down in bed.
The box of Wheaties showed someone shooting the winning buzzer beating home run touch down in double overtime to win the world series of superbowl cups. Somehow I doubt that, due to the bowl of Wheaties I had for breakfast, my afternoon will look much like that.
> a home cinema will obviously deliver better sound.
Will it, though? Of course you could build a home theater with better sound, but I'd bet that the spatial audio built into AirPods delivers better sound that most peoples' home theater setups (which is generally just a TV with built in sound or a mediocre soundbar).
I'm more excited to use this for games and VRChat. My Valve Index needs my whole gaming desktop to power it which is actually pretty much the price of an Apple Vision Pro.
Like I said, "you could build a home theater with better sound." But most people haven't and won't. It requires time, technical expertise, and a lot of space. And with that you only get a home theater. And you can't travel with it (I love the idea of using one on a plane).
But I'm sympathetic to the social-watching issue. I don't love the idea of watching movies in a headset while my wife sits next to me on the sofa doing something else (or even watching the same movie on a screen). But I also don't love the idea of buying two. (And that's without even thinking about larger families.)
I think home theater will be a big part of the appeal, but it won't succeed if replacing a home theater is the only thing it does well.
There's also a physical limit on bass sound from small head speakers. Much of bass sound is felt in the chest as much as in the ear, and the little speakers on the device are limited there. iPods are the same of course, and they do okay with sound, but we accept a lot of limitations on portable devices.
Note that 65" is very different from 100" and most people's movie experience at home is far too small relative to the directors' intents.
The Sonos w/ sub + rear surrounds and an 85" OLED TV with these latencies will put you in the price point of this thing.
If you're apart, both people would need a room, TV, and Sonos system to share the experience. So each has that "need one per person" problem depending whether colocated or not.
I don’t think we are at a point in human technology where any noise-cancelling headphones sound better than cheap wired counterparts… they feel amazing by rather deceptive engineering, but it only lasts until you go back to standard non-cancelling speakers.
Except those people who have "mediocre soundbars" can't afford buying a $3.5K VR headset. And those who have a spare budget of $3.5K to enhance their TV watching experience will invest the money on a better TV and a surround speaker setup.
I want an IMAX viewing experience with booming surround effects and I only have time to watch when the kids are all in bed. Compared with a house large enough to have a dedicated sound-proof theatre room, $3500 doesn’t sound too expensive.
Also not everyone lives in a house, I’m sure Manhattan condo owners can afford the price of the theatre gear, but cannot afford the space required for them to be used optimally. Wealthy people don’t all live in mansions.
I think you might be over-extrapolating your own POV. I have a mediocre soundbar and can afford the Vision Pro. I'm not likely to upgrade my soundbar anytime soon (I don't really care), but I'm very likely to buy a Vision Pro.
can't imagine people will only be buying it for movie watching.
> Except those people who have "mediocre soundbars" can't afford buying a $3.5K VR headset.
There are many many people for whom money is not the limiting factor. It's because they don't have the space, the technical wherewithal to set it up, the motivation to make it happen, or some combination of all three.
The average American or British living room with even a cheap surround system is going to run rings around anything in-ear or on-ear.
There's many reasons that people warn newbies not to mix or master on cans and to use speakers.
For people who care about going beyond stereo, budget is going to be a much larger problem for most folks than space or technical knowhow. And anybody who cares about going beyond stereo probably cares about quality.
Home cinema implies (to me anyway) a true surround setup and not some crappy soundbar.
You can’t replicate true surround sound with stereo headphones. You can with binaural audio but that requires specialized recordings. I’m sure spatial audio sounds cool but it’s not true surround sound.
And then there’s the problem of low frequencies. You can’t beat a subwoofer.
By Gen3 in 5 years, people will begin to buy these like iPhones and then multiple people will be able to watch via SharePlay.
3D images are probably coming to iPhone 15 or iPhone 16 so the posts about "who's gonna wear this to take pictures" are already moot.
This is a developer/enthusiast focused niche release providing perfect beta testing grounds while technology will shrink this device to a smaller and more practical form factor.
In 3-4 years, the current Vision Pro will be the standard Apple Vision product with a smaller form factor while a new Pro product will have more advanced features and lose its external battery.
I also think that Apple Vision will be successful but Gen1 is not where its at for the vast majority of users.
good catch about needing 4 of them for a family... will they implement multiuser in vision OS or you will have to buy one for each member as you are supposed to do with the ipads?
I have to wonder about a device that won't allow you to watch a 2-hour movie without running out of battery and having to plug it in. I guess Oppenheimer is a no-go.
Using a tiny battery pack. I'm assuming (hoping) that you'll be able to use something bigger that provides USB-C power and get a correspondingly longer life.
Give it a decade, and the demand for immersive escapism will be greater than ever, if anyone can afford it, as western civilization continues its decline/collapse.
> You're making a bold assumption, that someone wants to wear this headset when relaxing.
Hey - the world's biggest computer company just went up on stage along with the director of the world's biggest entertainment conglomerate and made that 'bold assumption'. They're probably pretty careful about these sorts of things.
>Apple has produced plenty of devices that didn't pan out.
Have they? They've launched particular versions of existing products that didn't sell too well, but have they ever launched a device which was was fundamentally new and didn't eventually sell a ton of units?
To be fair, that might as well be ancient history. I imagine more than 99% of Apple’s value comes from post-iPod activity, and I can’t think of anything post–OS X that failed, let alone post iPod.
I don’t get this HomePod hate. I have the big (old gen) and small one, and they rock.
We’re in allocated housing at the moment for my fiancées work and they have a shitty tv. I wouldn’t be able to hear the thing if it wasn’t playing through my HomePod. And that’s before the benefits of it as a speaker
It takes very little for Bob Iger to say he will make Disney+ available on the Vision Pro. It takes very little to deliver a streaming platform to a new device in general, but even less for one that uses the same frameworks as one of your primary existing devices. Most of what they showed was just showing you Disney+ content on a floating screen. I highly doubt they have invested that much into any sort of experience that is only possible on the Vision Pro (hence limiting anything that came close to that as a generic vaporware "What if?" trailer at the end).
With respect to the CEO of that company, I mean, sure. But you kind of take that as a given. It's not like he's only been right, and certainly his leadership so far has been business oriented, vs. "wave of the future" oriented. A good example is how the AirPods ended up being an arguably bigger success than the Watch (and how that hasn't really been fully capitalized on). The good news is that the world's biggest company is precisely the kind of place that can afford to iterate on something like this in the public. So if the theory is that the "dream" of AR is only possible by getting stuff out there to iterate on, then they certainly now have a good shot.
Hey, that’s a great point. Mine was more along the lines that they probably did not go up there on mere assumptions about what users might want. They’re not kids, they’re professionals on the tail-end and apex point of their career. Probably had an army of people do the homework to make sure that they don’t end up looking like complete fools a few years down the line.
Hasn’t there also been some executive overlap on the board level of these companies for a long time?
I was just watching a Steve Jobs keynote from 1998 the other day. And you can see exactly the same strategies implemented there, only with profit margins at <$100m and an inverse David-Goliath relationships with delegates from industry partners.
Pure anecdata of course and I'm far from the average person, but I personally do not like to wear headphones if I can avoid it. (And yes, I have good headphones.) I can't even imagine having a screen strapped to my face.
I can imagine having a screen strapped to my face. I can't imagine a killer app that makes it worth the trouble & cost. I was hoping apple could help me out with my limited imagination, but they're pushing Apple Vision for watching movies, surfing the internet and facetime, so not really.
There are MANY examples of The Walt Disney Company making poor decisions. The most recent one would have to be the "Star Wars Hotel" that cost $1,200/night PER PERSON. In what world can enough Americans afford to fill up a hotel every night at that price? They did what all companies do- they got greedy. Now they have a $300M write-off as they tear it down.
DIS stock is taking a dump right now because Disney+, it turns out, isn't the savior we all thought it was (and were led to believe it was) during the pandemic when the Parks division wasn't bringing in the cash. ESPN is dead weight. They have more debt than ever thanks to the pandemic.
I did not say they’re making the right decision. I merely pointed out that the parent comment poked at this being a bold assumption.
They might be wrong, they might be making a bad play. But they’ve also probably devoted a reasonable amount of resources at finding answers to questions like whether people will want to use these or not. So, they probably didn’t make “bold assumptions”.
It's a question of semantics I suppose. So to me, it was a bold assumption on Disney's part to assume, regardless of what the data/research/surveys told them, that A) there were enough people on the planet who would travel to Orlando, FL to stay at this Star Wars-themed resort for over $1000/person/night, and B) there were enough people on the planet who would travel to Orlando, FL again and again to stay at this Star Wars-themed resort for over $1000/person/night.
It would have surprised me if such people would be interested enough in the hotel to not stay at it in the first few months of its opening, but hold off until some time thereafter, and so in that respect, Disney seems to have recognized that once that initial high demand drops off, it's GG. Demand wouldn't magically (ha) go from ~50% occupancy to ~90-100% with no change to the hotel or the pricing (e.g. any factor external to the resort itself).
> ... Also, a TV can be watched by multiple people ...
I will point to this article: "Why Americans are lonelier and its effects on our health" [1] that claims that "some surveys reveal that around 60 percent of people in the U.S. right now report feeling lonely on a pretty regular basis. And that's pretty devastating from a public health perspective".
I don't know the real number but it connect with the market potential. Also, Apple is really great on hitting the mark. Playing with words, I don't think Mark is as good as Apple.
But isn't this VR/AR kit going to contribute even more to the loneliness - contribute and feed itself on the trend?
Despite positive upbeat music it was kind of sad to watch people alone in their sparsely furnished environments without personal touch, viewing favorite pictures on helmet instead of printed on the wall, father with the face hidden behind this helmet during kid birthday party, etc
Probably yes, we were talking about the success of the product not the society. That is another topic where we can also include mobile phones, streaming services, etc.
> Also, a TV can be watched by multiple people, and a home cinema will obviously deliver better sound.
I was extremely surprised that shared reality was completely absent from the presentation. Apparently the sensors on these devices don't enable creating a coordinate system that multiple devices can collaborate on/in. You can't look at the same objects in space together.
This is hard stuff, but I'm stunned they're shipping it before solving that problem.
We're really missing the point here. Yes, that device can't do better. You can't do that with your friends together. But there's some similar in America right now. You can just jump in and in 2 or 4 minutes, and that kind of experience. Why to bother this kind of thing, this new tech? Doing things together is good, I think that's the main selling point of these devices.
You’d think it would because of that but you’d also think if it was supported they’d mention it, if only to provide defense against the “only for friendless nerds that live alone” criticism, albeit at an absurd price point.
Got your point. I only saw it from a very limited technical understanding of how ARKit works and how shared experiences can be achieved on a framework level.
Not explicitly mentioning shared experiences other than video calls at all could also indicate this is not the way it should be framed (by focusing on the collaborative aspects that exist "today").
The price sure point prevents me and my family members from casually trying this experience.
I was merely suggesting that the technology for shared experiences already exists in the form of shared anchors.
You could be right wrt "if they didn’t mention it explicitly it's not part of their (currently) intended experience", but it might as well be due to "spatial computing" being sth that primarily will be shaped by their adopters along the way, which is something different than a corporation plotting the experience up front (as might be the case with metaverse?).
Especially with as much emphasis they put on SharePlay in the iPhone presentation. Quite a neat feature. For the few households that will splurge $14,000 for a family of 4 to watch movies together once a month, I'd hope it would have this feature!
It's not the sensors. Meta headsets can do this with much worse sensors by using shared anchors, which as someone else mentioned is already a feature in ARKit. Why they didn't mention this or integrate it into the OS I don't know.
> I'm stunned they're shipping it before solving that problem
Are you really? Outside of everybody sitting on the couch watching a movie together, which will be an extremely marginal use case for this thing anyway—are you seriously going to buy all of (spouse, kids, friends) their own $3500 headset?—shared-reality seems very niche for consumer applications, which are clearly what they're targeting.
I think without shared reality in place, the public verdict on this device will be that it's a loneliness enabler, or has you wear your loneliness on your face. Or rather, on a screen strapped to your face. It's going to be undesirable, the most damning quality of any consumer item. Nobody will envy their peers for having one.
People say this about smartphones, too, and yet adoption is practically universal. If the product is worth using, people will use it, and the social friction will fade. The reason products like Google Glass never moved beyond pariah status is that they weren't really worth using, so they were only ever used by "tech bros" who were already cultural pariahs, and who in so using outed themselves as such.
Besides which, nobody is looking into my home and calling my various screens "loneliness enablers". Not that I would give a shit if they were, though I might invest in some blinds or drapes.
> I'm saying the "Apple goggles" can so easily fall victim this perception because those qualities are so front-and-center with it.
And I'm saying nobody will ultimately give a crap if the tech works as well as Apple wants it to. Our social spaces have been utterly transformed by screens and networked technology in the last few decades, and while there is always some pushback, progress marches on for better or worse.
> The glasses are extreme expensive and they are not replacing anything.
Well, they're essentially pitched as a replacement for laptops, tablets, and for some users TVs too. No product category goes from zero to full adoption in a day (look how long it took for laptops!) but saying this headset isn't pitched as a computer replacement is flat out wrong.
> Someone with an ipad still needs the glasses and the other way around.
Why? You're losing the drawing tablet functionality, which I assume most iPad owners don't use, and what else?
> Smart watches have been anything but a groundbreaking technological revolution.
I think Apple has made a tactical error here. The days of the shrinking iPhone are long gone, but not forgotten. It was the iPhone 3G that was a turning point for people who hadn't bought an iPhone yet. It was smaller with better battery life.
If the Apple Watch 3 had followed a similar pattern, they would have had to skip adding the next additional sensor to the device, but I think in the long term that would have just delayed us one design cycle but still given us a thinner and lighter watch, which we would have needed for a deeper impact.
Apple needs to do 3 things for the Vision Pro to be successful.
1. Convince enough people to buy one via halo use cases
2. Leverage or buy developer adoption
3. Create a decent enough developer experience to produce high quality apps
On 2 & 3, Apple has a proven track record, or at least amassing enough market share to force developers to ignore deficiencies in 3.
Which means 1 is going to be make-or-break.
The Apple Watch is a great analogy here, because it was evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
It did not let you do anything you couldn't before. It did let you do it better.
Consequently, this won't be (and doesn't need to be) an iPhone level smash success. It just needs to be volume and financially self-sufficient enough to get them to iteration N+X.
Because iteration N+X is "We shrink the iPhone down to a minimally-screened compute/network node, and the Vision SE becomes everyone's must-have companion, and then Apple owns a better-than-iPhone platform."
I think Apple made the right move in trumpeting its non-work use cases, because Apple has let macOS atrophy for enterprise use. And priced-for-work is a trap market they don't need to pursue (see: Microsoft).
But I don't know if most people want a better consumptive device $3500-badly... time, will tell.
Regarding #2 and #3, Apple has been working on this for years. ARKit for instance, is hugely gimmicky if not silly on iPhones, and LIDAR on the same had incredibly limited real world utility for that device. Yet for years they've been deploying millions of equipped devices, building it out, expanding the SDKs, doing developer outreach, and so on. They've even built shared AR spaces when the viewport is just a phone, again despite it being pretty goofy and of limited value.
They've been building towards this for years.
I suspect for most apps supporting the Vision Pro will be supporting variable resolutions (for resizable windows) and clicking a checkbox on the targets.
Surely $3500 and "Pro" in the product name implies they think it'll mostly be used for work? I didn't quite understand why they branded it that way given the heavy consumer focus in the demos. It implies that they intended for it to be a consumer device for a long time and got cold feet at the end when they realized they couldn't reduce the price.
> You're making a bold assumption, that someone wants to wear this headset when relaxing.
I've seen people pass out in VRChat with their headsets on. Some people on VRC are on there for 12+ hours a day. It's a fascinating sub culture I was totally shocked to learn about. People drink and do drugs while listening to music at a virtual rave. Multiple rooms full every Friday, Saturday 80-120 people in the room hanging out. I found myself up till 6 am lost in the music.
I used to do exactly that when the pandemic started, but like, is that enough for a $3k headset? I paid $2k for my setup but I was already heavily committed to various simulation game genres.
120 people is not enough for an entire headset division, and since the main reason most people don't like doing that is that they don't really enjoy having the headset on, I don't know what apple can do to change that.
> it's insanely hard to replace the simplicity of text buffers and a keyboard
Totally agree. I just want to use this to replace my big bulky monitor that I can't take with me wherever I go and that makes my small place look a little more junky.
For me it could go either way. I am willing to put up with wearing a headset if it unlocks some new use cases. But we really need to know the specs. I haven't seen anyone mention a field of view, refresh rate, pixel per degree, etc. And even with these specs I would need to actually try it to get a holistic feel for the product and its software.
> You're making a bold assumption, that someone wants to wear this headset when relaxing.
Raises hand. I'm in for that. I'm a VR fan but my soapbox has always been that AR is the true future.
> Also, a TV can be watched by multiple people, and a home cinema will obviously deliver better sound.
In the same way that when the iPhone came out there were individual devices that could do each feature better than the iPhone could, yes :)
If you look at video consumption, "individual" devices (phones, tablets, laptops) make up about 50% of viewing time. TV the rest. I don't think the multiple people angle is going to kill this considering how much content is consumed individually already.
A home cinema also has to be researched, purchased separately, takes up space, etc. Any pair of $200 Bose headphones sounds better than the old iPhone ear pods...and yet...
> it's insanely hard to replace the simplicity of text buffers and a keyboard.
We're talking about replacing monitors, not text buffers or keyboards!
> Because it's insanely hard to replace the simplicity of text buffers and a keyboard.
And why would you think this would seek to replace that, rather than complementing it? Fill up your entire vision with forty text buffers. Use a keyboard on a twelve-inch-deep shelf on one side of your bedroom with no monitor taking up space behind it.
The accessibility of this product is going to be transformative in industry. There have been similar AR headsets for woking in some industrial sectors, but this makes it possible for all companies to develop apps specific to their work place. Every factory, every distribution centre, every construction site, every industrial site, every hospital, can have this integrated to guide their workforce in complex tasks.
Imagine this for surgeries, or complex construction tasks, even just finding items in a warehouse.
This is going to be massive in the workspace, thats where I think people probably underestimate it.
We may all end up with one of these - or the none "pro" version - at home, just as we have iPads laying around. But many of us are going to end ups waring these for many hours a day during work.
Taking of a headset when we go home will end up being a joy.
What about $3500 says "accessibility" to you? You're just re-vomiting out all of the same promises VR companies have been making for the past half decade. No company is going to spend $3500 on a tool that easily breaks for low stakes jobs and is untested/unreliable for high stakes jobs.
I work in construction. $3500 is a paltry, pocket change amount of money compared to project budgets.
Standard single-building commercial / institutional new builds can be tens of millions to low hundred million, "big" projects are often north of a quarter billion dollars, and well over a billion is not unusual for so-called "mega projects". Risk (from defects / mistakes) is often roughly proportional to budget. The placement of seemingly minor and easy to miss elements at the initial critical stages of a concrete pour in a high rise, for example, is pretty high stakes with rework costing hundreds of thousands to potentially millions. We have processes for mitigating that of course, but none that approach it in such a direct and observable way as AR, and none are incompatible with being done alongside AR. Paying $3500 + software for something that helps mitigate that risk in a totally new and complementary way is very very interesting to many companies.
edit: To be clear, I'm not convinced that this particular device is revolutionary compared to those that already exist, which have their own challenges. I'm just objecting to the idea that there isn't a market for it at that price even WITH challenges.
For me 100% of the excitement is about the bajillion business ideas I've had hoping that VR would become more popular, when it just simply didn't get there.
Tons of minimally invasive procedures are performed through the Davinci surgical robot where the surgeon is literally hunched over with his head buried ina computer screen. As long as there is some medical benefit, I don’t see this sort of technology interaction as being something new.
>This is going to be massive in the workspace, thats where I think people probably underestimate it.
I don't think companies are going to spring this much for a headset and laptop until there's very obvious benefits, but maybe I've just been short-changed with shitty equipment my whole career.
Companies trying to get people to go back to the office, then ordering them VR headsets will be the height of tech irony.
Speaking as a total non-expert here: assuming workspaces _look_ good, I think this will entirely depend on software. What will it be like to use this with a keyboard? Will the OS be as siloed as iOS?
This morning, my mac wouldn't boot. I tried to write on my iPad instead. It was a nightmare: too cumbersome to move between apps, Zotero nearly unworkable, hard to navigate different file versions. If the OS works more like iOS than macOS, I can't imagine it being as useful as computers save for very specific applications.
This is not what got Apple to where it was. It was recognizing what we wanted to do to go further, individually and together, and amplified that with technology.
This literally amplifies your ass to the couch. I'm shocked. Stunned. And sad.
> This literally amplifies your ass to the couch. I'm shocked. Stunned. And sad.
Were you “shocked/stunned/sad” about Apple TV? A product which physically relies on your ass being sat on the couch?
Think a little bigger here! This goes well beyond entertainment value. Imagine the general business uses in industry, manufacturing, medicine, conferencing, telecommunications, let alone any form of interpersonal interaction over long distances…
These are all things we take for granted with FaceTime, Google, GPT… All these are new but ubiquitous technologies, which allow us to enhance our human abilities and connect with each other in new and novel ways.
You and I both know the TV was not Apple's 'One more thing...' to such a cringy degree.
Preface: I've been in the VR/AR space a long time. I started a company with a friend around the launch of DK1 - we wanted to sell VR Computer Boxes. We had so many dumb but beautifully naive ideas.
I will only offer high level themes (although incomplete) that should hopefully explain why I take such issue with this release:
We already have the best vision system on the planet, 'our eyes'.
Spatial Computing in humans is not vision and audio alone - proprioception underlies all.
What you cover with a headset, you cannot faithfully recreate with cameras and software.
Use the brilliant chipset advantage to bring super 'low cost' computing embodiments to every corner of life - then integrate with devs
Ambient Computing is the next iteration of 'mac at the center of your digital life'
AirTags, Beacons, and AppClips don't get the corporate strategic attention they deserve
Apple Watch should be 'the wand' for life out in the real world, with AppClips, Beacons and such
Not this version probably, just like the first version of the iPhone wasn't stellar. But as a new product line, this is the first VR/AR device I've seen that demonstrates a vision for the future that might work. For a one-day ubiquitous product, $3k is the entry level price. None of the existing devices support this vision - they are just VR hardware. Their lower price doesn't matter because that's not what's going to go mainstream.
I will go on record as saying this will be one of the biggest flops in Apple's modern hardware history.
They've shown no innovative scenarios that Hololens / Quest / Google Glass (and similar devices) hasn't shown before. Those things flopped because they didn't have the scenarios and nothing changed now.
For me, the big difference is apps. I have a Quest and there's not much usable stuff for it. I can see a lot of those ipad/iphone/mac apps as useful on an AR device.
Quality also matters. I don't really like looking through the Quest for very long. Fresnel lenses and meh screen combined with a terrible processor means the visual experience isn't very good. I'd bet a lot that their custom lenses and screens combined with a decent SoC offer a HUGE jump in visual fidelity.
Is this the new reverse-Dropbox reverse-iPhone HN groupthink meta? The question is, will we link back to this in 10 years as a gotcha as AR/VR is still 10 years away from mainstream then?
Having multiple private large-scale screens anywhere, even on the train or plane, is huge. Many VR headsets tried delivering that, but so far the resolution just wasn't there. The article is a bit light on actual details, but at least the price point gives an indication that Apple might make it possible.
I think it's a good risk, and the kind of risk Apple is well-positioned (as a combined owner of hardware, software, and third-party software ecosystem) to take.
Major we'll-see risk factors I identify:
1) $3,500 is expensive, any way you slice it. That makes it price-competitive with a workstation.
2) The stand-up-and-work environment they demo'd doesn't work for a lot of people. But if you sit down, you lose a lot of the benefit of that panoramic space.
3) Their gesture interface has to be rock-solid (meaning no false negatives but also no false positives) for it to be part of a daily work environment.
4) We've been experimenting with headsets for long enough to know that for the average user, the amount of time you can comfortably use one is lower than the amount of time seated at a mouse-keyboard-monitor UI.
5) The battery life is 2 hours, which is like nothing. You can use it plugged in, but then you're plugged in (meaning not only that you're tethered to somewhere, but that you've got the constant pressure of the tether disrupting your head motions, which adds up over time in irritation).
All of that having been said, if anyone has a prayer of overcoming these obstacles it's Apple. They've got the software / hardware / UI / UX integration in-house to take a solid run at the challenge.
I completely agree with your point about risk. When we're talking about risk, the opposite of risk is a great benefit, just like a starship. Captain Kirk said great risk we have, the more potential gain we probably gain. Stand-up work environment is also huge for me. I don't like sitting all the time in front of a desk. But I'm not sure if I sit down, all the benefits gonna last. Maybe it's just a choice. Maybe I can sit down doing some different kind of things. Or maybe I can lay on my bed, just do something else. The gesture interface has to be rock solid. I agree. Especially you're already doing something more fine-tune level things.For example, you want to manipulate a 3D object, but I think we can, or the engineering can finally overcome those difficulties by using those optical algorithms to track, to kind of think about a new way to interact with computer. Actually, if you think about the way we communicate with computer, all we're talking about is the keyboard, but does the keyboard is the only solution to all the problem we have? I don't think that is the only problem. The battery lapsed two hours, I'm not sure what exactly they mean. If it's just two hours, maybe it's a replaceable charge or something like that, maybe we can bring a bigger external battery. I'm not sure, but if it's just only working for two hours, that's going to be some potential issues here.
IMHO the biggest risk factor is that without a mass market version (running iPhone apps in a window doesn't count) the developers won't reach the critical mass you need to support a novel piece of hardware like this. $3500 is a shit ton to spend on a toy that lets you have a virtual Mickey Mouse standing next to a screen playing a Disney movie.
If nobody is buying the product then developers have no incentive to buy one either. The only software for it will be demos from Apple and extremely expensive bespoke professional applications for businesses, and that market is far too small for Apple to ever recoup their R&D costs, much less ongoing expenses.
The only way I see this working is if Apple themselves invent a killer application for the headset. Even then its going to struggle to find buyers at that price point. It doesn't matter how cool your hardware is if nobody can afford it. It's hard to see how they would even cut down the existing hardware to make a version for real people.
> I will happily go on the record as saying that this will be as revolutionary as the iPhone, perhaps even more so.
It seems to have the potential. The UX seems incredible. Little details like using eyes as a pointer make it for a far better experience (no, moving your head to point is not the same). Looking at your Macbook to pull apps from it is the sort of thing that can make it intuitive for the average user. A proper review of what this could do would take an article.
I think the main things we need to know are:
* What sort of apps can we use? Is this IOS-like, or can I run XCode on it? Having to own the headset plus a macbook is not going to make or break it, but it changes the value of the device at its current price point.
* Can we comfortably use it for 8+ hours a day?
* Is text really crisp enough for productivity usage?
I don't think this version is quite there yet, but give it a few iterations and we may be able to ditch physical monitors altogether. I've been waiting for that for a while.
At $3499 it's quite a gamble. At $999 it would have been a no-brainer, as that's the price of a phone. It does have way too much hardware for a lower price point, so it's understandable. But the more devices that exist, the greater the network effects.
4K is roughly 8 million pixels. I wonder if they’re including the front display in their pixel count. Or there actually is significantly better than 4K per eye happening here.
At any rate, it’s a lot of pixels. Not sure what GP is complaining about.
GP here. It's 12M because the displays are square, not 16:9, so there are more vertical pixels. This will look better than most existing headsets, but it's not enough to match flat displays. You can't think about it in terms of traditional monitors- this is 4k over your entire field of vision, which translates to monitor-sized objects at maybe 720p. That's why all the virtual screens in their demo are so big; they're very low density.
Remember the age of 768p laptops? It'll look like that.
I get what you're saying in a mathematical sort of way, but I think the point you might be missing is that "monitor sized object" isn't a relevant concept for this device. You're saying that I can't think about this in terms of regular monitors, but I think you're doing precisely that.
"monitor sized object" exists as a thing because we live in a reality where desks limit the size of the things we can reasonably use for work. But here, your desk is virtual now. There is "space" for a bigger screen. You're saying they compensated by making the virtual screen larger--my thought here is "so what"?
Text legibility / crispness will be important. I'm one of those guys who buys the 5K displays, so I agree it matters. But Apple made a point of calling out clean text rendering, and none of the previews have complained so far. But obviously no one in those early previews has spent 8 hours in an IDE, so we'll see.
Fully agree that more would be better, and would increase the usability of smaller, more fine elements. But this might be enough resolution to pull off the concept in a perfectly usable way.
Sadly no. I've used AR glasses that have double the pixels per degree than the Quest Pro (done by using a smaller FOV). It looks like 1080p on maybe a 32" desktop monitor. You can read but it's not a fun experience. Apple's version will depend on what FOV they use, but it's going to look pixelated regardless. There's a reason they didn't use their Retina branding.
> - In response to the obvious criticisms (high price, battery life, form factor, weird eyeball thing)... this is Gen 1. Look how quickly the iPhone and Apple Watch evolved between generations 1 to 3, and look how the price changed as production capabilities and economies of scale evolved.
The original iPhone released for $599, which is ~$876 2023 dollars based on CPI. So, while most of your bullet points about iPhone improving is true, the iPhone is the wrong thing to point to for economies of scale making Apple products cheaper over time.
This sounds like a take from somebody who doesn't realise that's already there in headsets like the Quest that this presumably won't match in numbers.
What is brilliant here, are the specs giving some serious boost to the use cases already established by Meta/Oculus, NReal etc and services like Immersed, BigScreen etc.
But please, less of that breathless "Apple have invented this new thing" tone, it's annoying when they haven't.
Either do some basic research first, or if you have, then at least frame what you reckon is revolutionary in terms of the existing market.
I am sure from the specs, if not the price, that this is going to kick up some dust, but its not obviously inventing anything that isn't there already.
Not only they don't realize it already exists, they don't realize how bad it is.
There's never enough resolution (even with 8K headsets), eye strain from trying to focus on virtual objects is real, and camera passthrough always look fake (and may even cause mild nausea). Not to mention that most folks don't really train their neck muscles to support significant extra weight on their heads on front-back axis (we typically tilt our heads much less than lean forward or backward, so headphones are not comparable).
I don't believe Apple have made some giant leap and included an autorefractor in there and made external cameras moveable and able to match you pupillary distance (and convergence!), then added some fancy magnetostrictive micro-mirror system to dynamically boost resolution at the areas you're focusing at. Not in this form factor, and if they would somehow magically make it they'd be boasting about it non-stop.
If they showcase it in Apple Stores I would definitely take a peek, and I would like to be wrong - but I'm pretty sure it's a pricey gimmick that won't be anywhere comfortable for any prolonged use.
I will happily go on record to say that you're critically wrong and that the only reason this will ever have any usage is the Apple Reality Distortion Field.
I speak having used most available VR devices available these past few years, and currently owning a Valve Index:
Watching movies: wearing something over your eyes and on your head like that for so long _fucking sucks_. It's heavy/hot enough when you're doing something that takes your attention. Watching a movie is fun for the first time, then you realize that being able to walk around, look at other things etc is infinitely better. Not to mention the fact that if you ever want to watch with someone else, well they better have 3.5k available. that makes it a non starter for literally anyone hoping to, you know, have people over.
- For work: it fucking sucks. You know what's worse than having two screens taking up your entire sight? Having to physically turn your head to see more screens. It is physically sickening to have your entire attention taken up like that.
- Form factor: my dude the last thing I want in public is to look like I'm wearing swimming goggles. Also, two hours is absolutely pathetic.
- Price: the first iPhone cost $600. The cheapest new iPhone 14 is $1000, the most expensive is like 2000. It got worse, not better.
It's going to be a fun, overpriced toy and it'll be just like every VR device people currently own: hanging on your wall and used once every two weeks, at best.
> For personal/entertainment use it largely replaces the need for a TV, soundbar, or home cinema.
TV viewing is often a social experience: friends gathering in front of a TV to watch a sporting event (say, a World Cup soccer match, or your favorite team's football game, or an NBA finals game). This takes away that aspect. I'm not sure if this is a change we really need.
Sure but "for personal use" kinda excludes "social experience" here.
> it largely replaces the need for a TV, soundbar, or home cinema
In my previous flat, living along, a big TV just didn't fit anywhere. A sound system would also have annoyed the neighbours. Something like this would have been perfect for getting that 4K HDR viewing experience.
Small, comfortable smart glasses enabling Hololens 2 like UX, I agree.
Bulky, expensive passthrough? No, there are better, cheaper, more open options than this on the market. If it was going to change things, we'd be seeing people using this capability already.
The main hold up here is technology advancement, not quite where it needs to be yet, but the field is showing the progress needed to reach it.
I have an NReal Air. It offers similar capabilities to everything you mentioned (though much worse resolution).
If I have the preference, I still choose a screen. Screens are easy, screens a casual, screens exist in the real world. I can share them, I can walk away from them, I can position them where _they will never, ever move_. Screens have (and will always have) higher resolution. Screens don't require me to mess with some cord and pull a headset off to find my snack or walk to the bathroom.
I prefer my Nreals in two situations:
* When I'm traveling/on-the-go and want more screen real estate.
* When my wife is using the main TV and I don't feel like hauling the Playstation downstairs.
Sounds like the Vision Pro addresses your main issues - it's fully wireless, albeit with the somewhat ridiculous cord hanging off and battery pack in your pocket. And you can walk around your house with (presumably) near perfect pass through view of the real world. And then the resolution - I think you could be wrong about that. It's surprisingly hard to compare, but the Vision Pro is going to get you pretty close to high enough resolution that it doesn't matter any more.
It's interesting though you seem to view the fact that it's close to impossible to move your monitors as a plus - that part sounds very weird to me.
The cable is really about how it runs down your shoulder/back. It gets caught on stuff and pinched between your body and seat, pulling it off. This is a problem even when using magnetic usb cables or Nreal with a usb-c based phone.
Taking it off is still necessary for anything outside of a trivial task. It's really scary to think about dropping a $3.5k device in the toilet/sink or having it fall off your head.
> It's interesting though you seem to view the fact that it's close to impossible to move your monitors as a plus - that part sounds very weird to me.
In the video, all of the virtual monitors are "perfectly" aligned with the user and the surrounding environment. It looks beautiful, but presents some challenges that I hope Apple has installed.
For example, if you use this at a desk, how do you ensure that the screens anchor directly in front of you every time you use it? Are the just slightly off? Do they read the room and reset when they recognize it? Do you need to "recenter" every time you use the device?
How do you put a TV in the perfect place in your room?
> how do you ensure that the screens anchor directly in front of you every time you use it?
That might link to why they made the otherwise slightly weird way you activate it - by looking at your laptop screen. So it knows exactly where your laptop is, and can position the screens perfectly relative to that.
I found it odd because partly the whole point is that it liberates you from being anchored but perhaps this is part of the reason they did it that way?
We've had all these things since the very first VR headsets. I remember sitting in a movie theatre setting trying to play a 1080P movie and it looking like a potato.
Forgetting the AR/VR debate for a minute, the thing holding these back from wide adoption has been resolution and comfort. I have yet to use an XR device where I can simply play a video without it being jarringly blurry and pixelated. I've yet to use an XR device that isn't a chore to wear and sweaty (although I do trust Apple to address this one).
Let's see. The proof will be in the pudding when I try one of these in an Apple store next year.
I'm willing to take the opposite "bet", and say that I think this will receive very little traction.
The single reason being that it's uncomfortable to use. That's it. It's an "Emperor's New Clothes" type saying: It doesn't matter how impressive the capabilities are, if it's uncomfortable, people will, after the initial allure fades, just not use it.
IMO The only viable future for VR/AR is when the form factor will come down to normal looking/weighting glasses that I might look around for while having them on.
I was wondering what was dragging HN down :-). That said, if it translates signs in the "real world" on the fly to your native language, that would be win for business users. The "infinite screen/screens" thing has always show promise but has always been hard to execute against. The lack of them pushing any kind of gaming experience[1] was a bit telling for me. I'm guessing they haven't fixed the vomit problem. Still think it would be awkward to be in the same physical space with people who have visors and people who don't.
[1] To be fair I didn't see the keynote, just followed the website sales pitch.
The thing that amazed me the most with the presentation was that they never showed typing on a virtual keyboard. It seems like you need an actual physical keyboard to do any typing.
The keyboard was famously considered a make it or break it feature internally at Apple when developing the original iPhone. It is very telling that they haven’t managed to solve this basic HCI problem for the Vision. Steve Jobs would never have released this. I’m sad to say it, but this is not a “Pro” device. It’s a Prototype device.
Apple Vision Prototype
(And I’m sorry, but the eyes are creepy —- uncanny valley)
The dual-touchpad style VR keyboard like the original Vive has is probably the only usable virtual keyboard. Everything else is one by one, find and peck typing.
If you want to experience it, get a steam controller or a steam deck and use the trackpads on that keyboard. You get used to it very fast and you can get really usable typing speed.
It won't work for programming though because anything that needs more niche than basic punctuation would require chording or multiple inputs, which sucks.
Yeah from what I can tell and being a solitary person if I had 3.5k I'd be all over this. And I am a die-hard Linux guy though I have an iPhone and an Apple Watch. Very cool stuff, albeit, if it lives up to the hype in the presentation. Very cool stuff.
So.. Fun fact, Osterhaut group(ODG) has something just like this and it was working as Apple demos showed and it was out 7 years ago. I tried it on and for me it was the biggest game changer I felt since the 2007 iphone. Microsoft bought the patents from odg and the company ran out of money trying its own strategy. Sad story for them but I hope apple really does this right as it will be an absolute game changer.
I spent a ton of money configuring my home office. Many displays, giant motorized desk, articulating arms, cable management, etc. Easily over $3500, and I still don't feel like it's ergonomically great. It certainly can't be brought anywhere. It occupies a whole room.
Now I am thinking I might not need that bulky stuff at all, and if I don't need the displays and big desk then maybe I don't need the office. If I don't need the home office then maybe I should be shopping a home that's around 75-100k cheaper with one less room.
I've often wanted to work outside from my deck but then I don't have my screen real estate and I get tons of glare. This could solve that.
We've long complained about the degradation of the in-office experience. These days it's all open-floor plans with a fixed monitor set and no privacy. If I could put these on and have a huge display with a beach in the background, I wouldn't as much mind sitting 2 feet away from coworkers.
The benefits of something like this on flights and in airports seems obvious. Its not really weird, considering savvy travelers swaddle themselves in AirPods Max and bizarre neck-sling-pillow apparatuses already.
> I will happily go on the record as saying that this will be as revolutionary as the iPhone, perhaps even more so.
> Look how quickly the iPhone and Apple Watch evolved between generations 1 to 3
I would not compare the iPhone to the Apple Watch. They were on completely different orders of magnitude of evolution.
I could see the Apple Vision Pro being half as popular as the Apple Watch (primarily due to the price tag) and I think there's a good chance it finds its market, but I think comparing it to the iPhone is way off base.
How can you say that before trying? Have you ever tried VR? You can see the pixels, it's not at all immersive. I find it hard to believe that Apple have somehow invented revolutionary display technology before Meta/Oculus who have had about decade to do R&D. Not to mention that "inside-out" tracking is nowhere as good as shown as show at the WWDC keynote.
> For personal/entertainment use it largely replaces the need for a TV, soundbar, or home cinema.
It remains to be seen if the experience is better than a large OLED TV.
In terms of sound I seriously doubt it. Maybe if it had large planar drivers but I doubt you can use large headphones with it. If it's meant to be used with crappy Airpods the sound is going to be nowhere comparable to a home theater.
For people who are loners, live alone and don't share anything with others. I guess if you enjoy sitting on your couch watching TV all by yourself all day this is it, yes.
Name with "Pro" in it already, might suggest lower-tier versions coming in some future?
Device looks promising, and I wonder if they plan to allow 2 devices to show the same content simultaneously to say watch 3D movies with someone else in the same room.
Some say $3499 is a high price, but being able to carry huge design studio with you is heck of a value to me.
I get the impression this model is intended to introduce the product line to the market and give developers something to build on while Apple fine-tunes the hardware. The thing is way overpriced for the average consumer but the tech inside it is wild. I expect we'll see more consumer-friendly models in 2024-2025.
I think this is long game material. And we won’t see a “consumer” version for at least two more years. Maybe Christmas 2025, but I feel like that’s super optimistic.
I remember when the iPhone came out, and one kid in my high school got one cause his dad was a wealthy businessman. Everyone thought it was super cool but it was definitely not consumer-friendly at the time (No app store, default stocks app, expensive and carrier-locked)
I think this headset has potential, but we're definitely not there with the first generation.
This will sell like hot cakes for flight sim consumers, if they could somehow show a virtual cockpit. It will be gone in seconds, flight simmers will pay more than that. I consider myself a starter and I already spent 2k+ just on flight sim hardware.
23M pixels across the field of vision of two eyes doesn't meet the requirements of a design studio. A retina display is minimum 60 pixels per degree. This will be around 30.
23 million pixels is 6kx4k (or maybe a slightly different aspect ratio, but whatever). That would be a 100 degree horizontal field of view at 60 pixels per degree. That would be a fairly narrow fov, but not unusually so for an HMD. I suspect they'd go for a much wider field though.
Agreed - we don't know what the actual PPD will be, but it will surely fall short of 60 given that the VR display covers more of your field of view than a 4K monitor in front of you.
That said, it'll still be higher than the current VR headsets and I expect many people will find it sufficient for their work.
I've never spent even $1500 on a single tech product before, let alone $3500. They might as well have made it $9999. Its pricing puts it in the business buyer / wealthy Apple enthusiast league with Mac Pro, not consumer hardware. This is not priced for the market of middle class consumers worried about a recession.
The Quest 3 is $499. This headset looks GREAT but is it really 7X greater than the Quest 3?
I'm totally getting a quest for fitness. This thing doesn't look like it is designed for fitness at all, although I might get one in the future if (a) I have disposable income for it and (b) the experiences are compelling? $3500 isn't that much these days (unfortunately).
Tech is so cheap now. When the Macintosh II came out in 1987 [1]:
> When introduced, a basic system with monitor and 20 MB hard drive cost US$5,498 (equivalent to $14,160 in 2022). With a 13-inch color monitor and 8-bit display card the price was around US$7,145 (equivalent to $18,400 in 2022).
Even the Commodore 64 was expensive [2]:
> Volume production started in early 1982, marketing in August for US$595 (equivalent to $1,800 in 2022).
If the experience is worth it and there's no cheaper competitor, people have the money for these things.
And honestly, as a big user of the Quest 2 -- the Quest 3 isn't anywhere close to the same ballpark as this. Apple Vision Pro looks absolutely more than 7x better, the only question is whether it's worth it for you.
Absolutely. I’d rather have companies making these type of high quality products even if I can’t afford them to not having products like this in the market at all.
Just because there's tech in something doesn't make them a tech product. Your microwave oven probably has tech built in, doesn't make it a 'not appliance.'
Looks like an awesome device, but with that price I don't think it's aimed at consumers. Also, would the Pro moniker imply a non-Pro version at a lower price in the future?
Expensive but with such an immersive experience can right off the bat replace a television and surround sound system. But potentially offers a lot more than this.
Not bad for a 1st generation product.
My (and I suspect many others') main use case for a TV+surround sound system is social consumption of media. A TV I can't watch with my partner is useless, a speaker I can't use to keep a party going is useless. To me the relevant comparison here is a PC, and by that measure this is a very expensive PC with an improved screen experience. Whether that screen improvement is worth the $1K-1.5K more than a Macbook will depend on how thoroughly they've actually delivered on the AR experience.
Well it s good, this is how you make something that turns us to cyborgs.
A bit pricey to become a household items (because a family needs 4 of them) but this is probably where things are heading to
There is so much engineering going on here that maybe ... it's simpler to start considering retina implants or just brain implants.
This was more like a work of art than a consumer device. I wonder if Oculus can steal some ideas ... Like, these device are not for gaming but general productivity. Ditch the 2 oculus controllers, put the battery in the 1 controller and wire it to the head. I m not convinced if eye tracking is worth it. oculus' controls are precise enough and in any case it's better to hold something instead of pointing and pinching the air, it makes the device more physical. dont know what is needed for the ability to render a full field of view but would be interesting to know what is the level of nausea this causes when movement is involved. I guess Apple purposely chose to eliminate all optic flow movement - all the apps appear to be stationary.
Their cost comparison to a 4k tv, surround sound, high end laptop, etc does seem reasonable for a single person, but it does indeed break down for a family. Everyone sitting on the couch watching a movie, but you with your goggles getting a completely different experience.
Notably there doesn't seem to be any tech present to share virtual spaces at all. All these smiling people staring at their virtual screens couldnt even share their experiences if they wanted to & everyone else had a Vision Pro too. These are personal, pocket spaces.
There was notably no effort to do a MagicLeap either, of playing with existing space. Meta for example shows people enjoying a crazy dungeon crawler board game atop their real table; very primitive but something physically integrated. I didn't see a single example of Apple integrating with space, only taking it over.
I’m convinced it’s not possible to build a decent headset without eye tracking. Low latency, high refresh rates, massive resolutions,
in a tiny footprint just isn’t possible with our current generation of chips. Eye tracking lets you put your compute cycles where they’re needed, and not waste time rendering to useless pixels.
is it really low latency considering that it needs 2 cameras and a bunch of leds? Also, saccades are not very precise and are relatively small movement so i m nor
sure how precise and detailed the pointer is in these.
The said during the event that they have a custom chip to do the signal processing for the cameras and sensors. I fully believe they’ve solved the camera latency issue.
It is a great input, but more importantly: drastically lowers the required computation with foviated rendering, i.e. rendering hires where you look, not everywhere.
Unless you’re doing at least once over 100Hz refresh rates, human eyeballs are too fast for foveated rendering. Motion to photon latency for this thing is 12ms from the presentation, which is 83Hz(so it’s 85Hz), and that’s probably for post-processing 2D warping and not 3D scene shading/rendering where foveated rendering must take place so no way that works.
Also the 12ms mentioned, wasn't that from camera to screen (so the latency of both the camera sensor added to the latency of the screen) or did i misunderstand?
Now that i think about it, the eye tracking is also a camera. Hmm.
It’s not theory. Every VR headset produced, since the 90’s, and every microscope, shortly after their invention, has had optics that make viewing comfortable, by having a distant focal distance, for the eyes to settle on. This is, quite literally, Physics 101 material!
As a glasses wearer I was wondering how this works. They mentioned extra lenses that I would have to install into the device. But why isn't it possible to do this all in software?
It takes optical phased array(we’re not there yet at all)) or light-field display(not there in computational power yet) to do this in software. Some googles has diopter correction/focus adjustment dials, but it’s not common for some reason, which I can only make assumptions, perhaps to do with motion sickness.
The focal distance won't be an inch away of course. Every headset I've seen specs for puts the focal distance at 20ft. For normal human eyes, 20ft is optical infinity, so there's no difference optically between looking into a headset and looking at the horizon.
Did they say anything about myopia from holding screens close? I thought they specifically said the feature was encouraging spending more time outside. I believe the current theory for increased myopia is from not getting enough sunlight into your eyes as a child. Nothing to do with focusing close.
Directly after mentioning the sunlight monitoring/monitoring outside time feature they announced a feature that utilizes the Face ID cameras to warn you if you are holding a screen too close to your face.
> Additionally, increasing the distance the device is viewed from can help children lower their risk of myopia and gives adult users the opportunity to reduce digital eyestrain. Screen Distance in Screen Time uses the TrueDepth camera to encourage users to move their device farther away after holding it closer than 12 inches from their face for an extended period of time.
Funny, the moment they showed the vision health feature, I immediately thought they'd come back to that later to tell us that computing using a headset is in fact better for the eyes (because of the lenses that shift the focal distance).
The price is even higher than people expected at $3.5k! The passthrough of the wearers eyes with a front facing display is pretty interesting, especially with the 3D lenticular display giving every viewer the correct perspective.
I hadn't seen that in the rumors leading up to the launch, its good to see apple still can keep some secrets.
Yeah, with them touting watching movies and only having "up to 2 hours" of battery, that's going to severely limit the movies you can watch. "Everything, Everywhere, All At Once", which they showed someone watching, is 2.2hrs.
This will only be targeted in US, no? I doubt it's GDPR compliant and won't probably buyers outside of US. If it's $3500, then in Europe, it will be around $5000.
What’s the issue with GDPR? If it is similar to other Apple products where data is collected / processed at the edge, then no more issues than anything else they do.
I don't think GDPR is a problem, but they might have to cut some features in some EU countries where facial recognition is illegal (if they use that, but they probably do).
Kind of like Google Photos which has facial recognition and tagging, except in the EU.
AR sized sunglasses is the next iPhone so much innovation to happen here.
Though as of now and until they shrink all the tech into regular sized glasses the majority will reject while the innovators will jump on this headset and start creating amazing things.
I really miss the authenticity of an Elon presentation. Some of the people in the Vision Pro presentation looked 3D rendered with the degree of post processing the video underwent.
No kidding. This honestly felt like something out of Hunger Games, with some obviously well-off, out-of-touch, work-from-home dweebs wearing this unit to show off their status to their Apple ecosystem social circle. And then we have Disney! With Marvel and Star Wars! So you can experience Adventure! Without leaving your home!
Yeesh, this says a lot about their target market.
Cool tech, though. Let's hope I'm not peer pressured into wearing one of these masks for my kid's goddamn birthday party.
I guess they had to call it a "spatial computer" in an attempt to overcome the shock that they want $3,500 for a VR headset when the competition is selling their newest generation for $500.
Honestly, it really doesn't seem different at all.
AR is also where other notable headset makers are betting, Quest has had hand controls for quite a while (which made the "clunky controllers" dig fall flat).
It definitely seems more refined, but then again, it's over 2x the cost of the competition, so that would have to be taken as read.
There is really no comparison between the Apple device and what Meta announced, the devices are quite different.
Even when Apple showed games, it was less full AR games or like VR experiences in AR, it was about putting a screen up and playing a standard game like this.
The Apple experience is full VR and using every space as a screen to access the things you already do. Meta is insisting on building the 'metaverse' it's a completely different concept that people making this argument seem to have completely missed.
And I say that as someone that uses a Q1 everyday for Fitness and will be purchasing a Q3, you saw Apple announce nothing like this, also I think the name is a give away 'vision pro' it's about visuals and virtual screens, not about creating another reality, which is likely why they moved away from the reality pro name that was rumoured.
It was all 2.5D apps and watching movies - this is the exact stuff that has already been tried. It's a really polished presentation of it with the shadow casting and stuff, but is that really the missing piece? Seems unlikely.
Fully 3D apps and content are definitely supported, just not emphasized a ton in the keynote. I expect third party devs to create tons of cool stuff for it beyond the basic 2D iPad apps!
What are they doing that can't be done with other VR headsets? Virtual desktop has been a thing for years, and VR pass-through and "pointing interfaces" are possible with the Meta Quest. While these features may be better on Apple's headset, they certainly aren't new.
I'm sorry, but have you tried the Quest Pro's pass-through?
I have, and it was an awful experience. They had color pass through but faked it and it felt like a grayscale video that someone shoddily tried to paint over it. There was significant warping and text (like a poster on my friend's wall) was barely readable.
It "exists", but was completely useless in terms of usability. If Apple can get pass-through to actually work well, I would call that "new" in the sense that it's a feature that's usable.
I guess they had to call it a "spatial computer" in an
attempt to overcome the shock that they want $3,500 for
a VR headset
With "computer" I think they're trying to emphasize the fact that it's standalone, not an add-on?
That may seem silly, but I have not paid much attention to VR/AR and I had assumed that headsets like the Meta Quest 2 were tethered to some other device. A quick search before this post showed me that is not the case, but I was actually ignorant about that fact. So apparently there are dopes like me who need to be told that these flagship headsets are standalone computing devices.
It should have DisplayPort out so you can use it as a computer too. (There's probably some garbage patent already for using a VR computer as a computer, mercy patents are just such trash.)
The cheapest android sells for $50, vs iPhone that starts at $900, yet it takes weeks to get an iPhone on launch. What's the point here.
The thing has its own more than capable chip, knowing Apple has seamless integrations and will absolutely start a new trend. Can't wait for Google's and Samsung's substandard implementation soon, like what they did with the watch.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 784 ms ] threadAlthough I still think it's pretty awesome, need to give it a few years and see the price come down and a few versions later, this tech will be very interesting in the 5-10 year time space, what a crazy time that is going to be with AI and all this stuff.
So it makes no sense to price it at $399.
It certainly seems better than Microsoft Hololens. Basically the same idea but with higher end hardware and more refined.
This does not look like to be a turning point either way, it is priced out of mass market adoption, but it will be an interesting toy for many.
Some of the stuff on display felt gimmicky, but I would imagine as bare minimum there are lot of people who are happy to have a private huge 4k screen they can move anywhere.
There is absolutely a market for this, the demo experiences are extraordinary.
I have no idea what the Meta experience is like, but even in ignorance, it's not like what this thing is doing.
They were correct in saying this is something only Apple can do.
There are a lot of isolated technophiles with money to burn to put into something like this. The idea of lifting your mac into space with nothing but a keyboard and mouse in front of you alone is enough for many to pop for this. Talk about bringing your office into the local Starbucks, this moves it to the next level.
Thar she bloooows!
And considering Apple isn’t really known for dropping product prices as the years go by, all this really does is tell us that the tech just isn’t ready for mass production yet.
I’m considering this, like Google Glass, to be a neat proof-of-concept.
In a world of $1000 cellphones, $2000 computers and $40k cars, I wouldn't be so sure. I suspect if the prices do stay this high, it'll get priced on a monthly like how many people pay for their phones or cars.
That's a really bizarre thing to say. People will literally spend that on a fancy watch. They will spend 30 times that on a car.
This can’t be compared to other headsets out there, and is rather in an entirely different product category.
The only drawback I can see is the 2h battery and potential fatigue from wearing something on your head, near the eyes for longer periods of time. Maybe that'll be a non-issue? Will have to wait and see.
I think folks are missing the point that this is the first Pro version. Likely targeted at developers and early adopters. I’m sure there will be an Air/Lite/etc version that cost reduces overtime.
---
EDIT: To clarify this statement...
- For personal/entertainment use it largely replaces the need for a TV, soundbar, or home cinema.
- For business use, the days of multiple displays and screen management seem set to be a relic of the past. I look forward to coding in an IDE which isn't constrained to a physical device sat on my desk, or replying to emails "on the beach" versus under fluorescent lighting. My work environment will soon become consistent, without relying on the realities of my real-world physical environment. Think about people working from home with little-to-no desk space: this solves that problem.
- In response to the obvious criticisms (high price, battery life, form factor, weird eyeball thing)... this is Gen 1. Look how quickly the iPhone and Apple Watch evolved between generations 1 to 3, and look how the price changed as production capabilities and economies of scale evolved.
- Personally, I've been using Apple devices for 20 years. This is the first novel Apple device I've felt genuinely excited about since first joining the ecosystem. Will I use it for everything? No. Will the first version be perfect? No. Does it offer a whole new paradigm to any one of the physical devices I already own...? Yes! If Apple's reputation for growth and improvement in other product categories historically is anything to go by, I look forward to seeing how ubiquitous this becomes in 5 or 10 years from now.
The original 128k Macintosh was $2,495 in 1984--that's $6,244.14 in todays (2023) dollars, just to put things in perspective.
Obviously there will be less expensive models to come; this is just the start. This will be mostly for early adopters and developers.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
If you look at the historical ratio of income to the price of housing you'll see we're making less compared to the cost of things every year.
Pull up a chart of "FRED:ASPUS/FRED:MEHOINUSA646N" on https://www.tradingview.com
edit: took a screenshot to save the trouble https://imgur.com/a/U5ml4Iq
[0]: https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home-prices/
This has a lot more to do with governments making it illegal to build housing than the overall strength of the economy.
The point: it sold well enough for it to lay the groundwork to the Mac market of today.
At this stage, Apple looks like the only company with a real shot at making a mixed reality headset mainstream in the next 5-7 years.
I just don't see the must-have reason why everyone would have to buy one.
It’s day one utility was one of the best ever
...that fits in your bag. This is huge for folks like me that want to travel without lugging around a large display. If the visual integrity is there, it's gonna be worth it for me.
Also a lot of FBs efforts seemed to be around their whole Metaverse play which is a step beyond just making a good VR/MR headset. The Quest headset seems to be doing pretty well if not the explosive world eating unicorn that companies are always reaching for.
You missed one, porn.
They'd have to work with hand tracking (low accuracy, no buttons or sticks, no haptics) or a conventional console controller (limited immersion).
Nearly all existing VR games are built around dual controllers and would need significant reworking/compromises to be playable on the Vision Pro.
You can connect a traditional controller of course, they showed it working with a Playstation controller in one of the clips, but that's mainly useful for playing traditional flat-screen games on a virtual big screen and not so much for games which actually explore the possibilities of VR and AR.
Even if they are self tracking (like the Quest Pro controllers and therefore expensive) there's still a bunch of things that need to work smoothly together.
It's not just like making a Bluetooth gamepad.
And one thing we know about expensive, optional peripherals is that lack of developer support is usually it's death knell
Virtual movie theaters and virtual monitors haven't really been compelling use cases for putting an ugly sweat box on your face so far. What about slapping an Apple logo on it and pricing it even further out of reach changes that in your mind?
For those downvoting, see the parent comment and also this: https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
"Lame" was a historic comment and parent commenter should have included it :)
Agreed, but Apple have put themselves in a weird spot with the $3500 USD price tag.
For people making 10x what we make, these are on the level of $300.
And Apple gets to iterate and present v2 in a year or so, at 1/2 the price.
...One can also translate it into coffees. Just 700 coffees! Ok, better not.
If this "incredibly crisp text" is true, then I want it. Nobody has done this yet.
I don't think it's a great comparison. The MP3 players in the pre-iPod era were all made by tiny players no-one had heard of. The Oculus in particular has absolutely massive backing and still hasn't amounted to a lot.
I suspect the differentiator will be software, not hardware. In particular the willingness of third parties to create software. Apple has a good record there at least.
Apple's product, on the other hand, is extremely wonky. Who is this thing actually for? Based on the demos, it just looks like a second screen for my phone. It's also outrageously expensive. So Apple is asking me to seriously buy into the ecosystem and have confidence that this will be an important device in my collection.
I don't know, to me this isn't like any previous Apple take on a well defined market. In fact, this is Apple's take on a very undefined market with an unknown trajectory. It kind of feels more like when Apple went off the beaten path and added a touch bar to the MacBook Pro. It was an interesting idea and a lot of very long man hours went into making it work, but at what cost? In the end, it turns out, people just wanted simple tactile keys.
that's actually the playbook for new product launches for Apple. That was the same issue with Apple watch - they had no idea who it was for when they launched the first generation. It was just a watch with a screen that told time and gave you notifications. Then, they realized people loved using it for tracking health, and each generation they keep coming up with more and more ways to use it as an all-around health tracker. Now, Apple watch is as ubiquitous on people's wrists as iPhones are in people's hands
However, point still stands, they knew they wanted an iPod shuffle with health and personal safety device at launch. They even went all out with a Nike partnership to help promote it.
It didn't catch on until several years and hardware iterations later.
- existing apple ecosystem;
- the fact that this looks far more AR focused than the VR focused stuff I've currently seen;
- the public's perception of the Apple brand and its build quality (questionable if real, but an undeniable public perception nonetheless) could get around the "ugly sweat box" vibe you've described;
- the willingness for app-makers to build for the ecosystem;
- the 4k and (apparent) visual quality;
...could make this successful, or at least iPad-like in terms of dominating a market.
Hard to know for sure though until we get some actual reviews and footage of people wearing it.
Yes with the headsets I have, you can surf the web and technically try to write code, but it's not a good experience. And those displays basically still suck. You can see the pixels, and the lenses create weird effects. If Apple has solved this, and the presence of the screen and lenses is just "forgotten", it's going to be a huge step forward. It'll be a device to actually be productive on, let alone watch movies and play games, IMO.
I have hundreds of hours in VR, doing fiddly simulator things, and it's not an enjoyable experience, but rather something you put up with to get to experience something you wouldn't otherwise get to experience, like flying a real as it gets plane.
A couple really nice monitors are $500. A laptop with a really nice built in screen is $2000, even if you want the apple logo on it.
Having infinite floating windows in VR is actually pretty useless. Either they are all tiny and unreadable because you need INSANE resolution to get 1080p quality at normal viewing distance, or you have one giant screen pressed against your face and your eyes find that very uncomfortable. VR is tiring on your eyes, worse than looking at a screen all day.
I wish rich kids would stop trying to attain a minority report style dream of computation and focus on making actual, usable, good UIs that are enjoyable, easy, and productive to work with. This is none of those.
Apple seem to think they have solved these issues. We'll see.
When the Apple Watch was introduced, I thought that the form factor would change after a few years. It’s almost been ten years and it doesn’t seem like Apple will be making any big form factor changes to the product.
Apple will just have to make it fashionable to wear dorky scuba masks everywhere. Maybe the price tag will be sufficient…
It's an open question whether these will fit into their intended social contexts, whether that's the office, home, or public. If anywhere, I'd guess they wouldn't look weird in an office or on a single person at home (since there is nobody to look at them), but not in public or in a family setting.
In Apple's 10 minute video about this device the "AR" part came up exactly twice:
1) When the lady was interrupted by a friend to talk about sushi or something. This is literally Occulus' passthrough mode. It was a temporary "see around me" mode switch in practical usage.
2) The dad filming his kids. This was just depressing.
All the other examples had the room around them, so the "AR" part, as a glorifed skybox. The person was isolated & alone.
Like maybe Apple will figure out something that Microsoft's Hololens didn't. That's certainly possible. But they also didn't showcase any such examples, either.
Just look at the virtual avatar they demoed compared with Meta’s. Apple went with a more professional looking avatar instead of a cartoony one.
Another app that was shown was a Birds Eye view of a basketball game. I’d love to be able to watch a sporting event live from that perspective (if I could stomach the entry fee for the experience).
I was on the fence about this product, thinking that there wouldn’t be many good use cases, but their presentation gave some activities that I’d want to try on the hardware. Whereas Meta’s presentation didn’t show anything I was interested in.
Apple is giving developers 6+ months to make even more interesting apps. I think there’s a good chance that this could be a successful product. But I should hold my judgement until I’ve seen the caveats of this device (ie comfort, battery life, display quality, etc). I’m sure we’ll see more in-depth looks in the coming months. We can judge it more fairly when these reviews come out.
Is there anything specific to the Vision Pro in that feature? Couldn’t they just offer that as something that you could choose to watch on TV?
With eye and head tracking in the headset, you can watch what you want to watch during live events and eventually in interactive motion pictures/motion environments.
This is just like how grocery stores have made us all become cashiers.
I'm not doing that, it's work, and I'm not going to do work.
I don't see any reason live sports would be different here, do you? It'd be cool but it hardly seems "revolutionary", more like something you do once or twice for the novelty before going back to just not doing that.
A TV wouldn’t be apt at creating a 3D-ish AR viewing experience. It also doesn’t have the controls to navigate such a scene easily. What I’m looking for is like a holographic 3D display of the game on my table top.
1) Have a compelling halo use case that most people in their target purchasing demographic can relate to (Hint: most people don't code)
2) Sell enough units to attract app developers
3) Have an easy-to-use SDK that polished apps are built
2 & 3, I have faith in Apple being fairly good at. Or at least, using 2 to overcome deficiencies in 3.
1... that's the rub.
The iWatch is probably the best analogy, because it was evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Watches that told time on your wrist existed. Smart watches existed. Apple did that, but better.
With the Vision Pro, they face the same battle. Televisions exist. Screens exist. Laptops exist. They need to do those, but better.
And that's the requirement to get them to the starting line, which is a financially self-sustaining ecosystem.
If they can get there, they'll win via their relentless invocation and Apple platform interoperability.
But can they surmount 1? Time, will tell.
That was Disney’s presentation not Apples. Am I the only one who thought that part was Magic Leap level total fantasy BS?
Some stadiums have cameras that fly over all the stadium but no idea if it was BS or not
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IISMmjWOFoM
Although it appears to just be playing a human animated 3D sequence at the same time as a non-live video.
And that it's very light weight and more comfortable fitting and probably wont be a sweatbox.
Apple Vision v3 will not be a sweat box. And even right now, Occulus interface has to evolve to match this. Controller has to be optional. It has to be AR.
It's sexy. Also, it's Apple, which means–given the price tag–it's unlikely to be shit, and if it is, I'll have some semblance of support.
Probably the fact that Apple has an excellent track record of entering nascent consumer electronics markets late (e.g. iPod, iPhone, Apple Watch) at high price points, nailing the execution, and eventually dominating said markets with arguably superior products.
It's the same story again and again. If you've already decided Apple is charging $3000 for "slapping an Apple logo on it" and nothing else, you may as well have been one of the people back in ~2001 who swore up and down that the iPod was just an overpriced late entry in a market full of mature, attractive offerings like the Archos Jukebox line. In retrospect, to be clear, you would have looked quite silly.
I'm not saying this thing is absolutely going to be a success, but the problem with previous attempts at virtual displays has been that the execution is always shit, and Apple's greatest strength is nailing the execution. I don't think betting against them here is a good bet.
A lot will depend on the quality of the virtual avatar generated for you while in a video call.
Yes, while they are working on something. I've often wanted to 'take my screen with me' as I moved to a different location.
It’s a great Apple product for people who already own Apple products.
It’s like filling your tire with a Mercedes branded pump.
In general, using the Apple TV I get the impression that Apple PMs are probably deep in the Apple bubble and the idea that someone might not have an iPhone is inconceivable to them.
The only big flaw is really the lack of HDMI audio passthrough which will not be an issue for most users.
You probably didn't experience the Atmos bug. For about a year, Atmos audio on the last Apple TV model would just drop out randomly every couple of minutes for like 10 seconds. In some cases it would make a big noise sound blasting through your speakers. They finally solved it in the last big TvOS version but it was painful to experience.
For streaming of Netflix, Disney, etc it's a great device but for Plex it sucks that it doesn't have HDMI audio passthrough.
Where on this popular one?
I went from finding it unimpressive to it being my first recommendation for anyone getting a TV. Screw regular smart TV software, just get the TV with the best panel and use Apple TV. So long as the TV doesn't break, you won't need to upgrade for a long long time.
Fwiw, my Google TV runs well too.
But the Apple TV really shines with the integration in the Apple ecosystem. AirPlay, SharePlay, AirPods, HomePod, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, etc. the integration is fantastic.
I have an Apple TV 4k in the living room and it’s great, but I find myself drawn to the Chromecast experience way more. Apple TV is more refined, but Chromecast’s remote is far better than ATV’s (1st gen, at least) and Google’s voice assistant is obviously far smarter (especially if you’re multilingual).
Granted, I am not an Apple user at all, so it's possible there would be similar frustrations on that side, but anecdotally I hear that Apple is way better about these sorts of things.
It's an arguably best-in-class app-based TV watching experience. But its market share is pretty small years after launch, it hasn't caused much change/adaptation in the market as a whole as a result of existing, and it's not really at the center of any kind of cultural conversation.
I am really curious to learn more details about Vision Pro (like... how much does it weigh?), and would be even more curious to learn about the market fit research Apple must have done to believe there's a place for this device, especially at this price point. The biggest omission for me was the placement of the headset as device on which to view movies, and see pictures of your kids, while at the same time completely sidestepping the question of how you'd do that together with your family, which is how these activities are typically performed in a household with children.
It has a higher MSRP than the others, but once you get one…
The idea of having a fully immersive 3D environment around you is cool, but I haven’t had any VR experience that didn’t turn out to be eventually a headache let alone actually productive. Even with gaming I can only name a few titles that actually benefit, but for the ones that do the effect is quite something, I’ll admit that.
It was totally clear that a device for 3.4k can have the values apples headset has.
I’m not aware of any remotely comparable product.
2D content in 3D is a gimmick; it's nice to have, but it's not going to sell consoles. And even beyond that it's not a "head start"; almost all of that content is already available on other platforms, even other VR platforms. Just owning the content doesn't get Apple much if anything here.
>apps, games
...I don't know how you can possibly spin it as them having a head start here. Meta has a multi-year lead on them, and PC is even further, in games. Apps will need a lot of work as well - just throwing a 2D app in 3D space doesn't provide a compelling use case. You may as well just use a tablet.
Despite spending a lot of time pushing for AR apps on iPhone, Apple is still way behind on the VR/AR race. They need to get developers working on novel applications that utilize the full possibilities of a headset like this, and they need it yesterday if they don't want Meta to own the space.
Which brings us to the real reason that they released this $3.5k device: it's not actually for consumers, it's ultimately just a fancy, overly-polished dev kit.
Those are a few reasons that people will find this device compelling.
Also, keep in mind, Meta's headsets have full access to all of Windows' apps and games through link or Virtual Desktop, which absolutely dwarfs Apple's lineup.
Also small FOV is a critical issue for transparent screen AR. No one has managed to improve this significantly after hololens v1.
HLv2 was an all around improvement, if you only tried v1, you cannot make conclusions
I haven't seen anything the apple device does better than the hololens 2, other than the field of view, which is only possible because they are mock AR, not real AR
But the form factor is a problem.
If it had all of the capabilities announced but combined with the Google Glass form factor of ultra thin & light - then it would be a device more revolutionary than the iPhone.
But the form factor makes it much more niche.
And the tech just doesn't exist in the year 2023 to make a device with that sweet-spot combination of high capability and tiny form factor.
(My two cents, which I am hoping ages better than the infamous HN Dropbox comment.)
But I (perhaps naïvely) think this is being approached from the wrong direction.
To me, if Apple had launched a new highly limited device but with the Google Glass form factor - then I could see the path to incrementally improve (keep the form factor, and add features over time as hardware progresses).
It's much harder for me to see the opposite - of starting out with the clunky form factor, even if it is 100x more capable.
EDIT: Or I may be thinking from the wrong direction. I could see this device as overtaking existing VR devices like the Rift by far.
It depends on whether "success" here is defined as surpassing the previous best-selling VR headset (very plausible), or as matching the iPhone (much less plausible).
Sure the experience was terrible, but that's the same play here. Apple generally takes a technology space which is a little early and poorly done by others, and ships a great experience across hardware, software, and ecosystem to capture a market.
But pretty much nobody has a VR headset right now (or at least IRL people that I know), so not sure if a normal person will see a benefit of owning this kind of device.
The success of the iPhone has been all about the 'incremental progress'.
This is much more comparable to a laptop than a phone, and it doesn't introduce new communications technology like the iphone did with there now being near universal real time access to people's cameras and gps location.
This feels like what the apple watch was to the iphone but instead to the MacBook pro.
The rear revolution will be when the info goes directly to our brain, bypassing the eyes. VR headsets looks to me like half assed interim "what if" devices.
I'm one of the weird people who tried out the Google Glass. It was finnicky, 0 actual interaction with the modern world, lasted a good 45 minutes, melted your face, and had terrible audio.
But the thing is, if you could peak THROUGH the shortcomings, it was abundantly clear how an eyesight driven, glass form factor is the destination for computing. Smartphones were even less advanced at the time, but even then, we I tried for a few weeks making more extensive use of it, I would catch many glimpses of how "neat" this technology would be... even doing simple things like effortlessly capturing a picture on the spot, or videoconferencing with my gf (now wife!) showing her stuff in the grocery store and asking her what to get.
The AR capabilities, mixed with the essentially VR potential for movies/games, will totally be a thing and it'll totally live on our face as glasses. There can be details as to when exactly, price points ,etc., but the ubiquity of this sort of computing device will eclipse the iPhone when it comes time, and until then, slowly but surely change the nature of "working on a screen."
This seems to be an actual well thought out product. The resolution is a lot higher than the meta quest 3, and delays will be super small.
They're marketing this for productivity, which for me is the main selling point for VR at this point. I want a more spatial desktop, and I want multiple screens on the go.
You're making a bold assumption, that someone wants to wear this headset when relaxing. Also, a TV can be watched by multiple people, and a home cinema will obviously deliver better sound.
> For business use, the days of multiple displays and screen management seem set to be a relic of the past. I look forward to coding in an IDE which isn't constrained to a physical device sat on my desk, or replying to emails "on the beach" versus under fluorescent lighting.
The IDE is an interesting perspective I too as a developer am thinking about. But there's a reason you can be as productive in 2023 as in 1983 using emacs or vim. Because it's insanely hard to replace the simplicity of text buffers and a keyboard.
> In response to the obvious criticisms (high price, battery life, form factor)... this is Gen 1. Look how quickly the iPhone and Apple Watch evolved between generations 1 to 3, and look how the price changed as production capabilities and economies of scale evolved.
Smart watches have been anything but a groundbreaking technological revolution.
Well Apple showed someone using the headset while lying down in bed. I’d say that Apple is making a bold statement about the comfort of their product. We’ll need to wait for hands on reviews to determine if it indeed is as comfortable as Apple implies it is.
The box of Wheaties showed someone shooting the winning buzzer beating home run touch down in double overtime to win the world series of superbowl cups. Somehow I doubt that, due to the bowl of Wheaties I had for breakfast, my afternoon will look much like that.
Will it, though? Of course you could build a home theater with better sound, but I'd bet that the spatial audio built into AirPods delivers better sound that most peoples' home theater setups (which is generally just a TV with built in sound or a mediocre soundbar).
And you’ll need a Vision Pro for each person watching.
But I'm sympathetic to the social-watching issue. I don't love the idea of watching movies in a headset while my wife sits next to me on the sofa doing something else (or even watching the same movie on a screen). But I also don't love the idea of buying two. (And that's without even thinking about larger families.)
I think home theater will be a big part of the appeal, but it won't succeed if replacing a home theater is the only thing it does well.
The Sonos w/ sub + rear surrounds and an 85" OLED TV with these latencies will put you in the price point of this thing.
If you're apart, both people would need a room, TV, and Sonos system to share the experience. So each has that "need one per person" problem depending whether colocated or not.
Also not everyone lives in a house, I’m sure Manhattan condo owners can afford the price of the theatre gear, but cannot afford the space required for them to be used optimally. Wealthy people don’t all live in mansions.
can't imagine people will only be buying it for movie watching.
There are many many people for whom money is not the limiting factor. It's because they don't have the space, the technical wherewithal to set it up, the motivation to make it happen, or some combination of all three.
But does everyone have the space/room dimensions to have a proper surround sound setup? Pesky physics restrict you here as well.
There's many reasons that people warn newbies not to mix or master on cans and to use speakers.
For people who care about going beyond stereo, budget is going to be a much larger problem for most folks than space or technical knowhow. And anybody who cares about going beyond stereo probably cares about quality.
You can’t replicate true surround sound with stereo headphones. You can with binaural audio but that requires specialized recordings. I’m sure spatial audio sounds cool but it’s not true surround sound.
And then there’s the problem of low frequencies. You can’t beat a subwoofer.
3D images are probably coming to iPhone 15 or iPhone 16 so the posts about "who's gonna wear this to take pictures" are already moot.
This is a developer/enthusiast focused niche release providing perfect beta testing grounds while technology will shrink this device to a smaller and more practical form factor.
In 3-4 years, the current Vision Pro will be the standard Apple Vision product with a smaller form factor while a new Pro product will have more advanced features and lose its external battery.
I also think that Apple Vision will be successful but Gen1 is not where its at for the vast majority of users.
A good experience is still expensive and even apple only made it with 2h runtime.
It will take perhaps more or something really revolutionary.
After all you need 4 to watch anything as a family and people don't even mind watching movies on their phones!
Apple also has to believe for so long in this while not being successful with it (my guess).
Using a tiny battery pack. I'm assuming (hoping) that you'll be able to use something bigger that provides USB-C power and get a correspondingly longer life.
I'm really curious if they have overheating limitations.
They did say "all day use when tethered" which suggests not.
Hey - the world's biggest computer company just went up on stage along with the director of the world's biggest entertainment conglomerate and made that 'bold assumption'. They're probably pretty careful about these sorts of things.
Apple has produced plenty of devices that didn't pan out.
Let's not get too hyped away.
Have they? They've launched particular versions of existing products that didn't sell too well, but have they ever launched a device which was was fundamentally new and didn't eventually sell a ton of units?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pippin
Pippin
Apple III
Apple Lisa
iPod HiFi
With respect to the CEO of that company, I mean, sure. But you kind of take that as a given. It's not like he's only been right, and certainly his leadership so far has been business oriented, vs. "wave of the future" oriented. A good example is how the AirPods ended up being an arguably bigger success than the Watch (and how that hasn't really been fully capitalized on). The good news is that the world's biggest company is precisely the kind of place that can afford to iterate on something like this in the public. So if the theory is that the "dream" of AR is only possible by getting stuff out there to iterate on, then they certainly now have a good shot.
Hasn’t there also been some executive overlap on the board level of these companies for a long time?
I was just watching a Steve Jobs keynote from 1998 the other day. And you can see exactly the same strategies implemented there, only with profit margins at <$100m and an inverse David-Goliath relationships with delegates from industry partners.
DIS stock is taking a dump right now because Disney+, it turns out, isn't the savior we all thought it was (and were led to believe it was) during the pandemic when the Parks division wasn't bringing in the cash. ESPN is dead weight. They have more debt than ever thanks to the pandemic.
They might be wrong, they might be making a bad play. But they’ve also probably devoted a reasonable amount of resources at finding answers to questions like whether people will want to use these or not. So, they probably didn’t make “bold assumptions”.
It would have surprised me if such people would be interested enough in the hotel to not stay at it in the first few months of its opening, but hold off until some time thereafter, and so in that respect, Disney seems to have recognized that once that initial high demand drops off, it's GG. Demand wouldn't magically (ha) go from ~50% occupancy to ~90-100% with no change to the hotel or the pricing (e.g. any factor external to the resort itself).
They either also invested and need it to succeed or don't mind investing in it because they can afford it and are looking for the next big thing.
I will point to this article: "Why Americans are lonelier and its effects on our health" [1] that claims that "some surveys reveal that around 60 percent of people in the U.S. right now report feeling lonely on a pretty regular basis. And that's pretty devastating from a public health perspective".
I don't know the real number but it connect with the market potential. Also, Apple is really great on hitting the mark. Playing with words, I don't think Mark is as good as Apple.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/why-americans-are-lonelier....
Despite positive upbeat music it was kind of sad to watch people alone in their sparsely furnished environments without personal touch, viewing favorite pictures on helmet instead of printed on the wall, father with the face hidden behind this helmet during kid birthday party, etc
I was extremely surprised that shared reality was completely absent from the presentation. Apparently the sensors on these devices don't enable creating a coordinate system that multiple devices can collaborate on/in. You can't look at the same objects in space together.
This is hard stuff, but I'm stunned they're shipping it before solving that problem.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/aranchor
Not explicitly mentioning shared experiences other than video calls at all could also indicate this is not the way it should be framed (by focusing on the collaborative aspects that exist "today").
The price sure point prevents me and my family members from casually trying this experience.
I was merely suggesting that the technology for shared experiences already exists in the form of shared anchors.
You could be right wrt "if they didn’t mention it explicitly it's not part of their (currently) intended experience", but it might as well be due to "spatial computing" being sth that primarily will be shaped by their adopters along the way, which is something different than a corporation plotting the experience up front (as might be the case with metaverse?).
Are you really? Outside of everybody sitting on the couch watching a movie together, which will be an extremely marginal use case for this thing anyway—are you seriously going to buy all of (spouse, kids, friends) their own $3500 headset?—shared-reality seems very niche for consumer applications, which are clearly what they're targeting.
I think without shared reality in place, the public verdict on this device will be that it's a loneliness enabler, or has you wear your loneliness on your face. Or rather, on a screen strapped to your face. It's going to be undesirable, the most damning quality of any consumer item. Nobody will envy their peers for having one.
Besides which, nobody is looking into my home and calling my various screens "loneliness enablers". Not that I would give a shit if they were, though I might invest in some blinds or drapes.
I'm saying the "Apple goggles" can so easily fall victim this perception because those qualities are so front-and-center with it.
And I'm saying nobody will ultimately give a crap if the tech works as well as Apple wants it to. Our social spaces have been utterly transformed by screens and networked technology in the last few decades, and while there is always some pushback, progress marches on for better or worse.
This clashes with my model of how humans work and socialize. We'll see!
No one ever has a ring tone anymore.
The glasses are extreme expensive and they are not replacing anything.
Someone with an ipad still needs the glasses and the other way around.
You are sweating in these things.
I can eat while watching on my OLED.
And the glasses are also expensive for companies. So no typical iphone as company phone thing.
Well, they're essentially pitched as a replacement for laptops, tablets, and for some users TVs too. No product category goes from zero to full adoption in a day (look how long it took for laptops!) but saying this headset isn't pitched as a computer replacement is flat out wrong.
> Someone with an ipad still needs the glasses and the other way around.
Why? You're losing the drawing tablet functionality, which I assume most iPad owners don't use, and what else?
It's too bulky for a laptop
they need super powerful software tech for this, and it likely isn't good enough to demo yet
I think Apple has made a tactical error here. The days of the shrinking iPhone are long gone, but not forgotten. It was the iPhone 3G that was a turning point for people who hadn't bought an iPhone yet. It was smaller with better battery life.
If the Apple Watch 3 had followed a similar pattern, they would have had to skip adding the next additional sensor to the device, but I think in the long term that would have just delayed us one design cycle but still given us a thinner and lighter watch, which we would have needed for a deeper impact.
1. Convince enough people to buy one via halo use cases
2. Leverage or buy developer adoption
3. Create a decent enough developer experience to produce high quality apps
On 2 & 3, Apple has a proven track record, or at least amassing enough market share to force developers to ignore deficiencies in 3.
Which means 1 is going to be make-or-break.
The Apple Watch is a great analogy here, because it was evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
It did not let you do anything you couldn't before. It did let you do it better.
Consequently, this won't be (and doesn't need to be) an iPhone level smash success. It just needs to be volume and financially self-sufficient enough to get them to iteration N+X.
Because iteration N+X is "We shrink the iPhone down to a minimally-screened compute/network node, and the Vision SE becomes everyone's must-have companion, and then Apple owns a better-than-iPhone platform."
I think Apple made the right move in trumpeting its non-work use cases, because Apple has let macOS atrophy for enterprise use. And priced-for-work is a trap market they don't need to pursue (see: Microsoft).
But I don't know if most people want a better consumptive device $3500-badly... time, will tell.
They've been building towards this for years.
I suspect for most apps supporting the Vision Pro will be supporting variable resolutions (for resizable windows) and clicking a checkbox on the targets.
Enterprise will take care of enterprise.
Better to invest the marketing dollars and mindshare on consumer, because that's where they're going to get the volume.
I've seen people pass out in VRChat with their headsets on. Some people on VRC are on there for 12+ hours a day. It's a fascinating sub culture I was totally shocked to learn about. People drink and do drugs while listening to music at a virtual rave. Multiple rooms full every Friday, Saturday 80-120 people in the room hanging out. I found myself up till 6 am lost in the music.
120 people is not enough for an entire headset division, and since the main reason most people don't like doing that is that they don't really enjoy having the headset on, I don't know what apple can do to change that.
Totally agree. I just want to use this to replace my big bulky monitor that I can't take with me wherever I go and that makes my small place look a little more junky.
Raises hand. I'm in for that. I'm a VR fan but my soapbox has always been that AR is the true future.
> Also, a TV can be watched by multiple people, and a home cinema will obviously deliver better sound.
In the same way that when the iPhone came out there were individual devices that could do each feature better than the iPhone could, yes :)
If you look at video consumption, "individual" devices (phones, tablets, laptops) make up about 50% of viewing time. TV the rest. I don't think the multiple people angle is going to kill this considering how much content is consumed individually already.
A home cinema also has to be researched, purchased separately, takes up space, etc. Any pair of $200 Bose headphones sounds better than the old iPhone ear pods...and yet...
> it's insanely hard to replace the simplicity of text buffers and a keyboard.
We're talking about replacing monitors, not text buffers or keyboards!
And why would you think this would seek to replace that, rather than complementing it? Fill up your entire vision with forty text buffers. Use a keyboard on a twelve-inch-deep shelf on one side of your bedroom with no monitor taking up space behind it.
Imagine this for surgeries, or complex construction tasks, even just finding items in a warehouse.
This is going to be massive in the workspace, thats where I think people probably underestimate it.
We may all end up with one of these - or the none "pro" version - at home, just as we have iPads laying around. But many of us are going to end ups waring these for many hours a day during work.
Taking of a headset when we go home will end up being a joy.
Standard single-building commercial / institutional new builds can be tens of millions to low hundred million, "big" projects are often north of a quarter billion dollars, and well over a billion is not unusual for so-called "mega projects". Risk (from defects / mistakes) is often roughly proportional to budget. The placement of seemingly minor and easy to miss elements at the initial critical stages of a concrete pour in a high rise, for example, is pretty high stakes with rework costing hundreds of thousands to potentially millions. We have processes for mitigating that of course, but none that approach it in such a direct and observable way as AR, and none are incompatible with being done alongside AR. Paying $3500 + software for something that helps mitigate that risk in a totally new and complementary way is very very interesting to many companies.
edit: To be clear, I'm not convinced that this particular device is revolutionary compared to those that already exist, which have their own challenges. I'm just objecting to the idea that there isn't a market for it at that price even WITH challenges.
Industry is where I'm a lot more excited.
Ask yourself - do you like it when your surgeon is using CAT scans, MRIs, blood/protein testing?
Do you like it when your surgeon is wearing magnification glasses?
Do you think fighter pilots with AR huds with tactical info perform better than fighter pilots with just their eye?
I don't think companies are going to spring this much for a headset and laptop until there's very obvious benefits, but maybe I've just been short-changed with shitty equipment my whole career.
Companies trying to get people to go back to the office, then ordering them VR headsets will be the height of tech irony.
You can further reduce furniture and physical office costs
Apple also isn’t the only one with an XR headset. Meta’s is considerably weaker, but it’s $999
This morning, my mac wouldn't boot. I tried to write on my iPad instead. It was a nightmare: too cumbersome to move between apps, Zotero nearly unworkable, hard to navigate different file versions. If the OS works more like iOS than macOS, I can't imagine it being as useful as computers save for very specific applications.
Laptop budget is 1-3k.
And people steal expensive shit. Alone the stealing is a deal breaker alone.
And we have working cheap AR glasses.
Judging from the video it doesn’t work outside anyway so you’ll be fine.
This is not what got Apple to where it was. It was recognizing what we wanted to do to go further, individually and together, and amplified that with technology.
This literally amplifies your ass to the couch. I'm shocked. Stunned. And sad.
Were you “shocked/stunned/sad” about Apple TV? A product which physically relies on your ass being sat on the couch?
Think a little bigger here! This goes well beyond entertainment value. Imagine the general business uses in industry, manufacturing, medicine, conferencing, telecommunications, let alone any form of interpersonal interaction over long distances…
These are all things we take for granted with FaceTime, Google, GPT… All these are new but ubiquitous technologies, which allow us to enhance our human abilities and connect with each other in new and novel ways.
Preface: I've been in the VR/AR space a long time. I started a company with a friend around the launch of DK1 - we wanted to sell VR Computer Boxes. We had so many dumb but beautifully naive ideas.
I will only offer high level themes (although incomplete) that should hopefully explain why I take such issue with this release:
We already have the best vision system on the planet, 'our eyes'.
Spatial Computing in humans is not vision and audio alone - proprioception underlies all.
What you cover with a headset, you cannot faithfully recreate with cameras and software.
Use the brilliant chipset advantage to bring super 'low cost' computing embodiments to every corner of life - then integrate with devs
Ambient Computing is the next iteration of 'mac at the center of your digital life'
AirTags, Beacons, and AppClips don't get the corporate strategic attention they deserve
Apple Watch should be 'the wand' for life out in the real world, with AppClips, Beacons and such
They've shown no innovative scenarios that Hololens / Quest / Google Glass (and similar devices) hasn't shown before. Those things flopped because they didn't have the scenarios and nothing changed now.
Quality also matters. I don't really like looking through the Quest for very long. Fresnel lenses and meh screen combined with a terrible processor means the visual experience isn't very good. I'd bet a lot that their custom lenses and screens combined with a decent SoC offer a HUGE jump in visual fidelity.
I'm not so sure about that but I'm 100% sure that if anyone manages to pull that off it's going to be Apple.
Corollary: if this doesn't make AR/VR finally go mainstream then forget about it, it's 3D TV again.
Major we'll-see risk factors I identify:
1) $3,500 is expensive, any way you slice it. That makes it price-competitive with a workstation.
2) The stand-up-and-work environment they demo'd doesn't work for a lot of people. But if you sit down, you lose a lot of the benefit of that panoramic space.
3) Their gesture interface has to be rock-solid (meaning no false negatives but also no false positives) for it to be part of a daily work environment.
4) We've been experimenting with headsets for long enough to know that for the average user, the amount of time you can comfortably use one is lower than the amount of time seated at a mouse-keyboard-monitor UI.
5) The battery life is 2 hours, which is like nothing. You can use it plugged in, but then you're plugged in (meaning not only that you're tethered to somewhere, but that you've got the constant pressure of the tether disrupting your head motions, which adds up over time in irritation).
All of that having been said, if anyone has a prayer of overcoming these obstacles it's Apple. They've got the software / hardware / UI / UX integration in-house to take a solid run at the challenge.
If nobody is buying the product then developers have no incentive to buy one either. The only software for it will be demos from Apple and extremely expensive bespoke professional applications for businesses, and that market is far too small for Apple to ever recoup their R&D costs, much less ongoing expenses.
The only way I see this working is if Apple themselves invent a killer application for the headset. Even then its going to struggle to find buyers at that price point. It doesn't matter how cool your hardware is if nobody can afford it. It's hard to see how they would even cut down the existing hardware to make a version for real people.
It seems to have the potential. The UX seems incredible. Little details like using eyes as a pointer make it for a far better experience (no, moving your head to point is not the same). Looking at your Macbook to pull apps from it is the sort of thing that can make it intuitive for the average user. A proper review of what this could do would take an article.
I think the main things we need to know are:
* What sort of apps can we use? Is this IOS-like, or can I run XCode on it? Having to own the headset plus a macbook is not going to make or break it, but it changes the value of the device at its current price point.
* Can we comfortably use it for 8+ hours a day?
* Is text really crisp enough for productivity usage?
I don't think this version is quite there yet, but give it a few iterations and we may be able to ditch physical monitors altogether. I've been waiting for that for a while.
At $3499 it's quite a gamble. At $999 it would have been a no-brainer, as that's the price of a phone. It does have way too much hardware for a lower price point, so it's understandable. But the more devices that exist, the greater the network effects.
With 2 hours of battery life this is not a problem.
> Can we comfortably use it for 8+ hours a day?
No. Even if the ergonomics are perfect, the screens aren't good enough for this.
> Is text really crisp enough for productivity usage?
If they match the leaked resolution, no.
At any rate, it’s a lot of pixels. Not sure what GP is complaining about.
Remember the age of 768p laptops? It'll look like that.
"monitor sized object" exists as a thing because we live in a reality where desks limit the size of the things we can reasonably use for work. But here, your desk is virtual now. There is "space" for a bigger screen. You're saying they compensated by making the virtual screen larger--my thought here is "so what"?
Text legibility / crispness will be important. I'm one of those guys who buys the 5K displays, so I agree it matters. But Apple made a point of calling out clean text rendering, and none of the previews have complained so far. But obviously no one in those early previews has spent 8 hours in an IDE, so we'll see.
Fully agree that more would be better, and would increase the usability of smaller, more fine elements. But this might be enough resolution to pull off the concept in a perfectly usable way.
Is > 4k not enough for this? Looks to be almost double the Quest Pro resolution.
The original iPhone released for $599, which is ~$876 2023 dollars based on CPI. So, while most of your bullet points about iPhone improving is true, the iPhone is the wrong thing to point to for economies of scale making Apple products cheaper over time.
What makes you think people will prefer strapping a much heavier and uncomfortable headset to watching a screen?
What is brilliant here, are the specs giving some serious boost to the use cases already established by Meta/Oculus, NReal etc and services like Immersed, BigScreen etc.
But please, less of that breathless "Apple have invented this new thing" tone, it's annoying when they haven't.
Either do some basic research first, or if you have, then at least frame what you reckon is revolutionary in terms of the existing market.
I am sure from the specs, if not the price, that this is going to kick up some dust, but its not obviously inventing anything that isn't there already.
There's never enough resolution (even with 8K headsets), eye strain from trying to focus on virtual objects is real, and camera passthrough always look fake (and may even cause mild nausea). Not to mention that most folks don't really train their neck muscles to support significant extra weight on their heads on front-back axis (we typically tilt our heads much less than lean forward or backward, so headphones are not comparable).
I don't believe Apple have made some giant leap and included an autorefractor in there and made external cameras moveable and able to match you pupillary distance (and convergence!), then added some fancy magnetostrictive micro-mirror system to dynamically boost resolution at the areas you're focusing at. Not in this form factor, and if they would somehow magically make it they'd be boasting about it non-stop.
If they showcase it in Apple Stores I would definitely take a peek, and I would like to be wrong - but I'm pretty sure it's a pricey gimmick that won't be anywhere comfortable for any prolonged use.
I speak having used most available VR devices available these past few years, and currently owning a Valve Index:
Watching movies: wearing something over your eyes and on your head like that for so long _fucking sucks_. It's heavy/hot enough when you're doing something that takes your attention. Watching a movie is fun for the first time, then you realize that being able to walk around, look at other things etc is infinitely better. Not to mention the fact that if you ever want to watch with someone else, well they better have 3.5k available. that makes it a non starter for literally anyone hoping to, you know, have people over.
- For work: it fucking sucks. You know what's worse than having two screens taking up your entire sight? Having to physically turn your head to see more screens. It is physically sickening to have your entire attention taken up like that.
- Form factor: my dude the last thing I want in public is to look like I'm wearing swimming goggles. Also, two hours is absolutely pathetic.
- Price: the first iPhone cost $600. The cheapest new iPhone 14 is $1000, the most expensive is like 2000. It got worse, not better.
It's going to be a fun, overpriced toy and it'll be just like every VR device people currently own: hanging on your wall and used once every two weeks, at best.
TV viewing is often a social experience: friends gathering in front of a TV to watch a sporting event (say, a World Cup soccer match, or your favorite team's football game, or an NBA finals game). This takes away that aspect. I'm not sure if this is a change we really need.
Sure but "for personal use" kinda excludes "social experience" here.
> it largely replaces the need for a TV, soundbar, or home cinema
In my previous flat, living along, a big TV just didn't fit anywhere. A sound system would also have annoyed the neighbours. Something like this would have been perfect for getting that 4K HDR viewing experience.
I don't know about others in this thread, but for me the satisfaction of watching a movie alone is extremely low - to the point I don't do it at all.
Bulky, expensive passthrough? No, there are better, cheaper, more open options than this on the market. If it was going to change things, we'd be seeing people using this capability already.
The main hold up here is technology advancement, not quite where it needs to be yet, but the field is showing the progress needed to reach it.
But maybe it is. Just another step away from one another, further into isolation.
If I have the preference, I still choose a screen. Screens are easy, screens a casual, screens exist in the real world. I can share them, I can walk away from them, I can position them where _they will never, ever move_. Screens have (and will always have) higher resolution. Screens don't require me to mess with some cord and pull a headset off to find my snack or walk to the bathroom.
I prefer my Nreals in two situations:
* When I'm traveling/on-the-go and want more screen real estate.
* When my wife is using the main TV and I don't feel like hauling the Playstation downstairs.
It's interesting though you seem to view the fact that it's close to impossible to move your monitors as a plus - that part sounds very weird to me.
The cable is really about how it runs down your shoulder/back. It gets caught on stuff and pinched between your body and seat, pulling it off. This is a problem even when using magnetic usb cables or Nreal with a usb-c based phone.
Taking it off is still necessary for anything outside of a trivial task. It's really scary to think about dropping a $3.5k device in the toilet/sink or having it fall off your head.
> It's interesting though you seem to view the fact that it's close to impossible to move your monitors as a plus - that part sounds very weird to me.
In the video, all of the virtual monitors are "perfectly" aligned with the user and the surrounding environment. It looks beautiful, but presents some challenges that I hope Apple has installed.
For example, if you use this at a desk, how do you ensure that the screens anchor directly in front of you every time you use it? Are the just slightly off? Do they read the room and reset when they recognize it? Do you need to "recenter" every time you use the device?
How do you put a TV in the perfect place in your room?
That might link to why they made the otherwise slightly weird way you activate it - by looking at your laptop screen. So it knows exactly where your laptop is, and can position the screens perfectly relative to that.
I found it odd because partly the whole point is that it liberates you from being anchored but perhaps this is part of the reason they did it that way?
Forgetting the AR/VR debate for a minute, the thing holding these back from wide adoption has been resolution and comfort. I have yet to use an XR device where I can simply play a video without it being jarringly blurry and pixelated. I've yet to use an XR device that isn't a chore to wear and sweaty (although I do trust Apple to address this one).
Let's see. The proof will be in the pudding when I try one of these in an Apple store next year.
The single reason being that it's uncomfortable to use. That's it. It's an "Emperor's New Clothes" type saying: It doesn't matter how impressive the capabilities are, if it's uncomfortable, people will, after the initial allure fades, just not use it.
IMO The only viable future for VR/AR is when the form factor will come down to normal looking/weighting glasses that I might look around for while having them on.
[1] To be fair I didn't see the keynote, just followed the website sales pitch.
The keyboard was famously considered a make it or break it feature internally at Apple when developing the original iPhone. It is very telling that they haven’t managed to solve this basic HCI problem for the Vision. Steve Jobs would never have released this. I’m sad to say it, but this is not a “Pro” device. It’s a Prototype device.
Apple Vision Prototype
(And I’m sorry, but the eyes are creepy —- uncanny valley)
If you want to experience it, get a steam controller or a steam deck and use the trackpads on that keyboard. You get used to it very fast and you can get really usable typing speed.
It won't work for programming though because anything that needs more niche than basic punctuation would require chording or multiple inputs, which sucks.
“Hey Siri! Put that statement in an if-clause. …no, not that one. The other one. Argh!!!”
throws the $3499 vision across the room
Not even close.
99% of the people I know would never put a computer on their face.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/03/odg-unveils-its-first-cons...
I spent a ton of money configuring my home office. Many displays, giant motorized desk, articulating arms, cable management, etc. Easily over $3500, and I still don't feel like it's ergonomically great. It certainly can't be brought anywhere. It occupies a whole room.
Now I am thinking I might not need that bulky stuff at all, and if I don't need the displays and big desk then maybe I don't need the office. If I don't need the home office then maybe I should be shopping a home that's around 75-100k cheaper with one less room.
I've often wanted to work outside from my deck but then I don't have my screen real estate and I get tons of glare. This could solve that.
We've long complained about the degradation of the in-office experience. These days it's all open-floor plans with a fixed monitor set and no privacy. If I could put these on and have a huge display with a beach in the background, I wouldn't as much mind sitting 2 feet away from coworkers.
The benefits of something like this on flights and in airports seems obvious. Its not really weird, considering savvy travelers swaddle themselves in AirPods Max and bizarre neck-sling-pillow apparatuses already.
> Look how quickly the iPhone and Apple Watch evolved between generations 1 to 3
I would not compare the iPhone to the Apple Watch. They were on completely different orders of magnitude of evolution.
I could see the Apple Vision Pro being half as popular as the Apple Watch (primarily due to the price tag) and I think there's a good chance it finds its market, but I think comparing it to the iPhone is way off base.
It's got a 2h battery life, so your dreams of using it on the beach are pretty funny versus just using a laptop.
The perfect version of this tech -could- be what you describe. But so far there are quite a few unknowns about the real experience.
It remains to be seen if the experience is better than a large OLED TV.
In terms of sound I seriously doubt it. Maybe if it had large planar drivers but I doubt you can use large headphones with it. If it's meant to be used with crappy Airpods the sound is going to be nowhere comparable to a home theater.
but the issue I always had with VR is at that point when I realise i can't actually touch or feel any of it.
Device looks promising, and I wonder if they plan to allow 2 devices to show the same content simultaneously to say watch 3D movies with someone else in the same room.
Some say $3499 is a high price, but being able to carry huge design studio with you is heck of a value to me.
First it has to not bomb.
I think this headset has potential, but we're definitely not there with the first generation.
As a golfer I can assure you plenty of people will happily spend that amount and more on their hobby.
This isn't remarkable or xReal.
That said, it'll still be higher than the current VR headsets and I expect many people will find it sufficient for their work.
The Quest 3 is $499. This headset looks GREAT but is it really 7X greater than the Quest 3?
I’ll buy it at $3,500, but not at $9,999
> When introduced, a basic system with monitor and 20 MB hard drive cost US$5,498 (equivalent to $14,160 in 2022). With a 13-inch color monitor and 8-bit display card the price was around US$7,145 (equivalent to $18,400 in 2022).
Even the Commodore 64 was expensive [2]:
> Volume production started in early 1982, marketing in August for US$595 (equivalent to $1,800 in 2022).
If the experience is worth it and there's no cheaper competitor, people have the money for these things.
And honestly, as a big user of the Quest 2 -- the Quest 3 isn't anywhere close to the same ballpark as this. Apple Vision Pro looks absolutely more than 7x better, the only question is whether it's worth it for you.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_II
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64
Just because there's tech in something doesn't make them a tech product. Your microwave oven probably has tech built in, doesn't make it a 'not appliance.'
Enter the story of the Nintendo Power Glove.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiWE-aO-cyU
A bit pricey to become a household items (because a family needs 4 of them) but this is probably where things are heading to
There is so much engineering going on here that maybe ... it's simpler to start considering retina implants or just brain implants.
This was more like a work of art than a consumer device. I wonder if Oculus can steal some ideas ... Like, these device are not for gaming but general productivity. Ditch the 2 oculus controllers, put the battery in the 1 controller and wire it to the head. I m not convinced if eye tracking is worth it. oculus' controls are precise enough and in any case it's better to hold something instead of pointing and pinching the air, it makes the device more physical. dont know what is needed for the ability to render a full field of view but would be interesting to know what is the level of nausea this causes when movement is involved. I guess Apple purposely chose to eliminate all optic flow movement - all the apps appear to be stationary.
Group movie watching on this would be cool with people in different places, but if you're already in the same house that feels too dystopian for me.
We used to think it is dystopian that people were looking at their phones , now it s the most common image everywhere
None of those can be replaced by a vr headset in anything but "some" applications and scenarios.
There was notably no effort to do a MagicLeap either, of playing with existing space. Meta for example shows people enjoying a crazy dungeon crawler board game atop their real table; very primitive but something physically integrated. I didn't see a single example of Apple integrating with space, only taking it over.
It is a great input, but more importantly: drastically lowers the required computation with foviated rendering, i.e. rendering hires where you look, not everywhere.
Also the 12ms mentioned, wasn't that from camera to screen (so the latency of both the camera sensor added to the latency of the screen) or did i misunderstand?
Now that i think about it, the eye tracking is also a camera. Hmm.
Also Apple: Strap a pair of 4K displays an inch from your eyeballs!!!
https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1371485209603022853
Valve Index reportedly around 6 feet
https://www.reddit.com/r/ValveIndex/comments/by1j2z/focal_di...
https://www.apple.com/ios/health/
> Additionally, increasing the distance the device is viewed from can help children lower their risk of myopia and gives adult users the opportunity to reduce digital eyestrain. Screen Distance in Screen Time uses the TrueDepth camera to encourage users to move their device farther away after holding it closer than 12 inches from their face for an extended period of time.
Link: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/06/ios-17-makes-iphone-m...
I hadn't seen that in the rumors leading up to the launch, its good to see apple still can keep some secrets.
Kind of like Google Photos which has facial recognition and tagging, except in the EU.
Though as of now and until they shrink all the tech into regular sized glasses the majority will reject while the innovators will jump on this headset and start creating amazing things.
Yeesh, this says a lot about their target market.
Cool tech, though. Let's hope I'm not peer pressured into wearing one of these masks for my kid's goddamn birthday party.
AR is also where other notable headset makers are betting, Quest has had hand controls for quite a while (which made the "clunky controllers" dig fall flat).
It definitely seems more refined, but then again, it's over 2x the cost of the competition, so that would have to be taken as read.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAhce2OgZu4
Even when Apple showed games, it was less full AR games or like VR experiences in AR, it was about putting a screen up and playing a standard game like this.
The Apple experience is full VR and using every space as a screen to access the things you already do. Meta is insisting on building the 'metaverse' it's a completely different concept that people making this argument seem to have completely missed.
And I say that as someone that uses a Q1 everyday for Fitness and will be purchasing a Q3, you saw Apple announce nothing like this, also I think the name is a give away 'vision pro' it's about visuals and virtual screens, not about creating another reality, which is likely why they moved away from the reality pro name that was rumoured.
I have, and it was an awful experience. They had color pass through but faked it and it felt like a grayscale video that someone shoddily tried to paint over it. There was significant warping and text (like a poster on my friend's wall) was barely readable.
It "exists", but was completely useless in terms of usability. If Apple can get pass-through to actually work well, I would call that "new" in the sense that it's a feature that's usable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAhce2OgZu4
That may seem silly, but I have not paid much attention to VR/AR and I had assumed that headsets like the Meta Quest 2 were tethered to some other device. A quick search before this post showed me that is not the case, but I was actually ignorant about that fact. So apparently there are dopes like me who need to be told that these flagship headsets are standalone computing devices.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAhce2OgZu4