There is a veiled “we’ve got work to do” admission:
“
And seeing what they put out there and how they’re going to compete just made me even more excited and in a lot of ways optimistic that what we’re doing matters and is going to succeed. But it’s going to be a fun journey.
“
1: they admit that having Apple dip into a category validates it
2: the “fun” is a euphemism for - we need to get our s@!t together quick, expect some all nighters
Not after burning 40B USD. He had no choice but to present a strong facade.
The Apple device looks impressive and the use cases presented seem plausible. It is expensive no doubt, but if they can convince the jet set crowd to wear it then it will catch on.
"Five hundred dollars? Fully subsidized? With a plan? I said that is the most expensive phone in the world," Ballmer reportedly said of the first iPhone.
"And it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard. Which makes it not a very good email machine."
By all accounts, Apple have absolutely nailed it when it comes to how the product works. The key to its wide-scale success from this point forward is not how well the product works, but in making it affordable to the masses. Apple have already cleared the “needs amazing product thinking” hurdle and now it’s all about getting the supply chain to where it needs to be. They don’t need a Jobs, they need a Cook.
And multiple parts of the Vision keynote highlighted being present with those remotely as well as those locally.
“
so much energy that now you need a battery
“
I think everyone remembers the part where Apple admitted they are behind and getting the device they intend for consumers requires first getting it into developers hands.
This is a high end Macbook Pro with a matching price tag and additional features. For a device that is aimed at developers and early adopters, it makes sense. In a year I expect to see the Apple Vision Air for less than half the price while the OS evolves.
I highly doubt it, maybe in a few years when cost of the components needed to build a Vision headset decrease. There is a lot of expensive tech in the Vision Pro. You have two processors, 4K eye pieces, expensive sensors, expensive cameras, expensive LIDAR. How are you suppose to build a similar product for half the price? You would have to gut a lot of features and you would end up with a completely different product.
This is why you can't really compare Quest and Vision because they are meant for completely different markets. Meta could build something similar but they don't want to sell a 3500$ headset. Meta rather build a cheaper product where more people can use it. Hence why they don't package their headset will expensive components.
The Quest 3 will outsell Vision Pro by 10x because of this.
> The Quest 3 will outsell Vision Pro by 10x because of this.
I doubt it. If any of them will ever sell well it's because of an application that people care about. None of them will succeed if all they can offer is just Beat Saber in higher resolution and existing apps in 3D. I am sure it would be cool to have screens floating around, but virtual desktops do the job as well and to me the difference doesn't seem worth it.
I don't think the price is the main problem. Phones with folding displays aren't exactly a bargain either, and yet those are popular enough that Samsung is about to launch their fifth iteration. The difference is that those folding phones have benefits obvious to anyone who ever used a smartphone and a tablet.
They sold 15m Quest 2 since release. Apple doesn't even think they will sell a million Vision Pros.
You can't compare VR/AR to Phones. Phones are used by almost everyone in the world on a daily basis. VR/AR is still completely new to the vast majority of people in the world. Phones have been around for decades even before the iPhone they had calling, messaging and internet. iPhone just made the interface better. The Vision Pro doesn't have this luxury. It has to be sold to people that have no experience with the technology and most probably don't have a favorably opinion about it.
IMO Quest marketing it better because it aimed towards a demographic that has the most experience with VR, gamers.
> Apple doesn't even think they will sell a million Vision Pros.
Because the Vision Pro is mainly a dev kit and has zero third-party apps right now. Apple would never say "this won't sell" about a product they deem finished and ready for the consumer market.
> VR/AR is still completely new to the vast majority of people in the world.
Because the tech has been completely uninteresting aside from a small gaming niche and shortlived tech demos, which makes it a pure luxury product for people who already have high-end gaming hardware able to drive it.
> Quest marketing it better because it aimed towards a demographic that has the most experience with VR, gamers.
Sony's PSVR has been targeting gamers for 6+ years and aside from that one horror game I don't think it ever got decent content. It does not matter who you target if your product has nothing that interests people in the long term. Name one big feature of the Quest 3 that's more interesting than anything possible with the original Oculus Rift a decade ago.
> The Quest 3 will outsell Vision Pro by 10x because of this.
Which is perfectly fine and why Apple will eventually win - they don't need to sell a ton of units right now.
Apple is going about it the right way, the same way that Tesla did with their electric cars. Eventually there will be a model 3 of the vision pro - and all that R&D they put into making it the best will pay dividends down the line. Meta simply won't have that experience because they just did the cheap thing targeted a small market.
Betting against a veteran hardware company like Apple and in favor of Meta seems ludicrous to me.
> Which is perfectly fine and why Apple will eventually win - they don't need to sell a ton of units right now.
Eventually, both headsets will be shrunken down into the glasses form-factor, and Meta will be the Android of XR headsets and glasses or in second place overall if users want a cheaper alternative to the Apple Vision product line. Just like what Google had with Android phones, Microsoft had with Windows PCs.
Meta with their Quest headsets will win in quantity and price since there are more Android devices out numbering iOS devices regardless.
> Meta simply won't have that experience because they just did the cheap thing targeted a small market.
They have the money to acquire companies specialised in VR and AR just like what Apple has done recently.
> Betting against a veteran hardware company like Apple and in favor of Meta seems ludicrous to me.
Both will succeed. Apple will have the ecosystem lock-in advantage for those who can afford the best experience and Meta will win in quantity and make it much more accessible. Zuck's 7 - 8 year bet on Oculus seemed to be the right move all against lots of naysayers and the exaggerations of Meta's stock collapse which recovered against the news.
Windows has lost significant market share over the last 10 years. I wouldn't call that a smashing success. In the US iPhone market share has increased and outperformed android recently. Sure, global market and all - but let's be honest, android is cheap, and VR/AR is still a massive luxury - meaning most won't adopt in poorer regions, even if the the meta option is cheaper.
> They have the money to acquire companies specialised in VR and AR just like what Apple has done recently.
Apple builds its own chips, has been designing OSes for decades, building smashing success consumer hardware for decades. They're almost completely vertically integrated. Facebook was an adtech business. Acquiring fledgling startups won't help here.
> Both will succeed. Apple will have the ecosystem lock-in advantage for those who can afford the best experience and Meta will win in quantity and make it much more accessible. Zuck's 7 - 8 year bet on Oculus seemed to be the right move all against lots of naysayers and the exaggerations of Meta's stock collapse which recovered against the news.
It's already at quantity pricing and it hasn't succeeded now - what makes you think it will in the future? Meta's stock collapse didn't happen because its fundamental business is still strong - not because of their VR moonshot.
Here's "leaked" BOM list. There are some expensive parts but we find OLED (x2) is quite expensive. If its production scaled well, will it price down? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36022338
But that would likely mean removing sensors or reducing resolution, which would make it completely different than vision pro. I highly doubt Apple could reduce the price for the same product given the number of sensors and the quality of screen.
I think this commercial illustrates his point perfectly: "It’s about people interacting in new ways and feeling closer in new ways."
Commercial shows people having close positive relationship built through novel interactions. Relationship that pretty much would be impossible through all other media like social real world chitchat.
I took grumpiness of real-life parts as a joke. I think it was intended as such because in the last scene they still don't know they are having fun with their neighbor.
I didn't see it as "your life sucks, get virtual". More like, "your life is normal, enrich it with new activities and connections using vr".
Just having a higher resolution alone has made Apple Vision worth talking about. By all accounts I’ve read it’s very impressive. The interface is much better on the Vision than with the Quest. I had a Quest but I stopped using it because my eyes no longer can stand to see non retina screens. Pixelization was fine 15 years ago but anymore. Wearing glasses in the Quest was a pain. My glasses fogged up too often.
Implementation of features and capabilities is what matters. The capabilities are useless if it’s too hard to use them or the device is defective in some way that prevents users from wanting to use them.
I disagree that higher resolution alone makes it worth talking about. Meta can churn out high quality screens as well as Apple, for a price. The more compelling angle is how they have nailed the interface with eye and hand tracking and if this works as well in real-world environments as it did in their demo setup.
Apple has a tech advantage lately with their software and hardware stack. But historically their products have done well because of product features not because of tech advantages. There is a non-zero chance you get an almost $4K device as hamstrung as an iPad.
So the question still remains, what are they going to do with it? It has much potential. But in some ironic twist of fate it is Meta taking the product first approach here. And Apple’s closed ecosystem (not to mention high price) puts them at a huge disadvantage to target the social/gaming angle of “spatial computing”.
It’s not over yet, and in general this is exciting because competition will start to ramp up.
Meta can churn out high quality screens as well as Apple, for a price.
But they didn’t.
The more compelling angle is how they have nailed the interface with eye and hand tracking and if this works as well in real-world environments as it did in their demo setup.
This is what I was referring to when mentioned implementation. To paraphrase you I could retort: “Meta could have spent the time perfecting the interface but chose not to.”. I don’t see the relevance of such thinking though.
iPad is selling great because it is not ‘hamstrung’, it’s focused. People choose a device that does a few things only and does them greatly, instead of one that does everything, poorly.
There’s plenty of tablets with similar hardware specifications to an iPad that allow sideloading and hacking. That’s just not what a lot of people are looking for. They want a device where you can trust that if you press the button, the screen turns on and the apps do what they do, every time, without it being another computer to administer.
agreed. like or hate apple, it does seem they're the only company that consistently seems to test their products with 'regular' people (parents, school principals, construction workers, etc), not people who know what 'sideload' even means
I agree that only Apple can make this product, but current target audiences primary want virtual big monitors feature. For such usage, they don't need great hand tracking and passthru. Maybe passthru is useful for like drink a water.
On the budget side, there's 3D printable inserts that accept lenses from a cheap pair of Zennioptical glasses.
I got mine from VROptician whose were a bit pricier (maybe $80?). There were some cool options for magnetic ones, but I don't change the lenses enough for it to be worth the extra cost. It'll be interesting to see what Apple charges for theirs.
Quest 3 will up the resolution and still be 1/7th the price. The question I think is whether it's enough, but recent head sets (Quest Pro) with pancake lenses are pretty close and Quest 3 will be more. It may be enough for most people.
An another important spec is FoV. Reviewers say that FoV is not the best but not annoying, but I don't know is it true or they just Apple's cool aid on WWDC.
Keep bickering ya’ll ; it’s all better for us people who want to get work done. Apple made it more serious and even shows they actually support some of the Vision of Zuck. Let all big corps come in and compete for whatever their vision is.
I just want holodeck hardware and software with weeklong battery life. This is getting is closer.
One of the things that the Apple announcement will do; because it supports all iOS games and apps, meta (and other android eco system vendors) cannot not offer that. Things are going well. More competition please!
Seems pancake but you can place them anywhere in ‘space’. As I use VR/AR only for productivity (more/bigger monitors, less irl space), I would really like to have all android apps from the play store hanging in AR/VR space as pancake ‘screens’ I can organise. Now that Apple announced support for all iOS apps and games, I cannot see the rest being able to just sit and not follow for android.
At least Apple proves it’s possible To expose all their apps just as is; they have been saying in Quest forums for years this is ‘impossible’ and the app has to be tailored for it, even just as a flat screen hanging in VR. Impossible, or couldn’t be asked? The latter surely?
I think it's a good idea letting people get used to 2D apps in VR. Apple could've done more to first party apps to use their 3D space because they clearly showed us it works with the butterfly, dinosaur bit. I guess it depends on the developers now?
I wouldn't say it validates the market. At least not the market Facebook is going for. The ultra high-end market might be ripe for disruption after so many big companies failed at producing a super expensive MR device, but rumors say Apple plans to ship as little as 200k units in the first year. The entire Quest line has already sold north of 20M units, with most of that coming from the entry level models Quest 1 and 2.
This is the kind of thing a CEO says to fire up the troops. It is intended to encourage Meta employees to work harder on VR because now they're "threatened."
Reality Labs is going to burn at least $16 bn in '23 and '24. Meta can't really spend much more money on this business. I think investors will mandate clarity on how the spending is bucketed and see a mix shift to HW rather than Metaverse SW.
Financially, RL is the worst business on earth. No other business has lost this much money in such a short period of time.
> Financially, RL is the worst business on earth. No other business has lost this much money in such a short period of time.
This is like saying, the US is the worst country on earth because of it's debt. The reality is, if you have money and you don't invest it, it loses value.
Of course the options for Meta are limited on what they could do with that cash. M&A is a non-starter, and there isn't much more they could do in FB/IG/WA. Meta already does share buybacks as well. However, the opportunity cost, such as offer cloud services or SaaS products, is what they've lost. I'm sure investors hope they become more rational in their RL capital allocation and investors would certainly prefer more share buybacks instead.
Investing in RL is not a bad idea if it can drive significant top-line growth. However, unless RL turns into one of the best businesses on earth (like FoA), it will never delivered a positive ROI since its inception.
US debt is similar in that it's invested capital, but it does provide a positive contribution to GDP. If the US stops growing, our debt will become a massive issue.
I totally agree on the cloud service side though. I don't understand why they don't offer a competitor considering how good of a product they could create. When asked, Mark always says that a cloud platform wouldn't be related to their mission (connecting people).
> it validates the market and thus justifies further spending to Facebook investors.
Precisely. Apple has validated this product category and Meta has already established being a viable competitor in XR.
Even if Apple prices it high, Meta is going to win on quantity and price, just like Google did for Android, and Microsoft did for Windows.
Not even the Apple fanboys would buy this, unless they are developers or having this as a collectable who think that every product Apple releases is going to be an instant hit like the iPhone. I don't think it is this version of the Vision product line. It will probably be the third generation that comes in the slimmed down glasses form factor and slightly cheaper.
Apple is making an integrated headset: their own lenses, processor, ..., down to the operating system.
The Quest uses an Android based operating system and a lot of off the shelf components.
We've seen this story before and it hasn't ended well for the folks in Mark's position.
A personal device like these headsets needs to be delightful. It has to be responsive. It has to have the little touches. It's much more difficult to do that when you're constrained by off the shelf components.
Apple had the best touchpads for a decade because of those integrated properties, for example.
I worked at an electronics retailer in high school for a couple years, my job was to sell laptops. I sold a lot of laptops. Nerds like us who post comments on hacker news can have a hard time understanding the mind of the vast majority of regular people who simply could not care less about trackpad quality. It's just not a thing most people even think about.
Most people don't care about 'drive shaft quality' or 'steering wheel quality' in their cars either, but you can be sure it will be taken good care of by engineering, and subconsciously noticed.
There's truth in your point. People do feel the difference even when they don't notice it, but it doesn't seem like that's always (or even often?) reflected in the bottom line. Nissan sells an awful lot of cars with their crappy CVT transmissions and crossovers continue to be hugely popular in the US.
If I may, I’d make a slight modification to your statement.
The vast majority of people don’t care about trackpad quality when it comes to shopping.
They do care when they *use* it but they either take it for granted when it works well, or it’s too small a papercut to trade in their device and buy/research a new one.
but it all combines together to make a smoother experience when using it, and it can convert people as a part of a whole.
The vast majority of people don’t care enough to pay for it.
This is why people balk at the price of Apple Vision even though Apple managed to miniaturize a Macbook into a visor and added LiDAR, two 4K screens, a separate depth sensor, several other cameras, and even a 3D camera to it
That said, Mark’s devices aren’t bad for the price. They’ve been the best overall VR headsets for the past 2-3 years.
> or it’s too small a papercut to trade in their device and buy/research a new one.
Most of the time they don't notice at all unless its truly atrocious or truly mind blowing (and whilst I can firmly say the macbook trackpad is the best I've ever used, lets be honest its not mind blowing). They might notice things don't feel as smooth as it did on their macbook (assuming they even had one last, if not how can you tell something is worse if its all you've ever had), but they're unlikely to narrow this down to the trackpad.
Yes, they buy bottom of the barrel and, if it doesn’t work, assume that is where state of the art is.
Few months back I’ve seen anecdotal posts somewhere that new generations of managers are trying to shift computing to phones and tablets because they’re “better than laptops”. No one enforces a delightfulness standard for Windows laptops, and it is creating a skewed perception.
The delightfulness factor is something that’s a big deal and that technical people trivialize and can’t be expressed adequately on paper for non-technical people.
I used to be a die hard Android and Windows/Linux power user. I’d scoff at all the stuff people would mention on iOS/macOS because “well I can do that too if I do this and that”. But then I switched back to iOS/macOS for a project and a lot of the papercuts being solved out of the box was actually such a huge gain.
That’s not to say Apple is perfect. They can improve a ton too (give me a proper path bar in finder please!), but (and I say this often) the products they make are more than the sum of their parts.
but of course none of that is something that is evident when you’re shopping for a product.
Plus, the question one would ask is: “can this do this banal task?” not “which one does this banal task better”. So I see why it’s not prioritized on other platforms.
Most people are just shopping for capability and specs. The delightfulness is too ephemeral to consider until you encounter it yourself.
I think the average person does care about and notice quality, its just a question of if they can afford it. When I look around the coworking space, its almost universally macbooks. And these aren't tech people mostly.
But the uni student with a budget that only buys half a macbook doesn't get to care about trackpad quality.
Normal people don't say things like "The trackpad is unresponsive and the wifi drivers unreliable" They say "I just don't like it" "It feels kinda crap"
Apple did manage to patent the pythagorean theorem (“pinch zoom” uses the hypotenuse of a right triangle as the zoom factor), but, from what I can tell, the bad windows touchpad thing is self-inflicted.
I was confused by "touchpad", I assume it's the trackpad ?
More extensive touch support, like having touch support on the laptop display alleviates a lot of the trackpad needs. It's still nice when it smooth and responsive, but looking at the the Surface devices for instance, it's nice enough.
What boggled my mind were the trackpads on some laptops that weren't just average, but actively bad.
The worst by far I've ever used was on a circa-2007 HP convertible laptop that ran Vista. Despite it costing more than some models of MacBook at the time, the thing was built with that cheap creaky "fake metal" glossy plastic, and that included its trackpad. The trackpad would've been bad enough just like that with the smooth plastic gripping at your fingertips, but to make it worse its surface had inverse dimples, and because its touch sensitivity wasn't all that sensitive you had to apply more pressure when using it which pressed your fingers down into the dimples and made them stick even worse. Oh and of course, as was customary for non-Apple laptops at that point it was also tiny.
It's almost as if it was someone's job to make that thing's trackpad terrible to use. Just mind boggling.
Windows led to a few market failures like this. One that comes to mind is high DPI displays. In terms of pixels per inch, today’s 1080p displays are laughable by 2001 standards.
It has been a quarter century since high DPI CRTs were affordable, and 20+ years since LCDs were.
However, Windows wasn’t compatible with such things until at least 2010, so here we are a quarter century later, and laptop lines still often only offer meh-for-the-late-90’s displays.
A more recent example is suspend resume. I’m not sure of the details, but I am sure that intel will never do better than S3 sleep from ten years ago, and Microsoft pushed them to change how sleep works.
It's certainly improved over the past few years to a point where they're comparable to Macbooks. Windows Precision drivers and large glass trackpads are slowly becoming common in mid to high tier Windows laptops.
I have an XPS 15, the touchpad is fine. When I use a macbook I don't think "oh my god the touchpad is great", although that might just be because I'm too busy thinking "oh my god this OS is terrible".
Why does every comment chain devolve into this(although you admitted it)? Apple touch pads are an improvement over all other laptop brand touchpads. But then this fallacy is the only response.
"These rounded corners in the UI really make me not care about the touch pad"
"I wish I could care about touchpads, my ssd won't replace itself without a soldering iron though!"
"They have touchpads? I use a mouse"
Great. Apple touchpads are next generation compared to most other laptops.
I use my MBA in clamshell mode, but with an Apple trackpad. I used a mouse with my work PC when I was a lawyer, and I did enjoy having various buttons for open-in-new-tab, back/forward, right-click. But it seems like this is all easily accomplished with gestures on Apple's trackpads, plus scrolling is easier.
Exactly, if Meta sticks with snapdragon+android, it's game over for them. If you've been following John Carmack, one constant theme in his posts while still working there was his dissatisfaction with the underlying stack (Os+Hw) and not pushing the envelope hard enough.
Apple has a huge advantage with its vertical integration and nearly complete control of the entire stack. Android being a janky/buggy/glitchy mess is the icing on the cake.
> We've seen this story before and it hasn't ended well for the folks in Mark's position.
Is Microsoft today in a fundamentally problematic position ?
Apple has the spotlight and a higher evaluation, but I'm not sure Google or Microsoft "haven't ended well".
> A personal device like these headsets needs to be delightful.
The number of people willing to pay for "delightful" is pretty small though. Even as today, the iPhone isn't winning on delight, it's primarily on the ecosystem, green bubbles, game payments etc., as we've heard in the numerous trials and hearings from Apple execs.
Blackberry was making their own hardware and OS to almost the same extent as Apple does today...are you arguing that Apple will be the next BlackBerry ?
I'm not the same poster (and hate the one-word answers with nothing to back them up), but I think BlackBerry's position could be called similar to Meta's. They were already established with lower-cost, lower-spec'd devices. However, BlackBerry couldn't conceive of how more would be transformative. They insisted that the iPhone would flop because it didn't have a keyboard and such.
When you said that the iPhone wasn't succeeding today based on delight, I'd argue that it's the only reason the iPhone succeeded. BlackBerry had an amazing brand and the ecosystem that you say it the reason the iPhone is successful today - including its own proprietary messenger service. The iPhone came along with delight and overthrew the established players.
If the Vision Pro offers users an experience that they like, it could make the Quest series look like BlackBerries: low-rent devices that were bought as toys for enthusiasts before real devices came along.
The thing about the iPhone is that people could instantly see what they'd enjoy it for. BlackBerries were a status symbol, had some business use cases, and were a nice toy for those who tried to buy distractions. When Apple introduced the iPhone, they showed real web browsing, useful maps (even before GPS), a better iPod than they'd ever seen, YouTube, and more.
With the Vision Pro, Apple is showing me something I could see myself using. I could wear it writing code and have more display space than 3 displays (and still use my keyboard). I could watch movies, I could browse the web, and I could play games. Apple is showing me how it could become an integral part of my usage rather than just a gadget that I'm likely to ignore.
I'm not an expert on the VR/AR space, but it sounds like the Quest devices don't really have the resolution for reading text comfortably which cuts out a lot of usage - just as the BlackBerry devices didn't have good web browsing and other stuff. That could leave the Quest series in the BlackBerry zone where they're trying to fill a similar niche, but they're limited in the things that bring users back to the device rather than it sitting in a corner unused. It also seems like the Vision Pro is likely to be a lot more responsive. Android tends to have a lot of input lag compared to iOS and Apple's M2 processor will run circles around the Qualcomm XR2 in the Quest Pro - plus Apple has a dedicated R1 processor for handling real-time sensor data. The XR2 has one performance core from 3 years ago compared to 4 performance cores in an M2.
Meta can't even buy themselves a CPU that's competitive. Apple's M2 will be 40-50% faster on single-core stuff and it has 4 performance cores instead of 1 performance core in the top-end Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. On multi-core, the M2 is twice as fast. Plus, it has its own dedicated processor for handling all the sensor data!
When BlackBerry saw the iPhone design, they assumed Apple couldn't pull it off. They thought practically the whole inside would have to be battery. They weren't wrong about that, but Apple did pull it off. Is Meta thinking that Apple won't be able to pull off a better experience than their devices? I don't think companies are underestimating Apple at the moment.
Sometimes with tech, it's about getting over a hump. Everyone had been trying to do handheld computers since the 80s - even Apple's Newton development started in the 80s. Apple was the one who finally got it over the hump where it was really useful. Likewise, it's not like headsets are new - Nintendo's Virtual Boy came out in 1995, 28 years ago. But the Virtual Boy didn't get over that hump just as the Newton didn't. With the Quest, if I have to strain to read text, maybe it hasn't gotten over the hump. Again, I'm not an expert in this area, but my point is that it's not just about better specs for the sake of better specs. It's about better specs that overcome a bar...
I'd personally compare BlackBerry to Kodak. They had a strong market position, brand and loyal customers. They also had a vision for what should come next, but little to no incentive in fully executing on it, probably didn't want to canibalise the existing sales, while also seeing too much value in their existing customers who only swear by their products.
That's also kinda where I see Apple to a lesser extent: they masterfully executed on the iPhone concept, tried to push further on the iPad, but ultimately see too much value in their current moat to risk losing it. That's where I see the HomePods, Apple TV, Apple Watch being fiercefully bound to the iPhone when they could have been independent products the same way the iPod was. Same way the iPad only got its OS in name and couldn't get much beyond being a gloridied iPhone in many respects.
Any of these products are successful in a vacuum, but given the size of the watch market for instance, the sales numbers for the Watch don't feel as successful as the iPod was.
I'm curious to see how the Vision Pro will work outside of the Apple ecosystem, as at this point it's touted as a display, and that should open the door for more than just being a macbook or apple TV accessory.
On why the iPhone succeeded...until the iPhone 4, it had miserable battery life and crashed all the time, you'd miss phone calls, "you're holding it wrong" was only funny because of how bad we had reception problems. But it did net browsing, photo handling, and emailing better than any device on the market (way better than BlackBerry for half of the world, in the sense that BB was stuck on the western market). So it was a powerful device with a unique proposition, but delightful? hell no. Better than android sure, but it took a long time for it to be smooth and stable IMHO.
On Meta...I have a Quest 2 and completely agree with all the point. It's not good, just "barely good enough" for the price it is. But I'd argue it's here, when the Vision Pro will be real next year, and who knows when we get the next iteration. While I don't see Meta successfuly pushing the field, the sailant point is that the Quest 2 and probably Quest 3 are PC VR compatible, where the Vision Pro has almost no chance to be. This means that the next Beat Saber or Supernatural could come to Steam VR, get tested, and be successfully enough to go to the Quest store, then perhaps the Apple VR store.
I base that on the observation that ML didn't come to Mac or iOS first, but went to the more open windows world first. I don't see new VR creators starting from a Vision Pro when next Christmas gift season will still probably be Quest headsets and perhaps Vive if they can get their price low enough. Perhaps Apple will have a shot at it in 3 years, but we can check back the situation when they arrive there (I'd love an ultra competitive landscape for the next 3 years)
I also find it super interesting that the main use case is as a macbook multi-monitor when macos isn't touch ready. It'd be super excited if they bring a big surprise in that area at the same time the Vision Pro hits.
My worst fear is still that Apple eats all the high resolution display factories of the space, the same way they litteraly consumed all the displays at the peak iOS times and competitors had the leftover, even as the display technology wasn't Apple's.
> Is Microsoft today in a fundamentally problematic position ?
I mean… pretty obviously yes?
Windows is rotting on the vine, Azure is nowhere near the market share of other players, and while they still have a large installed base of users they’ve done nothing particularly noteworthy in like a decade at this point.
If there’s anyone on the path to being the next IBM it’s them.
Azure ($75.3B in 2022 revenue) is only slightly smaller than AWS ($80B). It’s GCP ($26.28B) that’s way behind. Microsoft has always known how to sell through its channels.
You could say iPod, xServe, AirPort or Pippin in the same vein. Companies lose/get out of entire markets and move to others, that's a natural (and probably healthy) thing.
Otherwise, I forgot about TabletPC, hut given they have the Surface line now, is it a failure ?
Thanks for the reminder: Zune. You think iPod belongs in the same breath as the others?
Random protocols aren’t products.
Surface is a strategic failure because it didn’t define the tablet market a decade ago, and iPad / Chromebook is what every grade school kid uses. Now it gets to cannibalize sales from their PC partners, who I’m sure are thrilled to be competing with their OS supplier.
iPod ended killed, so yes I'd ship it in the same category as we others. For what it's worth, to this day I'm still more salty about the AirPort line getting killed than the iPod.
> Random protocols
I didn't understand this bit.
> Surface
It's not taking the world by storm, but is a solid product line that is well received, has its loyal community, and continues to ship new products for 9 generations now. And the windows tablet market itself expanded around it, when it just didn't exist 10 years ago. I'd compare it to Google's Pixel line, it's not going to take half of the market, but it's alive, keeps fullfilling its role, get recognition and user satisfaction, so I wouldn't call it a failure.
On iPad/Chromebook, they're a different device category. The same way Chromebooks and Macbooks aren't the same category.
But there is even much more profits with ads and sales in those apps - that is the biggest market than selling software. On android it's even hard to track how much profits is via subscription because platform is less restrictive and apple.
And paid apps are slowly going away and are less relevant - it's been many years since mobile app peaked. Top apps these days in play store and app store are free.
The difference here is Zuckerberg gets to be the equivalent of both Samsung and Google in the Android analogy. That's going to unlock far more opportunities for ecosystem profit than Android did when split b/w OEMs and Google.
> Isn't this what Android did? They seem like they're doing fine enough
I don't think Meta's aspirations are to be Android. They were first movers in this space, spent billions and billions, only to be the less profitable, less coveted platform?
As outsiders, this is already how we're looking at it when Apple stepped in, which is unfortunate, and why Mark's refusal to acknowledge reality isn't a great look.
They may have market share, but there’s very little money being made by Android manufacturers and likely also by Google. Apple has an overwhelming percentage of the profit share from the smartphone market even if they don’t have a majority of the raw market share.
I am not sure I agree. Meta can aim to be the android of the VR market, providing a decent product for much less money and being able to benefit from having much more devices out there. If VR becomes anywhere near as mainstream as phones at some point, meta will be very well placed to capture that position, which could be incredibly profitable.
“Thanks to its high average selling price and its healthy profit margins, Apple captured 50 percent of global smartphone revenues and more than 80 percent of the industry's profits in the first three months of 2023”
Isn't this kind of the same as saying that LVMH is such a better company than Uniqlo? LVMH makes so much more money, but is it something I'm personally interested in or want to buy? That's a different question.
71.63%, but made up of an inordinate amount of outright cheap and/or high volume/low margin shitphones that last 1-1.5 years before self-destructing under the burden of their own pre-loaded bloat and adware.
That's not business, that's a struggle for survival.
The billions of people in poorer countries are able to have access to the world's knowledge due to smart phones are better served by those cheap smartphone than something they can never afford.
> We've seen this story before and it hasn't ended well for the folks in Mark's position.
Meta doesn't need to dominate the market. Being the Android to Apple's iOS or the Windows to Apple's macOS is way more than fine for Meta's business. iPhone's did $250b in revenue in 2022. Meta as a whole did $117b.
They aren't looking to replace Apple, they are just trying to find a way to get their revenue growing again. It's a huge win in their eye's if Quest3 contributes reasonably well to bringing their 2023 revenue to about $130b.
If there was a genuine third company competing with Meta then that would be a problem for them. Valve and Pico are roughly 0% the size of Meta and Apple. They just won't have the resources to actually compete. Google has been rumored to be working on a headset. If that's the case and they didn't fire that entire org then that would be Meta's only real competition for second place.
> They aren't looking to replace Apple, they are just trying to find a way to get their revenue growing again.
Thats like "they arent trying to be the best, they are just trying to be a little better.
Ofc they are trying to beat apple, and everyone else. Or you are saing that if they were magically given the opportunity to become most valued company, theyd simply pass with "no thanks, thats more than we want" attitude?
Every major corporation is trying their absolute hardest to grow.
They're developing completely different products. Apple's product is a productivity enhancing tool, the main use case is a mobile desk so that you can use your computer anywhere in the world and the monitor setup is always exactly the way you want. Meta is going for the console market. The type of product kids get for christmas.
> Apple's product is a productivity enhancing tool, the main use case is a mobile desk so that you can use your computer anywhere in the world and the monitor setup is always exactly the way you want.
Apple's initial use cases are around work, entertainment, and meetings. It's ridiculous to think they won't expand this and compete in every use case once they get market shares and a developer eco-system. They are not different products. That's like saying a MacBook Pro and a HP laptop are different products. No, one is a high-end, more expensive, more coveted product, and the other isn't.
> They aren't looking to replace Apple, they are just trying to find a way to get their revenue growing again
This is such an odd sentiment.
Meta was first in this segment, they've spent billions and billions, harmed their reputation as a company on Wall Street, etc. etc.. Apple comes in after them, with, from what we can tell, a superior product. This rationalization that this was all part of Meta's master plan all along is a little ridiculous. They're going to lose and get the crumbs, just like Android device makers get 30% of the profit (70% of it goes to Apple) but hold 80% of market shares. This wasn't Meta's aspirations and is a blunder.
You're looking at this too abstractly. Meta's revenue grew by 0.6% last year. And that's up from shrinking by 1.3% the year before. Their social media platforms have reached the peak and don't really have any more users to gain. They aren't looking for 300% revenue growth. They'd be blissfully happy to get back to 5% by establishing themselves as a serious hardware/software company.
> They went with a higher resolution display, and between that and all the technology they put in there to power it, it costs seven times more and now requires so much energy that now you need a battery and a wire attached to it to use it.
Comparing the pricing of your consumer level product to an enterprise level product is extremely disingenuous.
You don't have to think for long to see where they will take this, and how strong it will be in corporate environments. Especially a corporate world currently jostling between in-office and work-from-home.
In this clash of visions, Apple wins by default. Not because Apple has a track record of setting the computer interface paradigm for the whole industry, but because Apple actually has its own vision — “spacial computing”. Zuck, on the other hand, aims to realize a sci-fi dystopia that he didn’t envision. Neal Stephenson did. Zuck didn’t found Oculus either.
Now, Zuck may be the world’s greatest opportunist; copying, acquiring, optimizing, and scaling technologies that have already demonstrated product-market-fit. I sincerely admire his executive excellence.
With this in mind, Apple Vision Pro has validated Meta’s pivot to hardware. If Zuck swallows his pride and pivots the Quest to copying Apple, Meta has the opportunity to own the Android of spacial computing, enabling low-cost devices, collecting data, and selling microtargeted ads. This will allow Meta to continue as a globally dominant entity, and Zuck will remain one of the world’s wealthiest men.
But will Zuck’s quest to be respected as a visionary cloud his judgment and jeopardize his empire?
They didn't invent the mouse either, they just popularized it. Personally I like this term much better, so I hope we all start using it.
VR, AR, XR, mixed reality... these are too specific and fussy. "Spatial computing" encompasses them all in a fuzzy way that to me has the right granularity for most conversations about this stuff.
there's also a third much more likely possibility: VR is still a novelty/gimmick experience and neither apple or zuck or any other company will make it mainstream, no matter how much money they burn on it.
Apple's vision is the Microsoft HoloLens. I was walking around with apps floating in front of me (and staying in rooms where I placed them) years ago.
It's a neat gimmick but not worth the asking price because there's not $3500 of value you're extracting out of it.
Maybe $500 of value because it's neat? Not sure. It's great at presenting virtual screens (I don't need one) and non-game 3D content which will be a handful of 3D movies and novelty apps where you can explode a hologram of something.
Apple Vision will fail. It doesn't matter if it's a good product or not. Fact is, wearing it makes you look like a dork. This is why it will fail. Segway made you look like a dork too and it failed. Then the hoverboard got out and you looked cool while using it and it is successful. There is a future for Apple Vision's tech, but this is not the product that will sell. People will buy a product that makes them look cool. As simple as that.
Yes. I can see people in coffee shops wearing the apple ski goggles , but not Quest. In particular because it's very expensive and signals wealth. Like how many people buy a Tesla, even though VR goggles are less useful overall
Yeah the Quest always gave this corporate dystopia zuckerberg overlord world with NFT sneakers vibe. The Apple one feels like a high quality computing device I can imagine using in a few years.
It's kind of surprising to see this perspective being so common. They're both the same kind of dystopia, Apple just has more black mirror style polish, while Meta has the more old school "obvious" dystopia style going.
If Apple's Vision Pro succeeds in dominating this new market, there will be competitors like there always has. Let's say the Vision Pro is #1 in terms of market share--they might not be, but Apple certainly has some obvious advantages. I find the question of who will be #2 in the market more interesting.
Meta has positioned themselves as either #1 or #2 so far, but that position could easily vanish just like the Blackberry. It requires great execution of both the hardware and operating system with their current strategy, and Meta doesn't exactly have a history of producing either. I'm surprised they haven't gone the Android or Windows way of just producing the software and licensing the OS to OEMs. It greatly increases their attack surface area on either the hardware or the OS from another competitor other than Apple.
> Meta doesn't exactly have a history of producing either
Meta manufactured the Quest line after their oculus acquisition. While it runs Android, it’s heavily modified for VR AR. Overall, it’s a solid headset especially when you look at the price point and ease of use (compared to PCVR).
I tend to favor Apple, but I’m not going to overlook what other products have achieved
Interesting take, I thought he would be pretty excited a major player is entering the space he's been working on since they acquired Oculus. Apple would have done research to validate this product and market before entering it.
A friend of mine works at Meta and was telling me about how much of the AVP's functionality exists on the recent Meta devices, for a fraction of the cost. My reply: great! If that's true, that'll be a boon for Meta (as customers learn this) and for customers (who will save tons of money by getting Meta devices).
I think there is a large market of people that will never trust meta, but ignoring that, they have AR goggles now?
If not, their comments about overlapping features sound like the “but nokia candy bar phones already have a WEP browser!” objections from back in the iPhone 1 days.
(I’m personally not all that impressed by the apple vision announcement, but I also wasn’t impressed by the iPhone announcement, and for similar reasons. Hopefully someone will do significantly better than Apple this time.)
They always count functions but never how well it all works together, it saying I tried it but you can’t just count check off boxes and say they are similar
Pricing the headset at 7x the Quest seems like an Apple power move. Ordinarily if you’re 2nd or 3rd to a category you’d expect there to be pressure to price in the same ballpark. You want customers to compare but say the new product is worth spending a reasonable amount more than the old product because it has some bells and whistles.
At $3500 Apple invites no comparison. They’re basically pretending Meta doesn’t exist and that they’ve invented the category, as though it’s the iPhone or iPad.
On the flipside, it gives Meta a blueprint for disrupting the market. They're well-poised up to release a "Quest Pro Max" of sorts - keep the Quest form factor, but go all-in on eye tracking and screen tech. Price it at $3,000 and include a nice aluminum stand for kicks and giggles.
The Hololens was a "power move" headset that had to repeatedly re-adjust its target market because the price was too high. Apple could end up in the same spot if they can't iteratively bring down the price.
The hard part is the low end - and Meta has 20 million devices sold there. If the hardware is an obstacle to reaching market fit, I'm pretty confident Meta could get there. It's mostly a matter of scaling up what they already have.
Yea 20 million cheap VR headsets that haven't taken off into the expected market at all. Any hardware company could do that tomorrow. It's easy. Just source the parts.
Apple is practically completely vertically integrated. They design their own chips. They have decades of experience in consumer hardware.
To make AR/VR into what Zuck wants, his hardware is NOWHERE near what it needs to be. And they don't have the chops to get it there. If it's possible, I believe Apple can do it.
Why is that not a relevant strategy for competing with Apple? Nvidia and arguably AMD could both out-engineer Apple if you're just talking about chips here.
Aren't they talking about the "ease" of competing with a lower-end, non-vertically-integrated device?
Same tactic won't work against Apple because they make the key chips, make the hardware, the software, etc. They can have you look at your MacBook, and the headset brings up your laptop's workspace ready to go.
The sticking point is the silicon which they don't control. After watching Android flail for 10 years unable to match Apple's ARM processors in phones, I'm unfortunately not super optimistic that Meta can influence Qualcomm to suddenly make the necessary leap in performance needed. Of course, if they concede having an external power brick perhaps they can just stack multiple XR2's in there and get into the range ... but I'll be sad if they go that way. Carrying a power brick has to be a temporary detour, it can't be the long term of this.
Android shipped their first public beta in 2007. Its development overlapped the iPhone, and similarly the development of the standalone Quest systems has overlapped the Vision Pro.
There are most likely enough patents on both sides to render these portfolio boasts moot, once again.
Android was ahead for a long time 3-4 generations only recently had Apple jumped ahead, basically after Google killed affordable nexus devices that was the turning point
The Quest 2 is $299 now. You can buy a dozen of them for one Apple device.
It is indeed a different category. The control paradigm is different and the Quest’s popular apps are games and fitness. It’s a bit like comparing a Mac Studio to a Nintendo Switch.
Yeah. It made me wonder if they priced it such that it could be argued it's a success by a smaller metric, giving themselves leeway. As while they're positioning this as a general computing device it's unclear how many will be comfortable using it as such in this current iteration, compared to how they've traditionally been used almost entirely for entertainment (in the consumer space anyway).
Yes, hence the inventes "spatial computing" despite clearly providing hybrid AR. A.k.a. it's the same apps you already use, but now floating in front of you!
The point is that Mark's vision is much more social... The most Apple showed was FaceTime but with added 3D on their avatar. There's so much missed opportunity here for true spatial social interaction that Apple avoided
That’s seems disingenuous considering the Quest Pro is literally competing for the same market segment and there were numerous tech investments made to build out the workplace vision. I think Apple came out with a much more compelling product in that space (although it may be fair that the quest pro had less investment and focus because they believe low cost headsets are the real priority).
The pricing won’t matter because if Apple sells a bunch it won’t matter how much the Quest costs because the developers will be prioritizing the Vision headset and its modalities which is the key thing that will matter. It’s like what happened with Android - they were about to release when Apple showcased multitouch at which point they scrapped their existing stuff and retooled to make Android multi touch because they knew that would become the dominant modality to make it easy for developers to write apps for both / make it easy for customers to compare and contrast. More importantly, Apple seems to be seeding with an existing massive App Store for non-augmented apps that Quest doesn’t have in any meaningful way iirc and they’ll need to spend money trying to attract existing Android developers to publish to their store or sign a deal with Google to provide access to the Play store (which will never happen).
Expect to see a massive strategy shift from Facebook if Q4 numbers indicate the vision pro is a hit and likely competitor “me too” products from Google, Microsoft, and Samsung if it at ask looks like Apple has reinvigorated this market.
> “if Q4 numbers indicate the vision pro is a hit”
The Vision Pro isn’t shipping until 2024.
IMO this Verge article is a bit incongruent for mocking Meta’s announcement of Quest 3 a couple of months ahead, without mentioning that Apple’s announcement was almost a year before the Vision Pro will reach most markets.
If Apple solved the blurry text problem of VR, then they have a huge advantage in the pro market. Every app developer will be working on Apple VR apps: dashboards, AR training material, whiteboarding etc
Fixing blurry text is simply a matter of throwing hardware at the problem though. The $3k+ Varjo headsets had solved it already with OLED screens and resolution close to the Apple Vision Pro. (You need a beefy PC to drive those headsets, so they are not self-contained.)
It’s not a long-term competitive advantage. The same thing happened with high-DPI displays. Apple had a momentary advantage with what they call “Retina” display on iPhone 4, but soon every Android vendor was also shipping high-DPI and a few years later it was in the low-end handsets. Today it would be weird to say: “I got an iPhone because the text looks so sharp!”
Similarly nothing stops Meta from using a high-DPI screen in Quest as soon as the OLEDs and computing power becomes cheap enough (or if they are masochists and want to try a $3k version of Quest Pro, I guess).
Apple solved first the multitouch accuracy problem. People forget how bad other touchscreen vendors were in 2008. It took other companies at least 4 years to come close to the accuracy of the iPhone displays and keyboard. By that time Apple had already cornered the developer market.
I use the Quest Pro right now, because my interest in spatial computing (I like Apple's new term so trying to use it, haha) is greater than my misgivings about Meta (even though those are significant).
I will buy the Apple thing, too.
There are a lot of interesting differences between them (obviously, the biggest one being the price, and deriving from that) but the one I find interesting is Apple's decision not to have controllers.
This is just like the infamous "if you see a stylus, they blew it" approach with the iPhone. Double down on the simplest possible input mechanism and pretend it is enough. Today, of course, Apple ships an excellent stylus that they are happy to sell you for $129.
(UPDATE: I think here I wasn't clear, based on several replies. I'm not saying this decision was wrong -- it was right, clearly. I just mean they may very well ignore the existence of controllers... right up until they release an awesome high tech controller for us to buy (as an option).)
The controllers on the Quest Pro are fantastic, and although Meta also seems to be pushing as hard as they can to improve hand tracking and gesture recognition, too, there are and will always be immense benefits to having a hardware controller compared to just waving your hands and pinching your fingers. Precision, haptics, joysticks and buttons, additional positional audio, and more.
I have no doubt that if Vision OS succeeds, it will also eventually get spatially tracked controllers as well. But it is going to start without them.
That to me seems like the main competitive advantage Meta's Quest lineup has, other than the price. It's obviously superior in terms of delivering a deeper and more varied lineup of games; Apple seems to understand that and are hardly mentioning games (although, that makes sense due to the price as well).
It will be interesting to see how Meta tries to leverage this advantage. OTOH maybe some enterprising developer will just figure out how to connect Meta's controllers (or other similar ones) to the Apple Vision Pro.
Totally true, and I suspect that the same will hold true for Vision OS — controllers will always be optional (even when Apple has "the world's most advanced spatial controller" to sell us for $999/pair).
I would strongly recommend looking at the results people are achieving with Apple’s game porting toolkit just days after it was released. With the hardware that the vision pro is supposed to have, I seriously think it will be the best gaming headset on the market if the final product ends up living up to what was announced.
It’s compatible with any Bluetooth controller, but I see no reason it would be a nonstarter.
Remember it has full hand tracking. If you want to hold something e.g. a lightsaber or whatever, there is no reason not to. An inert plastic prop should work just fine.
I'm not a huge gamer, aside from fitness games like Thrill of the Fight, but I've tried a bunch of VR games just to see.
And there is just no way that a lightsaber game could be good without haptic feedback, in a world where haptic feedback exists. And I think many other kinds of game.
YouTube guy MKBHD even called out the lack of haptics in his initial impressions video, not even for a game: the butterfly flew over to him in the Apple demo, and he held out his finger, and when the butterfly landed on it... nothing. And that was kind of jarring, he said. (And it would be.)
By haptics you mean a buzzer? That doesn’t replicate any kind of real-world experience.
But again - there is no reason gamers can’t have a control, but it’s silly to use a game controller to interact with a computing environment when you can use your hands.
I am not sure how it works, but what PlayStation calls "rumble". In the light saber game, you can feel it when your light saber hits your opponent, or your light sabers clash, and it absolutely adds to the experience immensely. I think almost all players of those types of game would prefer to have that feedback, barring some kind of disability or something.
I don't think you need the haptic vibration function for interacting with floating menus and the OS, although again it helps for button presses, which is why all smartphones now feature haptic feedback.
But the other reason to use a controller in general-purpose OS use scenarios is precision. If you can directly touch something, then by all means that is the best. But if the menu to be interacted with is too far away, say 8 meters away, all current systems I have seen make you shout a beam out of your hand to the button or object, then do some gesture to click.
A controller is way more accurate for this, kind of how a mouse is more precise for most people than a trackpad. But even more so.
So on all of Meta's systems so far, the controller can more precisely highlight and click things at distance. And I think this holds true for all other currently-available systems as well.
What Apple Vision Pro is bringing that is new, though, is the eye-tracking. Supposedly, it is as good as, or perhaps even better, at selecting an object at distance. If so, then yeah, controllers wouldn't really provide a significant advantage for most non-game activity.
You mean... so we could like, battle our small children in our kitchens with lightsabers?
My kids indeed do have sword toys that vibrate and make sounds, so I have done this. And I'm sorry to have to report that it is... substantially less compelling than fighting Darth Vader in VR. (Perhaps not for them, though.)
And yeah, the Oculus controllers wouldn't nail the butterfly on finger demo, but if they had controllers, the demo would be a hawk landing on your forearm. (And that would work, even though it doesn't quite make sense that your palm would vibrate when a bird lands on your forearm... but haptic feedback is weird.)
Noone wants to use vr with a 2D game controller (a la xbox)- that completely destroys the point. You want spatially tracked controllers that fit each hand and are meant for vr. Even if there are third party controllers that get around the tracking problems, developers won’t have a controller standard to work against
No, only a small selection of games do hand tracking and it's usually only good if it's been made primarily for handtracking. Even with true hand tracking games, the amount of controls you can do is limited.
They do. The Quest Pro I have has been getting better and better at bare-hand control with each release. But AFAIK they all come with controllers, and it is the default (and generally is still easier and more precise to use, despite the continually-improving hand tracking).
MKBHD reveiw of the AVP says Apple WILL NOT make controllers for the AVP.
That struck me as odd. (Obviously anyone can connect a bluetooth controller and give users some extra control, assuming this device supports open bluetooth for audio etc.)
It is one thing for Apple to claim that their latest gadget does not NEED any controllers for basic navigation and selection. Because they invested so much in perfecting a gensture based system. So far so good.
It is far more presumptious if they say they will NOT allow controllers.
When claiming credit for launching a new space called "spatial computing" -- it is very short-sighted / arrogant to state that a one click finger gesture is all you will ever need for all your comupting needs.
There are games obviously where multiple simultaneous actions need to be triggered. There are 3D modelling applications -- actually a great use case for a AR/VR HMD. And I am sure there are tons of other applications that can benefit from innovative and ergonomic approaches to interactions. Why would Apple go out of their way to say there will be no controllers.
Apple should ideally have an open SDK to allow third party wireless controllers. Knowing apple though ... they will probably sell $499 bluetooth earbuds and call them Apple Ear Pro or something.
I haven't heard that they won't allow them. Just that they won't make them. I suspect it would support Xbox and Playstation and Nintendo controllers at launch, even, since their other platforms do.
However, VR controllers are different in that they need to be tracked as they move through space much more precisely than those console controllers support. But maybe third-party VR controllers can also be supported. I think nobody knows that yet.
Yep, they explicitly mentioned (and showed, IIRC) that you can connect game controllers to the Vision Pro. Presumably it will indeed be PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch controllers, as well as the various third party controllers specifically sold for Apple devices.
I guess that makes perfect sense, actually, now that I see they are making such a big push to make Unity games work. Presumably some of those existing Unity games can't work without such controllers.
I’m sceptical for a very simple reason. When Apple came up with the UI for the iPhone, the functionality of it wasn’t some vague promise, Steve Jobs gloated at length about how intuitive it all was while audiences gasped and applauded over and over. He did this by introducing several new sensors and technologies simultaneously.
They have insanely low latency. Every VR has noticeable latency but so far everyone who have tried vision pro says it’s unnoticeable. That’s a huge leap forward. And this is in a device that doesn’t feel like a center block on your head.
I think a lot of that was just the Steve Jobs’s presence and presentation style.
It’s pretty bananas they’ve crammed an M2 into a headset with all the cameras, sensors, ML engines, and high res displays. The M2 chip alone (I have an M1 Pro) is still blowing my mind with the low wattage performance.
But much like the first iPhone, it is yet to be seen if it will stick. I do think it’s far more capable than existing VR headsets.
I really think people aren’t putting enough weight behind the fact that it’s going to have an M2 chip in it. Obviously there’s no way to tell if it’ll deliver until it’s released but the idea of having a headset with potentially the full power of a MacBook is kind of insane.
OTOH wasn't it inevitable -- that small devices of tomorrow will overtake the most powerful cutting-edge gadgets of the past in computing power, storage, performance.
Maybe in a decade small thumb-drives will have an M2 chip equivalent built into them. To encrypt/decrypt data on the fly with zero latency on multiple GB/s data. Or whatever other application can gobble up that much compute power.
I think the eye tracking is the multitouch of this generation of devices. It's not a new idea, but it's the first device to ship with it (at least in the "consumer" space). Even if they end up with some sort of controllers in the future, the eye tracking enables so many interactions. Not to mention foveated rendering, which they mentioned in a few of the slides. Basically, render a super high quality dot where the user is looking, and fade out the quality in the peripheral vision. 2x4k screens is a lot of pixels to render, even with the M2 being a decent GPU, but with eye tracking, it's possible to really push the rendering quality.
Both examples strike me as strange since using either without something to keep the charger in place is a joy it setup, possibly worse than trying to keep an 8 pin from falling behind your bed stand again.
Apple doesn’t choose not to make these kinds of things because they aren’t needed. It chooses not to make them to narrow their focus.
Apple had planned to be out of the display market as well.
I believe the Studio display and even the XDR are possibly the result of failing to meet original timelines for Vision.
The company continues to sit out home networking despite the success of AirPort Extreme and generally confusing and messy state of the market.
So it is no surprise to me they wouldn’t be trying to guess at controllers. They are working on a platform.
I've wanted finger guns as an input mechanism since the Kinect disappointed me with its lack of finger gun halo. But the tracking would need to be crazy precise.
Personally I think this is what has held Pads (and iPhones) back from becoming better at gaming: sometimes a PlayStation style controller is just way better than touch controls on an iPad. Touch controls often don't register with the same reliability as physical controls and it does not have any physical feedback.
Apple should have made a standard gaming control that all games could use.
As others have mentioned, I’m sure that this will support controllers such as a PlayStation controller like the other iOS devices. I also just personally view this as more of a computer worn on your head than a VR headset. I personally purchased the first Vive that released and sold it shortly after. I’ve also tried a few other headsets afterwards. I have yet to experience a time that VR headsets have seemed to be more than a gimmick for a variety of reasons. From what was showed I think the Vision Pro could be the thing that changes my opinion. I don’t even know that I would personally get one but I do think that if it delivers on the hype that they’ve built, it will the headset landscape.
You're not going to play VR games with a vanilla console controller. And if you're thinking of emulating non-VR PC games on the headset, that seems like it would not be all that compelling. What's the draw?
I was never talking about VR games, other people keep mentioning them. I brought up the game porting toolkit because of the performance people are achieving on their laptops that have similar or the same apple chip that the headset will have. I understand not everyone will see the appeal of playing regular games on a headset but I feel that it makes sense with what the way they are marketing it. The draw is that I could play AAA titles practically anywhere I want with just a headset and a controller. Those games would appear to be displayed on a full size TV or smaller/larger depending on personal preference.
I have yet to find a reason to buy and keep a VR headset as most things just feel so gimmicky to me. At this point unless you’re either tethered to a more powerful device to be able to do the heavy lifting for the headset or you have a standalone headset that can play some basic arcade like games. A single device that can be taken on the go and play new releases not made specifically for the headset would be amazing to me. Obviously until it’s released who can say what it will actually be capable of but if it has the equivalent power of a MacBook, when my mid 2015 MacBook Pro finally dies I’d honestly consider replacing it with the vision pro but wouldn’t run out to buy one to have in addition to the MacBook.
I really don’t think that’s the case anymore after seeing WWDC and what people are doing with the new game porting toolkit. Individuals at their homes have Diablo 4 already running what seems to be flawlessly on their MacBooks using it. Also they brought Hideo Kojima out during the conference to talk about it, including announcing that DS was going to be released on max along with the sequel. I think apple is finally acknowledging gaming exists.
The best gaming headset on the market would have to be able to connect to a Windows PC. The M2 chip in the headset doesn't have the power to run an intensive game at 4K resolution for each eye. Even if the headset could be tethered to a Mac for additional power, the GPUs in Macs don't come close to the capabilities of the 4090, which itself struggles to support 2K per eye for demanding games. One potential solution could be foveated rendering, which has shown some performance improvements on the Quest Pro and PSVR2, albeit not significantly. However, it's possible that Apple's implementation of this might yield better results.
I still believe that for the masses (think console gamers and pc gamers without the gaming rig) cloud gaming will be the future.
I've been playing fps/rts/rpg games through GeForce Now on a MacBook M1 and so far there's few obvious drawbacks - good internet required, slight input lag which can be annoying for some FPS games sure, and not all games are available yet - but for those who only play a few games regularly, it's also much better than running the game on an i3/i5 Windows laptop.
I agree, the prospects for cloud gaming do seem promising. However, we can't forget that in VR, latency is a much more important factor. One solution could be for companies to establish datacenters near high-population areas to guarantee low latency. But, I believe a more effective approach might involve advanced foveated rendering coupled with technologies like DLSS. At present, it seems like a viable strategy for both Apple and Meta would be to sell "boxes" equipped with console-grade hardware that can wirelessly connect to their headsets, providing additional compute.
GeForce Now, Luna, Xbox Cloud Streaming, PS Cloud, Shadow, and a few others are still around. GeForce Now is especially awesome, being Nvidia's own offering with access to their latest GPUs at a very reasonable price point.
After thirty years of desktop gaming PCs, I sold mine and just use GFN now. It's completely silent (no fan), minor lag (only matters for competitive shooters), and much cheaper than maintaining a high end gaming rig.
Compared to consoles, it has much better graphics, can be played anywhere where you have good internet, supports mouse/keyboard, ultrawide, 120Hz, etc.
Compared to the Stream Deck, it has much better graphics, much longer battery life (it's just streaming video, not rendering on device), and no heat or fan noise. I also sold my Steam Deck because GFN plus a streaming portable (Logitech gCloud) was way more ergonomic.
Did cloud streaming really fail, or is it just a niche? It's come a long way since OnLive. Stadia was a royal fuckup but not because of its technology; Google just had no idea how PC gaming culture works. Their competitors are still around and doing fine, if not making billions.
True, although that might be where my analogy breaks down. Controllers are today the primary input device for pretty much all VR headsets out there. So, maybe the better analogy would be the Blackberry's keyboard.
And we know who won that one. I think Apple is probably right to just double down on bare hands and voice as the input mechanism for spatial computing. I'm just also saying that controllers do have some advantage, so Meta should probably try to leverage it where they can.
(BTW, I myself do use the iPad primarily with the stylus, now that you can use handwriting everywhere just like the Newton MessagePad of yore... but I concede that probably very few people do this.)
I guess my point would be that Apple's approach towards inputs with the iPad and, much more importantly, the iPhone were vindicated probably as thoroughly as anything in the history of the computer industry?
Jobs made the stylus wisecrack in 2010. In 2023, that statement remains dead on the money. Lots of things Jobs said didn't age that well. This one did.
Yeah, I actually agree with you completely. I probably didn't phrase things as well as I should have (maybe because I love me some stylus, haha).
What I meant was that probably someday Apple will be happy to sell us super high tech controllers for spatial computing, but for launch they are taking the same stance as they did with the iPhone, and going all-in on designing the whole experience to just use your hands.
(And, yes, this is probably the correct decision here, just as it was then.)
The Apple Pencil is only available for the iPad devices:
iPad navigation relies significantly on gestures that require multiple fingers, which is frustrating when holding the pencil.
The iPads are much larger in size then phones and it's often awkward to use the pencil as a primary input.
The pencil is kinda annoying to keep with the iPad, it magnetically sticks and is prone to falling off. My previous pencil fell and hit the nib, immediately breaking the tiny sensor that sits behind it.
They onscreen keyboard is too big to use with the pencil, and although you can use (a multi-fingered) gesture to make it smaller, it still isn't great.
For reference, I loved using the stylus as my primary input device for my Samsung Note. There were a bunch of quality of life features built around the stylus and you could stick it back in the phone to keep it safe.
By all accounts, the Vision Pro eye tracking is extremely good, so for pointing inputs it would probably beat hardware controllers on speed and precision metrics, as well as feeling more direct and natural.
I was thinking if eye tracking can cause more eye strain over long time, cause you'd have to focus your eyes more on something, than say casually moving pointer with a mouse or controller.
My guess is it'll be a personal thing where for a percentage of people it'll be fine for daily use, for another percentage it'll be tiring, and then for a final smaller percentage it'll be truly awful and cause migraines or whatever. Also I have yet to see much talk about how this will work for people with abnormal/poor vision (e.g. abnormal pupils or sclera, vision only in one eye, etc.). Although I do think Apple has a good track record for accessibility?
There's no way know until many thousands of people are using this device how those percentages will pan out.
Well, I am just really interested in the idea of taking a spatial computer headset device around with me, and doing work (writing software, so think VS Code/JetBrains/Xcode) in a large spatial environment instead of a laptop with a single small screen.
I did know that the Quest Pro would not live up to that task (and it doesn't), but I wanted to see how close you could get today for $1500 (now, $1000).
I also do boxing and similar fitness games almost every day, so I knew it would at least serve me well for that, despite being pretty expensive. (An yeah, for that, it's pretty great.)
The new Apple gizmo looks way better for programming and work like that, though, so I'm excited about it. After many years, we appear to be getting close to something that is actually pleasant to use. (Even the Quest Pro technically can be used for this, but the experience is far from pleasant.)
I don't think so. For one thing, they actually want you to develop your Vision OS app while using the Vision Pro. They had a session at WWDC where they highlighted that you can open a floating 4K resolution Xcode window inside the spatial environment, and have your app floating next to it.
(This does require a Mac to be also present, though.)
Secondly, none of these devices have anywhere close to enough computing power to make doing builds on them directly feasible — at least not for most coding work, including the work I do.
So I want to develop using the model popularized by tools like VS Code's remote development extensions or GitHub Codespaces. I want the headset to render all the editors and other windows locally. I want the device to connect to my mechanical keyboard and mouse, so that I can do all my normal coding stuff. But the machine where the code actually is, where the build is actually done, and where the local dev server or similar runs -- all remote.
This is actually the workflow I now prefer even on desktops and laptops, now that the tooling is so good. But for a spatial computing headset device, this will have to be the main model.
And while I also am not at all a fan of Apple's limiting what we can do on our devices the way they do, putting that aside you can already do this workflow in iPad. You can use CodeSpaces in the browser, but there is a cool native app called Blink[1] that lets you use your own hardware as the build machine.
I use a large and high-spec Linux workstation with 4 large monitors in my day-to-day work. But with VS Code remote, when I have to travel with my laptop, I just connect to the Linux workstation (via Tailscale in my case, but there are various options) and use the code editor locally on the laptop, but the CLI, build, etc is happening on the remote machine.
On a laptop, this works great. It is better than the regular workflow of doing it all on the laptop, because the tooling (if you use VS Code, anyway, but others are also working on this) is so good and the remote build machine is so much more powerful than a laptop. It also lets you just switch to a new device whenever you want without worrying about having to commit your changes first. So I can go to the office or just a different room of my house and just sit down at whatever computer is available and pick up where I left off.
But I've also done this using both the Quest Pro and iPad, just to check in with the state of the art on those devices. Both of them can do it. The Quest sucks in lots of ways (clunky OS, low-quality passthrough of the real environment, glitches). The iPad actually works fine, except teven the largest iPad Pro is a laughably tiny monitor to work on. (YMMV tho... if you are one of those "I love small screen!" people then this workflow works fine, and an iPad works as well as a laptop.)
For me, Quest Pro and iPad aren't good enough. But I want to do this workflow on a headset device, and Vision Pro looks promising.
Anyway, my point here is that even if Apple does make weird restrictions about being able to use dev tools locally on the device, that won't prevent it from doing the workflow I am interested in.
Just fyi, by many accounts of people who used the vPro its screen resolution is on par with the qPro. As in not significantly better or different. I would recommend taking advantage of their demos if you’re in the right city. Or waiting until it’s available to tryout in a nearby Apple Store before committing to a $3500 purchase for something that apparently isn’t much better than what you already have, for the purpose you’re buying it for.
Thanks. I'd definitely take the opportunity to test it prior to buying, if possible. OTOH though I am kind of an avid hobbyist in this area, so I buy one or two of these machines each year (and sell the ones I don't have continued use for). So I'll probably end up buying it regardless, unless it is somehow awful when it actually comes out.
The resolution isn't the problem with Quest Pro (although I always want more) but the passthrough of the real environment around you is terrible. It's very distorted, as if the cameras are far lower resolution than the screen is.
I've heard that this aspect of the experience is better on the Apple Vision Pro, although I don't know for sure since I haven't yet tried it myself.
This actually doesn't matter that much, because the resolution is still good enough to walk to the fridge and grab a drink (or whatever) without taking it off.
The other super interesting thing to me is the external display of your eyes on the surface of the headset.
This sounded so stupid to me when it leaked before they announcement, that now I am embarrassed, because the problem is one we have all the time in my own house. I've realized it is a fundamental problem with these devices, and one I even had all the time, and yet I couldn't see how that would solve it. But it really does seem to.
The problem we always have is, our kids put on one of the headsets we have, but then we (their mom and I, and their siblings/friends) can't tell whether they can see us or not. This actually really matters a lot -- if the wearer cannot see, then we need to make sure no other kids get near them, otherwise there is a risk of collision and injury. This is partially solved by casting the view from the headset to the TV or whatever, but this is glitchy and sometimes even disabled.
The other scenario where this is really useful is at the office, or even a coffee shop. When a coworker walks up to you, they have a visual indicator of whether you can see them or not. Actually a very important social cue.
Or when the waitress comes up to bring you your coffee. You can look at her and accept the coffee, and it is obvious to her that you can see the cup she's handing you. Sure, she'll still probably be a little weirded out the first time, but she'll get used to it. :-D
> This is just like the infamous "if you see a stylus, they blew it" approach with the iPhone
> Today, of course, Apple ships an excellent stylus that they are happy to sell you for $129.
Apple Pencil does not work with iPhone, only with iPads, which... makes sense. Artists use them as drawing tablets. But nobody uses a Apple Pencil with an iPhone.
Also, as a single point of anecdata: My $129 stylus spends the vast majority of the time magneted to the top of my iPad while my fingers do the actual work. It’s not exactly a regret, but as a not-really-an-artist, it’s… probably money I could’ve spent better. :)
Same. But I would use it more if
it would allow triggering all gestures (particularly home) without awkward assistive touch workarounds so it could be used for general navigation like the S-pen on my Galaxy Tab and phone.
Which I imagine is intentional by Apple for aesthetic reasons since iPad should only be navigated by touch.
Is that more because no one can use it with an iPhone?
The stylus support on Samsung flagships is very convenient to have cross device capability on, and everyone I know who has those devices feels similarly.
Eg when doing something on the tab with the pen and having a calculator open on the phone and seamlessly being able to use the pen for that. Support on phones, especially with the large screens these days, allows for all sorts of little synergies that make the experience much more smooth.
This kind of synergy is especially convenient for students and teachers. But because Apple hasn't decided to make a slick commercial about it "revolutionizing" computing, HN must act like it isn't a thing.
I'm not commenting on if apple should make iPhones compatible, I'm pointing out that the argument in the parent comment doesn't make sense, because Apple has never backtracked on "iPhone does not have a stylus"
Well, what you say is technically true, but when Apple Pencil was released, there was no iPadOS -- all iPhones and iPads were just iOS devices, at different sizes.
The Pencil is not a primary interface for iOS it is a specialized device that provides greater resolution than a finger. People love to try to point out how inconsistent and hypocritical Apple is and the criticism is usual unfounded, not thought through,...
I was saying that Apple tends to ignore the specialized/higher-precision option initially, focusing on the majority of the market that may not need it.
But then they introduce it later. As I suspect they will do in this case, too. But that leaves an opening (maybe, temporarily, if they can capitalize on it) for competitors that do support more specialized input devices.
If you wanted to draw diagrams or use handwriting input, Android had a huge advantage at first, ... until it didn't.
Sorry I misunderstood. I agree Apple focuses on the general problem without trying to solve all the exceptions. Once they are comfortable with the working principles that start filling in the gaps.
It took me 3 days just to really feel I understood what the Vision Pro video demonstrated. I was very uncomfortable watching the initial video. The first feeling was voyeuritistic as if I was spying on the user. The second feeling was the horror of actual people using them in isolated squalid environments.
Eventually I rationalized that the demonstration was really about hand/finger/eye tracking in space. The "spatial" interface was the most special thing they demoed. The rest of the demo was hardware power and the ergonomics.
Although these devices will be compared to each other ceaselessly, I think they're targeting two distinct markets. Apple believes that Vision Pro is the future of personal computing. Meta keeps marketing the Quest as social-connected VR gaming device. The former market is far larger and anything that displaces the PC will be transcendental.
Although Meta will sell more units in the short-term due to Apple's pricing, I do think they will have a tough time catching Apple on the hardware. The eye-tracking, <12ms image processing and display, and the M2 are things that Meta is well behind on.
Zuck mentioned that activity and "doing things" are Meta advantages, but people don't want to exercise while gaming or consuming entertainment.
You don’t know them. You don’t know the reasons for their weight. They very well could be using the device daily to exercise for all you know and it could be an issue with his metabolism. Or another medical condition. Or a side effect of drugs. Or literally hundreds of other reasons.
It is very obvious that that they have neither an exercise routine nor a healthy diet. It shows in the skin, the hair, the posture, the confidence etc. The only way that's not true, is if by some miracle he had multiple separate conditions that somehow when put together appear like a person who is sedentary by habit and enjoys junk food.
Nevermind the typical reddit mod looking apartment we saw in the $5k challenge. None of this some unique story. It's all the same pattern. It's just an exceptionally public one.
Fat may come and go until you have a heart attack because of an unhealthy life style.
> You don’t know them.
If I did I would have helped them exercise and lose some weight. Get healthy. So that keyboard warriors don’t come along trying to defend their unhealthy lifestyle choices.
I actually changed the pronouns once I saw the video that was pointed out and which multiple people pointed out was news to them (like seemingly everyone else, I don’t follow their channel and it was announced only 2 weeks ago so it’s not like it’s common knowledge yet), but I’m not the one that literally dead named them along with using their old pronouns.
Could you possibly be more misguided here? Like come on.
Gotta love making up excuses for refusing to honor one’s wishes and use their name and pronouns.
I thought it was because you wanted to “let people learn” or whatever BS you had originally come with. You spent three whole paragraphs talking about how much it would confuse people.
Turns out, you just don’t respect them enough to do such a simple thing. It was plainly clear from your fat shaming, but at least you’ve spelled it out in words.
You weren’t even the one being called a transphobe, you just decided to jump in and make it clear why you explicitly didn’t choose to update their pronouns or dead name after you found out.
> I can only assume you’re overweight as you’ve taken this whole thing very personally. Maybe you need some exercise?
I can only assume you’re a bigot as you’ve taken this whole thing very personally. Maybe you need to not be a shitstain on humanity?
> I can only assume you’re a bigot as you’ve taken this whole thing very personally.
Just remember you’re the one who can’t understand English. Not only can you not follow the conversation you’re having. But you literally fit the definition of a bigot and then called me one. That is hilarious.
Says the person who can’t take two seconds to correct someone’s correct name and pronouns when pointed out.
Because it would “be confusing” or whatever bullshit you came up with.
It’s pretty clear who the bigot is here and it’s not the person who is advocating for treating someone respectfully regardless of their weight. Or making an effort to change the pronouns and names used when pointed out.
Your comments are visible to the world, you realize that right? Just because they’ve been (rightly) flagged to death doesn’t mean they’re invisible.
Grow up. You’re clearly not mature enough for this site. Or the internet in general.
Lol because there’s no need for them to be corrected.
Your comments are visible to the world. Quite embarrassing for Microsoft to have an employee who rages at people and gets upset giving them a bad name.
> Lol because there’s no need for them to be corrected.
Because you’re a bigot who refuses to respect a person’s wishes, yes. You’ve made that clear already. Glad we’re in agreement.
Trying to spin advocating for treating people respectfully as a bad thing is the only thing that’s embarrassing here. And that’s sure not coming from me.
I’m done here, good luck continuing to live as a shitstain on the world.
Lol you can ask Santa for a dictionary to help break you out of the fantasy world you’re living in.
You’re not advocating for anything. You jumped in and started being angry, swearing in the first post (which you edited out when the tiny lightbulb went off and you realised that was a dumb move) and then continued to be loud and aggressive and try to paint a non existent picture.
So I’ll continue living my awesome life while you keep living in a bubble thinking the whole world is against you and being angry at nothing.
News to me – way to go, Emily! Love her videos, and really glad to see her taking this scary and exciting step into public life. Looking forward to more great content from her in the future!
Quite a few do. I use Beatsaber, Pistol Whip, and Superhot (more yoga-y than exercise) for this. Boredom during exercise is my primary issue with sustaining it; VR has removed that obstacle.
Sure, some people do, but the majority of people are not looking to exercise while gaming. It's a niche use case. The Wii lost its novelty pretty quickly.
If you're gaming for 3-4 hours, watching a movie, or using the device for productivity you're going to be seated or standing still.
Also, Vision Pro can be a mobile device, albeit for <2 hrs. Imo, Gaming will not be the primary use case for these devices.
It really didn’t. Ring Fit Adventure, a successor to the Wii Fit titles, sold 15 million copies for the Switch. Nintendo Switch Sports sold almost 9 million. Those are solid numbers. The kind of motion control the Wii used is still used for those titles, and they’re still popular.
Don't forget Just Dance. Just Dance 2 was the best selling 3rd party title for the Wii. Just Dance 3 was the 2nd best selling title of 2011, behind Call of Duty. As of 2013, Just Dance is Ubisoft's 2nd biggest franchise, behind Assassin's Creed. Teenage girls nowadays are still playing Just Dance all night at sleep overs.
Just because it sold a bunch of copies doesn't mean that it wasn't a novelty and got actively used. Fidget spinners sold like hot cakes. 15 million copies is also less than half of what Wii Fit pulled, so it sounds like people did in fact lose interest in Nintendo exercise games.
Fidget spinners sold like hotcakes for a very brief window of time. Nintendo motion games are continuing to sell millions of titles even 15 years after they first debuted.
> less than half of what Wii Fit pulled
Hmm, what numbers are you looking at? I see 22 million for Wii Fit, and 21 million for Wii Fit Plus (a separate title).
As someone who used to stand or move around while gaming, I'd much rather go back to that than sitting. Unfortunately for me I love the precision of a keyboard and mouse. One day I'll find the right compromise.
"spatial computing" is such a silly marketing phrase. All we saw was 2D windows placed in a fake 3D world. It's all just an aesthetic upgrade, a minor QOL improvement that has its own downsides, nothing more.
That's a skeumorphic anchor to get people comfortable with a new technology. If you're going to introduce technology to the masses, you have to do it in stages. There's a lot more going on here than is apparent on the surface.
You could have said all of things about the original iPhone. It did similar things to a lot of existing smartphones at the time (send email, play music, browse web, make call).
It's not a VR headset and it's not an AR headset. It's something else. It's reasonable to give your specific vision of these technologies a more human name.
Also, it's something that's going to be released in very limited quantities in a year from now. And it was announced at a developer conference so developers can start to prepare apps. We've only really seen a preview and the technology is in the earliest stages.
There's a ton of stuff they only mentioned in passing - like their proprietary camera format and cameras that can record the world in immersive depth-mapped 3D. Those will likely be licensed out to studios and sports leagues which can prepare content for Vision Pro.
Yet. They've set it rolling and so far own a perspective separate to AR/VR. Leaves the competition brawling over headsets for a still-to-be-defined VR concept while they pitch customers on their thing. Computing. Ties in to work. Easier to justify spending $x000.
That's a skeumorphic anchor to get people comfortable with a new technology.
Not just that. It also makes the Vision not just an ill-defined VR product, but also a 'MacBook Air or iPad for on the go with far more screen real estate'. This pitch resonates with pro users who are not necessarily interested in VR. The initial reaction of Apple-using friends/family is: I'd probably buy this as a replacement for a MacBook + external screen. It also makes the pricing more acceptable - it's about the same prices as a non-mediocre spec'ed MacBook Air + Studio Display.
> The initial reaction of Apple-using friends/family is: I'd probably buy this as a replacement for a MacBook + external screen
Then I believe they misunderstood the presentation, since this device is not a replacement for a MacBook, since it just can't run the same software. And even if it could, it would be much, much slower at it, since it has to spend huge compute resources on constant refresh of two 4k+ screens plus advanced vision algorithms to process the camera input and overlay the 3D graphics onto it in the expected locations.
To me, the term just sounds better than "VR" or "AR" without meaning anything different (other than being less specific). There's nothing Apple-exclusive about it; it would apply to existing "VR" or "mixed reality" apps like Horizon Workrooms or Virtual Desktop just as much as to what Apple is doing.
Personally, I feel "spatial computing" sounds clearer and less silly than the previous terms. But, that's just my opinion so I guess we'll see if it catches on...
Spatial computing as an idea is from early 2000s. It was in Wired and sci-fi pulp and something the graybeards would hobnob about. Sometimes it just takes 20 years for an idea to come to fruition.
I think he would love the internet access, think the web was stupid, and that Apple Vision is alien technology he dreamed of. He more or less spent his productive years defining the world we currently live in. I take him as man of vision and principal. He would be astounded by the tech and hate the content.
I was greatly disturbed by the product demonstration. After 72 hours I realized that since I work alone there are no real drawbacks to having a hands free computer. (I have been working in a 60'x30' studio that I have equipped with 8MP cameras, shopping for 4k and 8k projectors. The idea is to have the cameras act as an interface and use the projectors to create an image on the floor as feedback. The Vision Pro seems like it might be easier and cheaper. Although not as analog and collaborative.)
Hands anywhere in space they were visible acted as the primary interface to their ecosystem. The integration was so seamless that it was easy to miss the quantity of processing power and sensors at work.
Spatial computing is actually a good Apple name for this interface as it differentiates from the lower effort products that cost $3,000 less. This draws a line between AR/VR and what Apple is doing which is Spatial Computing. Apple needed to co-ordinate the fundamentals of Human Interface design and production.
When they finally had same they could actually produce that also function they shipped it.
Also, i don't understand the reasoning behind not having controllers. You are freeing up your hands for ... what? You are already wearing a blindfold on your face. ( I think the passthrough will be used very little because in most cases it's distracting)
On the contrary, I think the passthrough will be one of the defining differences to other headsets for the time being. Not having anything to hold in your hand while you go ahead and do non-VR things in your real environment adds a layer of convenience that's hard to appreciate from product videos. The improved passthrough, as bad as it still is, is one of my favorite additions on the Quest Pro.
What other things and how often though? Is it worth it losing the improved precision of the controller (and adding so much more complexity and battery use)
I think Facebook should consider usign only 1 controller though (i know I do). Also, to put the battery in the controller and tether it to the headset to make it even lighter. If apple is using a tether then it's ok to do it
I wonder if passthrough can be done mechanically, by rotating the lenses to a hole
That really depends on what you're doing with the device I guess. For gaming, controllers will remain indispensable, and you're planning to disconnect from the real world for a while anyways.
For everything else, quickly being able to grab a snack or drink, respond to a phone notification or change the place you're using the device from reduce friction.
It might be enough to push VR over that "I don't want to use the device because I don't want to commit to not doing anything else for at least 30 minutes now" hurdle that still very much exists.
That being said, I have no doubt Meta is going to be able to get there in due time too.
It's more about not having to perform a ritual before using the headset, like making sure the controllers are charged, and picking them up.
When you are holding controllers, you can't interact with the environment and people around you naturally, like how Apple showed it in the videos, before "reversing" the ritual.
Apple also wants users to plug it in and use it all day. You can't do that with the limit of controller battery.
Apple wants users to charge their earbuds, their watch, every day in order to listen to music and track their oxygen. These could all be integrated into the phone, but they chose not to, in order to sell more products. Everyone does this thing nowadays
assuming that handtracking doesnt confuse you eating popcorn with pinching gesture. But anyway i hope your headset doesnt smell of popcorn and coffee afterwards
As a quest pro owner, I can tell you that trying to do anything with your hands, such as take a sip of coffee, is extremely awkward, and so is the act of attempting to pick up the controllers after setting them down to do something. Same goes for handing off the headset for someone else to have a turn. There’s always this super awkward controller transfer and they fumble to orient them the right way in their hands, frequently accidentally swapping left and right and then discovering it’s hard to swap them without dropping them because you have to hold both in one hand.
Not having the controllers at all would be very nice for this. Not sure it’s worth losing the haptics though.
And given how little you actually touch the headset, you’d really have to be some kind of sloppy maniac to end up with it “smelling of popcorn and coffee.”
Another annoying thing about having your hands full is when you want to take the headset off briefly, eg to answer the phone. You need to find a place to set the controllers so you can use both hands to take it off. And unless you’re using passthrough, you’re blind to where you can set them down. Then when you put it back on, you need to then find the controllers. My usual routine is to intentionally break the guardian barrier so I can see well enough to find a table to put the controllers on. Without controllers, I’d just reach up and remove the headset in 2 seconds.
There’s a reason that all the drinks containers that Apple showed in their videos on the Vison headset had closed lids and straws.
You can’t easily drink out of an open topped container whilst wearing a headset, so without highlighting that (minor) issue, they wanted to plant the idea of having a sealed container with a straw on your desk as a solution before you ran into the problem yourself.
It's not to free the hands. The primary reason to go for this interface is comfort and ergonomics. Holding up your hands in the air for prolonged amounts of time is hard. We use keyboards and mice because we can rest our hands with them.
Apple's approach avoids that and lets your eyes do the selection, while still using your fingers for the clicking, thus giving you the responsiveness you are used to (i.e. no weird "hover over icon for one second to active").
Also according to people that tested it, it feels extremely natural, basically like mind reading, since the moment you look at something, you can click it. There is no separate step where you have to look at something and then also have to navigate your laser pointer over it to activate it.
As for passthrough, I think that will become extremely useful and commonly used when combined with the depth sensor, as it allows you to partly fade in and out pieces of reality. You can have a virtual office on the moon, but the desk in front of you, is still your actual real desk, while all the displays on it are virtual.
> Double down on the simplest possible input mechanism and pretend it is enough. Today, of course, Apple ships an excellent stylus that they are happy to sell you for $129.
The thing is, it is enough for general use. The Apple Pencil (or whatever they call it) is a specialised tool for people who need the extra precision.
The difference between modern no-stylus-needed touch screens and old stylus-required touch screens is exactly that, with the old screens they aren’t functional at all without the stylus.
It would be pretty ironic if the Quest Pro controllers end up being the defacto 3rd party controller for AVP. Would certainly make porting games that much easier.
I'm also curious if Apple plans to use iPhones as an input mode. Speech to text is nice but I'd like to be able to discretely type something.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 412 ms ] threadApple will only go further with this over time, positing current limits staying as-is seems … shortsighted.
point out there are things to learn from this?
suggest that it would take the company’s best efforts, but that it could do better?
you don’t have to shit on the other team to say your team can be the best.
this was an attempt to suggest apple is somehow less personable than zuck.
“
And seeing what they put out there and how they’re going to compete just made me even more excited and in a lot of ways optimistic that what we’re doing matters and is going to succeed. But it’s going to be a fun journey.
“
1: they admit that having Apple dip into a category validates it
2: the “fun” is a euphemism for - we need to get our s@!t together quick, expect some all nighters
zuck had, arguably still has, a chance for a real hero arc here. his recent pr piece about local martial arts tournament was endearing.
veiled admissions and euphemisms are just silly, and hint that this might just be more of the same. nothing at all.
The Apple device looks impressive and the use cases presented seem plausible. It is expensive no doubt, but if they can convince the jet set crowd to wear it then it will catch on.
its 2023, vulnerability and transparency can be signs of strength now.
for those brave enough.
"And it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard. Which makes it not a very good email machine."
It shows that the previous comment is cherry picking by providing a contrasting example, and it shows how cherry picking can say anything.
They had tons of flops before he came back, but the company is almost completely changed post.
of course, one could argue that he’s gone and that is lost as well, but they seem to continue delivering imho
“ every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself “
I’m not sure I grasp the critique given commercials like:
https://youtu.be/CfTC-dPwdLM
And multiple parts of the Vision keynote highlighted being present with those remotely as well as those locally.
“ so much energy that now you need a battery “ I think everyone remembers the part where Apple admitted they are behind and getting the device they intend for consumers requires first getting it into developers hands.
“ costs seven times more “
Is a fair criticism
This is why you can't really compare Quest and Vision because they are meant for completely different markets. Meta could build something similar but they don't want to sell a 3500$ headset. Meta rather build a cheaper product where more people can use it. Hence why they don't package their headset will expensive components.
The Quest 3 will outsell Vision Pro by 10x because of this.
I doubt it. If any of them will ever sell well it's because of an application that people care about. None of them will succeed if all they can offer is just Beat Saber in higher resolution and existing apps in 3D. I am sure it would be cool to have screens floating around, but virtual desktops do the job as well and to me the difference doesn't seem worth it.
I don't think the price is the main problem. Phones with folding displays aren't exactly a bargain either, and yet those are popular enough that Samsung is about to launch their fifth iteration. The difference is that those folding phones have benefits obvious to anyone who ever used a smartphone and a tablet.
You can't compare VR/AR to Phones. Phones are used by almost everyone in the world on a daily basis. VR/AR is still completely new to the vast majority of people in the world. Phones have been around for decades even before the iPhone they had calling, messaging and internet. iPhone just made the interface better. The Vision Pro doesn't have this luxury. It has to be sold to people that have no experience with the technology and most probably don't have a favorably opinion about it.
IMO Quest marketing it better because it aimed towards a demographic that has the most experience with VR, gamers.
Because the Vision Pro is mainly a dev kit and has zero third-party apps right now. Apple would never say "this won't sell" about a product they deem finished and ready for the consumer market.
> VR/AR is still completely new to the vast majority of people in the world.
Because the tech has been completely uninteresting aside from a small gaming niche and shortlived tech demos, which makes it a pure luxury product for people who already have high-end gaming hardware able to drive it.
> Quest marketing it better because it aimed towards a demographic that has the most experience with VR, gamers.
Sony's PSVR has been targeting gamers for 6+ years and aside from that one horror game I don't think it ever got decent content. It does not matter who you target if your product has nothing that interests people in the long term. Name one big feature of the Quest 3 that's more interesting than anything possible with the original Oculus Rift a decade ago.
Which is perfectly fine and why Apple will eventually win - they don't need to sell a ton of units right now.
Apple is going about it the right way, the same way that Tesla did with their electric cars. Eventually there will be a model 3 of the vision pro - and all that R&D they put into making it the best will pay dividends down the line. Meta simply won't have that experience because they just did the cheap thing targeted a small market.
Betting against a veteran hardware company like Apple and in favor of Meta seems ludicrous to me.
Don't you see how Toyota succeeded? There are some ways to succeeding.
Eventually, both headsets will be shrunken down into the glasses form-factor, and Meta will be the Android of XR headsets and glasses or in second place overall if users want a cheaper alternative to the Apple Vision product line. Just like what Google had with Android phones, Microsoft had with Windows PCs.
Meta with their Quest headsets will win in quantity and price since there are more Android devices out numbering iOS devices regardless.
> Meta simply won't have that experience because they just did the cheap thing targeted a small market.
They have the money to acquire companies specialised in VR and AR just like what Apple has done recently.
> Betting against a veteran hardware company like Apple and in favor of Meta seems ludicrous to me.
Both will succeed. Apple will have the ecosystem lock-in advantage for those who can afford the best experience and Meta will win in quantity and make it much more accessible. Zuck's 7 - 8 year bet on Oculus seemed to be the right move all against lots of naysayers and the exaggerations of Meta's stock collapse which recovered against the news.
It has always been Apple vs Meta in XR.
> They have the money to acquire companies specialised in VR and AR just like what Apple has done recently.
Apple builds its own chips, has been designing OSes for decades, building smashing success consumer hardware for decades. They're almost completely vertically integrated. Facebook was an adtech business. Acquiring fledgling startups won't help here.
> Both will succeed. Apple will have the ecosystem lock-in advantage for those who can afford the best experience and Meta will win in quantity and make it much more accessible. Zuck's 7 - 8 year bet on Oculus seemed to be the right move all against lots of naysayers and the exaggerations of Meta's stock collapse which recovered against the news.
It's already at quantity pricing and it hasn't succeeded now - what makes you think it will in the future? Meta's stock collapse didn't happen because its fundamental business is still strong - not because of their VR moonshot.
- spatial audio
- the front screen for your eyes (who the hell needs that anyway)
- only need rudimentary hand tracking since you will be mouse and keyboard
- potentially cheaper processor
Commercial shows people having close positive relationship built through novel interactions. Relationship that pretty much would be impossible through all other media like social real world chitchat.
I didn't see it as "your life sucks, get virtual". More like, "your life is normal, enrich it with new activities and connections using vr".
Implementation of features and capabilities is what matters. The capabilities are useless if it’s too hard to use them or the device is defective in some way that prevents users from wanting to use them.
Apple has a tech advantage lately with their software and hardware stack. But historically their products have done well because of product features not because of tech advantages. There is a non-zero chance you get an almost $4K device as hamstrung as an iPad.
So the question still remains, what are they going to do with it? It has much potential. But in some ironic twist of fate it is Meta taking the product first approach here. And Apple’s closed ecosystem (not to mention high price) puts them at a huge disadvantage to target the social/gaming angle of “spatial computing”.
It’s not over yet, and in general this is exciting because competition will start to ramp up.
But they didn’t.
The more compelling angle is how they have nailed the interface with eye and hand tracking and if this works as well in real-world environments as it did in their demo setup.
This is what I was referring to when mentioned implementation. To paraphrase you I could retort: “Meta could have spent the time perfecting the interface but chose not to.”. I don’t see the relevance of such thinking though.
iPad is selling great because it is not ‘hamstrung’, it’s focused. People choose a device that does a few things only and does them greatly, instead of one that does everything, poorly.
There’s plenty of tablets with similar hardware specifications to an iPad that allow sideloading and hacking. That’s just not what a lot of people are looking for. They want a device where you can trust that if you press the button, the screen turns on and the apps do what they do, every time, without it being another computer to administer.
I got mine from VROptician whose were a bit pricier (maybe $80?). There were some cool options for magnetic ones, but I don't change the lenses enough for it to be worth the extra cost. It'll be interesting to see what Apple charges for theirs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36245865
I just want holodeck hardware and software with weeklong battery life. This is getting is closer.
One of the things that the Apple announcement will do; because it supports all iOS games and apps, meta (and other android eco system vendors) cannot not offer that. Things are going well. More competition please!
I thought the battery last only about 2 hours
An idiot like me thinks the opposite: it validates the market and thus justifies further spending to Facebook investors.
Financially, RL is the worst business on earth. No other business has lost this much money in such a short period of time.
This is like saying, the US is the worst country on earth because of it's debt. The reality is, if you have money and you don't invest it, it loses value.
Investing in RL is not a bad idea if it can drive significant top-line growth. However, unless RL turns into one of the best businesses on earth (like FoA), it will never delivered a positive ROI since its inception.
US debt is similar in that it's invested capital, but it does provide a positive contribution to GDP. If the US stops growing, our debt will become a massive issue.
Precisely. Apple has validated this product category and Meta has already established being a viable competitor in XR.
Even if Apple prices it high, Meta is going to win on quantity and price, just like Google did for Android, and Microsoft did for Windows.
Not even the Apple fanboys would buy this, unless they are developers or having this as a collectable who think that every product Apple releases is going to be an instant hit like the iPhone. I don't think it is this version of the Vision product line. It will probably be the third generation that comes in the slimmed down glasses form factor and slightly cheaper.
Apple is making an integrated headset: their own lenses, processor, ..., down to the operating system.
The Quest uses an Android based operating system and a lot of off the shelf components.
We've seen this story before and it hasn't ended well for the folks in Mark's position.
A personal device like these headsets needs to be delightful. It has to be responsive. It has to have the little touches. It's much more difficult to do that when you're constrained by off the shelf components.
Apple had the best touchpads for a decade because of those integrated properties, for example.
The vast majority of people don’t care about trackpad quality when it comes to shopping.
They do care when they *use* it but they either take it for granted when it works well, or it’s too small a papercut to trade in their device and buy/research a new one.
but it all combines together to make a smoother experience when using it, and it can convert people as a part of a whole.
This is why people balk at the price of Apple Vision even though Apple managed to miniaturize a Macbook into a visor and added LiDAR, two 4K screens, a separate depth sensor, several other cameras, and even a 3D camera to it
That said, Mark’s devices aren’t bad for the price. They’ve been the best overall VR headsets for the past 2-3 years.
Most of the time they don't notice at all unless its truly atrocious or truly mind blowing (and whilst I can firmly say the macbook trackpad is the best I've ever used, lets be honest its not mind blowing). They might notice things don't feel as smooth as it did on their macbook (assuming they even had one last, if not how can you tell something is worse if its all you've ever had), but they're unlikely to narrow this down to the trackpad.
Few months back I’ve seen anecdotal posts somewhere that new generations of managers are trying to shift computing to phones and tablets because they’re “better than laptops”. No one enforces a delightfulness standard for Windows laptops, and it is creating a skewed perception.
I used to be a die hard Android and Windows/Linux power user. I’d scoff at all the stuff people would mention on iOS/macOS because “well I can do that too if I do this and that”. But then I switched back to iOS/macOS for a project and a lot of the papercuts being solved out of the box was actually such a huge gain.
That’s not to say Apple is perfect. They can improve a ton too (give me a proper path bar in finder please!), but (and I say this often) the products they make are more than the sum of their parts.
but of course none of that is something that is evident when you’re shopping for a product.
Plus, the question one would ask is: “can this do this banal task?” not “which one does this banal task better”. So I see why it’s not prioritized on other platforms.
Most people are just shopping for capability and specs. The delightfulness is too ephemeral to consider until you encounter it yourself.
But the uni student with a budget that only buys half a macbook doesn't get to care about trackpad quality.
Normal people don't say things like "The trackpad is unresponsive and the wifi drivers unreliable" They say "I just don't like it" "It feels kinda crap"
More extensive touch support, like having touch support on the laptop display alleviates a lot of the trackpad needs. It's still nice when it smooth and responsive, but looking at the the Surface devices for instance, it's nice enough.
The worst by far I've ever used was on a circa-2007 HP convertible laptop that ran Vista. Despite it costing more than some models of MacBook at the time, the thing was built with that cheap creaky "fake metal" glossy plastic, and that included its trackpad. The trackpad would've been bad enough just like that with the smooth plastic gripping at your fingertips, but to make it worse its surface had inverse dimples, and because its touch sensitivity wasn't all that sensitive you had to apply more pressure when using it which pressed your fingers down into the dimples and made them stick even worse. Oh and of course, as was customary for non-Apple laptops at that point it was also tiny.
It's almost as if it was someone's job to make that thing's trackpad terrible to use. Just mind boggling.
It has been a quarter century since high DPI CRTs were affordable, and 20+ years since LCDs were.
However, Windows wasn’t compatible with such things until at least 2010, so here we are a quarter century later, and laptop lines still often only offer meh-for-the-late-90’s displays.
A more recent example is suspend resume. I’m not sure of the details, but I am sure that intel will never do better than S3 sleep from ten years ago, and Microsoft pushed them to change how sleep works.
"These rounded corners in the UI really make me not care about the touch pad"
"I wish I could care about touchpads, my ssd won't replace itself without a soldering iron though!"
"They have touchpads? I use a mouse"
Great. Apple touchpads are next generation compared to most other laptops.
Apple has a huge advantage with its vertical integration and nearly complete control of the entire stack. Android being a janky/buggy/glitchy mess is the icing on the cake.
imo it is a technological marvel but the size of the demographic willing to spend $4k on a headset with no proven long term value is quite small.
Is Microsoft today in a fundamentally problematic position ?
Apple has the spotlight and a higher evaluation, but I'm not sure Google or Microsoft "haven't ended well".
> A personal device like these headsets needs to be delightful.
The number of people willing to pay for "delightful" is pretty small though. Even as today, the iPhone isn't winning on delight, it's primarily on the ecosystem, green bubbles, game payments etc., as we've heard in the numerous trials and hearings from Apple execs.
When you said that the iPhone wasn't succeeding today based on delight, I'd argue that it's the only reason the iPhone succeeded. BlackBerry had an amazing brand and the ecosystem that you say it the reason the iPhone is successful today - including its own proprietary messenger service. The iPhone came along with delight and overthrew the established players.
If the Vision Pro offers users an experience that they like, it could make the Quest series look like BlackBerries: low-rent devices that were bought as toys for enthusiasts before real devices came along.
The thing about the iPhone is that people could instantly see what they'd enjoy it for. BlackBerries were a status symbol, had some business use cases, and were a nice toy for those who tried to buy distractions. When Apple introduced the iPhone, they showed real web browsing, useful maps (even before GPS), a better iPod than they'd ever seen, YouTube, and more.
With the Vision Pro, Apple is showing me something I could see myself using. I could wear it writing code and have more display space than 3 displays (and still use my keyboard). I could watch movies, I could browse the web, and I could play games. Apple is showing me how it could become an integral part of my usage rather than just a gadget that I'm likely to ignore.
I'm not an expert on the VR/AR space, but it sounds like the Quest devices don't really have the resolution for reading text comfortably which cuts out a lot of usage - just as the BlackBerry devices didn't have good web browsing and other stuff. That could leave the Quest series in the BlackBerry zone where they're trying to fill a similar niche, but they're limited in the things that bring users back to the device rather than it sitting in a corner unused. It also seems like the Vision Pro is likely to be a lot more responsive. Android tends to have a lot of input lag compared to iOS and Apple's M2 processor will run circles around the Qualcomm XR2 in the Quest Pro - plus Apple has a dedicated R1 processor for handling real-time sensor data. The XR2 has one performance core from 3 years ago compared to 4 performance cores in an M2.
Meta can't even buy themselves a CPU that's competitive. Apple's M2 will be 40-50% faster on single-core stuff and it has 4 performance cores instead of 1 performance core in the top-end Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. On multi-core, the M2 is twice as fast. Plus, it has its own dedicated processor for handling all the sensor data!
When BlackBerry saw the iPhone design, they assumed Apple couldn't pull it off. They thought practically the whole inside would have to be battery. They weren't wrong about that, but Apple did pull it off. Is Meta thinking that Apple won't be able to pull off a better experience than their devices? I don't think companies are underestimating Apple at the moment.
Sometimes with tech, it's about getting over a hump. Everyone had been trying to do handheld computers since the 80s - even Apple's Newton development started in the 80s. Apple was the one who finally got it over the hump where it was really useful. Likewise, it's not like headsets are new - Nintendo's Virtual Boy came out in 1995, 28 years ago. But the Virtual Boy didn't get over that hump just as the Newton didn't. With the Quest, if I have to strain to read text, maybe it hasn't gotten over the hump. Again, I'm not an expert in this area, but my point is that it's not just about better specs for the sake of better specs. It's about better specs that overcome a bar...
I'd personally compare BlackBerry to Kodak. They had a strong market position, brand and loyal customers. They also had a vision for what should come next, but little to no incentive in fully executing on it, probably didn't want to canibalise the existing sales, while also seeing too much value in their existing customers who only swear by their products.
That's also kinda where I see Apple to a lesser extent: they masterfully executed on the iPhone concept, tried to push further on the iPad, but ultimately see too much value in their current moat to risk losing it. That's where I see the HomePods, Apple TV, Apple Watch being fiercefully bound to the iPhone when they could have been independent products the same way the iPod was. Same way the iPad only got its OS in name and couldn't get much beyond being a gloridied iPhone in many respects.
Any of these products are successful in a vacuum, but given the size of the watch market for instance, the sales numbers for the Watch don't feel as successful as the iPod was.
I'm curious to see how the Vision Pro will work outside of the Apple ecosystem, as at this point it's touted as a display, and that should open the door for more than just being a macbook or apple TV accessory.
On why the iPhone succeeded...until the iPhone 4, it had miserable battery life and crashed all the time, you'd miss phone calls, "you're holding it wrong" was only funny because of how bad we had reception problems. But it did net browsing, photo handling, and emailing better than any device on the market (way better than BlackBerry for half of the world, in the sense that BB was stuck on the western market). So it was a powerful device with a unique proposition, but delightful? hell no. Better than android sure, but it took a long time for it to be smooth and stable IMHO.
On Meta...I have a Quest 2 and completely agree with all the point. It's not good, just "barely good enough" for the price it is. But I'd argue it's here, when the Vision Pro will be real next year, and who knows when we get the next iteration. While I don't see Meta successfuly pushing the field, the sailant point is that the Quest 2 and probably Quest 3 are PC VR compatible, where the Vision Pro has almost no chance to be. This means that the next Beat Saber or Supernatural could come to Steam VR, get tested, and be successfully enough to go to the Quest store, then perhaps the Apple VR store.
I base that on the observation that ML didn't come to Mac or iOS first, but went to the more open windows world first. I don't see new VR creators starting from a Vision Pro when next Christmas gift season will still probably be Quest headsets and perhaps Vive if they can get their price low enough. Perhaps Apple will have a shot at it in 3 years, but we can check back the situation when they arrive there (I'd love an ultra competitive landscape for the next 3 years)
I also find it super interesting that the main use case is as a macbook multi-monitor when macos isn't touch ready. It'd be super excited if they bring a big surprise in that area at the same time the Vision Pro hits.
My worst fear is still that Apple eats all the high resolution display factories of the space, the same way they litteraly consumed all the displays at the peak iOS times and competitors had the leftover, even as the display technology wasn't Apple's.
I mean… pretty obviously yes?
Windows is rotting on the vine, Azure is nowhere near the market share of other players, and while they still have a large installed base of users they’ve done nothing particularly noteworthy in like a decade at this point.
If there’s anyone on the path to being the next IBM it’s them.
Almost every large company is already a Microsoft customer, and MS does a great job upselling Azure to many of them.
(recent estimates are AWS ~33%, Azure 23%, GC 10%)
Microsoft lost an entire platform, and yes, that was a problem (they’ve since recovered with other bets).
Otherwise, I forgot about TabletPC, hut given they have the Surface line now, is it a failure ?
Random protocols aren’t products.
Surface is a strategic failure because it didn’t define the tablet market a decade ago, and iPad / Chromebook is what every grade school kid uses. Now it gets to cannibalize sales from their PC partners, who I’m sure are thrilled to be competing with their OS supplier.
> Random protocols
I didn't understand this bit.
> Surface
It's not taking the world by storm, but is a solid product line that is well received, has its loyal community, and continues to ship new products for 9 generations now. And the windows tablet market itself expanded around it, when it just didn't exist 10 years ago. I'd compare it to Google's Pixel line, it's not going to take half of the market, but it's alive, keeps fullfilling its role, get recognition and user satisfaction, so I wouldn't call it a failure.
On iPad/Chromebook, they're a different device category. The same way Chromebooks and Macbooks aren't the same category.
Isn't this what Android did? They seem like they're doing fine enough
I think you must know this, so I’m not sure what the angle is you’re playing.
And paid apps are slowly going away and are less relevant - it's been many years since mobile app peaked. Top apps these days in play store and app store are free.
I don't think Meta's aspirations are to be Android. They were first movers in this space, spent billions and billions, only to be the less profitable, less coveted platform?
As outsiders, this is already how we're looking at it when Apple stepped in, which is unfortunate, and why Mark's refusal to acknowledge reality isn't a great look.
I dont know man. Historically who has been in Mark's position with 10 Billion+ $$ to spend on any one thing?
I think Zuckerberg would be elated if it plays out like iPhone vs Android.
Zuckerberg is in a tough spot. Especially if Google uses its control of Android to push forward a VR version of it.
> We've seen this story before and it hasn't ended well for the folks in Mark's position.
market share of android vs iOS in 2023:
> Android 71.63
> iOS 27.71
https://www.statista.com/chart/29925/apples-share-of-the-glo...
Apple is amazing at business. Hands down they are a phenomenal business. Destroying all other smartphone makers hands down.
Objectively from the perspective of capitalism, LVHM is a better business if it makes more money.
That doesn't mean you have to like LVHM products more than Uniqlo. That is personal preference and different from a business perspective.
That's not business, that's a struggle for survival.
Meta doesn't need to dominate the market. Being the Android to Apple's iOS or the Windows to Apple's macOS is way more than fine for Meta's business. iPhone's did $250b in revenue in 2022. Meta as a whole did $117b.
They aren't looking to replace Apple, they are just trying to find a way to get their revenue growing again. It's a huge win in their eye's if Quest3 contributes reasonably well to bringing their 2023 revenue to about $130b.
If there was a genuine third company competing with Meta then that would be a problem for them. Valve and Pico are roughly 0% the size of Meta and Apple. They just won't have the resources to actually compete. Google has been rumored to be working on a headset. If that's the case and they didn't fire that entire org then that would be Meta's only real competition for second place.
Thats like "they arent trying to be the best, they are just trying to be a little better.
Ofc they are trying to beat apple, and everyone else. Or you are saing that if they were magically given the opportunity to become most valued company, theyd simply pass with "no thanks, thats more than we want" attitude?
Every major corporation is trying their absolute hardest to grow.
Apple's initial use cases are around work, entertainment, and meetings. It's ridiculous to think they won't expand this and compete in every use case once they get market shares and a developer eco-system. They are not different products. That's like saying a MacBook Pro and a HP laptop are different products. No, one is a high-end, more expensive, more coveted product, and the other isn't.
This is such an odd sentiment.
Meta was first in this segment, they've spent billions and billions, harmed their reputation as a company on Wall Street, etc. etc.. Apple comes in after them, with, from what we can tell, a superior product. This rationalization that this was all part of Meta's master plan all along is a little ridiculous. They're going to lose and get the crumbs, just like Android device makers get 30% of the profit (70% of it goes to Apple) but hold 80% of market shares. This wasn't Meta's aspirations and is a blunder.
Comparing the pricing of your consumer level product to an enterprise level product is extremely disingenuous.
He's clearly scared.
Are you not aware of all the things apple showed this device will be able to do on release?
Are you aware and just being sarcastic?
Are you aware and unwilling to admit that it would have more uses than just watching movies?
Are you not aware that a business VR space already exists with similarly priced products?
What's your angle?
Now, Zuck may be the world’s greatest opportunist; copying, acquiring, optimizing, and scaling technologies that have already demonstrated product-market-fit. I sincerely admire his executive excellence.
With this in mind, Apple Vision Pro has validated Meta’s pivot to hardware. If Zuck swallows his pride and pivots the Quest to copying Apple, Meta has the opportunity to own the Android of spacial computing, enabling low-cost devices, collecting data, and selling microtargeted ads. This will allow Meta to continue as a globally dominant entity, and Zuck will remain one of the world’s wealthiest men.
But will Zuck’s quest to be respected as a visionary cloud his judgment and jeopardize his empire?
VR, AR, XR, mixed reality... these are too specific and fussy. "Spatial computing" encompasses them all in a fuzzy way that to me has the right granularity for most conversations about this stuff.
It's a neat gimmick but not worth the asking price because there's not $3500 of value you're extracting out of it.
Maybe $500 of value because it's neat? Not sure. It's great at presenting virtual screens (I don't need one) and non-game 3D content which will be a handful of 3D movies and novelty apps where you can explode a hologram of something.
Lol. It was called “spatial computing” at Facebook for years long before the metaverse rebrand.
Times change. If it fails it won't be because of this reason - people won't be walking around outside with these on.
AirPods Pro are an amazing product and it’s not dorky at all, never was.
The original AirPods with long stick were kinda dorky and not that great (no isolation)
Meta has positioned themselves as either #1 or #2 so far, but that position could easily vanish just like the Blackberry. It requires great execution of both the hardware and operating system with their current strategy, and Meta doesn't exactly have a history of producing either. I'm surprised they haven't gone the Android or Windows way of just producing the software and licensing the OS to OEMs. It greatly increases their attack surface area on either the hardware or the OS from another competitor other than Apple.
Meta manufactured the Quest line after their oculus acquisition. While it runs Android, it’s heavily modified for VR AR. Overall, it’s a solid headset especially when you look at the price point and ease of use (compared to PCVR).
I tend to favor Apple, but I’m not going to overlook what other products have achieved
Edit: he did acknowledge this a bit on Lex Fridman podcast https://youtu.be/C_fpCVtGR6I
If not, their comments about overlapping features sound like the “but nokia candy bar phones already have a WEP browser!” objections from back in the iPhone 1 days.
(I’m personally not all that impressed by the apple vision announcement, but I also wasn’t impressed by the iPhone announcement, and for similar reasons. Hopefully someone will do significantly better than Apple this time.)
At $3500 Apple invites no comparison. They’re basically pretending Meta doesn’t exist and that they’ve invented the category, as though it’s the iPhone or iPad.
The Hololens was a "power move" headset that had to repeatedly re-adjust its target market because the price was too high. Apple could end up in the same spot if they can't iteratively bring down the price.
Apple is practically completely vertically integrated. They design their own chips. They have decades of experience in consumer hardware.
To make AR/VR into what Zuck wants, his hardware is NOWHERE near what it needs to be. And they don't have the chops to get it there. If it's possible, I believe Apple can do it.
Why is that not a relevant strategy for competing with Apple? Nvidia and arguably AMD could both out-engineer Apple if you're just talking about chips here.
Same tactic won't work against Apple because they make the key chips, make the hardware, the software, etc. They can have you look at your MacBook, and the headset brings up your laptop's workspace ready to go.
S23, 1.4k (Single core), 4.8k (Multi core), 79.3 (3d mark/GPU)
14 pro max, 1.8k (Single core), 5.3k (Multi core), 74 (3d mark/GPU)
Looks like gen2 is already on-par in multi-core and GPU perf. Single core still is 28% faster in iphone.
---
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/galaxy-s23-ultra-vs-iphone-14...
With a high end you can continuously fund a drive toward lower manufacturing and operational costs. Without it you just focus on cutting corners.
There are most likely enough patents on both sides to render these portfolio boasts moot, once again.
It is indeed a different category. The control paradigm is different and the Quest’s popular apps are games and fitness. It’s a bit like comparing a Mac Studio to a Nintendo Switch.
Bullshit.
There were many lifestyle video showing people moving around. That was actually worse than sitting on the sofa and being generally stylish.
We should remember that Meta probably has to:
a) fight against low employee morale
b) cool device from a company that has proved over and and over again that they're one of the best in creating consumer products
The pricing won’t matter because if Apple sells a bunch it won’t matter how much the Quest costs because the developers will be prioritizing the Vision headset and its modalities which is the key thing that will matter. It’s like what happened with Android - they were about to release when Apple showcased multitouch at which point they scrapped their existing stuff and retooled to make Android multi touch because they knew that would become the dominant modality to make it easy for developers to write apps for both / make it easy for customers to compare and contrast. More importantly, Apple seems to be seeding with an existing massive App Store for non-augmented apps that Quest doesn’t have in any meaningful way iirc and they’ll need to spend money trying to attract existing Android developers to publish to their store or sign a deal with Google to provide access to the Play store (which will never happen).
Expect to see a massive strategy shift from Facebook if Q4 numbers indicate the vision pro is a hit and likely competitor “me too” products from Google, Microsoft, and Samsung if it at ask looks like Apple has reinvigorated this market.
The Vision Pro isn’t shipping until 2024.
IMO this Verge article is a bit incongruent for mocking Meta’s announcement of Quest 3 a couple of months ahead, without mentioning that Apple’s announcement was almost a year before the Vision Pro will reach most markets.
It’s not a long-term competitive advantage. The same thing happened with high-DPI displays. Apple had a momentary advantage with what they call “Retina” display on iPhone 4, but soon every Android vendor was also shipping high-DPI and a few years later it was in the low-end handsets. Today it would be weird to say: “I got an iPhone because the text looks so sharp!”
Similarly nothing stops Meta from using a high-DPI screen in Quest as soon as the OLEDs and computing power becomes cheap enough (or if they are masochists and want to try a $3k version of Quest Pro, I guess).
I will buy the Apple thing, too.
There are a lot of interesting differences between them (obviously, the biggest one being the price, and deriving from that) but the one I find interesting is Apple's decision not to have controllers.
This is just like the infamous "if you see a stylus, they blew it" approach with the iPhone. Double down on the simplest possible input mechanism and pretend it is enough. Today, of course, Apple ships an excellent stylus that they are happy to sell you for $129.
(UPDATE: I think here I wasn't clear, based on several replies. I'm not saying this decision was wrong -- it was right, clearly. I just mean they may very well ignore the existence of controllers... right up until they release an awesome high tech controller for us to buy (as an option).)
The controllers on the Quest Pro are fantastic, and although Meta also seems to be pushing as hard as they can to improve hand tracking and gesture recognition, too, there are and will always be immense benefits to having a hardware controller compared to just waving your hands and pinching your fingers. Precision, haptics, joysticks and buttons, additional positional audio, and more.
I have no doubt that if Vision OS succeeds, it will also eventually get spatially tracked controllers as well. But it is going to start without them.
That to me seems like the main competitive advantage Meta's Quest lineup has, other than the price. It's obviously superior in terms of delivering a deeper and more varied lineup of games; Apple seems to understand that and are hardly mentioning games (although, that makes sense due to the price as well).
It will be interesting to see how Meta tries to leverage this advantage. OTOH maybe some enterprising developer will just figure out how to connect Meta's controllers (or other similar ones) to the Apple Vision Pro.
Remember it has full hand tracking. If you want to hold something e.g. a lightsaber or whatever, there is no reason not to. An inert plastic prop should work just fine.
And there is just no way that a lightsaber game could be good without haptic feedback, in a world where haptic feedback exists. And I think many other kinds of game.
YouTube guy MKBHD even called out the lack of haptics in his initial impressions video, not even for a game: the butterfly flew over to him in the Apple demo, and he held out his finger, and when the butterfly landed on it... nothing. And that was kind of jarring, he said. (And it would be.)
Haptic feedback is a big deal.
But again - there is no reason gamers can’t have a control, but it’s silly to use a game controller to interact with a computing environment when you can use your hands.
I don't think you need the haptic vibration function for interacting with floating menus and the OS, although again it helps for button presses, which is why all smartphones now feature haptic feedback.
But the other reason to use a controller in general-purpose OS use scenarios is precision. If you can directly touch something, then by all means that is the best. But if the menu to be interacted with is too far away, say 8 meters away, all current systems I have seen make you shout a beam out of your hand to the button or object, then do some gesture to click.
A controller is way more accurate for this, kind of how a mouse is more precise for most people than a trackpad. But even more so.
So on all of Meta's systems so far, the controller can more precisely highlight and click things at distance. And I think this holds true for all other currently-available systems as well.
What Apple Vision Pro is bringing that is new, though, is the eye-tracking. Supposedly, it is as good as, or perhaps even better, at selecting an object at distance. If so, then yeah, controllers wouldn't really provide a significant advantage for most non-game activity.
Why wouldn’t makers of light saber toys just add a buzzer? That would be far better than a game controller, and super cheap to add.
My kids indeed do have sword toys that vibrate and make sounds, so I have done this. And I'm sorry to have to report that it is... substantially less compelling than fighting Darth Vader in VR. (Perhaps not for them, though.)
When Apple’s ready they’ll release haptic gloves that smash that experience out of the park.
(Not holding my breath, though...)
And yeah, the Oculus controllers wouldn't nail the butterfly on finger demo, but if they had controllers, the demo would be a hawk landing on your forearm. (And that would work, even though it doesn't quite make sense that your palm would vibrate when a bird lands on your forearm... but haptic feedback is weird.)
There is no reason this is how it would play out.
That struck me as odd. (Obviously anyone can connect a bluetooth controller and give users some extra control, assuming this device supports open bluetooth for audio etc.)
It is one thing for Apple to claim that their latest gadget does not NEED any controllers for basic navigation and selection. Because they invested so much in perfecting a gensture based system. So far so good.
It is far more presumptious if they say they will NOT allow controllers.
When claiming credit for launching a new space called "spatial computing" -- it is very short-sighted / arrogant to state that a one click finger gesture is all you will ever need for all your comupting needs.
There are games obviously where multiple simultaneous actions need to be triggered. There are 3D modelling applications -- actually a great use case for a AR/VR HMD. And I am sure there are tons of other applications that can benefit from innovative and ergonomic approaches to interactions. Why would Apple go out of their way to say there will be no controllers.
Apple should ideally have an open SDK to allow third party wireless controllers. Knowing apple though ... they will probably sell $499 bluetooth earbuds and call them Apple Ear Pro or something.
However, VR controllers are different in that they need to be tracked as they move through space much more precisely than those console controllers support. But maybe third-party VR controllers can also be supported. I think nobody knows that yet.
But no word that I’ve seen on VR controllers.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10088/?time...
Good news!
Not really seeing that this time around.
It’s pretty bananas they’ve crammed an M2 into a headset with all the cameras, sensors, ML engines, and high res displays. The M2 chip alone (I have an M1 Pro) is still blowing my mind with the low wattage performance.
But much like the first iPhone, it is yet to be seen if it will stick. I do think it’s far more capable than existing VR headsets.
Maybe in a decade small thumb-drives will have an M2 chip equivalent built into them. To encrypt/decrypt data on the fly with zero latency on multiple GB/s data. Or whatever other application can gobble up that much compute power.
And, I don’t think they had a stand for the iPhone Magsafe either. Here’s the intro video showing it’s use with just the cable:
https://youtu.be/82po_sYbbio
Both examples strike me as strange since using either without something to keep the charger in place is a joy it setup, possibly worse than trying to keep an 8 pin from falling behind your bed stand again.
Apple doesn’t choose not to make these kinds of things because they aren’t needed. It chooses not to make them to narrow their focus.
Apple had planned to be out of the display market as well.
I believe the Studio display and even the XDR are possibly the result of failing to meet original timelines for Vision.
The company continues to sit out home networking despite the success of AirPort Extreme and generally confusing and messy state of the market.
So it is no surprise to me they wouldn’t be trying to guess at controllers. They are working on a platform.
Apple should have made a standard gaming control that all games could use.
(IIRC though Xbox and Nintendo controllers can also be used.)
[0] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10088/?time...
You might. Flight sims are one of the most immediately compelling things to do in VR, and a controller is a huge step up from nothing.
I have yet to find a reason to buy and keep a VR headset as most things just feel so gimmicky to me. At this point unless you’re either tethered to a more powerful device to be able to do the heavy lifting for the headset or you have a standalone headset that can play some basic arcade like games. A single device that can be taken on the go and play new releases not made specifically for the headset would be amazing to me. Obviously until it’s released who can say what it will actually be capable of but if it has the equivalent power of a MacBook, when my mid 2015 MacBook Pro finally dies I’d honestly consider replacing it with the vision pro but wouldn’t run out to buy one to have in addition to the MacBook.
I've been playing fps/rts/rpg games through GeForce Now on a MacBook M1 and so far there's few obvious drawbacks - good internet required, slight input lag which can be annoying for some FPS games sure, and not all games are available yet - but for those who only play a few games regularly, it's also much better than running the game on an i3/i5 Windows laptop.
Every attempt so far has failed, spectacularly. What is promising about that?
After thirty years of desktop gaming PCs, I sold mine and just use GFN now. It's completely silent (no fan), minor lag (only matters for competitive shooters), and much cheaper than maintaining a high end gaming rig.
Compared to consoles, it has much better graphics, can be played anywhere where you have good internet, supports mouse/keyboard, ultrawide, 120Hz, etc.
Compared to the Stream Deck, it has much better graphics, much longer battery life (it's just streaming video, not rendering on device), and no heat or fan noise. I also sold my Steam Deck because GFN plus a streaming portable (Logitech gCloud) was way more ergonomic.
Did cloud streaming really fail, or is it just a niche? It's come a long way since OnLive. Stadia was a royal fuckup but not because of its technology; Google just had no idea how PC gaming culture works. Their competitors are still around and doing fine, if not making billions.
It is still a very useful tech that I use daily.
And we know who won that one. I think Apple is probably right to just double down on bare hands and voice as the input mechanism for spatial computing. I'm just also saying that controllers do have some advantage, so Meta should probably try to leverage it where they can.
(BTW, I myself do use the iPad primarily with the stylus, now that you can use handwriting everywhere just like the Newton MessagePad of yore... but I concede that probably very few people do this.)
Jobs made the stylus wisecrack in 2010. In 2023, that statement remains dead on the money. Lots of things Jobs said didn't age that well. This one did.
What I meant was that probably someday Apple will be happy to sell us super high tech controllers for spatial computing, but for launch they are taking the same stance as they did with the iPhone, and going all-in on designing the whole experience to just use your hands.
(And, yes, this is probably the correct decision here, just as it was then.)
The Apple Pencil is only available for the iPad devices:
iPad navigation relies significantly on gestures that require multiple fingers, which is frustrating when holding the pencil.
The iPads are much larger in size then phones and it's often awkward to use the pencil as a primary input.
The pencil is kinda annoying to keep with the iPad, it magnetically sticks and is prone to falling off. My previous pencil fell and hit the nib, immediately breaking the tiny sensor that sits behind it.
They onscreen keyboard is too big to use with the pencil, and although you can use (a multi-fingered) gesture to make it smaller, it still isn't great.
For reference, I loved using the stylus as my primary input device for my Samsung Note. There were a bunch of quality of life features built around the stylus and you could stick it back in the phone to keep it safe.
There's no way know until many thousands of people are using this device how those percentages will pan out.
What made you buy it?
(heavy, considering there's no included battery)
I did know that the Quest Pro would not live up to that task (and it doesn't), but I wanted to see how close you could get today for $1500 (now, $1000).
I also do boxing and similar fitness games almost every day, so I knew it would at least serve me well for that, despite being pretty expensive. (An yeah, for that, it's pretty great.)
The new Apple gizmo looks way better for programming and work like that, though, so I'm excited about it. After many years, we appear to be getting close to something that is actually pleasant to use. (Even the Quest Pro technically can be used for this, but the experience is far from pleasant.)
Based on Apple's track record, they're going to disallow development on the Vision like they do for all iOS/iPad devices.
(This does require a Mac to be also present, though.)
Secondly, none of these devices have anywhere close to enough computing power to make doing builds on them directly feasible — at least not for most coding work, including the work I do.
So I want to develop using the model popularized by tools like VS Code's remote development extensions or GitHub Codespaces. I want the headset to render all the editors and other windows locally. I want the device to connect to my mechanical keyboard and mouse, so that I can do all my normal coding stuff. But the machine where the code actually is, where the build is actually done, and where the local dev server or similar runs -- all remote.
This is actually the workflow I now prefer even on desktops and laptops, now that the tooling is so good. But for a spatial computing headset device, this will have to be the main model.
And while I also am not at all a fan of Apple's limiting what we can do on our devices the way they do, putting that aside you can already do this workflow in iPad. You can use CodeSpaces in the browser, but there is a cool native app called Blink[1] that lets you use your own hardware as the build machine.
I use a large and high-spec Linux workstation with 4 large monitors in my day-to-day work. But with VS Code remote, when I have to travel with my laptop, I just connect to the Linux workstation (via Tailscale in my case, but there are various options) and use the code editor locally on the laptop, but the CLI, build, etc is happening on the remote machine.
On a laptop, this works great. It is better than the regular workflow of doing it all on the laptop, because the tooling (if you use VS Code, anyway, but others are also working on this) is so good and the remote build machine is so much more powerful than a laptop. It also lets you just switch to a new device whenever you want without worrying about having to commit your changes first. So I can go to the office or just a different room of my house and just sit down at whatever computer is available and pick up where I left off.
But I've also done this using both the Quest Pro and iPad, just to check in with the state of the art on those devices. Both of them can do it. The Quest sucks in lots of ways (clunky OS, low-quality passthrough of the real environment, glitches). The iPad actually works fine, except teven the largest iPad Pro is a laughably tiny monitor to work on. (YMMV tho... if you are one of those "I love small screen!" people then this workflow works fine, and an iPad works as well as a laptop.)
For me, Quest Pro and iPad aren't good enough. But I want to do this workflow on a headset device, and Vision Pro looks promising.
Anyway, my point here is that even if Apple does make weird restrictions about being able to use dev tools locally on the device, that won't prevent it from doing the workflow I am interested in.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/blink-shell-build-code/id15948...
The resolution isn't the problem with Quest Pro (although I always want more) but the passthrough of the real environment around you is terrible. It's very distorted, as if the cameras are far lower resolution than the screen is.
I've heard that this aspect of the experience is better on the Apple Vision Pro, although I don't know for sure since I haven't yet tried it myself.
This actually doesn't matter that much, because the resolution is still good enough to walk to the fridge and grab a drink (or whatever) without taking it off.
The other super interesting thing to me is the external display of your eyes on the surface of the headset.
This sounded so stupid to me when it leaked before they announcement, that now I am embarrassed, because the problem is one we have all the time in my own house. I've realized it is a fundamental problem with these devices, and one I even had all the time, and yet I couldn't see how that would solve it. But it really does seem to.
The problem we always have is, our kids put on one of the headsets we have, but then we (their mom and I, and their siblings/friends) can't tell whether they can see us or not. This actually really matters a lot -- if the wearer cannot see, then we need to make sure no other kids get near them, otherwise there is a risk of collision and injury. This is partially solved by casting the view from the headset to the TV or whatever, but this is glitchy and sometimes even disabled.
The other scenario where this is really useful is at the office, or even a coffee shop. When a coworker walks up to you, they have a visual indicator of whether you can see them or not. Actually a very important social cue.
Or when the waitress comes up to bring you your coffee. You can look at her and accept the coffee, and it is obvious to her that you can see the cup she's handing you. Sure, she'll still probably be a little weirded out the first time, but she'll get used to it. :-D
> Today, of course, Apple ships an excellent stylus that they are happy to sell you for $129.
Apple Pencil does not work with iPhone, only with iPads, which... makes sense. Artists use them as drawing tablets. But nobody uses a Apple Pencil with an iPhone.
Which I imagine is intentional by Apple for aesthetic reasons since iPad should only be navigated by touch.
The stylus support on Samsung flagships is very convenient to have cross device capability on, and everyone I know who has those devices feels similarly.
Eg when doing something on the tab with the pen and having a calculator open on the phone and seamlessly being able to use the pen for that. Support on phones, especially with the large screens these days, allows for all sorts of little synergies that make the experience much more smooth.
This kind of synergy is especially convenient for students and teachers. But because Apple hasn't decided to make a slick commercial about it "revolutionizing" computing, HN must act like it isn't a thing.
ehhh...
>But nobody uses a Apple Pencil with an iPhone.
I was saying that Apple tends to ignore the specialized/higher-precision option initially, focusing on the majority of the market that may not need it.
But then they introduce it later. As I suspect they will do in this case, too. But that leaves an opening (maybe, temporarily, if they can capitalize on it) for competitors that do support more specialized input devices.
If you wanted to draw diagrams or use handwriting input, Android had a huge advantage at first, ... until it didn't.
It took me 3 days just to really feel I understood what the Vision Pro video demonstrated. I was very uncomfortable watching the initial video. The first feeling was voyeuritistic as if I was spying on the user. The second feeling was the horror of actual people using them in isolated squalid environments. Eventually I rationalized that the demonstration was really about hand/finger/eye tracking in space. The "spatial" interface was the most special thing they demoed. The rest of the demo was hardware power and the ergonomics.
Although Meta will sell more units in the short-term due to Apple's pricing, I do think they will have a tough time catching Apple on the hardware. The eye-tracking, <12ms image processing and display, and the M2 are things that Meta is well behind on.
Zuck mentioned that activity and "doing things" are Meta advantages, but people don't want to exercise while gaming or consuming entertainment.
A lot of people actually do. There is a whole community built around it.
You don’t know them. You don’t know the reasons for their weight. They very well could be using the device daily to exercise for all you know and it could be an issue with his metabolism. Or another medical condition. Or a side effect of drugs. Or literally hundreds of other reasons.
Nevermind the typical reddit mod looking apartment we saw in the $5k challenge. None of this some unique story. It's all the same pattern. It's just an exceptionally public one.
Oh wait, no, it's all just speculation and shitty assumptions by someone who has nothing better to do with their life.
You don't know them. You don't know their struggles. Stop pretending that you do.
Fat can come and go, but your personality is here to stay.
> You don’t know them.
If I did I would have helped them exercise and lose some weight. Get healthy. So that keyboard warriors don’t come along trying to defend their unhealthy lifestyle choices.
Could you possibly be more misguided here? Like come on.
But that’s still apparently not enough. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Using their name and linking to their video would have similarly been clear.
You chose to do neither.
I thought it was because you wanted to “let people learn” or whatever BS you had originally come with. You spent three whole paragraphs talking about how much it would confuse people.
Turns out, you just don’t respect them enough to do such a simple thing. It was plainly clear from your fat shaming, but at least you’ve spelled it out in words.
You weren’t even the one being called a transphobe, you just decided to jump in and make it clear why you explicitly didn’t choose to update their pronouns or dead name after you found out.
> I can only assume you’re overweight as you’ve taken this whole thing very personally. Maybe you need some exercise?
I can only assume you’re a bigot as you’ve taken this whole thing very personally. Maybe you need to not be a shitstain on humanity?
Do better. It’s not hard.
Just remember you’re the one who can’t understand English. Not only can you not follow the conversation you’re having. But you literally fit the definition of a bigot and then called me one. That is hilarious.
Because it would “be confusing” or whatever bullshit you came up with.
It’s pretty clear who the bigot is here and it’s not the person who is advocating for treating someone respectfully regardless of their weight. Or making an effort to change the pronouns and names used when pointed out.
Your comments are visible to the world, you realize that right? Just because they’ve been (rightly) flagged to death doesn’t mean they’re invisible.
Grow up. You’re clearly not mature enough for this site. Or the internet in general.
Your comments are visible to the world. Quite embarrassing for Microsoft to have an employee who rages at people and gets upset giving them a bad name.
Because you’re a bigot who refuses to respect a person’s wishes, yes. You’ve made that clear already. Glad we’re in agreement.
Trying to spin advocating for treating people respectfully as a bad thing is the only thing that’s embarrassing here. And that’s sure not coming from me.
I’m done here, good luck continuing to live as a shitstain on the world.
You’re not advocating for anything. You jumped in and started being angry, swearing in the first post (which you edited out when the tiny lightbulb went off and you realised that was a dumb move) and then continued to be loud and aggressive and try to paint a non existent picture.
So I’ll continue living my awesome life while you keep living in a bubble thinking the whole world is against you and being angry at nothing.
https://youtu.be/b-owBhLGaH4
Noted.
Quite a few do. I use Beatsaber, Pistol Whip, and Superhot (more yoga-y than exercise) for this. Boredom during exercise is my primary issue with sustaining it; VR has removed that obstacle.
If you're gaming for 3-4 hours, watching a movie, or using the device for productivity you're going to be seated or standing still.
Also, Vision Pro can be a mobile device, albeit for <2 hrs. Imo, Gaming will not be the primary use case for these devices.
It really didn’t. Ring Fit Adventure, a successor to the Wii Fit titles, sold 15 million copies for the Switch. Nintendo Switch Sports sold almost 9 million. Those are solid numbers. The kind of motion control the Wii used is still used for those titles, and they’re still popular.
These companies are aiming to have installed bases in the hundreds of millions if not billions.
Active gaming will be a nice use case, but will not be the reason 40-50m people buy a headset every year.
Fidget spinners sold like hotcakes for a very brief window of time. Nintendo motion games are continuing to sell millions of titles even 15 years after they first debuted.
> less than half of what Wii Fit pulled
Hmm, what numbers are you looking at? I see 22 million for Wii Fit, and 21 million for Wii Fit Plus (a separate title).
- Oculus <=> content consumption
- Apple Vision <=> productivity
You could have said all of things about the original iPhone. It did similar things to a lot of existing smartphones at the time (send email, play music, browse web, make call).
It's not a VR headset and it's not an AR headset. It's something else. It's reasonable to give your specific vision of these technologies a more human name.
Also, it's something that's going to be released in very limited quantities in a year from now. And it was announced at a developer conference so developers can start to prepare apps. We've only really seen a preview and the technology is in the earliest stages.
There's a ton of stuff they only mentioned in passing - like their proprietary camera format and cameras that can record the world in immersive depth-mapped 3D. Those will likely be licensed out to studios and sports leagues which can prepare content for Vision Pro.
Yet. They've set it rolling and so far own a perspective separate to AR/VR. Leaves the competition brawling over headsets for a still-to-be-defined VR concept while they pitch customers on their thing. Computing. Ties in to work. Easier to justify spending $x000.
Not just that. It also makes the Vision not just an ill-defined VR product, but also a 'MacBook Air or iPad for on the go with far more screen real estate'. This pitch resonates with pro users who are not necessarily interested in VR. The initial reaction of Apple-using friends/family is: I'd probably buy this as a replacement for a MacBook + external screen. It also makes the pricing more acceptable - it's about the same prices as a non-mediocre spec'ed MacBook Air + Studio Display.
Then I believe they misunderstood the presentation, since this device is not a replacement for a MacBook, since it just can't run the same software. And even if it could, it would be much, much slower at it, since it has to spend huge compute resources on constant refresh of two 4k+ screens plus advanced vision algorithms to process the camera input and overlay the 3D graphics onto it in the expected locations.
To me, the term just sounds better than "VR" or "AR" without meaning anything different (other than being less specific). There's nothing Apple-exclusive about it; it would apply to existing "VR" or "mixed reality" apps like Horizon Workrooms or Virtual Desktop just as much as to what Apple is doing.
Personally, I feel "spatial computing" sounds clearer and less silly than the previous terms. But, that's just my opinion so I guess we'll see if it catches on...
I was greatly disturbed by the product demonstration. After 72 hours I realized that since I work alone there are no real drawbacks to having a hands free computer. (I have been working in a 60'x30' studio that I have equipped with 8MP cameras, shopping for 4k and 8k projectors. The idea is to have the cameras act as an interface and use the projectors to create an image on the floor as feedback. The Vision Pro seems like it might be easier and cheaper. Although not as analog and collaborative.)
Spatial computing is actually a good Apple name for this interface as it differentiates from the lower effort products that cost $3,000 less. This draws a line between AR/VR and what Apple is doing which is Spatial Computing. Apple needed to co-ordinate the fundamentals of Human Interface design and production. When they finally had same they could actually produce that also function they shipped it.
I think Facebook should consider usign only 1 controller though (i know I do). Also, to put the battery in the controller and tether it to the headset to make it even lighter. If apple is using a tether then it's ok to do it
I wonder if passthrough can be done mechanically, by rotating the lenses to a hole
For everything else, quickly being able to grab a snack or drink, respond to a phone notification or change the place you're using the device from reduce friction.
It might be enough to push VR over that "I don't want to use the device because I don't want to commit to not doing anything else for at least 30 minutes now" hurdle that still very much exists.
That being said, I have no doubt Meta is going to be able to get there in due time too.
When you are holding controllers, you can't interact with the environment and people around you naturally, like how Apple showed it in the videos, before "reversing" the ritual.
Apple also wants users to plug it in and use it all day. You can't do that with the limit of controller battery.
Not having the controllers at all would be very nice for this. Not sure it’s worth losing the haptics though.
And given how little you actually touch the headset, you’d really have to be some kind of sloppy maniac to end up with it “smelling of popcorn and coffee.”
You can’t easily drink out of an open topped container whilst wearing a headset, so without highlighting that (minor) issue, they wanted to plant the idea of having a sealed container with a straw on your desk as a solution before you ran into the problem yourself.
Apple's approach avoids that and lets your eyes do the selection, while still using your fingers for the clicking, thus giving you the responsiveness you are used to (i.e. no weird "hover over icon for one second to active").
Also according to people that tested it, it feels extremely natural, basically like mind reading, since the moment you look at something, you can click it. There is no separate step where you have to look at something and then also have to navigate your laser pointer over it to activate it.
As for passthrough, I think that will become extremely useful and commonly used when combined with the depth sensor, as it allows you to partly fade in and out pieces of reality. You can have a virtual office on the moon, but the desk in front of you, is still your actual real desk, while all the displays on it are virtual.
I m not sure if they use the eyes as a pointer. It sounds very imprecise to me.
* https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10073
The thing is, it is enough for general use. The Apple Pencil (or whatever they call it) is a specialised tool for people who need the extra precision.
The difference between modern no-stylus-needed touch screens and old stylus-required touch screens is exactly that, with the old screens they aren’t functional at all without the stylus.
I'm also curious if Apple plans to use iPhones as an input mode. Speech to text is nice but I'd like to be able to discretely type something.