At first I thought it would be weird, but after a few minutes it all felt very natural and a deep work focus was achieved without me really realising it. I tried to grasp some of the awe I experienced in this blog post.
How is the resolution? I never tried a Vision Pro yet, but that was my main gripe with my Rift. Indeed, IME, the ‶real world″ size of the windows is nothing, it's their angular resolution that is a make or break.
I love high dpi displays as I like text (and other details) to be crisp and clear.
Vision Pro is approaching a quality that I feel is acceptable, somewhere between "flawless reality" and a decent screen. The virtual environments are crisper than the camera passthrough mixed environments.
There is definitely room for improvement on screen quality, but in general I am impressed.
It ranges from okay to not that bad. It’s not as good as the “retina” screens in Apple’s other products.
I can definitely see pixels on the device if I’m wearing contacts unlike what most of the early reviewers claimed.
But it’s not so bad as to be unusable and you don’t really notice them in most contexts - the main place I notice pixels is using it as a screen for macOS. VisionOS apps are rendered very large by default so the resolution deficiencies aren’t as apparent.
Overall it is very impressive but there’s also much room for improvement in resolution.
For non-text content, I think it's pretty good, actually. Watching content in Disney+ or Max's theater modes is really satisfying despite those virtual screens being sub-4k.
I don't think it is possible to see the pixels, they are the size of a red blood cell. But maybe you can see antialiasing or noise from the cameras.
Personally I can't see any pixelation. It's even better than reality. That being said passthrough cameras' resolution do suck but it's not what it's important and probably the easiest problem to solve.
sure, they're small, but some of them are closer to your eye lense than your retina. The pixels per degree are lower than any Apple product in the past 10 years
I have been using contacts and just got the zeiss lenses today. So far it's roughly equivalent. I think there is a touch more distortion (chromatic aberration along the edges) with the inserts. But my contacts are progressives and kinda sucked for this, single vision would probably be great.
I don't know, if I need to use my macOS laptop, it sounds a lot easier to just use my laptop, instead of using a helmet and then doing the connection dance to get a single ok-ish screen anyway
A single screen that is much larger than a MacBook screen, that is the advantage. And the connection dance is really just...tapping the connect button?
But with the same "resolution" such that you can't fit any more content on it and with much worse density.
Why would I actually want that? You've been able to do this for decades by hooking a TV up to your laptop and while that certainly has space challenges that limit the number of people that'll try it, it's not like tech bloggers were flocking to hook up 65" TVs to their macs and lovingly wax poetic about the productivity gains, either.
The virtual resolution is adjustable and you can fit a lot more contents on the screen than you can with a real monitor. It basically allows one more setting past the maximum “more space” mode you normally get from macOS. It does render a little bit blurry, though, if you crank up the virtual resolution to the max.
The original Oculus Rift had 1080x1200, VisionPro has 3660x3200, field of view is similar. In virtual monitor terms that means a Rift can display a 640x480 monitor and the VisionPro a 1920x1080 one. Still quite far away from Retina, but should be pretty usable, especially since it allows making the virtual screens bigger than a real monitor can be.
It's better than anything else I've tried by a long shot, which admittedly is only the Quest 2, but still not good enough to work in all day. It wasn't the weight/comfort for me, just it was too blurry. I fully expect to be using one eventually as an external monitor replacement but it's got a little ways to go. Probably needs another generation or 2 of screen/camera improvements. It's _good_ but not worth keeping unless you already use mostly iPad apps for work.
You have a great humorist writing style. I enjoyed the read and it just makes me want one even more.
I just went to an Apple Store to demo the Vision Pro and walked out feeling like I had a religious experience. I was overcame with emotion over that immersion demo, those baby rhinos completely blew my mind. I'm booking another appointment soon to get another taste. I really hope the price becomes manageable for consumers like me; I love the tech and want the future but can't afford it.
“Active noise cancellation for your eyes” is a great way to put. I also have found myself using the mount hood environment set to daytime as the setting for macOS + visionOS multi-window set up.
I took it off yesterday before some friends came over for dinner and I was kind of shocked that it had gotten dark outside because my mind felt like it was still day time since the sun was out in mount hood. I had actually been sitting on my office in darkness for a least an hour.
Have the kinks with the U3224KB been worked out? I had one for a while but ended up returning it and replacing it with a Studio Display due to a bunch of papercuts (blog post with details in my profile, if interested) mostly concerning its functionality with macOS (though there were a couple of issues with the monitor itself too, mainly the AG coating).
I don’t think I would call it “the same” as the Pro Display XDR, pretty sure it’s not the same panel?
I have the XDR and got it as I live in an apartment which gets a ton of natural sunlight and the XDR goes to 1000 nits sustained brightness (1600 peak for hdr). The specs of the Dell panel indicate max brightness of 450 nits, so not at all comparable.
Same here, 3 2K screens were better than it. Also, re: using your phone, that was a huge issue for me. I would get notifications for things I couldn't do on the AVP (at least not well, worst of all was text input) or just notifications only on my phone that I wanted to read but couldn't though the AVP passthrough. I hope they do an on-demand "Mac Virtual Display" for your phone in a future version so it looks clear.
I tried to use the Vision Pro for work, and I'm not sure if it was just my eyes or what, but looking at code inside of that thing was just...exhausting. When I took it off, I looked at my regular monitors with a newfound love.
I'd love for this thing to reach it's full potential as this 'work from a mountaintop, but really your garage' device, but I feel like until the resolution gets to the same as existing monitors (no small task, I know) it's just...not as good for the vast majority of use cases.
Not you you responded to but I tried both. I mean I never seriously thought the passthrough would be good enough, and it wasn't, but it was just barely legible and useful when I was trying to pair my AVP to my MBP. But I really tried to like MVD and I just couldn't do it. It wasn't clear enough and felt like an added "tax" on my mind, also I felt very limited compared to when using my external monitors.
Many people work on remote desktop all day long, and I spend my fair share of time in SSH sessions as well. It's not like it improves the experience compared to working locally, but for me it works fine so long as you're within a few hundred kilometers without much jitter. On the VR, the screen should move as you move your head because that position isn't what's being passed through, so that can't be the difference either. I don't understand (without having a device myself) how/whether this is worse than normal video streaming over LAN?
You misunderstood, the video passthrough of your surroundings is not good enough. Using the macOS virtual display is fine, there is some noticeable streaming latency, maybe 30ms (that would be solved if it could just take DP over USB-C or Thunderbolt in) but it's suitable for long term use.
Not just giving a display port of some sort seems like such a mistake given that there's already the battery cord/pack and that the virtual display latency is so bad.
If i'm not mistaken, judge2020 meant that what's not suitable is looking through your AVP at your real monitor. The virtual display (glorified VNC or whatever) that you're saying is OK, I think the agree is also OK.
And I'd assume that yes, it would be torture to try to view a monitor through the AVP just due to the resolution loss. It would be like poorly downscaling the 4k/5k resolution of your 27" monitor to like 1366x768 but much worse since the pixels are not even staying lined up on a level grid but resampled at slightly diagonal angles as your head moves even a couple of degrees. I am pretty sure setting up 2 more big $1000 monitors left and right would be better than "center monitor + AVP with virtual apps left and right" (and it would save about $2000 lol).
I agree with you completely myself -- I bought a 4k 27" HP Envy monitor in the $400ish range about 5 years ago, and that plus the 16" laptop on a double arm setup is a great setup for me. But I definitely 2.5x'd the numbers in case of the people I've heard of (certain deeply-observant Apple devotees) who wax poetic about how using anything but a perfect multiple pixel ratio is painful to their eyes (they believe a 27" has to be 5k and don't believe in using a scaled screen resolution). Although tbh, I should have said "$1600 monitors" in that case, as there is nearly zero competition in that resolution+size combo, so Apple's hilarious one is the only option.
Is the virtual display feature as it's presented now likely to be a stopgap or fallback? A bit like emulation or Rosetta apps when Apple silicon was new, or running iPhone apps on an iPad. Those were things that seemed core when each was first introduced and then quickly disappeared for most people in most cases.
I wonder if it could largely be replaced by native AVP apps or a better way for them to send out data from the Mac to the headset once there is broader software support?
I’m not extremely productive, but I have 2 use-cases I’m excited about.
1. Having more screen real estate in my small home office. I often dive into spaghetti code, and seeing more of it helps me maintain context.
2. Working in my RV. I can’t take my extra screens with me (it’s a multi-use family RV, so I’m not mounting anything. Plus, there isn’t room.), and I’m so, so excited about having more screen real estate in there. We lived/worked in it for 3 months last summer, and it was really nice coming home to more screens at the end of the trip.
Similarly, I'm intrigued by the possibility of using it for coding whilst aboard a sailboat, where having multiple large physical screens isn't a possibility due to limited space and lack of suitable mounting surfaces.
Very curious to see how tolerable the UX is in an environment that's almost always experiencing some degree of motion independent of the user.
> Similarly, I'm intrigued by the possibility of using it for coding whilst aboard a sailboat, where having multiple large physical screens isn't a possibility due to limited space and lack of suitable mounting surfaces.
It’s amazing to me what people will do to avoid being present in the moment. You’re on a sailboat, enjoy it, smell the ocean, feel the water on your face, breathe deeply and take it all in. If you’re just going to strap goggles on your face to blind you to the beauty around you, then why did you even get a sailboat to begin with?
In this model, the work pays for the cruising. There's plenty of time to enjoy the elements, local sights, boat maintenance, what have you, after taking care of business.
Besides the ocean and elements, there's also a certain beauty in using the latest technology to operate a SAAS company from almost anywhere on the planet.
I don’t have unlimited PTO, but it sure is nice to shut my laptop at 5 and be somewhere beautiful. I don’t have that luxury at home and it’s a huge perk with my current job.
When I’m on PTO, my laptop doesn’t go with me. I absolutely use all my PTO every year.
As permanently mobile as a wife and young kid allow. We spent 3 months on the road 2 summers ago and had a great time!
I expect our radius to get smaller as our child gets older and goes to school, but we are very passionate about being outdoors as much as possible.
For example - I helped build a mutually accessible structure in a national forest, and my favorite work days are out there. We installed solar last summer, so it’s workable year round now.
I returned mine today after attempting to use it for work for a few hours at a time over the last week. I felt the same eye strain with my Mac as a mirrored display.
Zoom calls were cool, but nobody could take the Persona seriously.
After a few days the eye strain seemed to get worse and worse, until yesterday it give me such a bad headache I decided that was enough.
> Zoom calls were cool, but nobody could take the Persona seriously.
This is going to be another of their socially awkward gimmicks like Memojis they will double down until they inevitably fail.
I really feel like Apple actually just doesn’t feel it and every time they’re pushing their weird geeky ideas onto their users they loose a bit of coolness factor. And if kids decide Apple got too cringe, while someone else manages to use that to spin their momentum (think e.g. Nokia respawning riding the 90s sentiment wave), they may actually start to seriously struggle.
Don't worry, most people on Hacker News have no real idea how normal everyday people use tech products. This person thinks Memojis are unused, but they just lack perspective.
> This is going to be another of their socially awkward gimmicks like Memojis they will double down until they inevitably fail.
I don't necessarily agree. Some have talked about how the weirdness starts to fade after getting into a conversation and focusing on the discussion or collaboration at hand. It seems that once the brain has adjusted a bit, it can start to fill in for the badness somewhat.
The feature clearly has a long way to go before it's good, but I think it's premature to dismiss it. Future iterations will only improve, so if some people are finding some success with it now, that will only grow.
No, I absolutely get that. I still remember how talking to yourself wearing wired headset on the street was weird.
But it’s been over 5 years since Apple started pushing Memojis, they still continued as recently as last year and they have little adoption still, as far as I am aware.
Those who watched WWDC remember how cringey those Memoji bits were, I specifically refer to that aspect of their being increasingly out of touch.
I dunno. I know people who use their Memojis regularly and seem to enjoy it. I personally do not, but I think I’m not their target user. Not sure what the broader adoption looks like.
But I think these are different enough capabilities that the success or failure of one is not necessarily predictive of the other.
As a method of estimating adoption, that seems fairly suspect. It doesn't exactly seem like a capability that would generate much news.
Google Trends seems more likely to be instructive, and as a topic, it has shown fairly steady (if low) interest over time after peaking on release with some periodic spikes most likely correlated with major updates.
But as a feature, I wouldn't expect even Google trends to be very instructive (for understanding adoption), since people who know how to use them aren't likely to be out there searching. More use = more familiarity = less searching. Who knows; maybe they're barely used, but there isn't good data to back up that claim, and there are a number of other ways to interpret the data that does exist.
With all of that said, I'll maintain that I don't see any real connection between them and Personas, or any predictive value in comparing them.
Uh, of the 100 or so acquaintances I have who use iphones, way more than half of them use their memoji for their public-facing visual representation. Nobody writes news articles about that for the same reason they no longer write news articles about the ability to use your voice to dictate messages, or charge your phone without plugging in a cable.
I’ve wondered the same. Apple has been a “given” for 20 years because they somehow keep shipping great stuff and avoid the Microsoft trap of looking like total dorks by existing in an echo chamber.
Even if they made a small misstep or had an awkward moment in a launch announcement, it was seen as endearing and forgivable.
But there seem to be an increase in moments where Apple comes across as behind the curve, or not as aware of where the public is at relative to them, compared to then.
>avoid the Microsoft trap of looking like total dorks by existing in an echo chamber.
Lolwhut?? Microsoft wishes it had a fraction of the echo chamber Apple fans create. It's what Apple is known for.
>Even if they made a small misstep or had an awkward moment in a launch announcement, it was seen as endearing and forgivable.
Uhhhh... "You're holding it wrong" was an absolute unmitigated PR disaster for Apple. It was one of the worst kinks ever in the "reality distortion field". People were rightly pissed. It was smug and stupid, not endearing.
I believe the premise is that Microsoft--the employees and management or whatever: the entity, not the ecosystem or the users--exists in an echo chamber... as in, they keep thinking their users want stuff but their users actually don't.
Apple hasn't been cool for a long, long time. Everyone has an iPhone so it's no longer special. It's just a waste of money when you can get basically the same android phone for half the price
> After a few days the eye strain seemed to get worse and worse, until yesterday it give me such a bad headache I decided that was enough.
Curious if you've ever gotten your vision tested?
I don't need glasses in everyday life, but I did go to an optometrist and got a pair anyways after I got annoyed one night that a friend could read a faraway sign and I couldn't quite. They make things a little bit sharper but not that it ever makes a difference for anything I actually need.
But then I discovered that if I wear them, zero eye strain in VR. Without them my eyes hurt after 20 minutes. With them, I can use VR for hours, zero problem.
No idea why. And I can't seem to find much information on it, but I asked my optometrist and they said it's a whole thing -- people who wear glasses sometimes not to see better, but to reduce eye strain and headaches.
Interesting. I'm also nearsighted, so I've always assumed that I don't need glasses when wearing VR headsets. It's easier to just take them off before putting on the headset (MQ3) and I've not noticed a difference in clarity — but I do experience eye strain and visual exhaustion if I wear the headset for too long, so it might be worth comparing longer sessions with and without glasses.
Other vision issues can be relevant too. I have a very slight lazy eye - I can still see 3D video but my stereo vision is worse than average. I suspect it affects the eye tracking because for me it feels a little tedious and imperfect, but others don’t seem to feel that way.
Could be the motion blur. Vision Pro is in this really weird cross section of insanely good visuals but really bad motion blur. Generally a little motion blur is OK, but the better your visuals get, the worse and more apparent motion blur can be.
Personally I found AVP to be most draining if I'm moving my head around a lot and experiencing this motion blur. If I'm just looking at the screen in front of me, I get fatigued less
When I don't wear contacts for a while(just normal glasses), wearing them throughout the day also makes me a bit "tired". Even though the "resolution" is basically the same. But after wearing them consecutively for a few days, it becomes like the same as glasses.
I wonder if there's something similar here going on. Since we rely so heavily on vision for everything(Especially balance). Any difference to our normal perception will cause "exhaustion" of sorts. But maybe wearing it continuously for days can cause our body to adapt to it?(Which, obviously is impossible for AVPs)
That might have to do with the eye "enlarging" a little to make space for the lenses, or maybe more likely with you learning to "lubricate" the lenses with tearing
(pure conjecture, I last used lenses fifteen twenty years ago)
I haven't tried them, but I imagine that despite the high resolution, text that is badly aligned (and probably constantly imperceptibly wobbling) strains the eyes.
The software should probably force text to be aligned on whole real pixels, even if that detracts a little from the realism.
And the best would probably be to keep virtual screens completely fixed until you move by a certain, largish degree (as an option).
Then again, maybe this has nothing to do with the straining.
High DPI monitor text effectively can't be misaligned, especially since Apple's text rendering always dilated characters instead of trying to fit them onto pixel grids.
Well ok, but is it a problem to have the text aligned on both screens, if the user is fine with some "stuttering" when moving or with keeping the virtual screen fixed?
That's an interesting point. You potentially also have alignment issues with the window being placed spatially, i.e., rendering text that is not perpendicular to the plane of the screens. When moving my head in the AVP I'm moving the screens, unlike when I move my head to look at a different part of a monitor.
I've watched a few reviews where the claim is "multiple 4k monitors", and even on Apple's site it says "More pixels than a 4K TV. For each eye.". But any virtual monitor is going to be scaled down, and with "spatial computing" being the desired interaction, it's not going to be projected at a fixed point on the embedded screens. Sure, when you have a 4k monitor across the room, it's smaller because it's further away, but the full resolution is there (reality is much higher fidelity than "retina display" ever was and even the Vision Pro is). When a virtual display is projected into a space further away, it's going to take up fewer pixels and be down-sampled. It's kind of annoying that the term "4k" is being used to refer to "physical space the display takes up" or "size reported to the operating system" rather than the physical pixel density.
Text in natively rendered apps is perspective corrected before rendering and incredibly sharp as a result. It’s been mentioned in a few interviews in passing.
Text in streamed displays from a Mac may suffer from pixel misalignment.
While the resolution is high, the PPD is very low (pixels per degree of vision). It's lower density than a classic monitor, and nowhere close to a modern high density 4k or retina display.
Also your eyes can't really focus the same, anything within about 12 ft causes you to struggle to focus leading to eye strain. This is an unfortunate reality of the lenses
Same. I returned it the other night because I finally just gave up on trying to make it comfortable. My body was just rejecting it. I could make it 20-30 minutes.
It's a bunch of factors. Heavy, lots of pressure on a few specific points, the dangling cable to a slippery battery which I had to leave plugged in all day, the grainy passthrough... But most of all it's just too heavy. And connection would sometimes get janky between Mac and Vision Pro.
I've got high hopes for generation 2 and 3 but it needs time to cook.
VR headsets’ resolution are still a couple orders of magnitude away from being indecipherable from normal vision, and that doesn’t even include motion.
I couldn’t stand the constant glare when looking at code. Everything just felt hazy combined with the awful pass through was a downgrade. Was more productive at first since I could block the world out. Didn’t last.
When you move your head around in Vision Pro, do the windows stay where you put them, or do they follow your head? If they stay where put, is this perfect, or do they jig a little bit?
My NReal Air are nice glasses, but the fact that I can’t look away from the huge ass screen is annoying af. Eye movements can only get you so far, and the intuitive head movement does not work. Argh!
Eye stain has been a huge issue for me with earlier VR goggles.
Some people seem to be suggesting the higher quality of the Vision Pro overcomes this, but I'm starting to really wonder. Would even more resolution actually solve it? Or maybe there's really no way around the discomfort for some of us.
If that's the alternative you're considering, get the monitors. If you're like me and have been dying to be a bit less tethered to one location for a while, or you want to get a lot out of a little space, this device has finally crossed the threshold of usability (and being a joy to use). But if your baseline is three 5K monitors in one spot, you're gonna be disappointed.
It doesn't beat 3 2K monitors let alone 5K. I know, I have 3 2Ks and the Apple Vision Pro didn't come close to competing. It will one day and I can't wait but I returned mine for now.
LG 24" 4k monitors are like $350 - might be worth a try. I have two with my M3 Pro and they look fantastic - sharp text, good color and viewing angles.
Get a 43'' center monitor with two LG DualUP 16:18 ratio monitors on the sides. Cheaper and much much better than Vision Pro. You will need a large desk though.
> Get a 43'' center monitor with two LG DualUP 16:18 ratio monitors on the sides.
Sounds nice for the office, but find myself conflicted with the notional operating value prop of continuously juicing north of 200W less graphics compute (?!) just putting idle pixels on screen on a home workstation that seldom gets shutdown.
Curious if you've realized meaningful productivity gains since switching to that setup, and what graphics card(s) are you using to drive them?
My biggest problem is that it is sometimes difficult to read the keys on my keyboard. I really wish that it could do object recognition on my keyboard and re-render the keycaps. This would be especially useful in "environments", which make the keyboard disappear entirely.
This. I'm a touch-typist but I still find myself fumbling around trying to find where to put my hands when I first start typing while in an environment. I don't do that when I can see my keyboard in my peripheral vision though, so I think the keyboard object recognition would help.
I was surprised Apple didn't have this. My Meta Quest 2 had a super crappy version I tried for all of 2 minutes. The AVP passthrough and rendering content behind your hand (cut out?) both leave some to be desired. The little indicator that floats over your keyboard is cool, touch bar coming back from the grave. But I felt like I couldn't dial in the environment past the point where I could still see my keyboard/hands because of the "keyboard disappearing" issue.
I found setting the environment immersion to around 50% lets me see enough of my keyboard so I’m not groping around for it.
I’d also like to see app re-render your iPhone, Apple Watch and ipad screens which are pretty blurry in pass through. Also some sort of workaround for Face ID on iPhone when you’re wearing Vision Pro. Seems like things Apple is uniquely positioned to do.
> I’d also like to see app re-render your iPhone, Apple Watch and ipad screens which are pretty blurry in pass through.
Totally agree, I just made the same comment elsewhere in this thread. And yes, if I've authenticated with IrisID or whatever it's called then when I raise my phone do the same thing that allows my mac to unlock from my watch. Throw a little notification in the headset (some sound/animation) so if it's not me picking up the phone then it alerts me that someone else is and/or force me to do the IrisID to unlock the phone. After years of FaceID I just expect it to work 99% of the time and it was annoying to enter in my code to use my phone, felt very anti-Apple. A very Apple thing was the Universal Control when using Mac Virtual Display which lets you control/type in other AVP apps, that felt like magic.
I can touch type just fine, it’s finding the home row to put my fingers in the start positions that is the problem. Blacking out my keyboard wouldn’t accomplish anything.
I recently had a kid and lost my office :), I've been struggling to have a set space for work when he's asleep, but would absolutely love it if I could just put on a headset. Is it workable for that?
I used to try to code in the quest3 but the resolution felt like I might as well be coding on my phone. I'll go buy one today if this would be an office replacement for me.
from experience — yes, absolutely. It's not as good as a dedicated, already-optimized work space, but it comes pretty darn close.
I have a great workspace well-tailored for me with a massive desk, ultrawide monitor, nice speakers, etc., but I still pop into my vision pro and screen mirror my laptop to get work done. If I'm having trouble focusing, the environments and white noise generation are really helpful. I've also noticed that it really boosts my productivity when I would otherwise be disturbed by a cluttered environment.
Go get a demo at an Apple Store. They won't show you Mac Virtual Display and the clarity of the AVP/iPad apps is good, pictures/experiences are breathtaking. MVD is not that clear, full stop. Also, try to resize an app with text down to the size you would use for a window on your computer. You can't. I constantly found myself wishing to make apps smaller but you can't and so you get limited quickly on what you can fit in front of you/in your field of vision. I even wish there was a way to switch to the iPhone app instead then so I could see more. I wonder if part of that limitation is that the text won't be as legible if it's smaller.
One day it will get there, today is not that day. That said, you should go try it at an Apple Store, it's free to do.
Alright I can definitely say Apple in store support has gone downhill since years ago when Jobs was around and they were more luxury feel, not to date myself too much.
Signed up for a demo, booked a week in advance, got there and waited the entire length of the demo (30 min) to even have the one person doing demos get to me. Then, no way for them to show the only thing I care about for this, which is viewing a display to see if working is possible. Not only that, but unlike Quest demos I’ve done, there seemed to
Be a very strict demo flow. Might as well have just watched a video.
Welp, going to just cost them money instead since they have a 14 day return policy so planning on “demoing” myself. I’ll keep it if it can actually do this but 80% sure they’ll be processing a return from me in two weeks.
Weird way to try to sell an expensive device. Also seeing returns are like 50% which aligns with them not actually letting people demo beyond a set path to find if they want it or not.
The difference between the quest 3 and your phone is the monitor sizes. I have 4 monitors in immersed and while not high res, this is far more convenient than a phone (and for me than actual monitors; I hate stationary monitors workspaces). But I guess it might depend on what you actually do.
Completely different from my reality; the selective blurring when connected to a laptop hurts my eyes and forces me to refocus them constantly. The limited field of vision stops where I can place my windows and displays without moving my head. The resolution noticeably worse (as expected) than my 2 year old 5K monitor.
My imagination ran a bit wild and I thought of a sort of "respirator" one could wear for enhanced immersion, featuring artificial odors. Maybe even a small straw to sip your preferred beverage from, like one of those water pouches hikers carry.
I'm so glad that some people are able to use it in this way and I'm jealous. I found the code too blurry [0] and I disliked being limited to 1 blurry screen with 3 clear monitors available to me. I ended up returning mine but I can't wait till I can work inside one of those without feeling limited. It's easy to imagine a future where the AVP beats my monitors and I can't wait.
This feels like one of those activities that's so drastically different that there may be serious health concerns about it. Wearing a VR headset to play a few hours of games a week still lets your eyes mostly exist in a natural light setting. When you're wearing a VR display the light is right up against your eyes with no possibility for them to look away to relax. When we're normally working we can glance out at a horizon (hopefully - sometimes you don't have a window) or at least let your eyes wander off to the ceiling and defocus. It seems like giving your eyes a chance to relax (i.e. having narrow glasses where part of your view field is out of focus) can be beneficial at delaying the onset of Myopia. The idea of wearing one of these for eight hours a day feels much worse than even staring at a phone in your hand when it comes to eye health.
That's entirely a consequence of the made-for-marketing headstrap instead of the headset itself. Check out companies like BOBOVR that make more ergonomic headstraps (not for AVP yet, but they've hinted at working on it).
This is my goal and hope, but I'll temper OP's points with how things stand today.
Background: I got my AVP on Monday 5th (having gotten up before dawn to place my order when it first became available). I am a programmer with a multi-screen setup to maximize my usable workspace, which consists of editor, terminal, and browser windows. My hope is for the AVP to replace a set of fixed screens, and have in effect infinite screen space.
The AVP has worse Angular Resolution than a monitor, at average 34 Pixels-Per-Degree (PPD) vs a monitor's 64 PPD (more details in iFixit's writeup [1]).
This is an inevitable consequence of placing a screen so close to your eyes. The AVP's exceptional screen technology mitigates this (and for me completely eliminates the "screen door" effect that plagued earlier VR sets), but it can't beat Physics.
So for one thing, you cannot have the legible text density of, say, 2 27" monitors an arm's length away. In other words, the equivalent amount of text will take more space in your vision on the AVP.
This is understandable. But where the AVP really has a problem, but I really hope they improve, is window management.
Someone quipped that, from an app/window management perspective, the AVP is like sticking an iPad on your face, and I agree.
As someone who's used to moving and resizing windows around with Tiling window managers on Linux and SizeUp or Moom on macOS, the window management of the AVP is really awkward. Say you put your editor large front-and-center, but now want to switch to a terminal, or resize the editor to put a reference on the side? The hand control may feel magical, but you're going to be doing a lot of it to move and resize your windows.
But these are software UX problems, and I'm gambling on Apple fixing them over time.
OPfftopic: the text preview bar following your wireless mac keyboard around is the standout AR feature for me. If that sounds unimpressive, I agree; I have yet to experience truly impressive AR on the AVP. But it's still early, so I'm hopeful.
its been 14 years on the iPad and even longer on MacOS and neither of them have good window management, I really don't think Apple will come up with a good solution on the vision pro
MacOS has had features like expose and Mission Control for many years. Even something like that would be a big step forward for window management in visionOS.
I wonder if using something like stage manager on Vision Pro would cause a lot of people to get motion sickness… I can imagine large windows flying around in virtual space three or 4 feet from you is going to cause a lot of disorientation for many people.
I like the comparison: like a good pair of earphones for your eyes. That’s a nice succinct summary and gets to when and how the device operates best - when detaching from your surroundings helps you in some way. That marginal value every day isn’t for me but I can see how it could be for many, especially as the price drops over time.
Any idea how the author was able to have multiple desktop screens? What app is he using for this? I thought it only allowed you to mirror one screen per Mac and from my experience it is quite laggy.
This is the problem(with Apple); this device, like iOS devices, is fenced off, so you cannot run vscode etc if you don’t connect a MacBook. For this device it’s actually worse than an iPad to disallow that: it’s 4x as expensive as a MacBook Air here but I cannot run most apps I want on it while that would make me buy one today. I don’t want another iPad (which I bought because it’s nice and small and great battery, but if I cannot code on it normally, what’s the point).
No, the only reason you can't run vscode is that no one has put in the effort to port it. It's a problem of financial incentives and not a problem of "fences."
Edit: Desktop software can be ported to other operating systems. Just because an operating system can't run a different, desktop operating system's software that doesn't mean it can't run desktop software. The CPU is used in iPads too. It is used between 3 different form factors.
Only the ‘shell’; not all the rest that make it practical. There are a lot of blog posts (a yearly one here) of people trying to code on iPads; they all end badly because Apple allows nothing. It’s fenched off. Nothing to do with lack of incentive to port Xcode; there are plenty of code apps on iPad, they just cannot run real envs (docker, anything other than toy interpreters etc) without rooting.
"fences" is definitely not the best analogy. "spikes and minefields" would be more appropriate as Apple has explicit rules against apps that compile and run code, third party extensions would also probably be prohibited, and the terminal would have little use.
At the end of the day what's possible under the current rules aren't that different from just running it in Safari, so why bother ?
It is a new operating system with a different api and security model. Binaries on one operating system with the same processor does not necessarily run if you run it on another operating system using the same hardware.
Meh, it's not like everyone has been working from the beach or lakeside up until now. I'd wager it's less dystopian than your current setup staring at the wall of your home or office, maybe with a window to a view of nothing in an office you're forced to drive to.
Sure! Thank you. There's a few good definitions out there, some more absolute than others, but none of which quite capture the generally subjective nature of it. Personally tend to align more towards the "corrupted utopia", esp. where acceptance is controversial or blurred
... think the matrix or fahrenheit 451.
But the scene I pictured when I read that line, rightly or wrongly, was straight out of pearl jam's do the evolution. It's evolution baby.
I can't think of any version of dystopia that would be defined by "working your comfortable office job from your multi-story family home while experimenting with a multi thousand dollar piece of high tech equipment which can provide virtual experiences the likes of which was mere science fiction just two decades earlier purchased with your own money the month it was released to the public" Certainly no more dystopic than the very idea of remote work in general.
Still less dystopian than forcing people to commute for an hour to sit in noisy open offices to teleconference with other people not at the office. Dystopian status quos breed dystopian solutions, sadly.
It's not a perfect product by any means. The question is, has Apple backed itself into any corners? Can the battery life or field of view be improved? The resolution? The weight? I think in all cases, Apple has a technical path forward.
Despite its imperfections, wow is it fantastic. I'm writing now from a Mac virtual display (which, yes, is a bit blurry). But how could I return this thing? It's the most impressive product Apple's ever made and it's genuinely useful. It's not an expensive novelty by any means. What an achievement.
But, I think you should consider a pair of AR glasses from xreal or rokid. They cost a fraction of the price, have less latency, and you don't need to worry about battery life.
They're also much much more portable. I think using AVP primarily as an external display is a huge huge waste.
Funnily enough, your Mac laptop in the real world has better pixels per degree of vision. If you just take the headset off it’s more clear.
The Vision Pro wants to be a VR headset that throws away the existing VR ecosystem. No VR controllers, no beat saber, no Oculus Link, no PC VR.
At the same time, it wants to be a productivity machine that can’t compile its own code and has the same software limitations as iPadOS.
Mobile airplane computer? It fits in a backpack worse than a regular laptop and gets 1/10 the battery life. You could buy an economy plus subscription from United Airlines for 7 years for the same price and just use your laptop on the plane.
I agree that Apple has paths forward to fix all of this, but I disagree that they will go down those paths. I see Apple products like the iPad stagnating because Apple refuses to take them beyond a constrained vision. Apple will never let you install applications outside of their walled garden and they’ll never let you compile code on the Vision Pro.
That’s fine for an entertainment device like a $500 Quest 3 but a $3,500 “spatial computer?”
Yes, I am exaggerating a little bit, but frankly coding like this is kinda silly, you don't need this headset to fancy manipulate text presentation when the really important thing, the abstractions, are in your brain.
I find the comparison to "headphones" for your eyes really interesting because it might provide a long-term view as to the Vision Pro's place on the computer market. Desktop speakers and Hi-Fi home stereo equipment are obviously still a thing today, and, in a few generation (and with the advent of more competition), the case of bigger desktops (and possibly laptops/tablets) might be analogous to today's headphone-loudspeaker duality.
I don't know if it's intentional, but it's a reference to a Steve Jobs quote from 2005:
"Headphones are a miraculous thing. You put on a pair of headphones and you get the same experience you get with a great pair of speakers, right? There’s no such thing as headphones for video. There’s not something I can carry with me, that I can put on and it gives me the same experience I get when I’m watching my 50-inch plasma display at home. Until someone invents that, you’re gonna have these opposing constraints."
Walt Mossberg then mentions goggles, and Jobs says "but they're lousy!" (And Walt adds, "you never get a date if you wear them.")
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 371 ms ] threadVision Pro is approaching a quality that I feel is acceptable, somewhere between "flawless reality" and a decent screen. The virtual environments are crisper than the camera passthrough mixed environments.
There is definitely room for improvement on screen quality, but in general I am impressed.
I can definitely see pixels on the device if I’m wearing contacts unlike what most of the early reviewers claimed.
But it’s not so bad as to be unusable and you don’t really notice them in most contexts - the main place I notice pixels is using it as a screen for macOS. VisionOS apps are rendered very large by default so the resolution deficiencies aren’t as apparent.
Overall it is very impressive but there’s also much room for improvement in resolution.
Personally I can't see any pixelation. It's even better than reality. That being said passthrough cameras' resolution do suck but it's not what it's important and probably the easiest problem to solve.
Does it obviate the need for the 149$ Zeiss add-ons ?
Do you blink enough in the environment ?
The main advantage is that it's less crowded in there, I suppose.
Why would I actually want that? You've been able to do this for decades by hooking a TV up to your laptop and while that certainly has space challenges that limit the number of people that'll try it, it's not like tech bloggers were flocking to hook up 65" TVs to their macs and lovingly wax poetic about the productivity gains, either.
You can choose 4k resolution and get extra real estate
I just went to an Apple Store to demo the Vision Pro and walked out feeling like I had a religious experience. I was overcame with emotion over that immersion demo, those baby rhinos completely blew my mind. I'm booking another appointment soon to get another taste. I really hope the price becomes manageable for consumers like me; I love the tech and want the future but can't afford it.
I took it off yesterday before some friends came over for dinner and I was kind of shocked that it had gotten dark outside because my mind felt like it was still day time since the sun was out in mount hood. I had actually been sitting on my office in darkness for a least an hour.
My 6k monitor kicked the butt of the spatial computing screen. My Macbook was easier to use. I could use my phone laying on the side.
There were ultimately a lot better, less blurry display options.
The same as the `Pro Display XDR` but with more ports, and half the cost.
I have the XDR and got it as I live in an apartment which gets a ton of natural sunlight and the XDR goes to 1000 nits sustained brightness (1600 peak for hdr). The specs of the Dell panel indicate max brightness of 450 nits, so not at all comparable.
I'd love for this thing to reach it's full potential as this 'work from a mountaintop, but really your garage' device, but I feel like until the resolution gets to the same as existing monitors (no small task, I know) it's just...not as good for the vast majority of use cases.
Because of lag, or why?
Many people work on remote desktop all day long, and I spend my fair share of time in SSH sessions as well. It's not like it improves the experience compared to working locally, but for me it works fine so long as you're within a few hundred kilometers without much jitter. On the VR, the screen should move as you move your head because that position isn't what's being passed through, so that can't be the difference either. I don't understand (without having a device myself) how/whether this is worse than normal video streaming over LAN?
And I'd assume that yes, it would be torture to try to view a monitor through the AVP just due to the resolution loss. It would be like poorly downscaling the 4k/5k resolution of your 27" monitor to like 1366x768 but much worse since the pixels are not even staying lined up on a level grid but resampled at slightly diagonal angles as your head moves even a couple of degrees. I am pretty sure setting up 2 more big $1000 monitors left and right would be better than "center monitor + AVP with virtual apps left and right" (and it would save about $2000 lol).
For coding you don't need a 2k$ monitor setup, you can get by comfortably on 3-400$.
It's an interesting argument but they are going to need to try a lot harder for it to be a compelling desktop replacement.
I wonder if it could largely be replaced by native AVP apps or a better way for them to send out data from the Mac to the headset once there is broader software support?
It’s felt more like I was playing a simulator game of myself coding, and it was not enjoyable at all.
I often wonder how people who actually work at fast paced places as engineers are claiming to be more productive with this strapped on.
If I just ingested and read email and slack messages all day, or talked in zoom all day, sure (maybe), but I don’t.
1. Having more screen real estate in my small home office. I often dive into spaghetti code, and seeing more of it helps me maintain context.
2. Working in my RV. I can’t take my extra screens with me (it’s a multi-use family RV, so I’m not mounting anything. Plus, there isn’t room.), and I’m so, so excited about having more screen real estate in there. We lived/worked in it for 3 months last summer, and it was really nice coming home to more screens at the end of the trip.
Very curious to see how tolerable the UX is in an environment that's almost always experiencing some degree of motion independent of the user.
It’s amazing to me what people will do to avoid being present in the moment. You’re on a sailboat, enjoy it, smell the ocean, feel the water on your face, breathe deeply and take it all in. If you’re just going to strap goggles on your face to blind you to the beauty around you, then why did you even get a sailboat to begin with?
Besides the ocean and elements, there's also a certain beauty in using the latest technology to operate a SAAS company from almost anywhere on the planet.
When I’m on PTO, my laptop doesn’t go with me. I absolutely use all my PTO every year.
I expect our radius to get smaller as our child gets older and goes to school, but we are very passionate about being outdoors as much as possible.
For example - I helped build a mutually accessible structure in a national forest, and my favorite work days are out there. We installed solar last summer, so it’s workable year round now.
Zoom calls were cool, but nobody could take the Persona seriously.
After a few days the eye strain seemed to get worse and worse, until yesterday it give me such a bad headache I decided that was enough.
This is going to be another of their socially awkward gimmicks like Memojis they will double down until they inevitably fail.
I really feel like Apple actually just doesn’t feel it and every time they’re pushing their weird geeky ideas onto their users they loose a bit of coolness factor. And if kids decide Apple got too cringe, while someone else manages to use that to spin their momentum (think e.g. Nokia respawning riding the 90s sentiment wave), they may actually start to seriously struggle.
From my broad circle in the US and Europe, I know one person who sends one maybe once a quarter.
What do you mean? Obviously normies all browse the web in emacs and write their own plugins in elisp.
Or maybe you lack perspective, because maybe some people use it in your circle, but otherwise it’s very unpopular?
Observational fallacies work both ways.
Lots of people use Facebook but virtually nobody considers Facebook to be fashionable.
Meta doesn't care if Facebook is fashionable, but the more Apple looks like Meta, the bigger the opening for being disrupted on that front gets.
I don't necessarily agree. Some have talked about how the weirdness starts to fade after getting into a conversation and focusing on the discussion or collaboration at hand. It seems that once the brain has adjusted a bit, it can start to fill in for the badness somewhat.
The feature clearly has a long way to go before it's good, but I think it's premature to dismiss it. Future iterations will only improve, so if some people are finding some success with it now, that will only grow.
But it’s been over 5 years since Apple started pushing Memojis, they still continued as recently as last year and they have little adoption still, as far as I am aware.
Those who watched WWDC remember how cringey those Memoji bits were, I specifically refer to that aspect of their being increasingly out of touch.
But I think these are different enough capabilities that the success or failure of one is not necessarily predictive of the other.
Just google news Memojis and see what you get. Hardly any content, and if you navigate 2-3 pages further, you quickly reach 2022 and 2021 articles.
If that doesn't scream "low adoption" then I don't know what does.
Google Trends seems more likely to be instructive, and as a topic, it has shown fairly steady (if low) interest over time after peaking on release with some periodic spikes most likely correlated with major updates.
But as a feature, I wouldn't expect even Google trends to be very instructive (for understanding adoption), since people who know how to use them aren't likely to be out there searching. More use = more familiarity = less searching. Who knows; maybe they're barely used, but there isn't good data to back up that claim, and there are a number of other ways to interpret the data that does exist.
With all of that said, I'll maintain that I don't see any real connection between them and Personas, or any predictive value in comparing them.
For the record, my point here was: More use = more familiarity = better writing subject for portals and journalism
Even if they made a small misstep or had an awkward moment in a launch announcement, it was seen as endearing and forgivable.
But there seem to be an increase in moments where Apple comes across as behind the curve, or not as aware of where the public is at relative to them, compared to then.
Lolwhut?? Microsoft wishes it had a fraction of the echo chamber Apple fans create. It's what Apple is known for.
>Even if they made a small misstep or had an awkward moment in a launch announcement, it was seen as endearing and forgivable.
Uhhhh... "You're holding it wrong" was an absolute unmitigated PR disaster for Apple. It was one of the worst kinks ever in the "reality distortion field". People were rightly pissed. It was smug and stupid, not endearing.
I cringe every time I hear someone say this to malign stupid users. Yes, I hear it at work.
Some people legit only read the headlines about that story, not the articles.
You either have some rendered 3D model or you take the headset off when making a call.
Physics dictates that those are your only two choices.
This thing is like $5k all-in and even then you have to get on a waiting list. I wouldn’t really say that they’re pushing this on people.
Apple hasn't been cool for a long, long time. Everyone has an iPhone so it's no longer special. It's just a waste of money when you can get basically the same android phone for half the price
It's not perfect. It's not even good. But it's better than nothing.
Curious if you've ever gotten your vision tested?
I don't need glasses in everyday life, but I did go to an optometrist and got a pair anyways after I got annoyed one night that a friend could read a faraway sign and I couldn't quite. They make things a little bit sharper but not that it ever makes a difference for anything I actually need.
But then I discovered that if I wear them, zero eye strain in VR. Without them my eyes hurt after 20 minutes. With them, I can use VR for hours, zero problem.
No idea why. And I can't seem to find much information on it, but I asked my optometrist and they said it's a whole thing -- people who wear glasses sometimes not to see better, but to reduce eye strain and headaches.
Personally I found AVP to be most draining if I'm moving my head around a lot and experiencing this motion blur. If I'm just looking at the screen in front of me, I get fatigued less
I wonder if there's something similar here going on. Since we rely so heavily on vision for everything(Especially balance). Any difference to our normal perception will cause "exhaustion" of sorts. But maybe wearing it continuously for days can cause our body to adapt to it?(Which, obviously is impossible for AVPs)
(pure conjecture, I last used lenses fifteen twenty years ago)
https://appleinsider.com/inside/apple-vision-pro/tips/why-ap...
The software should probably force text to be aligned on whole real pixels, even if that detracts a little from the realism.
And the best would probably be to keep virtual screens completely fixed until you move by a certain, largish degree (as an option).
Then again, maybe this has nothing to do with the straining.
I think that'd be difficult given that pixels are effectively "non-rectangular" given the warping from the lenses.
Remember that you're working with two screens, not one, and they have to have coordinated projections that will also depend on the user's IPD.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pupillary_distance
Text in streamed displays from a Mac may suffer from pixel misalignment.
Also your eyes can't really focus the same, anything within about 12 ft causes you to struggle to focus leading to eye strain. This is an unfortunate reality of the lenses
It's a bunch of factors. Heavy, lots of pressure on a few specific points, the dangling cable to a slippery battery which I had to leave plugged in all day, the grainy passthrough... But most of all it's just too heavy. And connection would sometimes get janky between Mac and Vision Pro.
I've got high hopes for generation 2 and 3 but it needs time to cook.
My NReal Air are nice glasses, but the fact that I can’t look away from the huge ass screen is annoying af. Eye movements can only get you so far, and the intuitive head movement does not work. Argh!
Some people seem to be suggesting the higher quality of the Vision Pro overcomes this, but I'm starting to really wonder. Would even more resolution actually solve it? Or maybe there's really no way around the discomfort for some of us.
Sounds nice for the office, but find myself conflicted with the notional operating value prop of continuously juicing north of 200W less graphics compute (?!) just putting idle pixels on screen on a home workstation that seldom gets shutdown.
Curious if you've realized meaningful productivity gains since switching to that setup, and what graphics card(s) are you using to drive them?
I’d also like to see app re-render your iPhone, Apple Watch and ipad screens which are pretty blurry in pass through. Also some sort of workaround for Face ID on iPhone when you’re wearing Vision Pro. Seems like things Apple is uniquely positioned to do.
Totally agree, I just made the same comment elsewhere in this thread. And yes, if I've authenticated with IrisID or whatever it's called then when I raise my phone do the same thing that allows my mac to unlock from my watch. Throw a little notification in the headset (some sound/animation) so if it's not me picking up the phone then it alerts me that someone else is and/or force me to do the IrisID to unlock the phone. After years of FaceID I just expect it to work 99% of the time and it was annoying to enter in my code to use my phone, felt very anti-Apple. A very Apple thing was the Universal Control when using Mac Virtual Display which lets you control/type in other AVP apps, that felt like magic.
It's not impossible, it's just annoying.
It would be nice if they could take input as well, to display inside a screen somewhere (HDMI or whatever).
I feel pretty confident we're going to have this available as sunglasses before I'm dead, which is pretty cool.
I used to try to code in the quest3 but the resolution felt like I might as well be coding on my phone. I'll go buy one today if this would be an office replacement for me.
I have a great workspace well-tailored for me with a massive desk, ultrawide monitor, nice speakers, etc., but I still pop into my vision pro and screen mirror my laptop to get work done. If I'm having trouble focusing, the environments and white noise generation are really helpful. I've also noticed that it really boosts my productivity when I would otherwise be disturbed by a cluttered environment.
One day it will get there, today is not that day. That said, you should go try it at an Apple Store, it's free to do.
Signed up for a demo, booked a week in advance, got there and waited the entire length of the demo (30 min) to even have the one person doing demos get to me. Then, no way for them to show the only thing I care about for this, which is viewing a display to see if working is possible. Not only that, but unlike Quest demos I’ve done, there seemed to Be a very strict demo flow. Might as well have just watched a video.
Welp, going to just cost them money instead since they have a 14 day return policy so planning on “demoing” myself. I’ll keep it if it can actually do this but 80% sure they’ll be processing a return from me in two weeks.
Weird way to try to sell an expensive device. Also seeing returns are like 50% which aligns with them not actually letting people demo beyond a set path to find if they want it or not.
Now I can sit on my couch in a much more comfortable and ergonomic? position with 4k screen size virtual display.
Plus I can watch movies with the sound on and not wake anyone up.
[0] https://joshstrange.com/2024/02/04/apple-vision-pro-writing-...
One improvement vs phones is there’s no more bending the neck down to look at something in your hands.
Interesting times!
Background: I got my AVP on Monday 5th (having gotten up before dawn to place my order when it first became available). I am a programmer with a multi-screen setup to maximize my usable workspace, which consists of editor, terminal, and browser windows. My hope is for the AVP to replace a set of fixed screens, and have in effect infinite screen space.
The AVP has worse Angular Resolution than a monitor, at average 34 Pixels-Per-Degree (PPD) vs a monitor's 64 PPD (more details in iFixit's writeup [1]).
This is an inevitable consequence of placing a screen so close to your eyes. The AVP's exceptional screen technology mitigates this (and for me completely eliminates the "screen door" effect that plagued earlier VR sets), but it can't beat Physics.
So for one thing, you cannot have the legible text density of, say, 2 27" monitors an arm's length away. In other words, the equivalent amount of text will take more space in your vision on the AVP.
This is understandable. But where the AVP really has a problem, but I really hope they improve, is window management.
Someone quipped that, from an app/window management perspective, the AVP is like sticking an iPad on your face, and I agree.
As someone who's used to moving and resizing windows around with Tiling window managers on Linux and SizeUp or Moom on macOS, the window management of the AVP is really awkward. Say you put your editor large front-and-center, but now want to switch to a terminal, or resize the editor to put a reference on the side? The hand control may feel magical, but you're going to be doing a lot of it to move and resize your windows.
But these are software UX problems, and I'm gambling on Apple fixing them over time.
[1] https://www.ifixit.com/News/90409/vision-pro-teardown-part-2...
It feels so perfect for this use but it’s a shame it doesn’t exist
I would expect any window management system to be the same when auto tiling
You can tell by the icon floating at the top right of the windows, which appears for "compatible apps" aka iPad apps.
It helps that I have optimised a great part of my workflow due to me liking tablets.
Like others have said, AVP is like strapping an iPad on your head - I happen to like my iPad, too.
So it's not multiple desktop screens it's multiple windows from locally running apps.
No, the only reason you can't run vscode is that no one has put in the effort to port it. It's a problem of financial incentives and not a problem of "fences."
Edit: so it is indeed similar/same; cannot run normal desktop software even though desktop cpu.
Edit: Desktop software can be ported to other operating systems. Just because an operating system can't run a different, desktop operating system's software that doesn't mean it can't run desktop software. The CPU is used in iPads too. It is used between 3 different form factors.
At the end of the day what's possible under the current rules aren't that different from just running it in Safari, so why bother ?
Probably what they do and it's most likely more marketing than a really new OS with breaking changes to how apps run, but I haven't looked into it.
Define dystopia.
But the scene I pictured when I read that line, rightly or wrongly, was straight out of pearl jam's do the evolution. It's evolution baby.
Despite its imperfections, wow is it fantastic. I'm writing now from a Mac virtual display (which, yes, is a bit blurry). But how could I return this thing? It's the most impressive product Apple's ever made and it's genuinely useful. It's not an expensive novelty by any means. What an achievement.
But, I think you should consider a pair of AR glasses from xreal or rokid. They cost a fraction of the price, have less latency, and you don't need to worry about battery life.
They're also much much more portable. I think using AVP primarily as an external display is a huge huge waste.
The Vision Pro wants to be a VR headset that throws away the existing VR ecosystem. No VR controllers, no beat saber, no Oculus Link, no PC VR.
At the same time, it wants to be a productivity machine that can’t compile its own code and has the same software limitations as iPadOS.
Mobile airplane computer? It fits in a backpack worse than a regular laptop and gets 1/10 the battery life. You could buy an economy plus subscription from United Airlines for 7 years for the same price and just use your laptop on the plane.
I agree that Apple has paths forward to fix all of this, but I disagree that they will go down those paths. I see Apple products like the iPad stagnating because Apple refuses to take them beyond a constrained vision. Apple will never let you install applications outside of their walled garden and they’ll never let you compile code on the Vision Pro.
That’s fine for an entertainment device like a $500 Quest 3 but a $3,500 “spatial computer?”
Yes, I am exaggerating a little bit, but frankly coding like this is kinda silly, you don't need this headset to fancy manipulate text presentation when the really important thing, the abstractions, are in your brain.
Tons of people buy high spec laptops, or high spec desktops with high spec monitors and high spec keyboards just to code.
Turns out people pay for an experience that suits them.
Yet, I find it very interesting to explore what tomorrow's work could look like given this approach to 'spatial computing'.
Because tech will eventually become cheaper and better, perhaps reaching a level that is won't costs more than any other piece of gear.
"Headphones are a miraculous thing. You put on a pair of headphones and you get the same experience you get with a great pair of speakers, right? There’s no such thing as headphones for video. There’s not something I can carry with me, that I can put on and it gives me the same experience I get when I’m watching my 50-inch plasma display at home. Until someone invents that, you’re gonna have these opposing constraints."
Walt Mossberg then mentions goggles, and Jobs says "but they're lousy!" (And Walt adds, "you never get a date if you wear them.")