I recently took a long flight and brought my Quest device, set to travel mode. It worked great! Pretty much the same experience as this article describes.
One protip, I bought a 512G flash drive and loaded it with content. Then I could pop the drive in and play movies off it. I did not want to deal with needing connectivity for DRM or other server checks.
Highly recommend that people try this out, the next time you travel. It’s a killer use case for VR.
There’s a headphone port in the Quest 3. I just got a $20 set of wired headphones for it. I think you can connect via Bluetooth for wireless but I have t tried.
Aside from the Meta integration which will always be a non-starter for me, it would be great if Quest and other headsets followed Apple's design with an external battery pack. I wonder if there are/will ever be "dumb headsets" that are powered/ran by a phone.
You can extend your Quest with third-party accessories to do this. I got a better head strap with external battery support + 2 batteries and charger from BoboVR. With the magnetic snap-in the batteries can be easily replaced mid-play, in essence providing infinite charge time.
The very first gen of untethered headsets were powered by the phone. They quickly realized that the phone stack in that phone stole too many resources to reach the performance they wanted. The Quest came out "shortly" after that Carmack presentation.
I have a Quest 2 and a Quest 3 - both headsets allow you to continue using them while they're plugged into an external battery pack or charger, so you can absolutely do this already.
I agree it'd be nice to have an external CPU pack for heat and weight reasons, but we're not quite there yet. The closest thing currently is wireless streaming via a PC running Steam VR, but that's not exactly portable.
I believe XREAL headsets are exactly that. Bulky sunglasses form factor, Pepper's Ghost optical setup, dumb display by itself + 3DoF for comfort with an adapter, takes DP Alt input.
Pretty much yes, there are already hints that this will be coming but for the current experience what would be the benefit Quest with battery included is already the same weight as the Vision Pro without the battery. So just add an external battery bank via USB and you have the same weight experience
Yeah, as a first-gen Quest owner I got no idea what they're going on about. My favorite feature is how light it feels with the battery included - I can use it comfortably with no wires for 2-3 hours, then take it off and let it recharge. If I need more runtime, I plug it in.
If Meta made new versions of the Quest without the battery built in I think I'd actively avoid it.
Do you know that you can create a Meta account with a one-time email address, fake name, and no connection to any other Meta service but the Quest platform? That may still be more connection to Meta than you prefer, but to many "Meta integration" implies an automatic linkage to Facebook or Instagram.
They only recommend your real name in case you need to recover your account.
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To create a Meta account using your email address, you will need to provide:
Email: You can only create one Meta account per email address.
First and last name: We recommend using your real name in case you need to recover your account or manage your store purchases.
Birthday: You need to be at least 13 years old (or the applicable age in your region) to set up and manage your own Meta account. If you are between 10 and 12 (or the applicable age in your region), then you need a Meta account that’s managed by a parent or guardian.
Password: This must be at least 8 characters. Avoid passwords that someone could easily guess.
Why? There's are already 1000s of external batteries. Unless you mean you think Meta should do it so they can charge 4x of any other battery like Apple does?
Quest is also lighter than Vision Pro, even with it's built in battery
Depends on the content, but some disc rips, some ytdl, some internal corporate stuff that I just hit Save As. The nice thing about the Quest, it is pretty much just a computer so lots of formats can get played (and you can even just copy files to the filesystem in a format the e.g. BigscreenVR or other video player apps can read)
I have a Quest One collecting dust, but now I'm thinking it might be fun to bring it on a long flight if I know the onboard entertainment will be really lacking--some airlines I've been on have really reduced the TV/movie selections for some reason.
An iPad works pretty well for in-flight entertainment like video or reading. Though I’ll just bring a Kindle on a shorter trip where I sort of know I won’t be watching video.
It is also one of the few public places to 'safely' do it.
Would you feel comfortable wearing one and limiting your awareness of your surroundings on a public bus? In a coffee shop? Sitting outside a coffee shop? In a park? In a pub?
And also your answers may be yes if you are male, but I can imagine in the current world we live in a lot of women would feel potentially at risk if they were wearing these in public.
You assume that most train rides offer a good view, and a view that the commuter would find novel.
If I’m taking a commuter train every day , my view is not something great. Most of the time it’s rundown houses, tunnels or fences. This has been my experience in the UK, US and Canada.
If I’m taking a more long distance train, you assume I’m sat on the side with a view. Ever taken a mountain train? One side just gets rocks wizzing by.
You also assume they’re travelling in weather and a time of day that affords them a good view. Traveling at night? Traveling in misty weather?
And all that aside, you assume they’d prefer to look at the same things you do.
I guess that is based on experience as I have commuted in the swiss alps for years by train. There is even a tunnel when you are comming from Freiburg in direction of Lausanne/Geneva where you can count down the exact moment the tourists will let escape a collective woooaaaaah once the train exit the tunnel to a majestic view of Lake of Geneva with the alps and the Mont Blanc in the background.
There are some views you never get tired of looking at, especially as seasons, weather, clouds and time of the day makes it an ever changing postcard.
All in all in most of europe the trains usually offer nice views and I often find myself daydreaming about climbing that dirt trail on the left with my bike, riding my motorbike on that twisty road on the right side a few minutes later and what kind of life was it living 500 years ago in the old castle I can see here.
At the same time, I feel you are being dismissive of the beauty around us every day. I used to bus the same route every day for months; and every day I would look out my window and just take it in. People watching, seeing buildings grow under construction, the changing of the trees. The sunset is always beautiful, imo.
Because not everyone has the same view afforded to them at all times?
Again, you are fortunate to have a view that you enjoy. That doesn’t extend to others, unless you believe that there are no other situations on the planet other than your own.
This is one of the most tone-deaf moments I have ever seen in an internet discussion. The guy lives in the closest thing we have to heaven on earth, a bountiful paradise of gorgeous beauty admired from afar the world over, and says to those of us living in crap-world that we should be grateful for what nature gives us.
I am not living there anymore and I still like to take the train and enjoy looking at the window. Sometimes it is just looking at people doing stuff.
You might find that real life is boring, I find that most tv shows and movies are super predictable, following the very similar scenaristic mechanics and aren't more entertaining. Obviously some are also very nice, but these are the ones you would like to watch comfortably on your sofa or in a theater, not in a train or plane anyway.
Maybe record that amazing commute so the less fortunate train travelers can play it on an Apple Vision Pro? Bit of a rubbish arrival surprise at work, but we can solve that next!
Still, are those temporary inconveniences so dull that you can't read a book or something? Why cling to a desperate need for hyper stimulation when you could just relax with a newspaper or book. Oh jeez, it's misty out, and I forgot my ridiculous VR goggles, guess I'll just be sad :(
My comment, in retrospect, came across needlessly aggro and dismissive, and I apologize for that; the downvotes were justified and I don't know what frame of mind I was in. Your comment struck me as a complaint about circumstances though rather than interest, to which I'd say have at it, do what you want to do with the tech you want to do it with; I just personally can't relate to the temporary lack of novelty during a commute seeming like a sensible reason for spending so much on this particular kind of device that doesn't really seem to serve another purpose. A steam deck, iPad pro, portable gaming system perhaps, all kinds of others, but the AVP seems like a bit out of scope somehow. I personally bring along a Nintendo DS, or a book, or whatever else, but I'd kind of think if my commute was so sufficiently long and dull that I'd want something more substantial, I'd just really start looking into a much bigger change.
I've taken the train across the Canadian prairies, and my god is that dull, but I just chatted with people, did a bit on my laptop, looked out the window since there always is one, read, used my Gameboy. If I wanted to completely immerse myself in anything but the train experience, I'd just fly, it's cheaper anyway
Out of curiosity, have you tried the Vision Pro ? I legitimately ask because it sounds like you think it isolates you somehow from the rest of the world around you.
But you can still see the world and communicate with others. Why is that materially different than being engrossed in a handheld video game with headphones in?
Also all your examples of other stuff you do to occupy the time, they are all temporary. Why do you think the Vision Pro user would use it the whole ride?
I think this is down to the Boolean nature of “is this normalized or not”
Because it’s not normalized, people don’t afford it the same benefit of the doubt of other things that they have normalized in their life.
No I haven't, and I am somewhat curious, but I'm also keeping up with it through some of the swift/apple podcasts and YT channels I follow. For me it's more about the cost, physical overhead, and (apparent) lack of other utility, which all-together would to me be sort of a more involved commitment than some little thing I may or may not ever bring out..
I'd only ever consider bringing something that is nearly invisible to both myself and others in terms of weight and required infrastructure, wouldn't bring anything with me for the purpose of occupying my attention that I can't forget I have, or that would consume more than a negligible amount of space/weight; I'll bring a book, but not a tome
Incidentally, Canadian cross-country trains don't even have outlets at the seat as far as I know; they're quite old sadly.
That said, I buy almost no superfluous electronics for raw consumption, and even an iPad Pro would be wildly out of scope, as nice as they seem to be, since although they do have other utility, I can't picture myself doing more than reading or watching videos. On-the-go entertainment is something I try to keep at arms length so I can spend that time at peace.
Fwiw, I do also hope it doesn't become normalized, not to squash others' potential for fun, but because our existing devices already enable people to protect themselves from social interaction on a large scale, which strikes me as damaging.
I'd add that this is all really only applies to various modes of commuting and travel, I have no qualms with the device itself, only the idea of using it regularly in-transit.
When I take trains in Europe, I tend to look out the window, and they often have nice views.
When I take trains in the USA, I usually look out for a few seconds every couple of minutes, because it's mostly the same -- lower-middle class housing or warehouses if we're in a city, or ugly terrain outside of a city.
Having ridden both routes, the Amtrak from Denver to Reno has a spectacularly better view than the Eurostar from London to Brussels. The food is also better.
These kinds of broad comparisons are utterly useless. Continents are much too large for that kind of thing to be anything resembling accurate.
I have to say, taking the night train from Moscow to St Petersburg was eye opening.
I went from modern metropolis of skyscrapers and tower cranes to run down rusty industrial facilities that wouldn't look out of place in a STALKER game to sod roofed villages that look as they might have when Napoleon was making an ill fated expedition. Then of course a vast expanse of nothing at all.
I don't see why won't you be able use a keyboard if you can touch-type. I can imagine that a CAD or an animation app could make great use of the 3D views, a mouse for precise coordinate input, and a keyboard for numeric and text input.
I wonder how soon will Maya or CATIA offer good enough integration. Maybe they already offer it at the high end.
Apple Vision Pro can recognize a Macbook and turn that screen into the "theater" screen so you can continue using your Macbook as is with the keyboard and trackpad.
There was even a Youtuber that got annoyed of the black screen on the Macbook when doing this that he removed the screen from a Macbook altogether[0].
> The work part though? I had the same feeling as with the iPad early on. I need a keyboard and a mouse to be productive.
Both my iPad Pro and my Vision Pro have a keyboard and trackpad:
- The iPad Pro of course uses the excellent Magic Keyboard.
- The Vision Pro uses an Apple keyboard w/o numpad side by side with the Magic Trackpad, in a custom tray to hold both. (Make sure that your carryon's front pocket can hold the full tray.)
For sure if I thought I could only do work on a MacBook not an iPad Pro (what most people seem to think, insisting iPad is a consumption device), then I definitely couldn't work on a Vision Pro.
But once you've figured out how to code (e.g. VSCode using blink code, or Koder, Working Copy, Textastic, etc.), do graphic design (e.g. Affinity suite), or run Office on an iPad (Teams, Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel), the Vision Pro does those too but with "all the app windows at once" (ofc, iPad Pro 13" makes excellent use of Stage Manager for window groups).
All that said, I haven't felt a burden to pull AVP out on the plane.
iPad Pro 13" HDR with AirPods Pro USB-C using Spatial Audio that anchors to your iPad screen seem more than enough. Especially since you can share audio with a seat mate who also has AirPods, and both watch the same movie together.
Not often talked about: for doing real work, do consider a fresh glasses prescription and the Zeiss add-ins. To keep windows rectangular instead of trapezoid, insist you're under 40 regardless of your age, otherwise Zeiss do a stealth "progressive" that warps window sizes.
"Spatial Audio" is "simulated" surround. Apple is undoubtedly using its engine to pan the audio as you move around in this example, but the main point is to market Dolby Atmos as useful with only two speakers.
> "Spatial Audio" is "simulated" surround. Apple is undoubtedly using its engine to pan the audio as you move around in this example, but the main point is to market Dolby Atmos as useful with only two speakers.
Apple Music marks Dolby Atmos and Spatial Audio separately. They are not the same experience for the listener. They do work well together.
Since we only have two ears, a degree of our surround cue comes from where the sounds are when we move our heads.
Apple's "motion tracking in space" spatial audio implementation taps into that to an uncanny degree, because your own motion is not simulated. Real motion in real space results in a real sound difference from the sound model that, you're right, is simulating how that motion should sound relative to the origin.
As a listener, you start to forget the sound isn't centered out there on the anchor point, and then you start thinking the surround sounds are really surrounding you...
Note that I disagree with the second explainer's final section that surround sound speakers like Sonos are the same "spatial audio" as the motion tracking sound modeling Apple is doing.
I agree with the first explainer that Apple's Spatial Audio is a system that takes advantage of the gyroscopes and sensors in the listening device and headphones to, yes, “simulate” a 3D listening space that stays static as you move your head.
It's really unfortunate that they decided for an ios variant instead of a macos variant for the vision pro. Even if the power of macos (a real filesystem and the software library) is hidden behind a 'expert mode' or some shit.
I want to replace my macbook, I don't want to replace my ipad. I can't work properly on my ipad unless i'm using it as a dumb terminal. And at the price point of a macbook that's what it should be replacing.
People may point out that i can use it to mirror my macbook screen.. but now i'm paying 2x to replace a screen. I think this is a primary misplay in he vision pro strategy.
Give me a windowing system that lets me place windows, not in a little box that is essentially a virtual monitor, but wherever i want in my immediate vicinity. Let me put my goland/ide window front and center, let me put a terminal to the left, and my music player above.. whatever.
I'd take a vision pro with much of the compute hardware stripped out but that I can tether to a macbook via usbc/thunderbolt as well.. just not an ipad strapped to my face.
> I want to replace my macbook, I don't want to replace my ipad. [...] People may point out that i can use it to mirror my macbook screen.. but now i'm paying 2x to replace a screen. I think this is a primary misplay in he vision pro strategy.
> From our perspective, we still think the main problem with the AVP is that it only supports native iPad apps (at least for 2D apps) [...] The AVP does allow you to tether to another Mac, but this relegates its usability to that of a "laptop aid" rather than a "laptop replacement". [...] We want to do this for the engineers and knowledge workers who need the extra capabilities in VR, and for the people who want to completely replace their laptop, rather than their tablets!
"It’s a fantastic device to travel with—Be it by train or by plane, it offers an unparalleled opportunity to selectively tune out your environment and sink into an engaging activity like watching a movie or just working on your laptop. "
Lord forgive you have a new unexpected experience while traveling or expose yourself to the underclasses or subject yourself to the shtty social environment you helped create...
Side note, he was an extremely talented math nerd and his manifesto did raise some interesting questions about technology and society.
I wouldn't exactly call him a "mass murderer", he only actually killed 3 people over a 17 year time span. IMO a "mass murderer" kills a lot of people all at once in a single location, for example, like McVeigh.
He only successfully killed 3 people - he definitely tried to kill more. That has to enter into the calculus. Not only that, by sending his packages through the mail he endangered many many more people in the process.
Relatedly: What's the threshold for you for body count before someone loses credibility? 5? 10? 100? 1000?
When someone goes unhinged and starts a mail bombing campaign and then threatens to kill more people if newspapers don't print his unhinged rambling manifesto then yes I think it's very important that every mention of him be paired with understanding of the lives he ended. Fuck him. I'm glad he's dead, and I'm glad he rotted in Supermax first.
Welcome to the forum. I think that's an unfair take. They say specifically that anything more than a very simple conversation (what would you like? tea please) and they'll take it off.
Take it off for all interactions with others, yes even “would you like a drink? Yes, tea”.
Why is that simple interaction somehow exempted from “showing others respect”?
Like is he too busy blasting porn into his retinas to take it off?
Or has he paused whatever he’s using the headset for for even that interaction?
Then why leave the mask on?
The whole pass thru tech is so you can see a keyboard or pick up a cup or write something down on paper.
The digital recreation of eyes is a strange dystopian solution looking for a problem.
Saying “I’ve yet to have a problem” is absurd cope.
Ps- welcome to the forum to you too. Apparently I should assume you’re new here or you’d understand that even people who have been participating here for years can still create new accounts.
There’s a high of friction for taking AVP off and on. It’s not as simple as locking/unlocking an iPhone or folding a laptop. Not only is the fit hard to get right, but it takes 3-5 seconds to unlock with OpticID. Might not sound like much, but it’s friction.
> Be it by train or by plane, it offers an unparalleled opportunity to selectively tune out your environment and sink into an engaging activity like watching a movie or just working on your laptop.
The more time passes, the less I can shake the feeling that the world would be better if we tuned out our environment less.
> But damn, based on how well it all works now, you can just tell by the 4th or 5th generation, Apple Vision Pro will be on the face of every frequent flyer.
If it even gets that far. I’d almost be willing to take that bet, but 5 generations for this device could mean more than a decade so I don’t think any of us can say for sure.
All that said, I haven’t read the full review yet and I doubt it’ll do anything to convince me, but still I appreciate you writing it up and putting it out there. From what I’ve read so far it looks well thought out and it clearly took some effort, so kudos.
>The more time passes, the less I can shake the feeling that the world would be better if we tuned out of our environment less.
Depends on what environment that is. I mean, is there some value in hearing an ambulance siren at full volume while I'm walking down the street? Or the sound of people trying to get my attention to hand me some flyer? Or the sound of the BART?
Yes, it would be wonderful to be able to tune out the wretched poor people. Maybe a future headset will include a forcefield to actively repel potential muggers or oncoming vehicles.
This is an astoundingly uncharitable attempt to make my otherwise personal assertion classist. Am I to meet my overstimulating environment head on, further exasperating my anxiety and mental exhaustion simply to please others who think my condition is actually a signal of wealth? I am not able to do so, and I am not apologetic about it.
i agree but i think what the parent and other folks up thread are saying makes sense. It's nice to have the choice to tune in or tune out but no one wants that decision made for them. No one wants to be forced to engage with 100+ random people in very close proximity with really no option to standup let alone leave like on a plane. Another way to look at it is imagine the person to your left and to your right are super fans of the political party opposite to yours. That wouldn't be very fun unless you like to fight for 3hrs.
This is kind of why I like living near highways and train tracks. Most people live in suburbs and they don’t hear the noise of the city. They just miss out on so much environment. Sadly, my wife hates this (she is not in tune with her environment) and so we moved from a place where there were crazy people screaming to a place which is relatively quiet.
Sometimes I’m at home and there aren’t any sirens or bells or people screaming and I just think about how out of touch we are with the environment.
This has spread to everyone. Paul Graham has lost his connection to the environment and instead writes about silence. What a fool! If only he was more in touch with his environment.
Anecdotally, I heard way more leaf blowers while living in the city than in the suburbs. Lots of times in the suburbs people just leave them on the ground. But it gets to be a gross mess pretty fast in an urban environment so they are cleaned up relentlessly through the fall.
They are designed to be heard at a distance and through automobile glass, not walking beside it on a sidewalk. Besides, the siren is not a meaningful signal to me: I’m not on the road.
I generally agree with this sentiment of people being too tethered to technology and not paying attention to the world around them, but I don't see a problem with it on a flight. You're generally going to be seated in one place for hours at a time. It's much more infuriating to be walking out of the subway here in NYC and people are just in zombie mode walking up the stairs slowly while staring at their phones. Or down busy streets. Or driving in their cars.
I coincidentally demoed the Vision Pro this past weekend and expected to hate it, but was pretty impressed with it. I definitely don't want people walking around NYC with it strapped to their faces, but on a long plane or train ride I can see it being pretty nice.
Well put! Though I would argue that the issue being discussed is not short-term distraction in highly dangerous situations like driving a car or sharing a sidewalk in NYC, but rather the long-term psychological effects of filling every spare moment with entertainment. Ever since being forced to bus an hour+ to high school (sans smart phone! Can you imagine?!) I've learned to appreciate what long stretches of contemplation can do for a person. Or, at least, do for me.
Of course, my attention span typically maxes out around 2h unless I'm in a particularly thoughtful place in life, such as my bus ride to a new city after undergrad graduation, or the flight home after a big family event. And, of course, being in the window seat is a must -- you'd have to be something of a zen master to peacefully "raw-dog" a flight by just starting at the seat in front of you!
Rant aside, I absolutely agree that being stuck in place for hours at a time is good reason to want some form of entertainment, and this is arguably the perfect application for VR. Being stuck on a long bus/train/plane without entertainment can feel downright claustrophobic, and it's not like there's any communication with others anyway. Other than the nice flight attendants, which we still have, for some weird reason -- I thought it was a nice touch to clarify that talking to them with the headset for more than a phrase or two feels disrespectful.
> Though I would argue that the issue being discussed is not short-term distraction in highly dangerous situations like driving a car or sharing a sidewalk in NYC, but rather the long-term psychological effects of filling every spare moment with entertainment.
Correct. And I also had in mind how those individual psychological effects affect our interactions with the rest of reality and other living beings, which collectively shapes society.
I’m reminded of something I read years ago (I don’t recall the source at all and am likely adding details) which argued that US politics were less aggressively divisive in the past because politicians from both sides regularly saw each other and spent time together, meaning they could form more empathy and see the opposition as real human beings and not caricatures. As they spend less time together, it’s easier to fall into the trap of seeing the other side as a “them” unworthy of respect.
> I thought it was a nice touch to clarify that talking to them with the headset for more than a phrase or two feels disrespectful.
> Other than the nice flight attendants, which we still have, for some weird reason
They're trained to get everyone off the plane in under 90 seconds in case of emergency. The handing out of drinks and snacks is a pleasant side effect of their presence.
> but rather the long-term psychological effects of filling every spare moment with entertainment.
Oh, for sure. I mean I'm in my 40s and have never owned a TV and have spent every morning with my meditation practice for a very long time. Even on 14+ hour flights I tend to just sit there, maybe listening to music a bit, but largely doing my meditation practice. I'm totally on board with people being present in their environments.
But of all the places for someone to use something like the Vision Pro, an airplane seems totally reasonable to me. I'm much more concerned with people needing to scroll TikTok while on the escalator at Whole Foods and what that says about society than someone watching a movie on an international flight!
> The more time passes, the less I can shake the feeling that the world would be better if we tuned out our environment less.
That may or may not be true in general, but air travel is one of the most oppressive environments people regularly find themselves in. Being in an extremely crowded environment with very little personal space is psychologically uncomfortable for a lot of people. And it's basically not possible to escape that environment until the plane lands, which is typically hours of time. If it's OK to tune the world out anywhere, it's got to be in an airplane.
Lovely, just what we need: cheap devices with a motion-sickness-inducing laggy passthrough, poor resolution screens (when they work at all), covered in other people’s face grease.
I'd bet on them removing screens and not replacing them, potentially also getting rid of the headphone jack.
Perhaps they extend the charging ports some airlines are offering, with a bit more juice than a phone's battery to let people use their device for a bit longer.
That's a really interesting idea. Do planes have access to Starlink now? I could see a market for passengers to purchase a vr headset and decent inet connection on a flight. It would be tough to keep the headsets in good shape and clean though...
> My prediction is that the experience would get even shittier. Since everyone would be tuned out, there’d be even less reason for the airline to care.
What can the airlines do to make it worse? I suppose they could cut out soda and pretzels. And get rid of the HUD on the back of the chair. But I don't think most people care that much about that stuff, especially since a lot of chairs have power outlets on them, even in coach.
IMO, the thing that people really care about is the amount of space they have access to - both width and depth. And I'm not sure how much more airlines can realistically squeeze that.
> That may or may not be true in general, but air travel is one of the most oppressive environments people regularly find themselves in.
Most people don't regularly travel by plane. This is a very "1%" (as shorthand for a privileged minority of people globally, not literally exactly 1% of the population) problem.
One of many reasons why per capita CO₂ emissions in US are 14.9t while in Germany, country that is always mentioned because they closed nuclear plants it is 'only' 8t (which is still higher than EU average).
Families tend to get spread out and vacations tend to be very short. There is a strong encouragement to meet for recognized holidays, so these are by far the busiest times at airports.
Last year, the prediction was 4.7 million people in the US traveling by plane over the thanksgiving holiday, which demolishes the 1% comment immediately.
You are greatly underestimating how common it is for Americans to travel by plane. Almost half of Americans fly at least once a year. It is sufficiently inexpensive that almost everyone can readily afford to.
A little bit of both, and they are related. Trains are a tough sell because they aren't competitive for most travel. Even at 300kph, they're only good for local-ish travel (by that, I mean up to perhaps as much as 1000km). Would be great for Portland to Seattle, or Portland to LA, but if you're going out of region (which is extremely common), an airplane will be way faster and almost certainly cheaper too.
I'd love a moderately fast train, say 200kph, between cities like Portland and Seattle. That's a great use case.
But as a nationwide network, there won't ever be a suitable rail alternative, unless it gets subsidized. Amtrak is already stupidly expensive for what you get.
Yeah, but “Rest of World cannot afford luxury travel” is not a notable fact. The US is rich. Americans are rich. For many things, the US is the only market where it’s feasible. A self-driving car is useless in India (1/6 of all people), for instance. Labour costs are too low.
It’s clear the Vision Pro didn’t find its market but I don’t think it’s an air travel thing.
80% of those people are flying economy class and already get along fine with earbuds and their phone. The remaining 20% that can afford something like Vision Pro almost certainly will choose not to.
If those uncertain people decide they want to distract themselves with VR, do you think they'll buy the $350 headset or the $3,500 one?
I just don't see the market Apple envisions materializing. I'd expect 20 people to be using a Quest in economy before you see 2 people using a Vision Pro in business.
The author specifically says he believes people will be using the 4th or 5th iteration of the Vision Pro for this purpose. Why are you comparing prices of devices that won't exist for another 5+ years?
Because you and I both know Apple will never be price-competitive with the commodity segment. They are a luxury brand that relies on luxury margins, so I want to know why their business model will succeed.
If plane seating is anything to go by, most people don't want a luxury experience but a practical and cheap one instead. Most seats aren't reserved for premium passengers because they are a minority, maybe a profitable audience but not at all the primary one.
> Because you and I both know Apple will never be price-competitive with the commodity segment.
OG iPhone: $799
iPhone 3G: $199
> They are a luxury brand that relies on luxury margins, so I want to know why their business model will succeed.
Apple has shown many times over they don't need to be price competitive with the commodity segment. If you want to know why their business model will succeed, why not just look at their current business model which has been massively successful? Arguably the most successful business model in the history of consumer hardware.
>The most recent such poll was conducted online between January 9-31, 2023, in which Ipsos interviewed roughly 11,000 adults age 18+ from the continental U.S., Alaska, and Hawaii.
Same poll can result with statement "100% of Americans use internet."
Google’s AI tool says that 20-25% of the world’s population flies at least three times a year. Not a good source, but at least a surprising statistic if true.
Some hard data says that 12% of US flyers take 66% of flights [1]. Those are all likely very frequent fliers, and is much more than 1%.
This completely depends on the person. The environment of a plane (dry humid air, loud engine humming, babies crying etc) is oppressive to a lot of people, even more so if you're neuro-atypical.
I hope you repeat that lecture to everyone wearing an eyemask trying to sleep, or wearing heaphones for their in-flight movie (god forbid they brought noise-cancelling ones!)
The flying experience is oppressive in the sense of being a constricting, heavy-handed and overbearing environment, indifferent to your inconvenience or discomfort.
Where else can you get a full body cavity search, be denied water, be delayed by several hours without so much as an apology, be nickle-and-dimed with overpriced shitty food and $5 fees for a cab to drop you off, and have your luggage smashed up, all under one roof?
Of course, I'm not sure the Apple Vision Pro can do much to improve on the situation.
Weirdly enough I love being on a plane (and airports). There's something psychologically freeing about them that I feel whenever I fly. I look forward to flying so much. And it's not like I'm flying first class or anything - I fly economy every time.
Maybe if I flew more frequently I'd grow to dislike it (I fly maybe once a year), but honestly airports and flying are my favorite part of a trip (yes, I like them more than any possible destination). TBF I haven't flown to anywhere particularly exciting but I fail to imagine any place matching the pleasure of an airport + flight. After writing this it sounds ridiculous but I'm 100% serious - I can't quite explain why I enjoy it so much.
I don't like flying that much but airports are an interesting place. I like people watching and just the spectacle of it all.
There's some funny tweets about airports like:
"The airport is a lawless place, want to get drunk at 7AM? Go right ahead. Tired? Just sleep on the floor. Chips cost $15".
edit: came back to post this, i definitely get an odd feeling of liberation once i'm at an airport. I travel sometimes for work and once i get in to the airport waiting to board I feel like work and every day life ceases for a time and i'm free to do whatever. It's odd because i'm trapped in this building with hundreds if not thousands of other people waiting to get on a pressurized metal tube blasting through the sky at hundreds of miles/hr. Nothing very liberating about that but for some reason being in the airport feels that way to me.
> I travel sometimes for work and once i get in to the airport waiting to board I feel like work and every day life ceases for a time and i'm free to do whatever.
Yes, this is very much how I feel. 0 responsibilities and there's nothing I can actually accomplish during my time there. I just sit there reading a book or something, just waiting.
Can't stand airports, because from the instant you arrive, the success of your trip is now basically out of your hands but also incredibly precarious.
Maybe there's some ticketing snafu and it takes an hour just to drop your checked bag (sanctimonious carry-on fliers hold your posts like you hold the seventeen bags you try to drag on the plane)
Maybe security is insanely backed up or just run by incompetents, like the time at SFO where it took them 30 minutes to screen the 10 people in front of me.
Then once you get past security, a whole new list of potential problems comes up:
Maybe the incoming flight is delayed, possibly delayed so much you're going to miss your connection.
Maybe you'll board but the plane will be broken because the airlines don't believe in preventive maintenance, and you'll have to deplane again.
Maybe you'll board but due to various circumstances in airport operations you spend 3 hours sitting on the tarmac while the airplane gets increasingly hot and your toddler gets increasingly fussy.
I do - I like to arrive early at the airport so it's just a long line to me. Unpacking my stuff to get xrayed is indeed a hassle but it's not a big deal to me.
I understand tech reviewers and journalists raving about having something to do on planes, as they probably spend an awful lot of time there. Then perhaps sales people also flighting on company's dime.
But regular people don't spend much time on planes, and many of them don't need it to be an entertaining or efficient time, they can just spleep if the flight is long enough (I can't imagine lugging along a luggage the size of the Vision Pro for just a 2 hour flight)
In particular the plane staff won't let you tune completely out if you're awake: the whole safety sequence , take off and landing, turbulences, the in-flight meal, all the guidance for international flights, your neighbours when you've pulled the middle seat etc.
Many regular people bought tablets, expensive noise canceling headphones and other hardware with the express purpose of using it on a flight 2-6 times (1-3 round trips) a year. Of course, it gets used outside of a plane too - but that applies to VR gear just as well.
If they can get the price below $1500, I'm sure many regular people will buy it even if they fly less than 10 times a year.
> And it's basically not possible to escape that environment until the plane lands
You can buy a business class ticket. I will hasard that the overlap between people who can afford to buy a 3000$ VR headset and people who can fly business is pretty much total.
My brother in god, you can travel from any point of the Earth to any other point on the Earth in less than a week. At what point are modern people going to “deal with it”?
> My brother in god, you can travel from any point of the Earth to any other point on the Earth in less than a week. At what point are modern people going to “deal with it”?
Clearly people do "deal with it" since lots of people fly all the time. But that doesn't mean that the experience can't be improved.
But the improvement has almost nothing to do with entertainment options. It’s about space and comfort. To a lesser degree cabin service but that quite a way down the list.
> air travel is one of the most oppressive environments people regularly find themselves in
How much of this would be solved by VR though? To me the unpleasantness of flying mostly comes down to physical discomfort. The seats are cramped, the air is dry, the food isn't great, the bathroom situation is uncomfortable, and you can't really walk around. VR would visually transport you somewhere else, but physically, you're still very much on a plane.
There's a reason people watch movies on planes - it's to distract you from the uncomfortable environment you're in. VR is more immersive than a 2D screen so it's more distracting.
As someone with generalized anxiety I hate almost every part of flying from the point at which I leave the house until I arrive, but none of what you mentioned bothers me terribly.
I'd be curious to try a device like this and see if it helps. I usually just use noise cancelling headphones and play a game or watch movies, which isn't too different from removing myself into VR, but I'm also aware that sometimes completely removing my sense of my surroundings can be more unnerving.
> Being in an extremely crowded environment with very little personal space
I don't disagree with you but I can tell you don't take the NYC subway or Paris metro or the London Underground with any regularity. If you think an airplane is "extremely crowded" then you have no words to describe actual mass transit.
> The more time passes, the less I can shake the feeling that the world would be better if we tuned out our environment less.
Agreed 100%. Apologies for linking to my own essay, but I think this can be more generally stated as a difference between "isolated" and "integrated" arts. A device like the Vision Pro (and most tech devices, for that matter) is pushing society further and further into isolated chambers, and thus further incentivizing media and creators to focus on creating isolated aesthetic experiences, not ones that are integrated with the environment.
This is such a baseline unquestioned assumption that we have about the structure of the tech economy, that to think a company like Apple would make a device that brings people together in the real world seems absurd.
Thanks for sharing, I for one found it relevant! I've always found it somewhat monstrous how much art is in museum archives -- surely "showcasing stuff behind glass" is something our civilization can manage??
I'd quibble that what you're really pointing to here is capitalism, though. Architecture isn't monotonous because of our cultural attitude towards architects/Architecture, it's monotonous because capitalists build most buildings, and they're predictably interested in perceived efficiency above all else. There's good reason to argue that beautiful surroundings augment worker productivity so it's not even a clean tradeoff, but in practice, only the richest companies and universities end up taking that risk with beautiful structures[1][2][3] and/or sculptures/fountains/gardens/etc. Obviously, the same dynamic applies to the exclusivity of contemporary art galleries and private collections.
In Apple's(/"tech"'s) defense, I think they'd absolutely love to sell integrative products whenever possible. The Nintendo Switch was originally marketed[4] as such, and despite being a bit goofy, I imagine it helped sell a lot of units. That's why Apple spent ungodly amounts of money trying to make real AR work before compromising with "passthrough" -- they know that people are social creatures, and that a huge driver of their sales is perceived social value.[5] Again: the problem is the system of incentives, not individual bad actors.
I agree that the fundamental issue may simply be capitalism itself, but I am more prone to blame it on a kind of individualism, both in culture and in the nature of how corporations sell products as individual objects to individual people, and not to any larger social organization. (Except as a placeholder for a group of individuals.)
The difficulty is in imagining some kind of economic structure in which an Apple or Microsoft could make billions from selling products/services that are somehow public goods, or enhancing public spaces. We can conceive of top design minds at Apple spending billions to create a new personal computing device, but the same minds working on a way to improve public spaces – say, by removing graffiti easily, or planting trees easily – just somehow doesn't make sense or fit into the "types of things" they would do.
It may also just be a fundamental structural issue, as I talked about in the latter part of the essay. There are far fewer legal restrictions on individual objects than there are on spaces. I.e., while everyone can use an iPhone everywhere, using a device to remove graffiti would come up against all sorts of property rights laws.
It's quite a difficult topic to wrap one's mind around, at the end of the day. But yeah in general I agree that it's not necessarily individual bad actors, and incentives are a huge part of it.
I have a little unproven hypothesis that fits that last statement, that it would be absurd for a company like Apple to bring people together in the real world.
My hypothesis is that these companies want to make money by "taking" your senses. They want your attention to be with them at all times, by being in your ear so you'll hear them, by being on your wrist so you'll feel them, by being on your eyes so you'll see them.
I'm thinking these companies are building up technological ecosystems - Apple's specialty! - that they hope will eventually form a proxy for you to experience reality. Because if they can convince you to experience life through them, they'll have your wallet too.
Maybe it's just a silly thought of mine, but it kind of fits.
Very well put. I agree with you, and yet I still wouldn’t give up using my Vision Pro. Though I hope I’ll be able to draw the line at the Apple NosePods ;-)
A phone is fundamentally a communications device. I use mine to catch rides, figure out where I'm going, call and text my loved ones, all of these things connect me to other people. I listen through headphones to music, and to talk to people, neither of these are isolating experiences. AirPods even have a mode which specifically turns off audio when someone is speaking to you, I like this, because I do enjoy listening to music or a podcast when I'm alone at the grocery store, and I do not like to be isolated by that from people around me, or the cashier.
I also use it to take photos, and then share them with people I care about, sometimes photos of people I care about, which I can then enjoy when they aren't around. These things enhance my senses, they don't steal them.
Phones certainly have some apps available which are addictive, I see people enduring self-imposed isolation in the presence of others due to that addiction, and that's sad, which is why I've dropped those social networks from my life and don't have those apps installed. Apple doesn't make those apps though, the closest thing is Messenger, which is a way to communicate with others, it doesn't have upvotes, it isn't public, none of those things.
I don't see a way to square all that with the thesis that Apple's specialty is isolatory sensory theft. Even the headset, which is clearly not designed to enhance the social parts of life, has several features which exist specifically to connect the user at least in part to their surroundings, and I think the fact that Apple never sold a VR headset without those features is a better reflection of their corporate philosophy than some paranoid yarn about how they make more money if users are cocooned in some Apple-provided sensory replacement bubble.
Did you mean to say Meta? Because if so, you made the mistake twice in the same post.
No, I made no such mistake. Nor was I talking about a "cocoon" or anything "isolatory".
Taking what I said about a commercially sensical strategy about selling a - what was the word I did use? Proxy - through which you can experience the world, and then spinning some paranoid yarn about not experiencing the world at all... Now that is kind of strange.
It's obviously hyperbole. I'm a fairly frequent traveler at this point and probably will continue to be in another decade, and there is no plausible future in which I'm strapping on a VR headset for the duration of a flight. Sometimes I'll read a book but not consistently. More often than not, I watch the landscape pass and get a thrill out of recognizing landmarks from high above. I also like to count the rubberized tracks in a city as it consistently surprises me how many there are when I can never seem to find one to run on where I actually live.
On the other hand, I try to take a middle ground here. As much as I get annoyed and shake my fist at clouds these days when I'm trying to run past people on the sidewalks and they've got their faces buried in phones and don't see me coming, I can recognize a lot of people seem to have a deep-seated need for non-stop mental stimulus they don't seem to get from the real world for whatever reason and I'm not going to judge them for that. They're just different from me and that's fine.
But I do exist too and it'd be nice if reviewers like this didn't typical mind everyone, either.
I was on a flight not too long ago where the two people sitting next to me had apparently just met. They were from different countries travelling for different reasons. They had a friendly chat for a while about where they were from, why they were on that plane, and some things they enjoyed to do. The whole interaction lasted maybe twenty minutes, from sitting to take off. Then they said “cheers”, one of them went to sleep and the other began watching something on the phone. They didn’t speak again until we landed and from the outside it didn’t feel any of them felt awkward for even a second.
I’m not suggestion you strike up a conversation with your seat partner on a plane, but if you do you don’t have to feel beholden to them.
So what I get out of this is that while they were nice and friendly and had a good chat, they also tuned each other out for basically the entire flight. Sounds like an example in favor of dagmx's argument, which is not to be unfriendly, but that friendliness is rarely a way to pass multiple hours in a plane.
They didn’t “tune each other out” nor did they tune out the world entirely. Any of them could have resumed the conversation if they wanted to. Heck, I could have easily started up a conversation with them if I felt like it. That’s not tuning out, it’s simply not interacting.
Have you never sat in someone’s company, be it a pet or another person, each doing your own thing yet the presence of another made it more pleasant? That doesn’t mean tuning out the other person, quite the contrary.
The intangible benefit of "I could have talked to them, but didn't, and it was nice to be nearby" is going to be a minuscule part of the plane experience.
It doesn't support the idea above of "it would be nice if people were bored enough to be friendly" as a way to handle entire plane trips, it just suggests a slightly different way of focusing on your own activities.
And what you described versus a vision pro is like, a difference between being 75% tuned out and 85% tuned out. It's not all that impactful.
And with a headset on, they could have still resumed the conversation.
Or is it also rude if one tries to sleep? Or if they decided to listen to music or watch a movie on the screens?
Really the fact is that all those things are normalized and this isn’t. The arguments against it would equally apply to all of the rest of the things people do on planes to occupy their time.
Your story just says what my comment does though. They ignored each other the rest of the time.
Nobody is saying you tune out the entirety of the world the second you sit down. But there is an awful amount of people acting like the environment around you on a plane is worth paying attention to the entire time
There is something subtle going on with the "passthrough" feature. All the marketing and fans continually point to it in a way that feels like tacit acknowledgement of this very point wrt "tuning out." We are all primed for full VR Wall-E experience machines to suck us up into our own world, but the future seems to be more and more about the overlay. Not replacing one picture with another, but just painting and filtering ontop of the original. Not "I am somewhere else right now", but "I am here, but I am doing something you can't see."
Which, I gotta say, is an even darker formulation at the end of the day! Like at least if we all plugged in and went the Oasis we are truly sharing some base experience of the place; or if its going to be solitary experience machines, at least those experiences would be holistically directed towards me in some consistent package; but with this stuff, you start to think about how much more ground these crooks can still take in stratifying the experience of simply the world itself as we perceive it.
We're getting closer and closer to the world Solaria in Asimovs universe.
I'm personally trying (and to some degree failing) to disengage from screens and other digital interactions.
My advantage is that I live quite remotely and can just hop into my boat and go fishing or something without the phone, but the craving that result in are scary.
> it offers an unparalleled opportunity to selectively tune out your environment and sink into an engaging activity like watching a movie or just working on your laptop.
Read, sleep, think, stare out the window… While you can argue reading and sleeping are tuning out the environment, I’m never completely disengaged from my surroundings. Even if you stare at a screen with headphones on¹, someone can still get your attention via your peripheral vision.
Either way, I get why people do it, I was making more of a general point. It’s common for me to be walking down a street and see other people, also walking, so glued to their phones they notice nothing around them, to the point they have no reaction to near collisions.
I also find it telling that while the author mentioned (and I quoted) planes and trains, all of the many responses so far has centred on planes.
¹ Which I don’t do but won’t criticise anyone for it either.
> The more time passes, the less I can shake the feeling that the world would be better if we tuned out our environment less.
While I appreciate the sentiment behind the statement, try living in an area where 90% of the environment is car stereos with subwoofers cranked so loud that you can practically see the air vibrating around you and get back to me. Given that (at least in the west), noise pollution is never really going to be properly legislated, the ability to tune it out is a god send.
On the flip side, continuously tuning out discomfort is a vicious cycle. You need to feel some of it to be motivated to do something to change your situation.
I’m not advocation for never taking a break, I’m saying that we keep doing more and more of it and should perhaps consider dialling it down. Or at the very least not take tuning out as a slam dunk desired benefit without adverse consequences.
For those who wear N95s on planes, I can confirm that 3M Aura 9205+ works great with Vision Pro※ and doesn't hinder using it at all, nor reduce comfort, at least for my head and face shape.
※ - Tested during my 30 min demo (more like 45 mins) at the Apple Store.
I used to think this especially since airlines touted how good the air filtration was when COVID hit.
It's actually quite poor and significantly worse than most indoor spaces I've entered (most spaces aren't great at around 800-1600ppm). On planes I've measured※ very high CO2 levels (1800-4000ppm), with the worst air during boarding and deplaning. This matches the findings of others (both amateur and professional researchers).
Apologies, I specified "filtration" but meant "quality", which I would define as filtration + fresh air intake.
I'd have expected a better mix (more fresh air) since even with filtration removing many particulates and viruses, high CO2 levels still cause worse cognitive performance.
It's hard to get lots of fresh air into a pressurized plane, so I'm willing to have a good bit of leeway on that front. And airflow patterns are important; a lot of fresh air running from front to back would likely do more harm than good.
I love how the recent availability of cheap PPM and CO2 sensors spawned a whole new subculture of air quality paranoia.
Based on Veritasium's recent video, given the cabins are pressurized by bleeding air off of the jet engine might not be too surprising about CO2 or particulates. However the cabin air is also exceptionally dry.
Airplane air is clean but there are just too many people aboard and for too long. Something like a quarter of all air travel passengers get a respiratory illness within a week. Some hypothesize that the incredibly low humidity of cabin air (in most aircraft, except the very newest) makes it easier to acquire infections. A face mask, in addition to its normal role, also solves this problem because it is very humid inside the mask.
I don't know, but I always tended to get sick after flying. I started wearing a mask while flying during COVID and it's the one place I still do it. Not scientific but I feel like I have gotten sick after flying less frequently since then. It could even just be the effect of making myself breathe humid air in what's normally an extremely dry environment.
There are long periods where the filters aren't running during startup and shutdown, you'll notice once the seatbelt sign turns on at the beginning and right after it turns off at the end, things get stale super quickly and the temps start rising. That's because they turned off/haven't switched to air supplied by the jetway yet.
A few family members caught covid on a plane despite everyone needing a negative covid test before departure and wearing a FFP2 mask during the whole flight.
Put a lot of people in close proximity for a long time and it's going to be very hard to prevent transmission of airborne viruses...
Slightly OT but I much prefer the 9211+: the vent[*] makes a difference in comfort when worn over long periods. Or the 9105 / 9105S which sticks out further away from the face, and its elastic design makes it a bit quicker to don / doff at checkpoints.
[*] Yes I'm prioritizing my comfort over safety for others, but that's the American Way (tm), isn't it.
There are masks with full N95 filtration that have a fan built in to pull the air through the filter. Makes it much more comfortable to wear for long periods.
(I switch to a mask with no metal in it for airport metal detectors, but I can switch back again immediately afterwards.)
Thanks for this recommendation; I was considering ordering these for my next trip since they should fit the same as 9205+.
(I don't see an issue with wearing an exhalation vent next to folks who aren't wearing masks themselves. If they cared about the air they'd also be wearing a mask. If I sat next to someone wearing one I'd switch back to the 9205+.)
Same here. I use the Honeywell Saf-T-Fit masks, with the exhaust, either N99 or P100. They have a soft cushion where it touches the face and I find it's far superior in comfort on long flights to masks without the soft inner part. A little more expensive, but I'll never fly with a regular N95 again.
> But damn, based on how well it all works now, you can just tell by the 4th or 5th generation, Apple Vision Pro will be on the face of every frequent flyer.
And they can stop paying extra for business class, because it stops mattering.
The times I've flown business, the best part has been how the seat can fold down fully so one can sleep property and lying down. None of the other stuff really mattered to me.
Just flew across the Atlantic on lay-flat seats. They are absolutely a massive improvement over anything I’ve flown in before but I still couldn’t sleep well. Maybe I’m too big (6’ 2” and not skinny) but I couldn’t lay completely flat because I ran out of leg room as the seat reclined.
Or a normal/skinny weight. Even my shoulders are too wide for modern economy seats.
I fly a lot of business class, and the comfort and space is what you pay for, not entertainment. But having good wifi helps a lot, even in a cramped seat.
This is the main reason I see to get a vision pro - basically a travel friendly monitor. Glad to see it does well under these conditions, though it's still a tough sell considering the price tag.
It's always interesting when I see this take because I was raised the opposite way and was really surprised to learn a few years back from articles like [1] that some people consider this an etiquette breach.
From what I can tell there are two populations: those who prefer to recline and those who prefer not to. As long as an entire column of seats belongs to one population you're fine (if everyone wants to recline no one loses space, we all just shift around to a configuration in which everyone is more comfortable). But when you have someone more comfortable staying upright sitting behind a recline-preferenced person, that's where issues arise. It's not clear to me whether it's morally wrong for the front person to recline in that case, given that's basically just preferencing the default of "upright", which is arbitrary.
Nothing here should be read as justifying people who don't pay attention to what's going on behind them and/or recline suddenly/aggressively. It's always something that should be done with a glance behind and a smooth, gentle motion. Maybe also a word to the person sitting behind though again I'm not convinced that's a moral imperative.
Personally I don't get on a high horse about it and just deal with it, but if the person ahead of me reclines I lose leg room that me reclining does not give back.
i do prefer to recline. i choose not to, even though the airline says that i am entitled to, because i know that reclining has a high likelihood of inconveniencing the person behind me (primarily due to loss of legroom and inability to use a laptop).
Same here; except I'll recline after dinner on long-haul flights, because that's the point virtually everyone does, especially when the lights are dimmed. I would never recline on <4 hour flights, and am irked by those who do.
(I wonder if it simply driven by an individualistic vs. collectivist mindset?)
A little bit of reclining means the difference between my head drooping forward or to either side if I fall asleep (very uncomfortable) or staying in a vertical position with the weight slightly on the back of the head (far more comfortable).
This is really a case of "don't hate the player, hate the game" (be mad at the airlines for packing people in like sardines, don't be mad at the people for trying to take a bit of extra comfort which has been made available to them)
Or get mad at yourself for not paying for more space. Airlines are a business, and you chose that particular seat knowing full well ahead of time what the parameters of that purchase were.
Would airlines be able to offer more space for more money? Sure they would. Would people pay for it? The market has already answered!
That's fair if you fail to consider that I am 6'3", my partner and child are much smaller, and I'd essentially be the only one to gain from such an upgrade while having to pay for 3x, unless I wanted to sit separately from them and endure much consternation. lol
Being in an airplane seat for any amount of time is unpleasant. IMO, getting upset at the person in front reclining the allocated 2 inches to ease some of that discomfort sounds vaguely narcissistic. If you want to get upset, get upset at the airline.
I take out my earbuds even saying Hi to the bus driver I can't imagine talking to a flight attendant while wearing a VR device. It seems very uninterested in the person you are talking to.
Could be just me but I think a lot of older generations share this experience. It is not hard to take out your earbuds or take off your VR device to show you are paying attention to the person you are talking to.
There's a huge shift in this field at the moment. I personally find it disrespectful to talk to people while wearing headphones/earbuds and I'd still consider myself young but a lot of younger people, especially u25 seem to find this completely normal.
I'm not sure I like this development. Ignoring the "disrespectful" part, it has become accepted to toy with your phone while listening to someone and let's be honest, we all know you're not REALLY listening or engaging with the conversation.
I personally also take them out. But don’t see it as rude or disrespectful if others don’t.
Especially with AirPods gaining hearing aid functionality, it shouldn’t be a sign of lack of focus.
As an aside, I personally able to concentrate _more_ in certain scenarios when I am fiddling or have background noise playing. It quiets the part of my brain that otherwise gets distracted. I use that method for video conferences to increase the amount I am focused on the speaker and content.
I think your perception of what is being played inside the earbuds may be why you're confused about this. Around here it's extremely common for people to keep their earbuds in for short conversations, but everyone will pause and activate surrounding sounds while they talk. There are obviously assholes who don't, but in general it's completely normal to assume someone wearing earbuds is listening to you.
Contradictory to your experience with it being young people who wouldn't listen to you it tends to be the 45ish business man who continues to talk on their phone in my experience.
I think it's a little disingenuous for you to take what I said out of the context I said it in, but you're right as far as it's in my anecdotal experience. Which is why I said "around here", but I guess I could've made it even clearer.
What about earbuds aiding in hearing? Lots of scenarios where earbuds can help with hearing and not impede it. I use AirPod Pros on flights for cancelling out the loud background noise of the plane but it makes talking to others much easier.
It doesn't give any social cues on how you are using it. That is, people cannot tell whether you are using earbuds to block outside sound or to enhance outside sound. Therefore it doesn't work, until social norms change.
I remember the real hearing aids of yesteryear. They look sufficiently different from earbuds that they are always acceptable.
It actually is a real pain to put the headset on and off frequently. Much, much more so than earbuds. It's a major UX issue.
I don't even really see people take off headphones in this scenario, just uncovering an ear. It would be fairly hilarious to see someone lift up one side of an AR headset to make (singular) eye contact, tho.
>Could be just me but I think a lot of older generations share this experience.
I am only 32 and wouldn't consider myself old.
I used to get very uncomfortable, maybe even angry, when people at the cashier in the supermarket just did not get off their headphones and just leave a simple hello to the person at the counter. Nowadays I am just mildly irritated sometimes, but I still think it's stupid. Especially if the cashier is a really nice and polite person. Leaving on your headphones and not saying a word, sometimes not even giving them a look, feels like a f- you in their face. Just be nice to other people and it even works if you are a very socially awkward person like me. The world can be nice and even give you a smile every once in a while.
This obviously got worse since corona. Germany used to be a cash-heavy country, but now since "everyone" is just paying by card, they just pull it out, wave around with it to signal that they want to pay with it, so that they don't even have to say one single word. So weird.
Yes, I found it funny that the interaction the reviewer did participate it (asking for tea) was okay to conduct while still strapped into the AVP Face Jail, but:
> One caveat is that, out of respect, if the conversation is more than the “what would you like? Tea please” deal, I do remove the headset to make direct eye contact with them. I feel that it would be sort of odd to have a full-on conversation with someone if they’re wearing a headset (like bro, just take it off and let’s talk like humans).
So there's an implied metric of "meaningful interaction" where, below a certain threshold, it's okay to treat the other person as an NPC?
Perhaps I'm being an uncharitable curmudgeon here, but I even take my earbuds out when I'm asking for tea on a flight.
It's a hassle for you to take it off and disconcerting for the other person if you don't. If the interaction is quick, doing nothing could be overall optimal.
I think that will fade. I don't know if you remember how mocked the airpods were when they first came out ("They look like q-tips"). All it'll take is a few celebrities spotted using one and they'll turn cool in no time.
You're not wrong, but I think there's at least a couple of orders of magnitude of awkwardness between the Airpods and the the Vision Pro that will have to be overcome, before the VP becomes mainstream.
There were times when going to an office wearing a T-shirt felt crazy, like going to an office while wearing a bikini, or wearing a clown attire, would be now. It changed maybe in late 1990s.
Things like these change very slowly, then suddenly, once the views of the perceived majority around most people change enough that the people start to see the new state as proper and confirmant, a new norm.
I don't think it will pass, but I think subsequent versions will be slimmer and less mock-prone. In 10 years people will look back at the first version the way people look back at the first bulky cell phones.
Oh, I have no doubt that it will get better over time, but I think people forget that part of the early adopter tax is often that you look like a fucking dork. Which in my mind isn't a bad thing - it shows that you're committed to making it work. There's something noble about that, wouldn't you say?
At least the AVP seems like a reasonably engineered piece of equipment. The cybertruck has a seemingly unending list of flaws documented in /r/cyberstuck.
That's not relevant, since the point of discussion is if enough people will buy the thing.
If it makes you look like a dork and yet it's the third most selling EV, you might blame the judgment of the average car buyer of the US (for whom you seem to have contempt), but you can't dispute that the product sold.
It's possible for those concerned with this to overcome it! Most people are way more focused on themselves than whatever a random person is wearing in public, and will likely forget the encounter the second they set foot off the plane.
To their credit, Apple users save a lot of money by living rent-free in your head.
99% of Apple users are not thinking about how much better they are than other people for buying the phone or computer they did. They just bought it because it's the obvious choice and they've had good experiences with it in the past.
Every time an anti-Apple zealout busts out the spec sheets to prove why alternatives are so much better, there's about 8000 gotchas and usability issues that aren't worth the tradeoff for most people. You're free to not think the tradeoffs of Apple devices are worth it for you, but for everyone else (most people) they make the best option that puts up the minimal amount of fighting and a handful of workflows that you simply can't recreate in other ecosystems without dozens of asterisks.
Every time an Apple zealot busts out counter points to prove their purchasing choice is better there’s about 8000 gotchas of what Apple won’t let you do on their device that aren’t worth the trade off for most people. You’re free to think the tradeoffs of non-Apple devices aren’t worth it for you, but for everyone else (most people since most people don’t own an Apple device) they make the best option that puts up minimal amount of fighting to customize your device and use it how you like without restriction. A handful of workflows that you simply can’t get in the Apple ecosystems without dozens of Apple zealots telling you’re wrong for choosing something else and bragging that their choice is somehow superior.
99% of Apple users are not thinking about how much better they are than other people for buying the phone or computer they did.
You must not spend any time around teenagers. Teenagers absolutely judge people for not having iPhones.
best option that puts up the minimal amount of fighting and a handful of workflows that you simply can't recreate in other ecosystems without dozens of asterisks.
This is backwards.
My mentees (and on the other end of the age scale, my in-laws) are always shocked that I can do something on my Android in seconds that takes them minutes on an iPhone...assuming they can even do it on their iPhones at all.
It’s funny because I was you for 25 years. I then got an iPhone and an M1 MacBook and never looked back. The Apple ecosystem doesn’t have competition, and products are very high quality.
Then again, Apple is one of the most valuable companies in the world. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude that they’re offering something valuable.
They do…is that belief that people don’t buy other products that aren’t overpriced a part of the cult beliefs? Do you have a passive aggressive youtube video for that idea that allows you to passively be a dick about the products you don’t buy?
No it doesn’t mean they are wrong, just closed minded.
You're carrying a lot of anger, making reductionist and polarizing arguments that sound like Mac vs PC platform wars from the 90s. I hope you find a more balanced approach to dealing with the world around you.
Life is way too short to spend it worrying about what other people think about this type of thing. Reality is, they almost never care and are far more concerned about their own problems than whether someone else looks like a dork.
I’m not a working while travelling kind of person (I often have the ambition to work while flying, but for some reason I always feel too tired); my Vision Pro stays in my bag for the duration of the flight. For work when away from home more generally, however, I find it a fantastic device. It’s basically a portable Apple Studio Display that I can use wherever I go. As someone in a long distance relationship who is often away from home for long periods of time, this is extremely useful.
Paying three grand for a monitor you can buy for your 'second place' for a few hundred dollars seems like a choice.
I'm in the same position. I considered the vision pro, but couldn't justify it, even if I used it on the flights etc. I depend on my switch/steamdeck for the plane, laptop if i have to work (I try not to, it's terrible)... and then I just went on amazon and bought a pair of 27" lg widescreens for a few hundred a piece. When I'm not in her apt we stow one of them in a closet (she dislikes two monitors on a purely aesthetic level). I fly in with my laptop and my keyboard and I'm ready to go.
I bought mine used for significantly less than three grand. And the thing is, I don’t have a single fixed second place. My life is rather complicated and nomadic, having a portable big screen is very convenient.
Just reading this blog makes me feel like it is actually not a great device to travel with. For me, a good travel device is one that takes up minimal room when packing to the point where it becomes easy to forget I even have it in my bag. The Vision Pro typically requires its own dedicated spot on top of your carry on as you go through the airport - kind of the opposite. The author talks about just packing it with a single cover for the goggles but that also makes me nervous given its MSRP
A kindle/book/tablet seems superior in this regard. You get your entertainment for the plane and you don't have to worry about unpacking it on the plane, being precious with a very expensive piece of equipment and they are negligible in terms of lugging around/storing in your hotel. You can even reasonably use these if you have a little down time waiting in a line, during quick trips, will be without power for a while, etc.
The last time I remember flying with a tablet, it was so suspicious that airport security hauled me into a private room and interrogated me about it. They questioned why I didn't take it out of my bag for the scanner (since it was a 'laptop'). They asked what it was. They made me turn it on and use it. They were extremely rude and kept me holed up for a long time while investigating it.
So I don't fly with a tablet any more haha! Although, I get that time has passed and I would no longer be accosted so much, I assume. Must be pretty common now. My story takes place in ~2011 with the Motorola Xoom tablet. I guess they had never seen a tablet before.
I was also working hard on a plane one time, writing code to access barometer data on mobile devices to build a distributed weather sensor network that could be activated in software. The flight attendant came by and told me, "okay, time to put your toys away sweetie" referring to my tablet and phone. Oooooooooh my god.
In the 13 years since your experience, airport security around the world has had time to be extremely blasé about most electronic devices.
That said, security rules vary from airport to airport. SFO with TSA Pre is practically a no-op, but CDG security requires that you remove from carry-on any device with a >20cm dimension!
I believe the main reason laptops have to be separated is because they appear as just a large chunk of metal on the X-ray. A tablet would look similar.
Pre-iPad, most airport staff (who aren't hardcore techies, or might not have the privilege of higher education) might think of a tablet as a laptop anyway.
The author (me) specifically recommends to not buy the bulky travel case from Apple and instead, just use the default front cover + a lens protector.
This is specifically to not to take up any extra room than is necessary. The only room it takes up is essentially the width of the HMD itself (even negating the strap)!
For those that might find themselves nervous with a naked AVP, consider this popular option, a Syntech Hard Carrying Case compatible with various goggles:
FYI, you may want to revisit a couple of your "only me" points on the AVP with the release of the Quest 3S.
The 3S has an IR blaster that allows it to work in total darkness. Meta also enabled a travel mode[1] a couple of OS revisions ago (back in June or so).
I've stopped carrying my over-ear noise-cancelling headphones for this reason. They take up like a quarter/half of a normal item-sized backpack. I can sleep with plane noise. But I always bring a sleep mask, because I can't sleep with bright lights turning on and off all the time. I did recently get some in-ear headphones w/ noise cancelling, perhaps they're enough.
There's always the fear of losing stuff when you're moving objects around so much, too. One less thing to worry about.
There are both wired and wireless noise canceling earbuds that work well. Never had an interest in the bulky over the ear ones. I pack pretty light even for 2-3 week trips.
In my experience my Airpod Pros and Huawei Freebud Pros achieve 95% of the audio and noise cancellation quality of my Sony XM3s that I just barely use the big headset anymore. I understand that they are technically different categories of products but for me and a lot of other non-audiophiles I know switched to TWS earbuds once they got half decent ANC.
OP uses the Apple case which pretty much every VP owner I've heard of agrees is comically oversized. You can make do with a much, much smaller case that would fit in a backpack.
That said, the last time I had the opportunity to use my VP on a plane I just used my kindle and laptop instead.
While this seems like a good use case for mixed reality headsets like the AVP, I still find it kind of creepy that someone is hiding most of their face while also potentially filming everything that's going on.
One area in which they’re significantly worse is tracking — they only really work well with the screen in a fixed position relative to your eyes, but this has been great for a movie.
I bought an xreal pro hoping for a cheaper vision pro while technology catches up.
Honestly xreal's marketing is generous at best. They seem to really try to push it as being an AR device when its really nothing more than a monitor stuck to your face that you can't change the size of.
Using the beam or the software on your computer adds some AR ability, but due to the way it works on your Mac it really is not a pleasant experience and uses a ton of resources. The tracking is not great.
The lack of any sort of pass through (all you can do is dim it) makes it fairly useless in many situations, like the one mentioned in this article.
Options are great, and it is great that is significantly cheaper. But I bought the xreal pro, I keep trying to use it for watching something, games, programming or other work. But every time I use it for maybe 20 minutes and just get frustrated and put it away for a few more weeks.
It is one of the reasons I think that the price (and size) of the vision pro is justified. The tech to make something smaller and cost less just isnt here yet. All of those headsets like the xreal have serious compromises while trying to push an "AR" narrative for features they just don't really have.
The marketing does make them look amazing. Though seems light on specs etc, it is kind of difficult to even figure out the difference between the models.
I do love the idea though and it is tempting.
I don't love programming on a laptop without external monitors, so I like the idea of having a decent monitor in a pair of glasses.
I couldn't justify the price of a AVP, as I would only be using them as an external monitor. And I would worry about Linux compatibility.
> A big bonus for watching movies in VR on a plane is the fact that you don’t need to conscious about movies that contain graphic scenes. You don’t need to turn down the brightness and rotate the screen away from children!
Ah! I was not understanding why would anyone prefer this over other less invasive or smaller options, but now I get to the real advantage! /s
Yes and for some reason I would probably find it weird watching a moving with a weird landscape being shown around the "virtual screen" instead of...reality.
Sort of. Headsets have limited FOV per eye. You can blow up the screen to be huge, but you'd only be able to see part of it at a time. But yeah, 110 degrees FOV can accommodate a very big screen.
I used to wonder how people watch movies on their iPhone then realized many people sit so far from their living room TV screen that if they held up their iPhone it would be the same apparent size.
By contrast, you can readily set the apparent screen size in the AVP to 40+ degree angle:
× 1.2 (corresponding to 40-degree viewing angle)
THX recommends that the "best seat-to-screen distance" is one where the view angle approximates 40 degrees,[26] (the actual angle is 40.04 degrees). Their recommendation was originally presented at the 2006 CES show, and was stated as being the theoretical maximum horizontal view angle, based on average human vision. In the opinion of THX, the location where the display is viewed at a 40-degree view angle provides the most "immersive cinematic experience", all else being equal. For consumer application of their recommendations, THX recommends ... multiplying the diagonal measurement by about 1.2.
The field of view is deceptive in 2d photos. With the VR headset your focal point is at infinity, and in practice it feels more like sitting in front of a big 60" TV on your couch.
If you kept reading to understand the context of that image, you'd realize that it could be any size, but that you need to enable "partial virtual environment." That was the entire point of that chapter/image, to showcase the three different modes (full virtual, partial, and full pass-through with collision).
I'm no fan of the AVP, but it is inane to post a comment on a picture from the article without taking the time to read the text surrounding it to understand the context. The blog went to great pains to set out the pros/cons, limits/advantages, just to have people half-read it or just look at the pictures...
Sure you can. Just increase the size of a virtual window to fill the entire avaiable field of view (110 degrees or so). It's basically the same effect as sitting in a close-to-the-front row of a theater.
There are VR headsets with wider FoV, but they're pretty bulky as of yet because of the limits of current costs-less-than-literally-$10,000-a-unit optics.
Another bonus, which I've found traveling with my Vision Pro, is when I get to my AirBnb/Hotel, I don't have to log into my streaming services when I want to relax. I've brought my whole home theater experience with me.
kinda true, but I'm surprised how some apps expect you to watch movies upright (TV+, Disney), which makes watching movies laying down quite "non ergonomic". ;)
The Meta Quest 2/3 finally fixed that a few months ago [1], where you "tilt" the horizon of the entire OS [2]. So it doesn't matter if an app doesn't support it -- you can lie on your bed and watch a screen directly above you even if it was only designed for horizontal use. It's a game-changer if you have back/neck problems.
Does the AVP not have something equivalent? To be honest, I was surprised it took Meta so long to get around to implementing it.
AVP doesn't support it when in 'theater mode' but if your video is a typical window you can simply lie down and recenter it onto the ceiling. The horizon stays locked but any windows can be parallel to the ground.
Why would you need to re log-in into streaming services in a hotel? How does AVP alleviate that need?
Do you mean you watch it on a smart TV in a hotel? Then I guess you could connect a laptop to that TV with an HDMI cable and not have to re-log in, right?
Just putting in my take for the vision-pro-curious, coming from a tall/big tech guy with excellent vision who owns one:
I kept mine this whole time and I still actually use it regularly and it still amazes me. There's a steady trickle of interesting things that appear for it, and it's VERY useful as a giant virtual extended laptop screen if you have a Macbook. Especially if you are in a recliner and can tilt the virtual screen above your head a bit- vastly more comfortable. Very much looking forward to the extra large virtual curved monitor they're working on, hopefully this fall.
The thing is still kind of magical.
When I first got it, I would get some eye fatigue and/or dizziness after about an hour of using it, but that seemed to improve after a couple weeks (adaptation?) and I can now use it for 2-3 hours at a time uninterrupted without any discomfort. Chewing ginger apparently helps (same as with VR headsets).
Drinking coffee from a mug with it on is difficult. Get a straw.
I'm a big guy (6'3", 260lbs) and the headset is still a bit heavy.
The gestural and eye-focus UI is extremely good, my only complaint is that I still find it hard sometimes not to make erroneous inputs which can get frustrating, but that is more the fault of web UI's with closely-clustered controls that were not designed with this interface in mind- but sometimes with text input as well, it's sometimes frustrating.
The quality of the passthrough video (AR) can be improved, it's a bit shimmery (although still clear enough to comfortably read things on your phone or watch). It's stitched together from a bunch of cameras so it is surely already a technical feat.
> (the video itself was blacked out when capturing the screenshot).
I already disliked DRM like this, where the user's device acts against them, but something about the form factor makes me extra uneasy about it. Maybe the fact that it's directly on your face, integrating tightly with your vision.
Hopefully by the time we move onto AR contact lenses or implants there'll be some good user-respecting alternatives, though I'm not too hopeful.
Recently discovered that on long flights, ear plugs (that just block noise, no music!) and a kindle is way more enjoyable for me. Less headache. Can’t imagine having a vision pro on a 10h flight
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 520 ms ] threadOne protip, I bought a 512G flash drive and loaded it with content. Then I could pop the drive in and play movies off it. I did not want to deal with needing connectivity for DRM or other server checks.
Highly recommend that people try this out, the next time you travel. It’s a killer use case for VR.
I agree it'd be nice to have an external CPU pack for heat and weight reasons, but we're not quite there yet. The closest thing currently is wireless streaming via a PC running Steam VR, but that's not exactly portable.
If Meta made new versions of the Quest without the battery built in I think I'd actively avoid it.
They only recommend your real name in case you need to recover your account.
From https://www.meta.com/help/quest/articles/accounts/account-se...:
---- To create a Meta account using your email address, you will need to provide:
Email: You can only create one Meta account per email address.
First and last name: We recommend using your real name in case you need to recover your account or manage your store purchases.
Birthday: You need to be at least 13 years old (or the applicable age in your region) to set up and manage your own Meta account. If you are between 10 and 12 (or the applicable age in your region), then you need a Meta account that’s managed by a parent or guardian.
Password: This must be at least 8 characters. Avoid passwords that someone could easily guess.
Why? There's are already 1000s of external batteries. Unless you mean you think Meta should do it so they can charge 4x of any other battery like Apple does?
Quest is also lighter than Vision Pro, even with it's built in battery
Come to think of it, you can skip the first step too, and just download them.
No sale.
My wife still makes fun of me when I'm working at home with Vision Pro - I wouldn't wear it out in public. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41836437
Would you feel comfortable wearing one and limiting your awareness of your surroundings on a public bus? In a coffee shop? Sitting outside a coffee shop? In a park? In a pub?
And also your answers may be yes if you are male, but I can imagine in the current world we live in a lot of women would feel potentially at risk if they were wearing these in public.
If I’m taking a commuter train every day , my view is not something great. Most of the time it’s rundown houses, tunnels or fences. This has been my experience in the UK, US and Canada.
If I’m taking a more long distance train, you assume I’m sat on the side with a view. Ever taken a mountain train? One side just gets rocks wizzing by.
You also assume they’re travelling in weather and a time of day that affords them a good view. Traveling at night? Traveling in misty weather?
And all that aside, you assume they’d prefer to look at the same things you do.
There are some views you never get tired of looking at, especially as seasons, weather, clouds and time of the day makes it an ever changing postcard.
All in all in most of europe the trains usually offer nice views and I often find myself daydreaming about climbing that dirt trail on the left with my bike, riding my motorbike on that twisty road on the right side a few minutes later and what kind of life was it living 500 years ago in the old castle I can see here.
Why must we always escape?
Again, you are fortunate to have a view that you enjoy. That doesn’t extend to others, unless you believe that there are no other situations on the planet other than your own.
Probably the point is that there are many mindstates to be in and maybe we should just let folks do their thing.
It’s great he can enjoy it but it’s self centered to tell others to do the same.
Some of us live in places like Baltimore, or Staten Island.
You might find that real life is boring, I find that most tv shows and movies are super predictable, following the very similar scenaristic mechanics and aren't more entertaining. Obviously some are also very nice, but these are the ones you would like to watch comfortably on your sofa or in a theater, not in a train or plane anyway.
Seriously, is everyone on here so narcissistic that they can’t imagine other people want other things?
I've taken the train across the Canadian prairies, and my god is that dull, but I just chatted with people, did a bit on my laptop, looked out the window since there always is one, read, used my Gameboy. If I wanted to completely immerse myself in anything but the train experience, I'd just fly, it's cheaper anyway
But you can still see the world and communicate with others. Why is that materially different than being engrossed in a handheld video game with headphones in?
Also all your examples of other stuff you do to occupy the time, they are all temporary. Why do you think the Vision Pro user would use it the whole ride?
I think this is down to the Boolean nature of “is this normalized or not”
Because it’s not normalized, people don’t afford it the same benefit of the doubt of other things that they have normalized in their life.
I'd only ever consider bringing something that is nearly invisible to both myself and others in terms of weight and required infrastructure, wouldn't bring anything with me for the purpose of occupying my attention that I can't forget I have, or that would consume more than a negligible amount of space/weight; I'll bring a book, but not a tome
Incidentally, Canadian cross-country trains don't even have outlets at the seat as far as I know; they're quite old sadly.
That said, I buy almost no superfluous electronics for raw consumption, and even an iPad Pro would be wildly out of scope, as nice as they seem to be, since although they do have other utility, I can't picture myself doing more than reading or watching videos. On-the-go entertainment is something I try to keep at arms length so I can spend that time at peace.
Fwiw, I do also hope it doesn't become normalized, not to squash others' potential for fun, but because our existing devices already enable people to protect themselves from social interaction on a large scale, which strikes me as damaging.
When I take trains in the USA, I usually look out for a few seconds every couple of minutes, because it's mostly the same -- lower-middle class housing or warehouses if we're in a city, or ugly terrain outside of a city.
These kinds of broad comparisons are utterly useless. Continents are much too large for that kind of thing to be anything resembling accurate.
I went from modern metropolis of skyscrapers and tower cranes to run down rusty industrial facilities that wouldn't look out of place in a STALKER game to sod roofed villages that look as they might have when Napoleon was making an ill fated expedition. Then of course a vast expanse of nothing at all.
Especially if you're travelling through cityscapes that aren't that appealing.
I tested the device in an Apple Store and was blown away by the experience. Such an amazing tool to explore, enjoy and relax.
The work part though? I had the same feeling as with the iPad early on. I need a keyboard and a mouse to be productive.
I wonder how soon will Maya or CATIA offer good enough integration. Maybe they already offer it at the high end.
And for the majority of us that cant?
There was even a Youtuber that got annoyed of the black screen on the Macbook when doing this that he removed the screen from a Macbook altogether[0].
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUa_pPUbpGQ
Both my iPad Pro and my Vision Pro have a keyboard and trackpad:
- The iPad Pro of course uses the excellent Magic Keyboard.
- The Vision Pro uses an Apple keyboard w/o numpad side by side with the Magic Trackpad, in a custom tray to hold both. (Make sure that your carryon's front pocket can hold the full tray.)
For sure if I thought I could only do work on a MacBook not an iPad Pro (what most people seem to think, insisting iPad is a consumption device), then I definitely couldn't work on a Vision Pro.
But once you've figured out how to code (e.g. VSCode using blink code, or Koder, Working Copy, Textastic, etc.), do graphic design (e.g. Affinity suite), or run Office on an iPad (Teams, Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel), the Vision Pro does those too but with "all the app windows at once" (ofc, iPad Pro 13" makes excellent use of Stage Manager for window groups).
All that said, I haven't felt a burden to pull AVP out on the plane.
iPad Pro 13" HDR with AirPods Pro USB-C using Spatial Audio that anchors to your iPad screen seem more than enough. Especially since you can share audio with a seat mate who also has AirPods, and both watch the same movie together.
Not often talked about: for doing real work, do consider a fresh glasses prescription and the Zeiss add-ins. To keep windows rectangular instead of trapezoid, insist you're under 40 regardless of your age, otherwise Zeiss do a stealth "progressive" that warps window sizes.
Now I wish I had gone for the bose QC ultra buds instead of the QC II buds.
https://support.apple.com/guide/airpods/control-spatial-audi...
Apple Music marks Dolby Atmos and Spatial Audio separately. They are not the same experience for the listener. They do work well together.
Since we only have two ears, a degree of our surround cue comes from where the sounds are when we move our heads.
Apple's "motion tracking in space" spatial audio implementation taps into that to an uncanny degree, because your own motion is not simulated. Real motion in real space results in a real sound difference from the sound model that, you're right, is simulating how that motion should sound relative to the origin.
As a listener, you start to forget the sound isn't centered out there on the anchor point, and then you start thinking the surround sounds are really surrounding you...
Here are two different explainers:
- https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/05/18/apples-spatial-au...
- https://www.gearpatrol.com/tech/apple-spatial-audio-vs-dolby...
Note that I disagree with the second explainer's final section that surround sound speakers like Sonos are the same "spatial audio" as the motion tracking sound modeling Apple is doing.
I agree with the first explainer that Apple's Spatial Audio is a system that takes advantage of the gyroscopes and sensors in the listening device and headphones to, yes, “simulate” a 3D listening space that stays static as you move your head.
I want to replace my macbook, I don't want to replace my ipad. I can't work properly on my ipad unless i'm using it as a dumb terminal. And at the price point of a macbook that's what it should be replacing.
People may point out that i can use it to mirror my macbook screen.. but now i'm paying 2x to replace a screen. I think this is a primary misplay in he vision pro strategy.
Give me a windowing system that lets me place windows, not in a little box that is essentially a virtual monitor, but wherever i want in my immediate vicinity. Let me put my goland/ide window front and center, let me put a terminal to the left, and my music player above.. whatever.
I'd take a vision pro with much of the compute hardware stripped out but that I can tether to a macbook via usbc/thunderbolt as well.. just not an ipad strapped to my face.
The SimulaVR guys (who are working on a competitor to the Vision Pro) had the exact same opinion (https://simulavr.com/blog/chassis-adjustments-and-apv-reacti...):
> From our perspective, we still think the main problem with the AVP is that it only supports native iPad apps (at least for 2D apps) [...] The AVP does allow you to tether to another Mac, but this relegates its usability to that of a "laptop aid" rather than a "laptop replacement". [...] We want to do this for the engineers and knowledge workers who need the extra capabilities in VR, and for the people who want to completely replace their laptop, rather than their tablets!
Lord forgive you have a new unexpected experience while traveling or expose yourself to the underclasses or subject yourself to the shtty social environment you helped create...
I don't care if he wrote the fucking Bible - he's a mass murderer and the world was better with him in Supermax.
I wouldn't exactly call him a "mass murderer", he only actually killed 3 people over a 17 year time span. IMO a "mass murderer" kills a lot of people all at once in a single location, for example, like McVeigh.
Relatedly: What's the threshold for you for body count before someone loses credibility? 5? 10? 100? 1000?
I don't think any of those necessarily makes someone lose credibility for their writings.
Why is that simple interaction somehow exempted from “showing others respect”?
Like is he too busy blasting porn into his retinas to take it off?
Or has he paused whatever he’s using the headset for for even that interaction?
Then why leave the mask on?
The whole pass thru tech is so you can see a keyboard or pick up a cup or write something down on paper.
The digital recreation of eyes is a strange dystopian solution looking for a problem.
Saying “I’ve yet to have a problem” is absurd cope.
Ps- welcome to the forum to you too. Apparently I should assume you’re new here or you’d understand that even people who have been participating here for years can still create new accounts.
The more time passes, the less I can shake the feeling that the world would be better if we tuned out our environment less.
> But damn, based on how well it all works now, you can just tell by the 4th or 5th generation, Apple Vision Pro will be on the face of every frequent flyer.
If it even gets that far. I’d almost be willing to take that bet, but 5 generations for this device could mean more than a decade so I don’t think any of us can say for sure.
All that said, I haven’t read the full review yet and I doubt it’ll do anything to convince me, but still I appreciate you writing it up and putting it out there. From what I’ve read so far it looks well thought out and it clearly took some effort, so kudos.
Depends on what environment that is. I mean, is there some value in hearing an ambulance siren at full volume while I'm walking down the street? Or the sound of people trying to get my attention to hand me some flyer? Or the sound of the BART?
I listen to books or music during a lot of my daily walks, but I've noticed that when I don't, I sometimes experience life differently.
Sometimes I’m at home and there aren’t any sirens or bells or people screaming and I just think about how out of touch we are with the environment.
This has spread to everyone. Paul Graham has lost his connection to the environment and instead writes about silence. What a fool! If only he was more in touch with his environment.
at least in the suburbs you can engage with and experience the leaf blowers.
I coincidentally demoed the Vision Pro this past weekend and expected to hate it, but was pretty impressed with it. I definitely don't want people walking around NYC with it strapped to their faces, but on a long plane or train ride I can see it being pretty nice.
Of course, my attention span typically maxes out around 2h unless I'm in a particularly thoughtful place in life, such as my bus ride to a new city after undergrad graduation, or the flight home after a big family event. And, of course, being in the window seat is a must -- you'd have to be something of a zen master to peacefully "raw-dog" a flight by just starting at the seat in front of you!
Rant aside, I absolutely agree that being stuck in place for hours at a time is good reason to want some form of entertainment, and this is arguably the perfect application for VR. Being stuck on a long bus/train/plane without entertainment can feel downright claustrophobic, and it's not like there's any communication with others anyway. Other than the nice flight attendants, which we still have, for some weird reason -- I thought it was a nice touch to clarify that talking to them with the headset for more than a phrase or two feels disrespectful.
Correct. And I also had in mind how those individual psychological effects affect our interactions with the rest of reality and other living beings, which collectively shapes society.
I’m reminded of something I read years ago (I don’t recall the source at all and am likely adding details) which argued that US politics were less aggressively divisive in the past because politicians from both sides regularly saw each other and spent time together, meaning they could form more empathy and see the opposition as real human beings and not caricatures. As they spend less time together, it’s easier to fall into the trap of seeing the other side as a “them” unworthy of respect.
> I thought it was a nice touch to clarify that talking to them with the headset for more than a phrase or two feels disrespectful.
Agreed.
They're trained to get everyone off the plane in under 90 seconds in case of emergency. The handing out of drinks and snacks is a pleasant side effect of their presence.
Oh, for sure. I mean I'm in my 40s and have never owned a TV and have spent every morning with my meditation practice for a very long time. Even on 14+ hour flights I tend to just sit there, maybe listening to music a bit, but largely doing my meditation practice. I'm totally on board with people being present in their environments.
But of all the places for someone to use something like the Vision Pro, an airplane seems totally reasonable to me. I'm much more concerned with people needing to scroll TikTok while on the escalator at Whole Foods and what that says about society than someone watching a movie on an international flight!
That may or may not be true in general, but air travel is one of the most oppressive environments people regularly find themselves in. Being in an extremely crowded environment with very little personal space is psychologically uncomfortable for a lot of people. And it's basically not possible to escape that environment until the plane lands, which is typically hours of time. If it's OK to tune the world out anywhere, it's got to be in an airplane.
What do you think is going to happen if, as the author predicts, “Apple Vision Pro will be on the face of every frequent flyer”?
My prediction is that the experience would get even shittier. Since everyone would be tuned out, there’d be even less reason for the airline to care.
Perhaps they extend the charging ports some airlines are offering, with a bit more juice than a phone's battery to let people use their device for a bit longer.
There's a number of airlines that have signed contracts, like United. I think it'll take a while for everything to be completely rolled out.
What can the airlines do to make it worse? I suppose they could cut out soda and pretzels. And get rid of the HUD on the back of the chair. But I don't think most people care that much about that stuff, especially since a lot of chairs have power outlets on them, even in coach.
IMO, the thing that people really care about is the amount of space they have access to - both width and depth. And I'm not sure how much more airlines can realistically squeeze that.
Most people don't regularly travel by plane. This is a very "1%" (as shorthand for a privileged minority of people globally, not literally exactly 1% of the population) problem.
Except, they do in a country like the US that has massive distances between cities.
Statista survey pre-pandemic says majority fly every year https://www.statista.com/statistics/316365/air-travel-freque...
Americans fly quite often.
Last year, the prediction was 4.7 million people in the US traveling by plane over the thanksgiving holiday, which demolishes the 1% comment immediately.
> Except, they do in a country like the US that don't have any other suitable alternatives
I'd love a moderately fast train, say 200kph, between cities like Portland and Seattle. That's a great use case.
But as a nationwide network, there won't ever be a suitable rail alternative, unless it gets subsidized. Amtrak is already stupidly expensive for what you get.
https://www.airlines.org/new-survey-nearly-90-percent-of-ame...
44% of Americans flew commercially in 2022.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802...
Probably not enough to make the statement that flying is a situation people find themselves in regularly.
It’s clear the Vision Pro didn’t find its market but I don’t think it’s an air travel thing.
I just don't see the market Apple envisions materializing. I'd expect 20 people to be using a Quest in economy before you see 2 people using a Vision Pro in business.
If plane seating is anything to go by, most people don't want a luxury experience but a practical and cheap one instead. Most seats aren't reserved for premium passengers because they are a minority, maybe a profitable audience but not at all the primary one.
OG iPhone: $799
iPhone 3G: $199
> They are a luxury brand that relies on luxury margins, so I want to know why their business model will succeed.
Apple has shown many times over they don't need to be price competitive with the commodity segment. If you want to know why their business model will succeed, why not just look at their current business model which has been massively successful? Arguably the most successful business model in the history of consumer hardware.
Same poll can result with statement "100% of Americans use internet."
Some hard data says that 12% of US flyers take 66% of flights [1]. Those are all likely very frequent fliers, and is much more than 1%.
1. https://www.businesstraveller.com/business-travel/2021/03/31...
It's boring but not oppressive. It's okay to let the mind wander without completely disconnecting yourself from reality.
Where else can you get a full body cavity search, be denied water, be delayed by several hours without so much as an apology, be nickle-and-dimed with overpriced shitty food and $5 fees for a cab to drop you off, and have your luggage smashed up, all under one roof?
Of course, I'm not sure the Apple Vision Pro can do much to improve on the situation.
Ever heard of closing your eyes ?
It takes a lot of meditation practice to get up to "entire plane flight" level.
Maybe if I flew more frequently I'd grow to dislike it (I fly maybe once a year), but honestly airports and flying are my favorite part of a trip (yes, I like them more than any possible destination). TBF I haven't flown to anywhere particularly exciting but I fail to imagine any place matching the pleasure of an airport + flight. After writing this it sounds ridiculous but I'm 100% serious - I can't quite explain why I enjoy it so much.
There's some funny tweets about airports like: "The airport is a lawless place, want to get drunk at 7AM? Go right ahead. Tired? Just sleep on the floor. Chips cost $15".
edit: came back to post this, i definitely get an odd feeling of liberation once i'm at an airport. I travel sometimes for work and once i get in to the airport waiting to board I feel like work and every day life ceases for a time and i'm free to do whatever. It's odd because i'm trapped in this building with hundreds if not thousands of other people waiting to get on a pressurized metal tube blasting through the sky at hundreds of miles/hr. Nothing very liberating about that but for some reason being in the airport feels that way to me.
Yes, this is very much how I feel. 0 responsibilities and there's nothing I can actually accomplish during my time there. I just sit there reading a book or something, just waiting.
Maybe there's some ticketing snafu and it takes an hour just to drop your checked bag (sanctimonious carry-on fliers hold your posts like you hold the seventeen bags you try to drag on the plane)
Maybe security is insanely backed up or just run by incompetents, like the time at SFO where it took them 30 minutes to screen the 10 people in front of me.
Then once you get past security, a whole new list of potential problems comes up:
Maybe the incoming flight is delayed, possibly delayed so much you're going to miss your connection.
Maybe you'll board but the plane will be broken because the airlines don't believe in preventive maintenance, and you'll have to deplane again.
Maybe you'll board but due to various circumstances in airport operations you spend 3 hours sitting on the tarmac while the airplane gets increasingly hot and your toddler gets increasingly fussy.
To me this is the most intriguing part of it all.
I understand tech reviewers and journalists raving about having something to do on planes, as they probably spend an awful lot of time there. Then perhaps sales people also flighting on company's dime.
But regular people don't spend much time on planes, and many of them don't need it to be an entertaining or efficient time, they can just spleep if the flight is long enough (I can't imagine lugging along a luggage the size of the Vision Pro for just a 2 hour flight)
In particular the plane staff won't let you tune completely out if you're awake: the whole safety sequence , take off and landing, turbulences, the in-flight meal, all the guidance for international flights, your neighbours when you've pulled the middle seat etc.
If they can get the price below $1500, I'm sure many regular people will buy it even if they fly less than 10 times a year.
You can buy a business class ticket. I will hasard that the overlap between people who can afford to buy a 3000$ VR headset and people who can fly business is pretty much total.
My brother in god, you can travel from any point of the Earth to any other point on the Earth in less than a week. At what point are modern people going to “deal with it”?
Clearly people do "deal with it" since lots of people fly all the time. But that doesn't mean that the experience can't be improved.
How much of this would be solved by VR though? To me the unpleasantness of flying mostly comes down to physical discomfort. The seats are cramped, the air is dry, the food isn't great, the bathroom situation is uncomfortable, and you can't really walk around. VR would visually transport you somewhere else, but physically, you're still very much on a plane.
I'd be curious to try a device like this and see if it helps. I usually just use noise cancelling headphones and play a game or watch movies, which isn't too different from removing myself into VR, but I'm also aware that sometimes completely removing my sense of my surroundings can be more unnerving.
I don't disagree with you but I can tell you don't take the NYC subway or Paris metro or the London Underground with any regularity. If you think an airplane is "extremely crowded" then you have no words to describe actual mass transit.
Agreed 100%. Apologies for linking to my own essay, but I think this can be more generally stated as a difference between "isolated" and "integrated" arts. A device like the Vision Pro (and most tech devices, for that matter) is pushing society further and further into isolated chambers, and thus further incentivizing media and creators to focus on creating isolated aesthetic experiences, not ones that are integrated with the environment.
This is such a baseline unquestioned assumption that we have about the structure of the tech economy, that to think a company like Apple would make a device that brings people together in the real world seems absurd.
I wrote a bit more about this idea here: https://onthearts.com/p/modern-culture-is-too-escapist-part
I'd quibble that what you're really pointing to here is capitalism, though. Architecture isn't monotonous because of our cultural attitude towards architects/Architecture, it's monotonous because capitalists build most buildings, and they're predictably interested in perceived efficiency above all else. There's good reason to argue that beautiful surroundings augment worker productivity so it's not even a clean tradeoff, but in practice, only the richest companies and universities end up taking that risk with beautiful structures[1][2][3] and/or sculptures/fountains/gardens/etc. Obviously, the same dynamic applies to the exclusivity of contemporary art galleries and private collections.
In Apple's(/"tech"'s) defense, I think they'd absolutely love to sell integrative products whenever possible. The Nintendo Switch was originally marketed[4] as such, and despite being a bit goofy, I imagine it helped sell a lot of units. That's why Apple spent ungodly amounts of money trying to make real AR work before compromising with "passthrough" -- they know that people are social creatures, and that a huge driver of their sales is perceived social value.[5] Again: the problem is the system of incentives, not individual bad actors.
[1] Google's newest 'Bayview' campus: https://blog.google/inside-google/life-at-google/bay-view-ca...
[2] Huawei 'Ox Horn' campus: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1fuo1tt/huawei_has_bu...
[3] Vanderbilt University's main campus: https://admissions.vanderbilt.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4...
[4] "The rooftop party" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzJdYXk6tjA
[5] The iPhone's status among teens: https://www.phonearena.com/news/Heres-why-iPhones-are-so-pop...
The difficulty is in imagining some kind of economic structure in which an Apple or Microsoft could make billions from selling products/services that are somehow public goods, or enhancing public spaces. We can conceive of top design minds at Apple spending billions to create a new personal computing device, but the same minds working on a way to improve public spaces – say, by removing graffiti easily, or planting trees easily – just somehow doesn't make sense or fit into the "types of things" they would do.
It may also just be a fundamental structural issue, as I talked about in the latter part of the essay. There are far fewer legal restrictions on individual objects than there are on spaces. I.e., while everyone can use an iPhone everywhere, using a device to remove graffiti would come up against all sorts of property rights laws.
It's quite a difficult topic to wrap one's mind around, at the end of the day. But yeah in general I agree that it's not necessarily individual bad actors, and incentives are a huge part of it.
My hypothesis is that these companies want to make money by "taking" your senses. They want your attention to be with them at all times, by being in your ear so you'll hear them, by being on your wrist so you'll feel them, by being on your eyes so you'll see them.
I'm thinking these companies are building up technological ecosystems - Apple's specialty! - that they hope will eventually form a proxy for you to experience reality. Because if they can convince you to experience life through them, they'll have your wallet too.
Maybe it's just a silly thought of mine, but it kind of fits.
A phone is fundamentally a communications device. I use mine to catch rides, figure out where I'm going, call and text my loved ones, all of these things connect me to other people. I listen through headphones to music, and to talk to people, neither of these are isolating experiences. AirPods even have a mode which specifically turns off audio when someone is speaking to you, I like this, because I do enjoy listening to music or a podcast when I'm alone at the grocery store, and I do not like to be isolated by that from people around me, or the cashier.
I also use it to take photos, and then share them with people I care about, sometimes photos of people I care about, which I can then enjoy when they aren't around. These things enhance my senses, they don't steal them.
Phones certainly have some apps available which are addictive, I see people enduring self-imposed isolation in the presence of others due to that addiction, and that's sad, which is why I've dropped those social networks from my life and don't have those apps installed. Apple doesn't make those apps though, the closest thing is Messenger, which is a way to communicate with others, it doesn't have upvotes, it isn't public, none of those things.
I don't see a way to square all that with the thesis that Apple's specialty is isolatory sensory theft. Even the headset, which is clearly not designed to enhance the social parts of life, has several features which exist specifically to connect the user at least in part to their surroundings, and I think the fact that Apple never sold a VR headset without those features is a better reflection of their corporate philosophy than some paranoid yarn about how they make more money if users are cocooned in some Apple-provided sensory replacement bubble.
Did you mean to say Meta? Because if so, you made the mistake twice in the same post.
Taking what I said about a commercially sensical strategy about selling a - what was the word I did use? Proxy - through which you can experience the world, and then spinning some paranoid yarn about not experiencing the world at all... Now that is kind of strange.
On the other hand, I try to take a middle ground here. As much as I get annoyed and shake my fist at clouds these days when I'm trying to run past people on the sidewalks and they've got their faces buried in phones and don't see me coming, I can recognize a lot of people seem to have a deep-seated need for non-stop mental stimulus they don't seem to get from the real world for whatever reason and I'm not going to judge them for that. They're just different from me and that's fine.
But I do exist too and it'd be nice if reviewers like this didn't typical mind everyone, either.
It’s a multi hour flight. I don’t know anyone around me, most are asleep.
Many people already tune out the noise with their noise cancelling audio products.
Why would it be weird to tune out the visuals too?
The Vision Pro lets me also see people while wearing it and they can see my eyes. If I’m tuned out and someone approaches me they fade through.
Meanwhile someone with the headset can watch movies on a larger screen and feel less claustrophobic.
- sitting next to someone who you get along with and don’t run out of things to talk about for the entire duration of the flight
- neither one of you wanting to sleep or do anything else for the duration of the flight either
- not caring about the other passengers around you who might also want to sleep
I’m not suggestion you strike up a conversation with your seat partner on a plane, but if you do you don’t have to feel beholden to them.
Have you never sat in someone’s company, be it a pet or another person, each doing your own thing yet the presence of another made it more pleasant? That doesn’t mean tuning out the other person, quite the contrary.
It doesn't support the idea above of "it would be nice if people were bored enough to be friendly" as a way to handle entire plane trips, it just suggests a slightly different way of focusing on your own activities.
And what you described versus a vision pro is like, a difference between being 75% tuned out and 85% tuned out. It's not all that impactful.
Or is it also rude if one tries to sleep? Or if they decided to listen to music or watch a movie on the screens?
Really the fact is that all those things are normalized and this isn’t. The arguments against it would equally apply to all of the rest of the things people do on planes to occupy their time.
Nobody is saying you tune out the entirety of the world the second you sit down. But there is an awful amount of people acting like the environment around you on a plane is worth paying attention to the entire time
Which, I gotta say, is an even darker formulation at the end of the day! Like at least if we all plugged in and went the Oasis we are truly sharing some base experience of the place; or if its going to be solitary experience machines, at least those experiences would be holistically directed towards me in some consistent package; but with this stuff, you start to think about how much more ground these crooks can still take in stratifying the experience of simply the world itself as we perceive it.
I'm personally trying (and to some degree failing) to disengage from screens and other digital interactions.
My advantage is that I live quite remotely and can just hop into my boat and go fishing or something without the phone, but the craving that result in are scary.
https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Buddha_Box
I’m curious what you do on a 6 hr plane ride that’s not tuning out your environment?
Either way, I get why people do it, I was making more of a general point. It’s common for me to be walking down a street and see other people, also walking, so glued to their phones they notice nothing around them, to the point they have no reaction to near collisions.
I also find it telling that while the author mentioned (and I quoted) planes and trains, all of the many responses so far has centred on planes.
¹ Which I don’t do but won’t criticise anyone for it either.
While I appreciate the sentiment behind the statement, try living in an area where 90% of the environment is car stereos with subwoofers cranked so loud that you can practically see the air vibrating around you and get back to me. Given that (at least in the west), noise pollution is never really going to be properly legislated, the ability to tune it out is a god send.
I’m not advocation for never taking a break, I’m saying that we keep doing more and more of it and should perhaps consider dialling it down. Or at the very least not take tuning out as a slam dunk desired benefit without adverse consequences.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-10-13/apple-...
※ - Tested during my 30 min demo (more like 45 mins) at the Apple Store.
It's actually quite poor and significantly worse than most indoor spaces I've entered (most spaces aren't great at around 800-1600ppm). On planes I've measured※ very high CO2 levels (1800-4000ppm), with the worst air during boarding and deplaning. This matches the findings of others (both amateur and professional researchers).
※ - using Aranet4
Are we expecting almost all the clean air to be from outside, minimal amounts from recirculation?
I'd have expected a better mix (more fresh air) since even with filtration removing many particulates and viruses, high CO2 levels still cause worse cognitive performance.
Based on Veritasium's recent video, given the cabins are pressurized by bleeding air off of the jet engine might not be too surprising about CO2 or particulates. However the cabin air is also exceptionally dry.
Put a lot of people in close proximity for a long time and it's going to be very hard to prevent transmission of airborne viruses...
[*] Yes I'm prioritizing my comfort over safety for others, but that's the American Way (tm), isn't it.
(I switch to a mask with no metal in it for airport metal detectors, but I can switch back again immediately afterwards.)
(I don't see an issue with wearing an exhalation vent next to folks who aren't wearing masks themselves. If they cared about the air they'd also be wearing a mask. If I sat next to someone wearing one I'd switch back to the 9205+.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSs4KMEuWkk
https://www.amazon.com/Honeywell-14110404-SAF-T-FIT-Particul...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95
And they can stop paying extra for business class, because it stops mattering.
It was an amazing ride other than that.
I fly a lot of business class, and the comfort and space is what you pay for, not entertainment. But having good wifi helps a lot, even in a cramped seat.
From what I can tell there are two populations: those who prefer to recline and those who prefer not to. As long as an entire column of seats belongs to one population you're fine (if everyone wants to recline no one loses space, we all just shift around to a configuration in which everyone is more comfortable). But when you have someone more comfortable staying upright sitting behind a recline-preferenced person, that's where issues arise. It's not clear to me whether it's morally wrong for the front person to recline in that case, given that's basically just preferencing the default of "upright", which is arbitrary.
Nothing here should be read as justifying people who don't pay attention to what's going on behind them and/or recline suddenly/aggressively. It's always something that should be done with a glance behind and a smooth, gentle motion. Maybe also a word to the person sitting behind though again I'm not convinced that's a moral imperative.
[1] https://thepointsguy.com/airline/airplane-seat-reclining-eti...
(I wonder if it simply driven by an individualistic vs. collectivist mindset?)
as soon as one person starts reclininig, you can die on that hill all alone and i'm reclining faster than you can sigh in disappointment
This is really a case of "don't hate the player, hate the game" (be mad at the airlines for packing people in like sardines, don't be mad at the people for trying to take a bit of extra comfort which has been made available to them)
Would airlines be able to offer more space for more money? Sure they would. Would people pay for it? The market has already answered!
Could be just me but I think a lot of older generations share this experience. It is not hard to take out your earbuds or take off your VR device to show you are paying attention to the person you are talking to.
I'm not sure I like this development. Ignoring the "disrespectful" part, it has become accepted to toy with your phone while listening to someone and let's be honest, we all know you're not REALLY listening or engaging with the conversation.
Especially with AirPods gaining hearing aid functionality, it shouldn’t be a sign of lack of focus.
As an aside, I personally able to concentrate _more_ in certain scenarios when I am fiddling or have background noise playing. It quiets the part of my brain that otherwise gets distracted. I use that method for video conferences to increase the amount I am focused on the speaker and content.
Contradictory to your experience with it being young people who wouldn't listen to you it tends to be the 45ish business man who continues to talk on their phone in my experience.
Just because you emphatically state that something is normal, that does not make it normal
I remember the real hearing aids of yesteryear. They look sufficiently different from earbuds that they are always acceptable.
I don't even really see people take off headphones in this scenario, just uncovering an ear. It would be fairly hilarious to see someone lift up one side of an AR headset to make (singular) eye contact, tho.
I am only 32 and wouldn't consider myself old.
I used to get very uncomfortable, maybe even angry, when people at the cashier in the supermarket just did not get off their headphones and just leave a simple hello to the person at the counter. Nowadays I am just mildly irritated sometimes, but I still think it's stupid. Especially if the cashier is a really nice and polite person. Leaving on your headphones and not saying a word, sometimes not even giving them a look, feels like a f- you in their face. Just be nice to other people and it even works if you are a very socially awkward person like me. The world can be nice and even give you a smile every once in a while.
This obviously got worse since corona. Germany used to be a cash-heavy country, but now since "everyone" is just paying by card, they just pull it out, wave around with it to signal that they want to pay with it, so that they don't even have to say one single word. So weird.
> One caveat is that, out of respect, if the conversation is more than the “what would you like? Tea please” deal, I do remove the headset to make direct eye contact with them. I feel that it would be sort of odd to have a full-on conversation with someone if they’re wearing a headset (like bro, just take it off and let’s talk like humans).
So there's an implied metric of "meaningful interaction" where, below a certain threshold, it's okay to treat the other person as an NPC?
Perhaps I'm being an uncharitable curmudgeon here, but I even take my earbuds out when I'm asking for tea on a flight.
Things like these change very slowly, then suddenly, once the views of the perceived majority around most people change enough that the people start to see the new state as proper and confirmant, a new norm.
I don't think any ear buds are "cool", but certainly nobody cares, it's perfectly normal.
But long before that we had DoucheTooth (or BlueTool, whichever you prefer) earpieces. Now those were mocked.
But to your point, it will probably get slicker over time. For this one, they erred on the side of high fidelity, and they nailed it pretty well.
And you're right! And some of us will happily pay that! It is the _bleeding_ edge, after all.
If it makes you look like a dork and yet it's the third most selling EV, you might blame the judgment of the average car buyer of the US (for whom you seem to have contempt), but you can't dispute that the product sold.
99% of Apple users are not thinking about how much better they are than other people for buying the phone or computer they did. They just bought it because it's the obvious choice and they've had good experiences with it in the past.
Every time an anti-Apple zealout busts out the spec sheets to prove why alternatives are so much better, there's about 8000 gotchas and usability issues that aren't worth the tradeoff for most people. You're free to not think the tradeoffs of Apple devices are worth it for you, but for everyone else (most people) they make the best option that puts up the minimal amount of fighting and a handful of workflows that you simply can't recreate in other ecosystems without dozens of asterisks.
an (imaginary) Apple zealot?
> of Apple zealots telling you’re wrong for choosing something else and bragging that their choice is somehow superior
Except that hardly ever happens. Unlike the opposite [as we are witnessing in this very thread].
Why are you so obsessed with Apple, though? Seems pretty weird. I mean even weirder than being an actual "Apple zealot"..
You must not spend any time around teenagers. Teenagers absolutely judge people for not having iPhones.
best option that puts up the minimal amount of fighting and a handful of workflows that you simply can't recreate in other ecosystems without dozens of asterisks.
This is backwards.
My mentees (and on the other end of the age scale, my in-laws) are always shocked that I can do something on my Android in seconds that takes them minutes on an iPhone...assuming they can even do it on their iPhones at all.
Then again, Apple is one of the most valuable companies in the world. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude that they’re offering something valuable.
Relatedly, if other companies make better, less expensive products then why don't consumers buy them?
The customer is always right in matters of taste. Just because you don't like the taste doesn't mean they're wrong about their own situation.
No it doesn’t mean they are wrong, just closed minded.
So is Louis Vitton...and a whole host of companies that don't offer anything valuable beyond status-based luxury goods.
I'm in the same position. I considered the vision pro, but couldn't justify it, even if I used it on the flights etc. I depend on my switch/steamdeck for the plane, laptop if i have to work (I try not to, it's terrible)... and then I just went on amazon and bought a pair of 27" lg widescreens for a few hundred a piece. When I'm not in her apt we stow one of them in a closet (she dislikes two monitors on a purely aesthetic level). I fly in with my laptop and my keyboard and I'm ready to go.
I guess that would be different if I was flying first or business class.
So I don't fly with a tablet any more haha! Although, I get that time has passed and I would no longer be accosted so much, I assume. Must be pretty common now. My story takes place in ~2011 with the Motorola Xoom tablet. I guess they had never seen a tablet before.
I was also working hard on a plane one time, writing code to access barometer data on mobile devices to build a distributed weather sensor network that could be activated in software. The flight attendant came by and told me, "okay, time to put your toys away sweetie" referring to my tablet and phone. Oooooooooh my god.
That said, security rules vary from airport to airport. SFO with TSA Pre is practically a no-op, but CDG security requires that you remove from carry-on any device with a >20cm dimension!
The audacity! I hope you called them sweetie too.
Pre-iPad, most airport staff (who aren't hardcore techies, or might not have the privilege of higher education) might think of a tablet as a laptop anyway.
This is specifically to not to take up any extra room than is necessary. The only room it takes up is essentially the width of the HMD itself (even negating the strap)!
Small: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0C4YFV9F9/
Medium: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QPN321B
Syntech recommend medium. Folks likely would prefer small, but caution about cracking glass front.
The 3S has an IR blaster that allows it to work in total darkness. Meta also enabled a travel mode[1] a couple of OS revisions ago (back in June or so).
[1] https://www.meta.com/help/quest/articles/in-vr-experiences/o...
There's always the fear of losing stuff when you're moving objects around so much, too. One less thing to worry about.
I love the Sony XM3/XM4 for this reason. They fold up to a very compact volume
That said, the last time I had the opportunity to use my VP on a plane I just used my kindle and laptop instead.
https://www.xreal.com/
One area in which they’re significantly worse is tracking — they only really work well with the screen in a fixed position relative to your eyes, but this has been great for a movie.
I can’t get them setup to program on well tho
Honestly xreal's marketing is generous at best. They seem to really try to push it as being an AR device when its really nothing more than a monitor stuck to your face that you can't change the size of.
Using the beam or the software on your computer adds some AR ability, but due to the way it works on your Mac it really is not a pleasant experience and uses a ton of resources. The tracking is not great.
The lack of any sort of pass through (all you can do is dim it) makes it fairly useless in many situations, like the one mentioned in this article.
Options are great, and it is great that is significantly cheaper. But I bought the xreal pro, I keep trying to use it for watching something, games, programming or other work. But every time I use it for maybe 20 minutes and just get frustrated and put it away for a few more weeks.
It is one of the reasons I think that the price (and size) of the vision pro is justified. The tech to make something smaller and cost less just isnt here yet. All of those headsets like the xreal have serious compromises while trying to push an "AR" narrative for features they just don't really have.
I do love the idea though and it is tempting.
I don't love programming on a laptop without external monitors, so I like the idea of having a decent monitor in a pair of glasses.
I couldn't justify the price of a AVP, as I would only be using them as an external monitor. And I would worry about Linux compatibility.
Ah! I was not understanding why would anyone prefer this over other less invasive or smaller options, but now I get to the real advantage! /s
In fact, the virtual display is higher resolution/high scaled than 13 inch MacBook (source: https://azadux.blog/2024/10/08/traveling-with-apple-vision-p...)
By contrast, you can readily set the apparent screen size in the AVP to 40+ degree angle:
× 1.2 (corresponding to 40-degree viewing angle)
THX recommends that the "best seat-to-screen distance" is one where the view angle approximates 40 degrees,[26] (the actual angle is 40.04 degrees). Their recommendation was originally presented at the 2006 CES show, and was stated as being the theoretical maximum horizontal view angle, based on average human vision. In the opinion of THX, the location where the display is viewed at a 40-degree view angle provides the most "immersive cinematic experience", all else being equal. For consumer application of their recommendations, THX recommends ... multiplying the diagonal measurement by about 1.2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimum_HDTV_viewing_distance
I'm no fan of the AVP, but it is inane to post a comment on a picture from the article without taking the time to read the text surrounding it to understand the context. The blog went to great pains to set out the pros/cons, limits/advantages, just to have people half-read it or just look at the pictures...
There are VR headsets with wider FoV, but they're pretty bulky as of yet because of the limits of current costs-less-than-literally-$10,000-a-unit optics.
Does the AVP not have something equivalent? To be honest, I was surprised it took Meta so long to get around to implementing it.
[1] https://www.engadget.com/you-can-now-lie-down-while-using-a-...
[2] https://www.meta.com/en-gb/help/quest/articles/headsets-and-...
Do you mean you watch it on a smart TV in a hotel? Then I guess you could connect a laptop to that TV with an HDMI cable and not have to re-log in, right?
12 kilometer * amp * hours is simply a very long lightsaber.
I kept mine this whole time and I still actually use it regularly and it still amazes me. There's a steady trickle of interesting things that appear for it, and it's VERY useful as a giant virtual extended laptop screen if you have a Macbook. Especially if you are in a recliner and can tilt the virtual screen above your head a bit- vastly more comfortable. Very much looking forward to the extra large virtual curved monitor they're working on, hopefully this fall.
The thing is still kind of magical.
When I first got it, I would get some eye fatigue and/or dizziness after about an hour of using it, but that seemed to improve after a couple weeks (adaptation?) and I can now use it for 2-3 hours at a time uninterrupted without any discomfort. Chewing ginger apparently helps (same as with VR headsets).
Drinking coffee from a mug with it on is difficult. Get a straw.
I'm a big guy (6'3", 260lbs) and the headset is still a bit heavy.
The gestural and eye-focus UI is extremely good, my only complaint is that I still find it hard sometimes not to make erroneous inputs which can get frustrating, but that is more the fault of web UI's with closely-clustered controls that were not designed with this interface in mind- but sometimes with text input as well, it's sometimes frustrating.
The quality of the passthrough video (AR) can be improved, it's a bit shimmery (although still clear enough to comfortably read things on your phone or watch). It's stitched together from a bunch of cameras so it is surely already a technical feat.
The FOV is OK, but more is always better.
The immersive environments (and being able to dial them in and out) are FANTASTIC. Shout-out to the Bora Bora one in vOS 2.0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKueDGv4OVQ and the Marvel and Star Wars ones provided by the Disney app https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lisof6XWtII&t=491s I also love the moon one. Each one has both a "daytime" and "nighttime" view as well.
It's fantastic on a plane, if dorky.
I don't mind using my laptop or iPad for movies and work on planes...
To each their own...
I already disliked DRM like this, where the user's device acts against them, but something about the form factor makes me extra uneasy about it. Maybe the fact that it's directly on your face, integrating tightly with your vision.
Hopefully by the time we move onto AR contact lenses or implants there'll be some good user-respecting alternatives, though I'm not too hopeful.