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Oh boy. This is bad for Vision Pro...

Apple would never make such a small deal about upgrading the chip in one of their products unless they thought that product was toast.

I wonder if they're just in full pivot mode to glasses.

Anyone using one? If so, what for? (please give details)

I got an oculus quest 2, was blown away by it for 1-2 hours, but never really picked it up again. The games were fun but very shallow, and never tried any practical uses.

Would love to use VR for working on a plane. Currently use a laptop, but my neck sometimes gets sore from looking down. VR has the potential to 10x the screen real estate and prevent having to look at down at an acute angle.

> Apple Vision Pro with the M5 chip and Dual Knit Band starts at $3,499 (U.S.), and is available in 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB storage capacities.

Apple being stingy with storage (and RAM) isn’t new, but the base $3.5k spec with only 256 GB is extreme.

EDIT: clarity

Wasn't the Apple Vision pro discontinued?
It's still crazy to me that they put an M5 chip in this thing, but to run Mac apps you need a Mac. Just let the face computer be a computer!
This part suggests Apple warming up a little to Oculus-style VR controllers:

> With support for the PlayStation VR2 Sense controller, players get a new class of immersive games with high-performance motion tracking in six degrees of freedom, finger touch detection, and vibration support.

Previously they seemed to be committed to finger controls only.

I expected them to give up on it. Props for not pulling a google, but I guess that isn't a high bar?
I have yet to see one of these things in person.

Granted, I only see a VR headset like four times a year, but nobody I know bought a Vision Pro either, whereas I know a few dozen people with other headsets.

I was super interested in the Vision Pro when it was first released. Then I found out they went with an app model and the device could only display a single MacOS window. There went my dream of surrounding myself with a bunch of vim windows and terminals.

If they'd focused on maximizing the device's usefulness instead of its revenue stream, maybe things would have worked out better.

You can just install La Terminal...
I went to an apple store, saw a vision pro and asked if I could try it on. They said you had to schedule an appointment, then they would take you through a supervised viewing or whatever.

This gave me the impression it wasn't ready for general use, and they would have to control your impression of the thing while selling you on it.

I know that VR is hard, and AR is much harder, but this made me think apple still hasn't cracked it.

As to single app - I figure the thing has to be hard real-time to do things without giving you a headache or nausea/vomiting. that probably doesn't leave room for a lot of sharing of resources.

In the end, I think this is a iphone 1.0 type device, and only continued development with deep pockets will make it viable, eventually.

The appointment is fairly hands off. The employee checks your prescription, installs the right lenses and helps you have a good fit, possibly trying other lenses if you’re having issues.

There isn’t any prep I saw that they would have to do before they could except a walk-in.

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I think most of us will wait for these chips to get into more useful computers.
Interesting to see apps like Steam Link and the PlayStation VR controller support advertised. Seems like an admission that Apple underestimated how many VR users need that gaming functionality to be there.
Is this chip imprinted with engrams from Daystrom? It seems like this might be the ultimate computer.
How are they at version 26 of VisionOS?
I'd preferred they'd downgraded the price instead, but snark aside is it still really the only headset with twin 4K resolution or are there others?
They are still making this?

Why?

I wish they could get the price down. I had it for a few weeks before returning it. It's really an incredible device but for the value it currently provides it's not worth the cost. They also need to sort out the fact that mirroring a Mac is tied up with your Apple ID. My main use case was going to be mirroring my work MacBook, but I'm not signing into my work device with my personal Apple account. It's an astonishing oversight. If they can halve the price (and maybe the weight) over the next decade it'll be huge.
$3499??? Is anyone actually buying this?
The Vision Pro is a premium VR experience, but the weight is something I could never get used to.

I hope that they revisit the hardware at some point when novel tech enables a lot of weight reduction.

Since they only list France and Germany as EU countries I guess the rest of us in the EU are never going to get the Vision Pro?

While I could get one from Germany, when I did that with the Google Pixel I ran into a whole bunch of trouble when it needed to get repaired. Since Google required an address in Germany.

I love my first gen Apple Vision Pro. I find that most of the criticism isn’t addressed at the product and technology, but at the price and Apple’s strategy.

Price will go down in five years, once the tech mature la. For now this is a bit like how the Oculus DK1 was. An early device to explore what the overall vision is about, and figure out the apps.

120 Hz support seems like the biggest upgrade.
> With M5, Apple Vision Pro renders 10 percent more pixels with the micro-OLED displays

I found this little piece of information interesting. Apparently the display on the Vision Pro has such high resolution that they reduce the detail of the rendering. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that reported before. It means that an even higher quality display is still far in the future, since the silicon to push that many pixels isn’t quite ready.

Spatial computing is not spatial intelligence. Apple fundamentally has missed the boat on topological integrations.