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I think a lens worth looking at that suggests this is a misstep is:
Apple has only ever convinced people to bring a new device with them once, with the iPod.
They realized that a wallet sized device that could playback your entire music collection would be a huge hit, and convinced people to effectively carry around a second wallet (plus headphones). This was the first and only time they convinced people to carry around a new device on a daily basis, and it was relatively easy since jeans had two front pockets anyways.
Around the same time, cell phones started also filling the role of second wallet, for a period, some of us even carried around 3 wallet sized devices. Then the iPhone just combined two of them (eventually all 3 kinda).
Macbooks / laptops, are basically just the equivalent of textbooks in our bookbag, iPads are just a fancier version of that book that can also work with a pencil. Apple Watch just replaced our regular watches. No other Apple product (or anyone else's for that matter) have convinced us to carry a wholly new form factor of device around with us.
Even the iPod was entering an already established market (consider the Sony Walkman).
Although that is interesting… I found some stats and 385 million walkmans were sold over 30 years. About 10. Million per year. Another report claims 51 million VR headsets in the last 5 years or about 10 million per year… (I started this comment planing to be negative, but now I wonder if Apple is not hitting the market at just the right time…)
wait… why would you want to carry it with you??
Why do you carry your laptop with you?
What is the purpose of the Vision Pro? Is it just a VR Headset? Then sure, it sits at home like your video game console. But paying $3500 for that is insane when you could buy a Quest and a gaming PC.
Or is it a work focused AR device like Apple is pitching, in which case, it should go everywhere your Macbook does, at home, at the office, on trips, etc. Hard to imagine people wanting to lug a bulky headset with them for those purposes.
I'm also getting at the idea that the true revolutionary moment for AR will be when we can use them and carry them with us everywhere, like watches / phones / wallets / glasses. Unlike the iPod / iPhone / Apple Wallet, Apple is releasing this well before that point.
If the AR floating windows/screens work as they advertise, then it replaces 1-2-3 screens, in whatever configuration you want them in. You connect it into a gaming PC and use the augmented floating windows as virtual monitors. Then use a mouse or whatever, it's more about the windows.
Later you want to see a movie. Minimise all your virtual monitors and deploy a big ass monitor to watch it in a big screen, without moving from you comfy gaming setup.
I'll wait until third party apps implement this feature and the price gets at least halved. I'm the only one I've seen that has mentioned this use case but I honestly feel like it has potential.
Yes, I understand this dream, I just also understand how far away we are from this. Wearing a VR headset like this is sweaty and uncomfortable, and you're not going to do it for nearly as long as you might look at a monitor and TV. The weight would need to be at least like 1/4 what it is to feasibly be comfortable to wear for 8+ hours a day.
Right but how much does a screen cost these days? (I guess the apple ones are still absurdly expensive, are they still charging $1000 for a monitor stand?)
Also I doubt that these things work anywhere like that. The resolution is nowhere near good enough. Also I've worn the quest and your face gets sweaty pretty quickly. The weight on the front of your head is very noticeable, and they give you headaches after a while if you don't get sick first. They can be fun for the right types of gameplay but that's it.
Also, SV doesn't really care about VR gaming. What they really care about is AR, and they care about it because they want to put advertisements like everywhere. Every building: Ads all over it, Every wall in your house: Ads everywhere. Every interaction with your loved ones: Ads. This is the future they dream about, but it sucks and they have never come up with any real reason for us to put their face huggers on.
And it only supports mirroring one screen from your Apple device... Kinda useless.
A heads up display that could overlay useful information onto the world around you would be amazing.
The problem is that the apple vision is huge and bulky. They need to shrink it down to the size of big nerd eyeglasses. Microsoft did the same thing with their whatever it was called. I played with it a few times at different tech demos. It was garbage from the start because it was heavy, uncomfortable, and the refresh rate was intolerably slow. Apple's is a slight improvement in a few categories but it still completely misses the point of what AR should be.
I agree with almost everything you said except that the Hololens was pretty remarkable for the time and magical when I got to use it at work, tiny FOV and crappy refresh rate regardless. Walking around a normal cluttered open plan office, watching youtube in a web browser as it followed me, then pinning it to a wall, walking elsewhere and pinning some of our architectural models to tables and stuff, and then walking back around the building and them all still being exactly where I put them was a pretty wild experience. The Quest 3's AR stuff still doesn't feel quite as magical due to the distortion, lack of peripheral vision, and noticeable ski goggle feeling, nor does the world tracking seem quite as good (though I still think it's impressive for a $500 consumer device).
The Hololens is also entirely limited by it's choice of using transparent displays but that's also what makes it safe to use in industrial and now military settings.
That's not what Apple wants it to be or is advertising it as at all. They don't expect people to be wearing it all the time when they're out doing things.
It's meant to be a supplement to laptops/desktops, then eventually a replacement (I don't think headsets will ever fully replace traditional computers though).
It's first and foremost a VR headset with really good AR and video passthrough. They're not glasses. Apple just doesn't want you to think that it's VR because they've decided they always have to be "special."
Honestly I kind of agree with op's submission. Apple just didn't have a real plan for what they wanted it to be. It sits in an awkward niche between AR and VR and it sucks at both as a result.
Why in the world do you think this is supposed to be a mobile product? Just because it can run on a battery doesn't mean they intend for consumers to wear it around town.
My impression is that it's for use in the home and/or office. I wouldn't walk around town with anything worth thousands of dollars out on display and I think most people are similarly minded.
What purpose does it serve in an office that your MacBook doesn't?
What purpose does a MacBook serve that an office from the 1980’s wasn’t equipped to handle?
AR devices in an office serve the same purpose as existing tools, but there are ways that they can improve efficiency, which is all the justification office tech needs. Shit, my monitor costs 2/3 the price of the Vision Pro, and an ideal piece of AR hardware would be immeasurably better. Meetings in virtual space would negate how much meetings suck remotely. Having unlimited screen real estate would make a huge difference in my line of work. Also, being able to use any area in my home or out of it with as much screen real estate as I want would be huge.
I’m not saying that the Vision Pro does all of those things, but it does some of them, and I’m 100% okay with it being the thing that introduces the benefit of AR to those without imagination.
Two professional 27" 4k dell monitors cost ~$800 combined. You overpaid like a mf if you spend $2000 on a monitor.
Let me know when someone announces one.
Lol, citation needed.
Agreed, as long as using those screens didn't require wearing a pair of ski goggles that will die after 2 hours.
An understandable point... I would argue that it's a much better practice for your mental health to have a dedicated space that you work to create a clear mental separation between home and work but it may work if that space is virtual.
Those benefits don't take imagination they just take having seen a sci Fi movie in the past 20 years.
Sorry, but you don’t understand the needs of the market that we’re talking about if you think that a pair of ~$400 dell monitors is equivalent to a high-end display. The difference between $800 and $2500 amounts to a few days’ worth of production for my workstation, which is very easily worth the huge difference in color accuracy, screen real estate, and not having a bezel run down the middle of your workspace over the 3-5 years that it’s used.
I already said that I’m talking about the Vision Pro as a first step in the direction of a fully-realized AR workstation. As it currently stands, it’s got some really cool tech that’s going to be a lot of fun for the guinea pig early adopters that fund the development of the tech I’m personally interested in.
Dude the last thing I needed for my “talking to an idiot online” bingo card was “(ignores point) aPpLe fAnBoY”
Dude the last thing I needed for my “talking to an idiot online” bingo card was “Dude the last thing I needed for my “talking to an idiot online” bingo card was “(ignores point) aPpLe fAnBoY””
I’m actually laughing over here, that was pretty good.
Hell if I know, I don't even know what all it can do. There are probably dozens of things it can do that all kinds of laptops can't do though.
I don't use 3D modeling for my work but I can see how a 3D stereoscopic display could be highly useful for scientific research, as those have been part of the high end Nvidia Quadro GPU feature set intended for scientific research for many years already. Those would be coupled with a 3D monitor, and that kit of 3D monitor and Quadro GPU probably already cost more than the Apple Vision does.
Basically I assume it can do all the 3D VR and AR stuff that laptops can't do in general. Whoever needs that for their office work might buy it, but I don't need one.
I used to be a professional 3D modeller at an architecture firm, we bought the Oculus Rift, we bought HoloLens, we bought almost every single VR headset that came on the market, and you know what they got used for? Basically nothing. Some marketing stuff and occasionally we would use them to walk a client through a design, though 99% of the time this was just done on a normal monitor or TV.
It's not easier or faster to 3D model in 3D than it is in 2D, since the human brain can't enter 3 different dimensional constraints at the same time. The only real benefit of VR is that it's better conveying a sense of scale and presence. But that's at the cost of having to wear a sweaty bulky headset with limited battery life or a long cord, having to pay for an even more powerful computer than normal to be able to render everything, waiting for CAD companies to rewrite their software and come up with usable 3D interfaces, and not being able to share the experience with anyone and see the same stuff like you do on a monitor.
Even In a business like architecture that you would think would be ideally suited to this, there's still almost no real benefit compared to a traditional monitor setup. Quite frankly the biggest real world benefit is just that if you're in an open plan office you could shut out your coworkers, but again, at the expense of wearing ski goggles and headphones all day.
They've only (in this century) produced a new product people take with them once, iPod. Except for the iPhone. MacBook Air. iPad. Apple Watch. AirPods.
So you're 16% correct, and falling.
You clearly didn't understand the same point that everyone else did. Maybe reflect on that rather than assume you're the only one able to do percentages.
It's not about the product, but the kind of device. Before the iPod, people didn't really carry around computer like devices with them in the pockets, did they?
Maybe you've heard of this device that plays music on tiny headphones, great for listening while walking. It was called a Walkman. Came out in 1979. By the time the iPod came out, there were plenty of digital music players; I carried a Rio Volt (CD-ROM full of MP3s), but the Nomad was the one CmdrTaco compared iPod to.
Many people carried Palm Pilots, Newtons, cell phones, pagers, portable games (GameBoy, Game Gear, Lynx), film & digital cameras. I used to carry so many gadgets. Sharp/Tandy PC-3 was a great little calculator/computer, so was HP-35s.
Apple's done an amazing job of making vastly better versions (eventually, in some cases; I waited for gen 3 iPod with USB), and folding multiple things into a device, and competing with themselves. So now most of those devices are gone, and we just carry an iPhone (or lame knockoff). I have a bunch of portable game devices, which live on my desk because why carry them? iPad rolled over the MacBook for portable computing. And now Vision Pro is going to roll over that (in a couple versions, probably).
The "one-hit wonder" assertion just requires someone to have lived a cave since 2006.
Genuinely curious, do real people actually use ipads?
Yes. It's Apple's second most profitable platform. If I go out to a café (which admittedly was before pandemic), half the people have one, much more than laptops now. In business, it's a super common way to take around documents, presentations, etc. The kids really love them.
I've been in love with it since launch, it's a magic book.