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I feel like I’m the only person in this room feeling like it’s kinda dystopian! Do you really want to see those devices become the norm?
With the father filming his children and all that shit we saw in the ad? Let’s live in the present, not through the camera of a device made by mega-corporation.
I think people who are into it can be into it and people who aren't don't have to be. Every innovation had detractors lamenting it. And many of those innovations miss the mark and never take off.
Dystopian seems to really overstate it. I'm not rushing out to buy one but I'm not ruling it out eventually if I find a good use case. Probably not filming my kids but maybe there's something. Some kind of mixed reality LARP game maybe.
As a developer I’m so excited that’s true, but that’s ridiculous the way they portray it as a normal thing to wear it in public lol it’s so eerie
I think of the marketing as a bunch of nerds who want it to exist for niche reasons trying to find a way to appeal to normies because who is going to spend that much money to watch a dragon set fire to New York or have CGI bad guys lurking around corners only to pop out to be shot or going to comicon to have the amazing cosplays somehow enhanced even further with animation.
I feel like it's inherently a non-mass market device trying desperately for mass-market appeal because nerds can't afford $10k to stomp around the city as a giant mech in the hope they run into another one and have a duel.
But let's be more real. How cool would it be to look around and see other users with a tag cloud and you instantly know you can talk to that person about Star Wars or anime or football or dating? How much easier would it be to make small talk or even friends?
There's a lot of potential in such a device if it takes off. But I don't know if the devices are mature enough yet. And achieving mass-market appeal is a whole other hurdle and if it can't get past that the rest is moot.
Obviously I wouldn't want to see Apple be the only game in town. There has to be a minimum of two significant players to drive innovation, but someone has to create the market first. Apple might be able to do that.
Yeah but that's just marketing bullshit, just like how in real life, (normal and attractive) people don't pull out a Nintendo Switch and pass around joycons to play Mario Kart on the phablet-sized screen at trendy rooftop cocktail parties.
What would you call wearing some chunky headphones while walking down the street?
A couple decades ago, only freaks did that.
Nowadays it's so popular, people don't even take them off when entering a shop, or going to the doctor (source: went to the doctor yesterday, sat next to a couple people with chunky headphones isolating themselves from the real world).
The ad is really dystopian, the dad is ignoring the kid IRL and playing with memories of that kid
Now: the dad watches his smartphone and shouts "more to the left!" while the kids try to play.
Tomorrow: the dad is interacting with the kids IRL, while what he experiences gets recorded transparently.
After tomorrow: "drink a verification can to start recording..."
There is a thin line between dystopian, utopian, and back to dystopian 🤷
I see potential on the technology as a fake monitor. No need to have monitors on your PC setup, just connect the thingy into your PC and use it to generate a fake screen. Now I want a movie, the fake screen takes the whole wall, now a game, it takes 27', now to work, it creates 3-4 virtual screens/apps to place in the wall.
I would pay a lot for something like it. The freedom it provides seems great. If the thing has the resolution it says it has, and they showed how you could connect it to a mac, if it takes off, the only possible future I see for high end PCs is virtual monitors.
Especially with the fake "eye" it creates for you on the front of the device. It's creepy and dystopian af. Like we're all sitting around wearing AR goggles, with fake eyes displayed on the outside so it still looks like we're engaging with people around us.
I mean, I can maybe see a use case for something like this, where you're prototyping a build, modelling something, etc. Especially if you have more than one person and they can all collaborate on and interact with the same objects. But I'm having a really hard time seeing other use cases. Gaming on macOS isn't really a thing, as much as the latest Apple silicon releases would like you to believe. AAA devs aren't porting their games to macOS. So what else? Watching movies? Browsing the web? Why would I spend nearly $4000 for a device to do that?
I think Apple overall is generally really good about taking existing tech and pushing the envelope with it, and/or making it more usable and appealing for the masses. And even if this thing does represent a big step in xR, what's the end goal? What's the killer app? What's the overall... vision for the product?
I put googley eyes on my quest and saved a bunch of money compared to the apple thing
Especially with the fake "eye" it creates for you on the front of the device.
I can totally see a fringe use case for meetings etc. where you can look super attentive while daydreaming or sleeping.
As much as I enjoy hating on Apple, their track record popularising niche technology is admittedly pretty good. They made mp3 players mainstream, then everyone else scrambled to catch up. They made smartphones mainstream, then everyone scrambled to catch up. I wouldn't be surprised if they managed to pull off the same thing with VR/AR. Just don't mention the Newton.
The Newton was before its time. So many features we use our phones for today were pioneered in the PDA era.
But when was the last time they did it without Jobs?
The AirPods released on 2016 basically kickstarted tws popularity.
They also removed the headphone jack from the phone, so it doesn't really count. Airpods followed the Sony approach: telling your captive audience they will buy the thing or suffer.
Why doesn't it count? GP asked for an example where post-Job Apple made something mainstream, and the AirPod basically made TWS earbuds and removing jack mainstream (while not necessarily benefits end users). There are gazillion TWS earbuds now ranging from $2 AliExpress special to $400 from audiophile brands, that should count as mainstream.
Whether Apple can make VR headset mainstream or not, that remains to be seen.
Because it relying entirely on the dominance of the iPhone isn't really a post-Jobs action. It's actually the exact opposite: relying entirely on something he captained in order to make sales.
By this definition, everything that Apple do will count as relying on the dominance of the iphones because how tight their integration between their products is.
The headline makes it sound like a bad thing, but that's more than plenty for launch if they are distinct apps that represent a variety of use cases. Frankly, it's a lot more than I would expect for a new product like this. Sure, there's VR and AR available now, but Apple has a track record of rolling together existing tech in a package that's more accessible and often more useful. You can throw a few things out there to showcase what's possible, but you also have to wait and see how consumers actually want to use it. They will find use cases the creators didn't think of or were unsure about. Then the floodgates can really open up in terms of apps. I really wouldn't be surprised to see people wearing these things out in public.
So what number of apps is it?
“Only 150+” provides zero information regarding quantity
Well it does say n >= 150. But the phrasing makes it sound like it is trying to imply that this is a small number.
Apple vision will be a very good product ...in a few years, after it's much cheaper and more capable. But as of today, you can get an oculus quest which does a large percent of the same stuff for literally 10% of the price
And support Facebook while you're at it! 😣
I know Apple isn't much better, but Oculus selling out to Zuck instantly guaranteed I would never buy their products.
It's a double-edged sword.
Oculus' vision was to bring VR to the mainstream. They really didn't have the cash to make that happen on their own. They were using leftover parts from the mobile and tablet industry to hack together some headsets. It was a good proof of concept, but that was it.
With Meta's backing they put VR on the map. Others jumped in on it. Without them the Vive probably wouldn't have happened, nor would WMR. Then the transition to self-contained VR, the Quest but also others like the Pico, the Pimax Crystal and now the Vision pro. I know PCVR is pretty dead now but to me it was more of a transitory phase (and I still use it a lot but wirelessly now). VR was never going to be mainstream if you needed a powerful PC to do it and with all the cable mess.
I don't think these would have happened without the meta investment. I think it was good for the industry as a whole. However yeah, for consumer privacy it's not great that it was Meta that did the investment and not someone else (except Google or Amazon which would have been just as bad)
I don't really view it as a sellout and I was one of the earliest kickstarter backers. Serious money was needed to make it fly.
I think that's a fair take. This product category needs people willing to throw boatloads of cash at it for an extended period of time and there's only so many companies capable and willing to do that. I think if another company had bought them, there's a very good chance they would have quit by now. I'm not sure Google would have stuck it out this long, they love acquiring and then murdering products.
Very good take, thank you for the insight! You're more than likely right; they need the money, and it was the best offer (if ill advised ...). Industry got kick-started (pun intended), and there was much rejoicing.
If I remember correctly, apple also made it so iPad apps automatically work on the Vision Pro unless if the dev explicitly disables it, which is also a plus
This makes a lot of sense. Apple is asking users to use the same apps with the same UI floating in your real workspace. Even if it doesn't have much gaming support, it'll be preferable to others (Meta) for the immediate familiarity and utility.
Then again, I can't imagine it can stay at this price point for long, unless it becomes a MacBook replacement.
It's not 150 unique apps. The article says:
It’s not just Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube that don’t have apps for Apple’s Vision Pro at launch.(...) As of this weekend, the AR/VR device’s App Store has just 150+ apps that were updated for the Vision Pro explicitly
You can watch Netflix on the Vision Pro in a browser but they didn't create a specific app for it like for example for iOS. 150 other apps were updated to run on the device. We're not talking about apps that run only on Vision Pro, just apps that have specific Vision Pro version. It's like if when Apple released the iPad only 150 apps were tested, maybe slightly adapted and marked in AppStore as iPad compatible.
150 is nothing. There are millions of apps in the AppStore, all (if not all, most) of them could be updated to run on the VisionPro and developers of only 150 bothered to do it. That's terrible result.
150 apps that has been explicitly updated to support a device that's so expensive that's guaranteed that nobody would actually buy it is a lot. And it's not even on sale yet!
For comparison look at the Microsoft hololens. Similar concept and similar price, announced 8 years ago, can only dream of having 150 useful apps. If i go on the hololens store page it says "Showing 1 - 90 of 321 items" and you can see that are mostly demos or proof of concepts.
8 years after the launch has just over double the apps for a device that will launch next month
You don't know what effort is needed to update an app for Vision Pro. For most apps it's probably just marking a checkbox in the XCode and releasing an update. What special features will you add to PCalc? It will just float in front of you like every other app. Do you need to write any special code to make it work on Vision Pro?
Most of those millions of apps are crap that hasn't been updated in years, and they don't have millions of users (not the kind of users who would by a Vision Pro at launch, anyway). I haven't read the list but I'm betting the 150 that are here are much more popular and useful for this platform -- the kinds of apps that would actively benefit from this technology and that the users actually want and will use.
the kinds of apps that would actively benefit from this technology and that the users actually want and will use.
Pre-installed apps optimized for Vision Pro:
App Store
Encounter Dinosaurs
Files
Freeform
Keynote
Mail
Messages
Mindfulness
Music
Notes
Photos
Safari
Settings
Tips
TV
Here’s a full list of third-party apps confirmed for VisionOS so far:
Disney+
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Teams
Zoom
WebEx
Adobe Lightroom
Unity-based apps and games (titles TBC)
Sky Guide
Yeah, because when I use Safari, Notes and Word what I REALLY need is augmenter reality.
To me it's like the XReal Pro 2 with a bigger screen but bloated into 10x its price and basically the same gestures that were garbage on Microsoft Hololens. Tbf Hololens was astonishingly horrible at gesture recognition.
And imagine you have to tap the software keyboard floating in the air... Yup, that's how it worked with the Windows OS on Hololens. Jesus, I had to input my 30-letter workplace account PW on a keyboard that had some petite keys floating mid-air and away from me, switching between the alphabets and symbols modes every few air taps.
I could almost never log in because it was impossible to tap the correct keys for 30 times straight. Make one mistake, BS, but then the BS key was also small and I rarely could tap the BS correctly. Yeah, you try to remove a character and instead insert another wrong one till you miraculously manage to BS for exactly the correct number of times.
Agreed, I worry about this too. The Quest uses a similar gesture with hand tracking (finger pinching to click) and it feels really frustrating compared to the much more direct feel you get with the included controllers.
With the Apple you don't even have controllers available if you want them so gesture tracking must work perfectly. Apple does have a lot of experience in getting stuff like that just right, but I really wonder whether eyetracking + pinching is comfortable for hours.
Supposedly the gestures are one thing they did a really solid job of based on the demo recaps I've watched. And the eye tracking supposedly works quite well for focus state switching. The main complaint I've heard is that the virtual keyboard sucks.
I'll be really interested to see more in depth reviews when they start coming out.
I will wait for the budget version in a few years, but Plex would be rad
Get a quest, you can stream your videos to a huge virtual screen for literally 10% of the price of an apple vision
You can even have some of the spatial features now on the quest. Not yet very useful but they are working towards the same kind of AR, just at an obviously lower quality which comes with the price point.
For me here in Spain even the Quest 3 is a significant expense, the Apple Vision Pro is just a complete non-starter, and I'm a total VR enthusiast working in the IT sector (even doing some VR development as part of my work). But the vision pro costs multiple monthly salaries for me :) Or more than 4 months rent! No way would I spend that kind of money on an unproven tech gadget.
How do they expect developers to make apps for it without actually having it available? This is the dev-kit. Yes, they fake it in software so you can do the basics on a MacBook. But that's not really testing. The device in your hands is testing.
I recognize that it's expensive. Being an early adopter isn't cheap. But it's sincerely priced insanely aggressively. The resolution is a huge difference from everything else available. It's the difference between 10 seconds of text making your eyes bleed and actually being able to work on a screen with text. You can't get just that for meaningfully less than the Vision Pro.
The passthrough, same deal. Your alternatives are higher latency while also massively compromising the image quality just to get something passed through at all. And that's before the fact that it has a genuinely powerful SoC in the mix, and high enough quality cameras and processing to be controlled fully with gestures.
There's a reason all the tech enthusiast "media", who have their hands on a lot of these devices regularly, talk about the rest like they're not anything special, but had their minds blown by the Vision Pro. It's a huge step. And, because of their great development tools and relationships with big players, there will be a richer ecosystem than any of the others. Solo developers already could, and have, made real apps with ARKit for phones. They'll make real apps for Vision Pro, too.
Other platforms are "more open", but nobody democratizes app development like Apple. I understand the complaints about the arbitrary limitations they place, and don't like all of them, either, but the bottom line is that they really do make it perfectly reasonable for a single dev or small team to get something high quality published and support themselves on, and all of that vibrant ecosystem is going to add a lot of value to Apple headsets.
Just not day one. Because people need hardware to develop for.
Does it come with Genshin Impact?