I own an Apple Vision Pro and I think it's one of the most impressive pieces of technology that I almost never use, for two reasons:
1. Too much startup friction. I share the Apple Vision Pro with someone else who like me also loves it and uses it all the time. But since we both wear glasses, there's a 2x ~10 minute process for recalibrating the eyesight each time we switch. It's an expensive device at $3500 which I'm happy to pay for quality, but to pay that twice, I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Apple goes too far with the greed here not letting us set up separate profiles. Netflix wouldn't get away with that. You not only have to repeat the setup process when switching, you have to share access to your apple user account too.
2. My main interest in a vision headset is I want a new virtual workstation where I can watch movies on a gigantic screen beneath a gigantic translucent terminal where I can do my daily work. There's a nice app called La Terminal that does just that. Sadly it has some serious keyboard latency issues since I don't think they've put as much focus into their support for this platform. I won't tolerate anything less than optimal latency in my work tools. So until I get around to building a terminal app for Vision Pro on my own, there's not a whole lot I'm interested in doing with it aside from watching the occasional movie on the moon. I would also really like for Vision Pro to have an ethernet port because I don't know how to run a wifi network without jitter.
If you haven't tried one of these things, then you really should. I didn't realize when I first put one on that it was a fully synthetic display until I tried reading the 10pt text on my computer monitor. It's really a stunning thing to witness. This Vision Pro is probably the best glimpse we can get today of what the singularity is going to be like in the future. So definitely give it a try at least once.
I can respect that it's probably worth trying, or even worth buying if you have a particular case for it and a rather large income, but I guess what is lost on me about the AVP (and by extension iPads, more expensive phones) is that they just seem to be a way to extract multiple thousands of dollars for essentially the same entertainment we've already been doing quite well for a very long time.
Like how much should watching stuff be worth to people!? Am I crazy? I don't even dislike movies, but $3500 usd might be what I already spend on all forms of entertainment + 2 years worth of food, and maybe all of my transportation for half a year or more, combined. I'd just kind of hope for something more substantial y'know?
For that price or maybe a little more you could buy a 4k projector and a nice screen that would make watching a movie a whole lot nicer
> $3500 usd might be what I already spend on all forms of entertainment + 2 years worth of food
Where do you live? I live in Romania and even my mom who makes around 1000e a month spends like 400e on food, so she spends around 5k euros a year on food
It is easy to spend EUR 400 for the monthly food, or even much more, if you buy industrially-processed food and various kinds of food that are tasty, but which are expensive and unnecessary.
Nevertheless, not only in Romania, but probably in most countries of the European Union, a human can spend for food only between EUR 100 and EUR 150 per month, while still eating very healthy food, with the condition of cooking at home and buying only raw ingredients. Even the industrially-made bread is at least 3 to 4 times more expensive than the bread made at home. For other kinds of food, the price ratio between buying and making at home is even greater.
We are family of 2 adults and 1 child. We spend very easily 400 (and more) per month. We don't buy any processed food. We cook at home. 90% of time. Some weekends we go out for a single lunch or dinner. We live in Czech republic. We rarely buy "bio" (or "organic" depending on where you live) food.
I spend way more than 100/week in food for two people. To spend less than a quarter of that I would have to scale down or remove fruit, vegetables, meat or fish from the menu. Probably would have to eat pasta and rice with some sauces all the time which isn't healthy at all. And I'm in Portugal, not the most expensive place in Europe by a long shot.
that's 145 USD/month for me. It's not impossible, but you're not eating out ever and are basically on little more than a rice and beans diet at that point.
>Apple goes too far with the greed here not letting us set up separate profiles
Apple really has one of the worst workflows around user accounts, I have to think it is because of some legacy reasons that means it would be a big project to fix (based on other companies I've worked at that lousy user accounts and couldn't fix)
No thanks, so far no VR headset has sorted out the problem of having little screens so close to the eyes, for people with light sensitive vision needing to wear light redution glasses when working with regular screens.
>I won't tolerate anything less than optimal latency in my work tools.
for $3500 I don't expect any primary shortcoming, especially for something I'd use professionally. There's a lot of substitute hardware I could buy to get the same experience at that point, so I see no need to compromsise just becasue it's a shiny new toy.
> I didn't realize when I first put one on that it was a fully synthetic display until I tried reading the 10pt text on my computer monitor.
Can you elaborate on this? I've not looked at it since it came out. Does this mean that you can look at your computer monitors while using it, or that it's replacing your computer monitors because it has a high enough resolution?
Every other display I've tried has far too low pixel density to be used for serious work, which is rather unfortunate.
When compared to a monitor in front of you (at the distance the physical monitor is), Apple Vision Pro is actually pretty low resolution. They say it has high resolution 4k or 8k displays, but all those pixels are "wasted" on your entire field of view. The actual 'monitors' or windows are a subset of that, and so will be drawn with less physical pixels than a real monitor.
he loves it, almost never uses it, while she also loves it, but she also uses it all the time.
(pronouns chosen to make it easy to distinguish two people, with no knowledge of anybody's sex or gender, but since sex and gender shouldn't matter, it shouldn't matter)
One of the commenters was thinking the same thing as me
> People are going to only read the headline and interpret it as “discontinue”. Like the article says, it just means they have enough inventory until they replace it with something cheaper. [https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/report-apple-may-stop-p...]
I wonder how Apple would go through with this, hopefully with a better form.
Effectively, there's no real difference. The model is discontinued, the article says they've produced their last batch and are focused on making a cheaper one.
Apple is free to continue selling what they have in inventory.
> Effectively, there's no real difference. The model is discontinued.
There is a huge difference. My interpretation is that the GP is making the point that with just the headline people will think the product as a whole was discontinued, not just this first version.
Whether the 'product' is discontinued depends on what the next product is. If they drop the AR using VR (its distinguishing feature), then the Vision Pro as we know it is dead and lives on only in name--effectively becoming an Apple Quest. I would love competition in that space.
VR should include computing and everything. Reality can be anything. VR can even include Reality. I'd agree with you if Apple wasn't backtracking what the idea of Computing is to be a modern monopoly app store.
Considering the number of people Apple marketing is able to reach, compared to the MacRumors website --- I really don't think it will have that kind of deleterious impact on people's interest in Apple VR.
That said, Apple marketing has been mostly dead silent since the product announcement 1.5 years ago.
My prediction is that they will "continue" the product as a different product, maintaining the name. A bit like how the Macbook Air is still a product, whilst we all know it was discontinued some years ago.
I’m not sure I follow. It has a different form factor now, but it still follows the same design ethos as the original model. It’s not like, say, the Ford Ranger, which had a long gap of non-production before being “brought back” in a different product category from the original.
It does say a lot about demand though. You don't discontinue production on something when you have no successor coming soon unless you vastly overestimated demand.
Without the bit of info that they are looking at how to make a cheaper one, some might take “discontinued” as a sign that they are giving up on the whole field. That’d be big news.
As to selling the rest of the inventory: of course they are free to sell whatever they want. But this is a device whose only real use is to be a sort of preview/testing ground for developers who want to get ahead on writing VR code. The pricing is ridiculous for a consumer device, and it is too goofy for Apple users to wear to coffee shops. Continuing to sell it without any note that it was pointless would be a massive betrayal to third party Apple devs if they aren’t planning on making a serious product.
This. The hardware and R&D investment won’t go to waste. I’d love a much lower friction version of Vision OS that could successfully get a high res screen in AR. Probably a few more years. Or maybe 10. :) Anyway, I’m curious what Apple will do next, and I’m looking forward to trying those facebook glasses as well. I think there’s almost certainly some tipping point of usefulness and form factor where AR becomes something that’s an “obvious next step, in retrospect” — but I don’t think the bulk, (lack of) comfort and weirdness of not seeing the eyes are winners for the AVP in the long run. I still pack mine for flying though — love it on a plane.
No they're just overspec'd and overpriced. If their goal was to ultimately release a consumer level device, they shouldn't have gone overboard with tech that has limited room for cost cutting.
It's typical of Apple's hubris, to throw in all these features they think people will want, meanwhile if the headset had no cameras and was just a display strapped to your head for $1000, it likely would have sold a lot better. But they didn't want a VR device for whatever reason.
At the same time you could blame discretionary spending being at some of the lowest levels in a decade.
I remember when apple got universally panned for putting cameras in laptops. Most people surely wanted the cost savings, while the small number of power users who needed video chat should have no trouble picking up a USB camera for $100 (more like $200 in present-day USD). Of course, what actually happened was that people (and apps!) in the mac world could suddenly assume that everyone else already had a camera set up, even if they weren't technical, and that was the real killer feature. The rest of the industry quietly memory-holed the snide commentary and followed suit.
Volume will drive price down once VR gets Good Enough. Right now it isn't, so I'm glad that Apple is playing to their strengths by taking swings at substantive challenges -- like the fact that VR makes the wearer look like a complete dope -- rather than becoming discount VR vendor #312.
Or when they release a phone with no keyboard, no apps, that couldn't even do 3G speeds. Followed by the iPhone funeral parade held by microsoft. Or when they release a tablet. Everyone was talking about how that was merely a content consumption device and no one would want it at that price point. Later everyone was concerned that Apple would cannibalize its laptop market.
Apple has a history of doing products that seem expensive and weirdly overspecced at the beginning, and then stick with it if they truly believe in it. OTOH, there are also clearly products that Apple killed because they didn't work out. But I believe it's still to early to tell where the Vision line is going.
They got lucky, many of us remeber a Apple that was about to send everyone home for the last time, and that only did not happen due to a set of lucky accidents that turned out great.
They're smoking something if they think anyone is buying this for 3.5k when it has exactly zero game & app support - discretionary income is going to be spent on things that are fun for deep immersion in a hobby, or else something that can be shared and enjoyed with others.
Disagree, it needs to be better and different, not worse. Every other Apple product is sleek and fashionable, this is a big goofy VR headset. A VR “screen for your face” device would probably be a little better but only in the sense that it is better to not waste a bunch of money on R&D for a device that is not going to be bought.
For a real attempt, the UI needs to be augmented reality you can wear walking around, and the form factor needs to be a pair of normal glasses. It is certainly possible the tech doesn’t exist yet. But that won’t convince people to buy a silly version.
They need cameras for tracking your position and orientation. Also, tracking your eyes can be beneficial in many ways, i.e. enabling foveated rendering, not just for showing a blurred face on the external screen.
Isn't it part of the Apple way to release expensive and weird products at times to keep Apple in the minds of people as a luxury brand. Things like $400 wheels for Mac Pro or the $1000 stand for the external display.
I can see AVP as being half luxury and half tech-demo/devkit for a more budget friendly device.
> to keep Apple in the minds of people as a luxury brand. Things like $400 wheels for Mac Pro or the $1000 stand for the external display.
I have never seen anyone look at those two examples and think “luxury”. Even the most ardent proponents of Apple products laugh at those prices and think they are absurd. With good reason. Who ever is going to look at computer wheels and think they’re a sign of luxury¹?
¹ Yes yes, someone surely will, just like there’s someone for everything. I’m making a general point.
Rich tech fetishists. I worked for one for several years and he had every fancy Apple gadget they ever made. On a positive note, I frequently got his castoffs when he got bored with them.
I'd wager they overstuffed this thing with sensors and high quality tracking to gather good training data, and the next model will be as effective with fewer cheaper sensors.
I do not think the price is only issue. Problem with VR headsets is that you need to commit your self to use it.
Personal computing did not reach mainstream until smartphones. Even notebooks were too much of commitment for most people. Maybe AR [0] glasses could go in path of smartphones but VR headsets are polar opposites to smartphones.
[0]: Actual augmented reality that is projected on top of real vision - not recorder reality with camera like in case of this product.
Yeah it really feels like a devkit they sold in hopes someone would come up with the killer app because they hadn't figured it out themselves yet.
It's a shame as it seems like they maxed out the tech specs, but given the state of the art it still ends up being too low resolution for true MacOS productivity replacement, while also being too heavy & tethered to a short lived battery pack.
Maybe a worse-is-better version that is cheaper/lighter will sell more for entertainment uses.
Exactly. They need to cut the price in half and focus on entertainment. Thats the only thing I hear friends talk about who still use theirs AVP. Wearing it longer than a movie becomes too strenuous.
I guess if they just called it a devkit, nobody would have bought it. But, with the specs, price, and the ridiculous form factor, it was a devkit in all but name.
Except there is so little investment in devs and the ecosystem that even as a devkit it falls flat. VR/AR is a teensy niche of simulation enthusiasts and a large group of people who essentially play 30 minutes of beat saber occasionally. That's not exactly a thriving market, and Apple explicitly eschewed that market entirely, because nobody sims on a mac anything, and there are no controllers to play beat saber with.
Where are the grants to devs to buy and develop something good for it? Apple just kind of expected everyone to do that work for free for them. Watching movies on an airplane is not a $3500 use case. Mirroring your desktop to a head mounted display that is too heavy and cumbersome to be a $3500 use case. Putting iPad apps into the air is not a $3500 use case.
Where's the killer app? What even IS a killer app for head mounted displays? They've been around for 30 years now. It has never been an insufficient hardware problem. The original oculus devkits were genuinely terrible, but VR IS a killer app for sim enthusiasts, so they rushed to implement it into everything they could straight away. Euro Truck Simulator was one of the earliest integrations. But that's not an Apple market and never will be.
If someone wants VR/AR to be some stupid ShadowRun heads up display for managing all the info you encounter in the world, that app should be built and iterated on first. How many average people even run an "organize and remember everything" app? What percentage of iPhone users even use the damn calendar?
I’d like Apple Maps to show up in my field of view. In that case I could even not have a phone at all. (But not like $3500 want). I agree that nobody has found a really good use case. I do wonder to what extent that is just because nobody has released an AR headset that you’d wear outside.
But they still look kind of off when wearing them in public (slightly bigger than normal sunglasses, cable from one ear and other people can see the light from the screens from the side or back).
And the lack of integration is a pain - the phone has to be unlocked so is subject to random taps and swipes in my pocket.
However, an Apple-built Carplay-style projection into XReal type glasses could work very well - the question being how would you control it?
> People love their electric scooters nowadays, and they’re just worse Segways.
Not sure about that. The scooter is a >200year old design and there is a reason it subsist to this day. Segways are huge and not as easy to store/fold. Onewheeler are more elegant design and much more compact but awkward to operate when powered off in places you aren't allowed to use it and you cannot carry loads as easily. In that sense a scooter offer the speed of the segways/onewheelers, with the convenience of being able to push them easily anywhere with minimum effort while staying foldable, easy to hide away once reaching destination yet they can carry stuff.
I see noone mention the Segway flaw in real world use - if either wheel loses traction for a moment, the device will spin and dump the rider on the ground. They're laughably bad and uncomfortable to ride compared to a regular pushbike, let alone eBikes.
Scooters are a smaller form factor, but bikes should be the real personal transport winner.
"high profile injuries" is a wonderful understatement. The most notable "injury" being the death of the president of the company while riding his Segway [1]
Maybe ... he bought it out in 2009, which was also when Paul Blart: Mall Cop came out, which served as a eulogy for any chances of dignity for the Segway
Segway was in a sense ahead of its time and trying to create a new market segment.
The early problems were it was illegal to use them on sidewalks but also there weren't bike lanes like there are in big cities now.
It was also pretty big & heavy it didn't work for multi-modal like using it for the last mile to/from a train or bus.
So the e-mobility space got won decades later by worse, cheaper products that were smaller & lighter .. being used heavily for food delivery app drivers using them semi-legally in bike lanes. A use case that wasn't imagined in the Segway unveiling.
I really wish this wasn't yet another platform war. There are already countless Quest devices, apps and games out there. Also, it will be very hard for Apple to beat the Quest 3S price point, we just got 4 headsets so we can all play together.
That's a good point but.. if they have enough inventory that almost points to a sign that inventory is not moving. They may stop producing them until they figure a way (an app) to spark a buying trend.
To be expected, I never understood Apple's point in making such a big thing of a VR headset, they were arriving to the party, as everyone was leaving the VR party, jumping into their cars to join the AI house party down the block.
Additionally at such a price, and with the current developer feelings regarding store practices impose by Apple.
Naturally it turned out to be such a niche product, unstainable to keep going.
The Vision Pro feels more like a spatial tablet than a spatial computer. A computer should be capable of handling productive work tasks such as developing software. Vision Pro's only relevant capabilities seem to be mirroring your computer's screen and acting as a device to run your test apps, just like a tablet.
My experience receiving a Vision Pro demo at an Apple store also involved a poor Apple rep having to keep a straight face showing me basic iPad games when I asked about gaming. This thing has some of the most advanced VR headset hardware and their best gaming demo was some iPad games where you tap and hold to jump over mountains.
Yeah I think it might of worked better if they made it open like a mac/pc where you can run whatever software. Geeky types could have better programing tools, gamers could get fancier stuff.
Apple's billion-dollar Vision Pro dilemma can be solved by the courageously coincidental public discovery of an iPadOS zero-day jailbreak, enabling early adopters to explore the limits of both tablet and headset. This side door can be closed in 24 months, after rolling up the most lucrative use cases into the core OS/API of future tablets and headsets. iPadOS has zero-days aplenty, so this doesn't need much effort from Apple beyond benign indifference.
It's invasive, heavy and more anti social than smartphones. Battery life is too short. Low volumes make software development for it unattractive. Companies keep pouring into ar/vr billions and no sigle killer use case to show.
Apple has, somewhere deep in its DNA, an almost pathological aversion to become the Amiga -- a ridiculously capable computer for its time that is mostly known today for games. They've always low-prioritized games and its really shaped the company.
The problem with video games is that publishers want to get on as many platforms as they can, so they have no loyalty to any specific hardware platform, which goes against Apple’s entire modus operandi - Apple wants its 3rd party developers making things only for Apple platforms, so that it’ll be really hard for customers to switch.
The only way to get around that in gaming is to have 1st/2nd party developers (like Nintendo/Sony tend to do), but making games has never been in Apple’s culture. Movies/TV shows are a bit closer to their DNA, and they’ve started producing those with mixed results - games would be a much taller order.
Really should have done with Meta did and grab one talented group to help them do this. And just work on a portfolio of decently fun, professionally made games. Not like Amazon that tried to just jump headfirst into MMOs and pretend you can buy yourself a fun game.
It's much too late in this stage of the industry to just look attractive for exclusives; the industry standardized (compared to a PS1 disc vs a N64 cartridge) and no one's throwing enough money to carry that plan long enough to pay off Like Microsoft kind of did. Not even FAANGs. But it's never too late to just make good games and foster series your platform is known for, like Nintendo.
But then again, Meta just shuttered that studio despite a hit game series from them, so who knows what's going on anymore?
That isn't a problem, exclusives are a common thing in the game industry as old as it exists.
It is always a symbiotic relationship, what is missing, is that Apple doesn't play their part of exclusives like Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft do (and SEGA in the past).
it's almost clockwork how they will use games for 1 year to showcase something for their hardware... and then proceed for 3-4 years to de-prioritize it until they need to yet again, show off their hardware.
that cycle came back last year when they used AAA games to showcase the power of the iPhone 15 and for devs, talk more about their porting toolkit. The last cycle was showcasing the M1 chip and Apple Arcade.
Yet these came after they actively fought against Vulkan support (and now they are using some form of MoltenVK to help with their porting tech) and hard blocked several cloud gaming platforms. Things that could have made their job a lot easier (and maybe cheaper).
so I suppose in 2-3 years we'll see Beat Saber working when they get serious with VR.
Isn't that the kind of description of the first iteration of many innovative products? The iPad was mocked just as much if not more, it was a big iphone without the phone, with no possibility of multitasking and a plethora of other limitations and yet now tablets are ubiquitous.
It's not hard to see how this product could continue to be streamlined and made more accessible in the future.
Apple showing up to the party is usually a pretty good indicator of a technology having crossed a maturity threshold: smartphones, tablets, smart watches, wireless earbuds, TV streaming devices, ARM laptops, etc.
Even their “misses” have just been devices that were too niche or bad value propositions for the average consumer, rather than being technically immature (thinking of HomePod here). It’s rare for Apple to launch a device that’s just far too early to be useful even to its target audience.
It's not really the first iteration though, the modern VR era started about 8 years ago with the first consumer Oculus Rift and in that time it's been iterated on numerous times by numerous players and none of them have stuck.
"The iPad was mocked" is irrelevant. Many or most products are mocked by some people, even iPhone. Regardless of mocking, iPad was an immediate success. Vision Pro is not. I fully admit that the price of Vision Pro is the biggest problem. But you can't pretend that the first iteration of Vision Pro is just like the first iteration of iPad.
My point is that they are two very different products with substantially different target audiences.
Now, sure, you can say the Vision Pro was not as big a success as the iPad even if you account for that difference in markets, scale, price ranges, etc. But that doesn't mean it's a total failure either, or that there is no future for the product.
Most people who have a Vision Pro, seem to like it. It's unsurprising that it's not flying off the shelves because at the moment it's little else than an expensive toy, and once the novelty wears off it's not like there is that much to do with it at the moment, it's also seemingly uncomfortable to wear for prolonged periods of time. But like I said, it's not hard to see how it could be getting better with future iterations.
So even if there is no perfect correlation between the shortcomings of the first iPad and the larger shortcomings of the first Vision Pro, there is a correlation.
putting aside my bitter cynicism of "Apple hype culture": I do think VR just needs to wait for the tech to evolve into the level of ease of "put on snow goggles" before we get wide adoption. But I also am in the camp where I don't see this being a market with desperate demand. The iPad is a great example because in many ways it's the same: some people read religiously on it, other people are artists and they catered to that market. Then others just use it as a "cheap" computer to put in front of a kid.
These are diverse markets, but far from the general market. I think VR/AR will end up the same.
tablets are everywhere, can be shared, and do not make people look ridiculous. hell, even my cats have apps made just for them. haven't seen any viral videos of pets wearing a headset.
not being able to see how this is different is very disingenuous. when the ipad was released, nobody had a device like that. apple's headset was not the first. even those the came before did not gain a lot of traction. so apple is not blazing new trails here that people just don't understand yet. this is an accepted as niche product line for certain personalities.
They are now, and that's exactly the point. And people don't look ridiculous now because they became adopted, but even the first versions of mobile phones made people look ridiculous.
Have some perspective, try to think beyond a lapse of more than two years back and forwards.
Reminds me of the Magic Leap. Or even the Kinect. That use case is even more niche than VR, but setup some tracking gloves and you can perform gesture based actions on your PC (don't really NEED the gloves, but it improves precision without needing a special spatial comera).
So, what exactly is the point of this line of argument? That some niche forms of touchless interfacing existed already? And thus the interfacing of the Vision Pro is not innovative?
The UX itself is an iPhone-vs-Blackberry style leap compared to every other AR or VR device out there. It's just a fundamentally better paradigm for basic tasks and for mixing a headset (or future iGlasses) with non-VR activities.
This so much. Can wear the AVP for hours uninterrupted, but lasted 10 mins in Occulus 3 before getting queasy. Have given AVP demos to dozens of people, offering varying degrees of guidance and everyone just "gets it" after a couple minutes regardless. Eye and hand tracking UI is phenomenal and awesome.
Headline:
Apple May Stop Producing Vision Pro by the End of 2024
First paragraph:
Apple has abruptly reduced production of the Vision Pro headset and could stop making the current version of the device completely by the end of 2024
MacRumors isnt the site it once was. The amount of clickbait crap on there has gone up significantly. Very much on its way out. Dont bother trying to discuss that on their feedback forums though, its an instant permaban for even suggesting the quality of content might be slipping.
Later on, it also says that Apple was stopped work on the second-generation Vision Pro and is focusing only on a lower-cost device. So that’s actually pretty reasonable.
I personally don't think it's reasonable for a publication to suggest Apple is outright discontinuing a product in the headline, only to reveal that, no, they're actually just making a strategy shift with the product line.
That's newsworthy all by itself. No clickbait needed.
Does anyone else find it incredible that they are actually making 1000 of these per day. Apple normally does not like holding inventory, so how many of these do they have in warehouses?
Most of them. Either as new units or returns. I'm surprised they didn't stop production months after release as it was very clear the product would be a complete failure based upon price alone.
Hardware aside they've still not found a purpose for this thing to even exist. They should've come out guns blazing with a ton of content for it. Most places would've paid game developers to make games for it (actual games, not the junk on Apple arcade), do special movie extras, fund loads of apps, etc.
They should've had a $2-3bn budget for content on top of production. Instead they just seemed to release it then walk away hoping everyone else would figure out the point of the product and make stuff for free. It failed.
> Some factories suspended production of Vision Pro components as early as May based on Apple's weak sales forecasts, and warehouses remain filled with tens of thousands of undelivered parts.
Next iphone are going to cost more and more, such a failure must have cost them a lot of money.
Whoever releases a pair of non-clunky glasses with eight hour battery that can do sufficient AR for under a thousand bucks will have the iphone moment and own the world. Looks like a race between Meta and Apple. Unless Microsoft has something sneaky in the works.
At the iphone moment most people used cell phones and the iphone was just a better one. With vr/ar it's a bit niche. I don't know how many people would want one even if it was cheap and good. Looking up the stats a lot have been sold but I'm not sure they get used much. We had a Quest 2 knocking around the flat which I didn't use and I did the vision pro demo which was cool but not sure I'd have used one much if they gave me one.
I'll be curious what the collecter's market looks like for Apple Vision Pro a decade from now. I imagine there are far fewer of these things out in the world than Apple hoped there would be, and I wonder how that'd impact long-term scarcity.
Is it Newton bad? Wonder what the morale is for the team working on a clearly not successful product? Do the other device team members duck their head as they pass them by like it's someone you know but they don't that their significant other is cheating? Do they serve up platitudes like "keep your head up"?
I’m guessing they all knew it wasn’t ready to ship, and would likely fail, and fail hard with that price.
Now Meta is out here demoing very impressive glasses - which was the goal Apple had but couldn’t make work - so I’m curious if Meta is likely the more exciting place to work for this tech.
Having used both AVP and occulus 3, the AVP is just way better user experience already, no need for them to copy an inferior product. Would expect usability delta to persist, (as well as the price delta.)
Killer for me is how klunky it is for multiple users. Had they supported swapping users seamlessly, I’d have bought two: it would get more use than the PS5 (or TV, for that matter).
That said, almost everything Apple does is personal computing. Maybe AR is just a bad fit until it can fit into the form factor of sunglasses. (And not be shit.)
Anyone who got a Vision Pro: are you still using it?
I remember there was a lot of initial excitement on HN about the possibilities of using it as virtual monitors for work or as a more immersive way to watch movies. Is it good for these applications long term, after the novelty wears off?
Bought it at launch and use it a couple dozen times a week.
For me, the killer function has been doing display mirroring with my Mac and leveraging the environments like Mt Hood or the Moon as a way to get into a focused flow. I love the idea of windowing in a virtual space, but the there is the same feeling of limitation that I get with this device as I get with my iPad. I've used it to capture some VR photos and videos of family, survey the house to identify the source of a water leak, used it for a couple workouts, to play some Xbox games in bed without waking my wife.
Weight only seems to be an issue for me at the 3h mark or so, but at that point I am taking a break. My eyes don't seem to be effected so far and the only visual quality issues have been either due to pancake lense physics or fogging up when the device is cold. App quality has been okish for the most part. I periodically check the app store for something new, but so far nothing that feels incredible. I'll probably buy a MetaQuest Pro after this just to see what that is like
I'm ultimately waiting for the ultrawide enhancement they teased earlier this year and hoping they add a few more environments.
It's the best display I've ever had in terms of screen "size" and quality balanced against each other, and it's the default I gravitate towards for movie watching, game streaming, etc, as well as occasional hobbyist things like writing (the environment knob is remarkably good for helping with focus, at least for my ADHD brain). Once there's a version of Virtual Desktop (a local wifi VR streaming app) available for it I'm sure it will also be the best VR headset I've ever used, at least for short sessions.
With that said, I haven't used it for non-hobbyist productive things because the weight and (more importantly) the really bad head strap design makes it awful for use in a sitting-up position for long. I feel like that comfort factor what drags it down most. The passthrough quality and UX stability is 100% there already to be fine wearing it for several hours at a time, including while doing unrelated tasks, if only it was actually comfortable enough for that.
For constrast, see the designs that companies like BOBOVR make for other headsets like the Quest 3 - https://www.bobovr.com/products/bobovr-m3-pro - which look bulky and silly but are perfectly comfortable for long high-activity VR sessions because of the fundamentally better design, even though they add extra battery weight to the headset itself.
Using it as a virtual monitor is tiring. It’s too damned heavy. The FOV is too small. The resolution isn’t terrible but it’s not great either (compared with a physical screen.) I get exhausted after an hour of using it, an 8 hour work day is just too much.
I used to use it to watch YouTube or movies but at some point it just becomes a chore to go get it and put it on when the TV is already there and doesn’t cause fatigue after 20 minutes.
spouse works night shift 3 days a week and ill develop on it and/or watch something.
our work has a cloud based ide for web stuff and ill commonly use AVP and virtual display on my personal mac for that and its better than my 2 monitor setup.
its for big nerds for sure and i am that. really is the best value for the best possible screen. i got it to have fun developing for novel xr hardware and watch great movies on the best screen. my advice is not to get one unless youre in that intersection of interests.
personally find it exciting i might be developing on discontinued hardware. always read and heard about hardware thats come and gos but dorks keep building stuff for it. i assumed everything is too well planned and managed these days for me to take part in something like that.
I still use mine for the things I watch by myself (with TV filling its usual role for social watches). I want to try it for other purposes but keep forgetting to.
The PPD is good, but a 46 degree FoV is pretty narrow for a virtual screen, and it's fixed in place in relation to your head. One of the big convenience differences of a true headset (even a cheaper one like the Quest line) is that you can move your head around and still have the "screen" fixed in place, so it doesn't get in the way as you look for your popcorn or whatever.
Funny thing is, Apple probably thought the iPod would be a niche product that would only appeal to existing Apple customers when they developed it. If they did not take the risk, they probably wouldn't exist today.
While I don't think the Vision Pro is a good fit for Apple (most of their products are portable, while the Vision Pro is unlikely to have much uptake outside of the home and office), it is hard to gauge whether it would be adopted without actually bringing it to the market.
Didn't they have a really small number of screens they even ordered in the first place? Did they change their minds from demand, or have they just finally run out of the first production run?
Before its release, I read that Sony had said they could produce 900,000 of the displays per year because the process was so complex. Obviously with 2 displays per device, half that is the maximum number of Vision Pros per year.
I'm guessing Apple and Sony would have invested in improving the process if it had hit expectations.
Sony display had capacity for 1 million screens in 2024. That's 500K devices. They are stopping short of that, but we don't know by how much. I'll estimate 400K devices made and sold in 2024 as the Pro model is sunset and Apple takes a shot at a Quest competitor in the $1000-2000 range.
From what I heard, they will ultimately halt production, assuming no major changes in sales, at around 500,000 - 600,000 produced. Based on my understanding of the sales, they will have a considerable number of units still available even if the production stops.
This seems to be specifically a change in the assembly volume. I imagine they have most of the specialist components, such as the screens, already delivered and stored.
That's the thing, Meta is /not/ "doing" glasses. They had a very limited run at $10K+/ea just for internal testing IIRC. That's very different from a shipping $3.5K product. It's also not clear if Meta could ship their glasses at ~$10K or if they'd need to charge even more.
Apple has repeatedly said that AR is where they want to be and glasses are what they want to do (directly and via leaks) but the tech wasn't there yet. "There yet" can mean "we can't figure out how to get the cost down to something reasonable". The AVP was clearly a "Let's fake it till we make it" product with faux-AR (or maybe it's still just "AR" but faux-"glasses"?) with the end goal of removing the ski visor for just glasses.
I don't know, I just tested the Meta Quest last night and at $300 it looked GOOD. Give it a few years and I bet they could get that level of fidelity into a glass frame @ ~$1000-1200
No, they cannot. Completely different technology tracks with the goggles form factor a dead end and the glasses form factor a decade or two away from consumer costs.
Well the Meta Quest 2 starts $500 so I'm not sure if you were using a MQ2 or MQ3S (which has essentially the screens of the MQ2 from what I understand). I have tried the MQ2 (I own one) and I have tried the MQ3. The 3 is better but the resolution is still not great, the AVP was much better than either. I did like the color passthrough on the MQ3 (vs grayscale on the 2) but I wouldn't say any of it looked "GOOD", it was adequate but still too blurry.
I think I'll end up getting a MQ3 eventually or maybe the next version at launch but I'm just not really drawn to VR. After the first few months of my MQ2 I lost interest and it's just collecting dust.
I think part of the challenge Apple now has is convincing developers who were already on the fence that they should take the plunge now rather than wait for what looks to be a clearly superior form factor.
It’s not like customers (aside from those who already have the hardware) are beating down anyone’s door asking for the Vision Pro.
This is very handwavy, but if Apple does intend to pursue the glasses form factor it would probably benefit them to do the very make the very un-apple move of articulating how investments into developing for Vision Pro will extend into glasses.
I agree that the OS is the most limiting factor of the AVP. In its current form it's just an iPad with all the downsides that brings. I had high hopes for it as a MBP replacement or companion but MVD was disappointing and so I returned mine.
Were you planning on bringing a keyboard and mouse around with you? VR "gesture" controls are godawful and nothing has supplanted mouse and keyboard because they are absolutely wonderful control methods.
If you ARE carrying around a mouse and keyboard and AVP, that seems like a lot more clunk and silliness than just using a damn laptop. What are you doing that actually benefits from gluing the screen to your face?
I want to be explicit: I love VR and have been hugely into it since the very first oculus dev kits, but other than flight/driving simulators and gun games which all hugely hugely benefit from the physical immersion VR provides, there is nothing worth doing in VR. Not that many games actually benefit from a physical presence. Almost nobody playing FIFA or CoD actually wants to do it in VR. The (really fun and quite well made) CoD ripoffs and other shooters in VR are nearly empty, because so few people are willing to stand up while playing. The Wii made this clear 18 years ago FFS.
I'm still waiting for a single use case that isn't sim driving, sim flying, or shooting, or beat saber. Billions invested into producing something, and still there is nothing.
> Were you planning on bringing a keyboard and mouse around with you? VR "gesture" controls are godawful and nothing has supplanted mouse and keyboard because they are absolutely wonderful control methods.
Yes, either external or the ones built into my MBP
> If you ARE carrying around a mouse and keyboard and AVP, that seems like a lot more clunk and silliness than just using a damn laptop. What are you doing that actually benefits from gluing the screen to your face?
I was hoping to use it as a companion (replacement was always "maybe in the future") initially so I was going to carry the AVP+MBP if things had worked out. Not always, but if I was going to be somewhere for an extended period of time (vacation/visiting friends or family/etc) then I would take both and have the "same setup" that I have at my desk at home (AVP+MBP). This was going to be an alternative to my 3-4 monitors (I have the same desk setup in 2 locations and duplicating everything was expensive and annoying). Unfortunately the MVD was too blurry and VR is too limiting (but mosting the MVD issues) so I returned my headset but that's what I was hoping to accomplish and how I was going to use it all.
Have you actually tried that though? People always bring this up like it's some cyberpunk fantasy but working with a one pound weight strapped to your face is awful and staring at screens situation an inch from your eyes is really really hard on them and absolutely sucks. I bet using VR for 8 hours a day would actually hurt your eyes.
Actual VR/AR desktop mirroring is a thing that exists now. It's a niche of a niche of a niche because it's not a good experience. It's interesting for the five minutes until it becomes unbearable.
Consider that many simracers, the niche that VR is the absolute best for, do not regularly use VR, because it's just too much fuss to put a damn set of goggles on, even when you are already sat in a purpose built simracing rig!
Whether it's VR, "Metaverse", or AI models, I want it to be open source.
I don't want to spend 8 hours a day in some corporation's world, even more than we already are. The incentives are not aligned.
The personal computer revolution (that Apple helped kickstart) was amazing. People could actually run the software locally, instead of a mainframe. People bought apps to run on their computer and videos to run on their own VCR. I feel like the Web started taking things backwards, empowering "the remote server" again, like a mainframe.
Now, we have Netflix, YouTube etc. and the broadband internet hurdle has been surmounted for many. We are fighting the wrong battles with "net neutrality". The real battle should be whether we can host the software on machines of our choice, or not.
When it comes to AI, yes you guys are lucky Meta had that snafu with LLaMa researchers and chose to seize the moment and make LLaMa available freely to everyone. Otherwise it would be quite a different world. Mark Z returned to his open-source roots that he had with Synapse and Wirehog back in the day, before Sean Parker and Peter Thiel “corrupted” him.
But when it comes to everything else, it is the opposite, in my opinion.
Apple sells you the hardware and you install apps locally. It’s not open source, but at least it runs locally. And Apple cares about your privacy.
Facebook is the opposite, it is ad-supported, it will never give you their backend source code or let you run your own social network. They only promote “React” front end framework and other ancillary things. They will try to take your data by hook or by crook (surreptitiously recording your camera and audio as well). Their “Metaverse” play would have to recouo the tens of billions spent on development.
But yeah when it comes to AI, you guys lucked out. Zuck’s image has improved since the first 15 years of “dumbf%[#s” giving him their data. He now surfs in a suit and looks much cooler. But remember — it’s people like Linus Torvalds, Tim Berners-Lee, and all the “BDFL”s of all the languages you use (like Guido Vom Rossum for Python and the Zend guys behind PHP) who really create most of the wealth for the world. If not for open source, you’d be spending more and more of your life in some corporation’s world.
Just ask yourself, when the following technologies enter your home or your body, would you rather all be hooked up to a corporation like the Borg, or at least have your own installation where you have a say:
TeslaBot in your house
Neuralink in your brain
Microsoft Recall recording
Hours in “the Metaverse”
Security cameras everywhere
What do you think the incentives will be for TeslaBot or Microsoft Recall surreptitiously storing everything they can about you, including your passwords?
When facing the temptation. Microsoft has already done it. Facebook has already done it.
But it can go far beyond that. How difficult would it be for TeslaBot to get all the info to impersonate you? All your mannerisms, voice recordings, your heartbeat rhythms, gait, everything?
> I don't want to spend 8 hours a day in some corporation's world, even more than we already are. The incentives are not aligned.
AR will be the 'future' for a very, very long time I think. Maybe there will be a Metaverse chatroom where all the worker bees can bounce around and have a happy hour on Friday or something
Apple 100% has something like Meta's Orion glasses or probably even better as a prototype in their basement.
Instead of an Orion puck for processing - it's your iPhone
Instead of the bracelet for extra precision - it's a future Apple Watch prototype.
They just won't do what Meta did - show off prototype hardware that they know they won't release in its current form and are working towards making viable for mass production.
My guess is the Vision Pro was largely driven by a need to get real world data.
By giving it all the bells and whistles they get to find out about more things and keep it at such a price range that it avoids being viewed as a colossal consumer level failure (instead if it's known by the general public at all it's as a weird but impressive premium level failure)
Translation: we sold almost nothing from the previous generation.
If the product was a hit, we'd just know about it. We'd see it around, people would talk about it. It wouldn't require an ambiguous comment from the CEO.
But I think they did this more to break into a new territory than to sell units. Of course, they didn't market it that way but that was probably their intention.
Next they're gonna come up with a cheaper device, hopefully below 2000 dollars with most of the things that made the vision pro interesting.
...or they're going to pull out of a market where the smartest people in the world tried to answer "but what is it good for?" in the 90s and failed. I don't believe that Apple is going to hit this one out of the park... we'll see how my comment ages in 5 years.
I'm happy to concede that AVP is probably great for watching movies on an airplane, but that's hardly comparable to the iPhone level of "world-changing".
From the beginning of the Vision Pro, I always expected Apple to take the approach of giving everyone an excellent, Apple worthy headset regardless of price. From there, focus on keeping the specs exactly the same but reducing the price until it's a reasonable purchase for people.
Head-mounted hardware needs to iterate fast. No one is happy with a bulky thing on their face. The iPhone moment will be when you don't think twice about wearing one.
> People are going to only read the headline and interpret it as “discontinue”. Like the article says, it just means they have enough inventory until they replace it with something cheaper.
This is such an odd take. Like trying to defend Apple from an accusation that was not made - The headline is a good representation of the news; production was suspended because they are sitting on too much unsold stock. Typically in-demand products with limited availability go out of stock fast and don't sit unsold.
This is why it always frustrating to read any negative news on companies like Apple or Tesla. They have some annoyingly sycophantic fanbase that always wants to downplay and misdirect any bad news.
If Microsoft made some AR glasses that sat unsold and they suspended production, no one would show up to say "actually, it is not being discontinued, nothing to see here". Nor should they.
So does Microsoft. Or Google. Or Toyota. Or any other sufficiently large company. They are put under proper scrutiny.
But those are not white-knighted by a fanbase that always feel like they need to protect the multi-billion dollar company from negativity.
Using myself as an example, there are companies I like. I happen to like Nintendo for example. I still call a failed product a failure (e.g.: Wii U), and sometimes I even dislike their successful products (I always hated N64 for that retarded controller).
Why Apple "fanbase" abandon all critical thinking is baffling.
They should have made an sdk that made it easier to port games (and excel). Iirc you had to use their gesture control, there was no way to use kb+m right? At least with other vr you can create a usable mapping to typical FPS controls.
You can connect a trackpad and keyboard to the AVP. Interestingly a trackpad worked but not a mouse. You can also connect a normal controller (like Xbox/PS).
HN had fifty people in every thread swearing that nobody predicted the iPhone would be a success so we should all shut up and buy or else FOMO.
It was constant and everywhere. Tens of posters who have apparently zero connection to the company Apple other than "They released the iPhone" as if they've never had a high profile flop, as if they've never had only okay sales of a product, as if they've never tried to change the world and failed miserably, as if Apple never misses.
Because of a single damn product release. One time. At the crux of a phase change in the personal digital device world.
Just, utterly divorced from reality. I feel like these posters are half of my company's management team.
Not to mention the old canard of "Apple doesn't do things first, it does things right", implying AVP success was inevitable, and the chattering classes were too dumb to see it.
Read some of the previous threads. There are hundreds of comments of people inventing use cases, that's how bad people want this to succeed. The problem is Apple's ecosystem for AVP is designed around consumer services like Apple TV, rather than the sci-fi fantasies of the average HN reader.
Apple products have been successful specifically because they attract the mass market right away.
Early adopters didn't use iPhones, they used HP iPaqs and Dell Axim PDAs running Windows Mobile. iPhones obsoleted them by simplifying the UI so anybody aged 8-80 could use it.
If an Apple product seems like it's for 'early adopters', it's already failed.
> Everyone thought I was crazy for thinking this thing would get no traction. People want to spend less time plugged into screens, not less
Almost everyone I know (and people here on HN) thought this would be niche at $3500. But that doesn't mean people don't want to be plugged into screens. They totally are plugged into screens - just not Vision Pro.
Maybe? I dunno. I’m tired of my current screens. But I want better ones. I want mass market e-ink monitor and a pair of VR glasses that look like actual glasses. We’re halfway to 2030, where’s the future? I’m still using a laptop, we’ve had those for decades, what gives?
> a pair of VR glasses that look like actual glasses
It's getting closer to that, but not quite there yet. There's Bigscreen Beyond out already, and the Immersed Visor is coming up, and they're a lot closer to that than Quest 3 or Apple Vision Pro to glasses (but also either less powerful and/or more expensive).
We want more screens, just easier to use them. We are too lazy to even stand up to wear a headset. We want them in front of us all the time, everywhere, without moving a finger, instantly!
I’m perfectly fine with standing up to get and use anything. For me, the problem is that it’s a /headset/ and not something else - as they have a host of ergonomics and comfort issues, causes fatigue and headaches, closes me off from my environment (despite their pass through idea), etc.
AVP user here who is wanting to get less plugged into screens.
What I really mean by that though, is that I want to make my screen time more meaningful. I don’t want to mindlessly scroll, like I often find myself doing, or like I see others doing in places like grocery store lines or on the subway.
The Apple Vision Pro is a very expensive, specialized device. When I use it, it's mostly to watch movies, TV shows, or other immersive content, but it’s still mainly just for entertainment. But I can't just sit in it and disassociate the same way I might my phone--I don't feel that it's built that way.
As for getting no traction, yeah that's correct. It's too expensive. I still love mine.
> People want to spend less time plugged into screens, not less.
Yes. I threw my phone away 2.5 years ago (after my 3yo daughter kept saying "no phone dadda") and it has made my life significantly better. Like living in the 1990's again.
In a land of the distracted, the phoneless man is king.
That being said, I think the AVP is very cool technology, and will have important applications in the years ahead. (Just not mass market for a long time, if ever)
Awww, Apple, don't become Google... I mean, if you go for a product like this, you should be prepared to sink money into it for at least 3 to 5 years. Thats what you owe to early adopters. There is nothing more sad then owning a piece of hardware which totally stopped being supported. Examples like this will steadily reduce the willingness of consumers to play with new stuff. The risk will eventually just be too high.
It needs very high-res video streams which basically no internet provider/CDN can offer at scale. 40Mbps+ HEVC just isn't scalable. So the only content is whatever can be downloaded to the device itself. A few games? A cool screensaver experience? It's all cool, but mostly novelty tech.
The resolution of the screens is not the resolution of the media you play on it.
You can stream even a 1080p movie to it and it will look fine, because it is playing in "physical" space, not filling your view completely. It is like watching a floating television or movie screen.
Success of every modern attempt at VR hinges on limits of self-expression. Meta's torsoverse and Apple's extension of the office failed while Second Life continues on with a thriving virtual real estate and retail market and VRChat makes commercial deals to support a massive yearly furry convention.
Second Life doesn't pretend to be anything it's not, so it attracts an audience who want that authenticity.
Apple and Facebook are the polar opposite of that. They look at a product segment and think "How we do sell this to X million people?" Turns out that regular people that buy iPhones and Macbooks, might not be as interested in VR.
One place you don't see the Vision Pro suspended is on Tim Cook's face. There is weak demand for a Vision so dim and weak. The visionary pros at Apple couldn't see a clear provision for Tim Cook's half-baked Vision Pro. Apple shall proceed without Vision.
To charge $3.5K for something that can only be used by one person is an epic fail of product vision. Like, what am I supposed to do if there are 4 people in my family? Or if I want to use the thing both at home and at work? I get that they’d prefer it if I bought several, but the price point puts that well outside any realm of possibility.
I really hate all of the talk about how this has been received. It was clear to anyone that was not trying to push clickbait headlines that this was never meant to be a mainstream device. Apple may charge a premium for their devices but they also understand the market enough to have lower priced Macs, iPads, and iPhones.
No one thought a $3500 device was going to be mainstream when we see people complaining about phones being above $1k.
The fact that the first one came out with the "Pro" name made this even more clear.
Headlines like this make it seem like it "failed" in some way that is only because we are putting expectations on this to match other Apple products but this is just like the other "Hobby" projects that apple used to classify products like the Apple TV.
The market for AR/VR is incredibly early (if it manages to take off at all) and the technology just isnt there yet. But while we wait for the hardware to catch up why not start working on an idealized vision of what it could work like with its own caveats. I would much rather this than the xreal's and similar headsets way over promising (borderline lying in their marketing) and severely under delivering.
This product will go the way of the Apple Watch. Deemed a failure before eventually becoming the category leader about 3 years and 3 iterations later. The price will come down, the (few) hardware rough edges will be softened, and enough support from the massive iOS developer pool will create a “killer app” that starts to build momentum here.
Misleading FUD from Macrumors trying to get clicks.
> and enough support from the massive iOS developer pool will create a “killer app” that starts to build momentum here
Apple certainly hasn’t helped themselves here by burning so much developer goodwill over the last few years. They may be marketing it as a “Pro” device currently but one of the biggest selling points seems to be immersive video, and Netflix and YouTube both saying no to developing an app for it is not a good look.
On the indie side, in just the last few days I’ve seen multiple Mastodon posts from developers regretting building a visionOS app [0] or considering preventing running their existing iPad apps on visionOS. [1][2]
I've had the watch since v1 and I've almost gone full circle on it.
Never had sound on, have disabled more and more notifications, steadily fewer and fewer complications until I finally just use the the silly Snoopy watch face instead.
What I do love it for is all the health tracking, and that I have about a decade of data on myself now. Really just activity level and resting heart rate primarily.
I'm at the point that I'd be similar (or, maybe more?) for a display-less slim Apple Fitness Band loaded with all the sensors of the Apple Watch.. and then go back to my analog wristwatch.
All of those things could happen, and it still wouldn't go beyond Oculus Quest levels of popularity, i.e. low.
Apple Watch is a status symbol in the same way Airpods and iPhones are. You're paying partially to be seen wearing them. The same is not true for Vision Pro or any headset. You'll just look like a Alamy stock image that comes up in an image search for 'technology'.
Possibly, but I don't think it's comparable because VR/AR headsets—whatever this category is—still has an unknown future. Smart watches had demonstrated use cases and a market before Apple released the Apple Watch. The Vision Pro is more like smart glasses, a category that still can't find a foothold 10+ years after the Google Glass.
Honestly, a lot of the critics would have bought the device for $500. It’s just that the price doesn’t have a selling point that justifies the current pricing
> well i can't think of a single killer app for this or any VR headset for me.
For a headset the size of a pair of glasses?
* A well-designed HUD that can seamlessly integrate 95%+ of the "utility functions" (as opposed to entertainment functions) from my phone into my field of vision. Calls, messages, navigation, calendar, notes. I never want to look at my phone unless I'm bored.
* One of those "speed reader" [0] apps that will flicker a message at 600WPM at me. This should probably interface with all long-form text.
* Subtitles/translations for the people I talk to.
* An "offline dating" app that only allows you to swipe people you see
I firmly belive AR is the future of personal computing, but the hardware needs to gain an order of magnitude in capabilities.
How about have a pair of glasses (iGlasses) with some kind of ability to connect to your iPhone and transfer information via small discrete camera/voice command via airpods. All the processing is done on the iPhone and displayed on the inside of the lens, sort of like a heads up display. Offer prescription services or clear lens and sleek style frames. News, txt, email, video, maps, health info, search, access to Apple AI, etc, etc. I don't need VR, just Terminator style information.
Personally, it seems obvious to me that this is the desired end state of AVP-related development, but somewhere along the line they decided that pure AR tech just wasn't good enough yet for the display quality and UX stability they wanted, and so they ended up with the headset as a clunky hardware compromise built around an OS mostly designed for the glasses use case.
I only see discussions about the Vision Pro from an entertainment perspective. To me it is clear that with the capabilities and the price, it should be a professional device to be used in industry, military, and such. Then the price is cheap. But this means that more traditional sectors need to make software that takes advantage of AR.
Rather than halting VR/AR efforts, this seems to be just cutting production of the current model. That doesn't mean there won't be future models but it does imply demand was lower than expected.
We've had 10-15 years of companies trying to make VR (and AR more recently) happen. I just don't think it's ever going to happen.
People are led astray by books like Snow Crash but there are fundamental issues with both VR and AR. Latency is a huge one for both. AR fundamnetally has an issue producing true blacks.
Businesses aren't as resentful as individual developers; IMO the difficulty is that it's really hard to make compelling content.
iPhone suits simple use cases, chat, video, audio, remote controls, utilities, simple games, and with controllers medium complexity games
iPad will do any phone or laptop app, plus high complexity games with a controller
Watch will do data displays, notifications, very small remote controls
Headset? AR, VR, cinema. But right now, that means "Occulus games, first party virtual display, and the kind of static AR content that's theoretically possible on an iPhone but very few actually use*", and AVP is 7 times the price of Meta's headset.
There's useful stuff if can do in specific niches, but I can't tell if e.g. "surgeons use AVP to assist during surgery" is a fluffy headline or a demonstration of value-add, and even if it's useful in this case it remains hard to figure out what this translates to in a mass consumer market.
I’m an indie app developer building photography apps because I love photography.
I don’t harbor any particular resentment towards the App Store; in fact I am fine giving Apple 15% of my proceeds (I make way less than $1M a year) to handle content delivery, refund requests, minor advertisement, etc.
I bought a Vision Pro on release, and have a number of ideas/prototypes for it.
After a few weeks of hacking, there are two simple reasons why I didn’t pursue development of them any further:
- the APIs are still really early stage (eg nothing around windowing, I’d like to build some pro photo editing apps that’d require advanced windowing functionality)
- even if I were to work around the API shortcomings, take the time to develop a full app, and then release it - then how many sales will I get at most? Maybe a thousand? Compared to the iPhone/iPad/Mac, that’s nothing.
So I figured waiting a year or two for the APIs to get better and more people to have access to the hardware made sense.
Also, I went from considering making AVP exclusive apps to making apps that work on Mac/iPad, and maybe have some bonus features on the AVP - I think that’s a better way to go about it (nothing released like that yet, still in development).
All that said, there’s something magical about the AVP’s high quality screens for photography. Seeing your photos in space right in front of you is definitely one step above looking at them on a phone/tablet/laptop screen (and one step below looking at large high quality prints of them, but that requires a different kind of effort).
You should put a link to your work in your bio it is really cool. Your name gives a clue but I only found your site after adding "software" to the search.
Not only, in general, over the last year or so, Apple has used every opportunity to antagonise and frustrate developers.
A business wouldn't care about the Vision Pro because there are but 10 people who still own one. The device is limited, extremely expensive and the software platform questionable at best - why did Apple needed to reinvent *Reality APIs instead of joining an existing industry is beyond me.
There are indie devs who still use the vision pro for engagement - flashy posts on the socials etc, but that's not enough to make a dent. Also, for many of them, this is their first encounter with AR/VR where Apple present's their achievements as novel while there are already existing ecosystems from other vendors.
You don't think it has more to do with the tech having hyper-specific use cases and being too expensive for most consumers to just casually own? Don't get me wrong, I think it is wonderful tech, but people pushing for VR/AR to be a big thing are a very siloed, vocal minority that always seems to be baffled when the latest iteration of it goes nowhere. It's because none of it has been practical enough for common consumption, yet.
Vision Pro is not a mass market device the addressable market is very small for any big investment from developers. Until the sales reach in millions Apple will need to develop themselves or pay developers to build stuff for it
My uninformed guess is that aside from the obvious glaring user base size problem, the API is too locked down to build unique, interesting apps and too different/incompatible to port existing ones like VR games.
Agreed - but in the past, Apple has been able to overcome this issue for several new products. If third party developers are understandably less enthusiastic to invest in this platform, Apple could either develop apps themself or pay third party developers to do it (what a novel concept!). But they don't seem willing to do it...
So Google fails, Apple fails, Facebook has been failing for a while. It seems only Microsoft out of the big tech is still continuing its dominance now with AI and things like that. But this is a great time for startups to come up.
Not sure where Google, Apple, or Facebook have "failed"... If we are taking a single random product's success/failure and projecting it on the whole company then Microsoft has failed more times than I can count, the most relevant to this discussion being the hololens and the biggest recent history blunder being the Microsoft Phone.
I said they are failing. Not failed. Bleeding will continue for long since we didn't break these up earlier. But companies are either going up or down and anyone with half a brain can see that these three are going down.
I own an Apple Vision Pro and I think it's one of the most impressive pieces of technology that I almost never use, for two reasons:
1. Too much startup friction. I share the Apple Vision Pro with someone else who like me also loves it and uses it all the time. But since we both wear glasses, there's a 2x ~10 minute process for recalibrating the eyesight each time we switch. It's an expensive device at $3500 which I'm happy to pay for quality, but to pay that twice, I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Apple goes too far with the greed here not letting us set up separate profiles. Netflix wouldn't get away with that. You not only have to repeat the setup process when switching, you have to share access to your apple user account too.
2. My main interest in a vision headset is I want a new virtual workstation where I can watch movies on a gigantic screen beneath a gigantic translucent terminal where I can do my daily work. There's a nice app called La Terminal that does just that. Sadly it has some serious keyboard latency issues since I don't think they've put as much focus into their support for this platform. I won't tolerate anything less than optimal latency in my work tools. So until I get around to building a terminal app for Vision Pro on my own, there's not a whole lot I'm interested in doing with it aside from watching the occasional movie on the moon. I would also really like for Vision Pro to have an ethernet port because I don't know how to run a wifi network without jitter.
If you haven't tried one of these things, then you really should. I didn't realize when I first put one on that it was a fully synthetic display until I tried reading the 10pt text on my computer monitor. It's really a stunning thing to witness. This Vision Pro is probably the best glimpse we can get today of what the singularity is going to be like in the future. So definitely give it a try at least once.
I can respect that it's probably worth trying, or even worth buying if you have a particular case for it and a rather large income, but I guess what is lost on me about the AVP (and by extension iPads, more expensive phones) is that they just seem to be a way to extract multiple thousands of dollars for essentially the same entertainment we've already been doing quite well for a very long time.
Like how much should watching stuff be worth to people!? Am I crazy? I don't even dislike movies, but $3500 usd might be what I already spend on all forms of entertainment + 2 years worth of food, and maybe all of my transportation for half a year or more, combined. I'd just kind of hope for something more substantial y'know?
For that price or maybe a little more you could buy a 4k projector and a nice screen that would make watching a movie a whole lot nicer
> $3500 usd might be what I already spend on all forms of entertainment + 2 years worth of food
Where do you live? I live in Romania and even my mom who makes around 1000e a month spends like 400e on food, so she spends around 5k euros a year on food
It is easy to spend EUR 400 for the monthly food, or even much more, if you buy industrially-processed food and various kinds of food that are tasty, but which are expensive and unnecessary.
Nevertheless, not only in Romania, but probably in most countries of the European Union, a human can spend for food only between EUR 100 and EUR 150 per month, while still eating very healthy food, with the condition of cooking at home and buying only raw ingredients. Even the industrially-made bread is at least 3 to 4 times more expensive than the bread made at home. For other kinds of food, the price ratio between buying and making at home is even greater.
We are family of 2 adults and 1 child. We spend very easily 400 (and more) per month. We don't buy any processed food. We cook at home. 90% of time. Some weekends we go out for a single lunch or dinner. We live in Czech republic. We rarely buy "bio" (or "organic" depending on where you live) food.
I spend way more than 100/week in food for two people. To spend less than a quarter of that I would have to scale down or remove fruit, vegetables, meat or fish from the menu. Probably would have to eat pasta and rice with some sauces all the time which isn't healthy at all. And I'm in Portugal, not the most expensive place in Europe by a long shot.
> a human can spend for food only between EUR 100 and EUR 150 per month
Try that in Croatia, you'll soon be dead or at least severely malnourished.
Good luck doing that in Portugal, 100 € will be food for one week.
that's 145 USD/month for me. It's not impossible, but you're not eating out ever and are basically on little more than a rice and beans diet at that point.
And where/what to watch when your best source is youtube + torrents
>Apple goes too far with the greed here not letting us set up separate profiles
Apple really has one of the worst workflows around user accounts, I have to think it is because of some legacy reasons that means it would be a big project to fix (based on other companies I've worked at that lousy user accounts and couldn't fix)
No thanks, so far no VR headset has sorted out the problem of having little screens so close to the eyes, for people with light sensitive vision needing to wear light redution glasses when working with regular screens.
>I won't tolerate anything less than optimal latency in my work tools.
for $3500 I don't expect any primary shortcoming, especially for something I'd use professionally. There's a lot of substitute hardware I could buy to get the same experience at that point, so I see no need to compromsise just becasue it's a shiny new toy.
> I didn't realize when I first put one on that it was a fully synthetic display until I tried reading the 10pt text on my computer monitor.
Can you elaborate on this? I've not looked at it since it came out. Does this mean that you can look at your computer monitors while using it, or that it's replacing your computer monitors because it has a high enough resolution?
Every other display I've tried has far too low pixel density to be used for serious work, which is rather unfortunate.
When compared to a monitor in front of you (at the distance the physical monitor is), Apple Vision Pro is actually pretty low resolution. They say it has high resolution 4k or 8k displays, but all those pixels are "wasted" on your entire field of view. The actual 'monitors' or windows are a subset of that, and so will be drawn with less physical pixels than a real monitor.
> one of the most impressive pieces of technology that I almost never use
> someone else who like me also loves it and uses it all the time
Wait, do you almost never use it or do you use it all the time?
he loves it, almost never uses it, while she also loves it, but she also uses it all the time.
(pronouns chosen to make it easy to distinguish two people, with no knowledge of anybody's sex or gender, but since sex and gender shouldn't matter, it shouldn't matter)
One of the commenters was thinking the same thing as me
> People are going to only read the headline and interpret it as “discontinue”. Like the article says, it just means they have enough inventory until they replace it with something cheaper. [https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/report-apple-may-stop-p...]
I wonder how Apple would go through with this, hopefully with a better form.
Effectively, there's no real difference. The model is discontinued, the article says they've produced their last batch and are focused on making a cheaper one.
Apple is free to continue selling what they have in inventory.
> Effectively, there's no real difference. The model is discontinued.
There is a huge difference. My interpretation is that the GP is making the point that with just the headline people will think the product as a whole was discontinued, not just this first version.
Whether the 'product' is discontinued depends on what the next product is. If they drop the AR using VR (its distinguishing feature), then the Vision Pro as we know it is dead and lives on only in name--effectively becoming an Apple Quest. I would love competition in that space.
> If they drop the AR using VR
Apple has been pushing for AR for years and years. I remember seeing demos when presentations were still live in person.
The whole concept of Vision Pro is “spatial computing”. Backtracking to VR would be a huge shift in focus.
The entire focus of the Vision Pro is mixed reality i.e. both.
Hence why they have the crown to seamless switch between AR and VR.
VR should include computing and everything. Reality can be anything. VR can even include Reality. I'd agree with you if Apple wasn't backtracking what the idea of Computing is to be a modern monopoly app store.
My point was that the Vision Pro implements AR using VR technology (plus some low-latency additions).
Considering the number of people Apple marketing is able to reach, compared to the MacRumors website --- I really don't think it will have that kind of deleterious impact on people's interest in Apple VR.
That said, Apple marketing has been mostly dead silent since the product announcement 1.5 years ago.
My prediction is that they will "continue" the product as a different product, maintaining the name. A bit like how the Macbook Air is still a product, whilst we all know it was discontinued some years ago.
I’m not sure I follow. It has a different form factor now, but it still follows the same design ethos as the original model. It’s not like, say, the Ford Ranger, which had a long gap of non-production before being “brought back” in a different product category from the original.
What? Is a Camry discontinued because they update it?
A 2015 MacBook Air was discontinued, but 2024 (or 2023, whatever the last update was) MacBook Airs are not.
It would be crazy to have different product names for fungible products that are at least as good as the previous one.
Acura dealerships started as fungible copies of Honda products via a loophole to add more dealerships while 'honoring' previous Honda agreements.
It does say a lot about demand though. You don't discontinue production on something when you have no successor coming soon unless you vastly overestimated demand.
The headline made me think Apple was giving up on the Vision product line which made me feel disappointed. Happy to hear that it lives on!
Without the bit of info that they are looking at how to make a cheaper one, some might take “discontinued” as a sign that they are giving up on the whole field. That’d be big news.
As to selling the rest of the inventory: of course they are free to sell whatever they want. But this is a device whose only real use is to be a sort of preview/testing ground for developers who want to get ahead on writing VR code. The pricing is ridiculous for a consumer device, and it is too goofy for Apple users to wear to coffee shops. Continuing to sell it without any note that it was pointless would be a massive betrayal to third party Apple devs if they aren’t planning on making a serious product.
> Apple is free to continue selling what they have in inventory.
Remember the Apple Lisa. Get yours while their prices are low.
They have produced their last batch for now. They are free to resume production if needed. From TFA:
>Apple will still be able to resume Vision Pro production if sales pick up since the production lines are not yet due to be dismantled.
If the item is still on Apple's website it's not discontinued.
This. The hardware and R&D investment won’t go to waste. I’d love a much lower friction version of Vision OS that could successfully get a high res screen in AR. Probably a few more years. Or maybe 10. :) Anyway, I’m curious what Apple will do next, and I’m looking forward to trying those facebook glasses as well. I think there’s almost certainly some tipping point of usefulness and form factor where AR becomes something that’s an “obvious next step, in retrospect” — but I don’t think the bulk, (lack of) comfort and weirdness of not seeing the eyes are winners for the AVP in the long run. I still pack mine for flying though — love it on a plane.
Maybe they are finding that they're like the Segway, just too geeky for the mainstream market.
No they're just overspec'd and overpriced. If their goal was to ultimately release a consumer level device, they shouldn't have gone overboard with tech that has limited room for cost cutting.
It's typical of Apple's hubris, to throw in all these features they think people will want, meanwhile if the headset had no cameras and was just a display strapped to your head for $1000, it likely would have sold a lot better. But they didn't want a VR device for whatever reason.
At the same time you could blame discretionary spending being at some of the lowest levels in a decade.
> typical of Apple's hubris
> meanwhile if the headset had no cameras
I remember when apple got universally panned for putting cameras in laptops. Most people surely wanted the cost savings, while the small number of power users who needed video chat should have no trouble picking up a USB camera for $100 (more like $200 in present-day USD). Of course, what actually happened was that people (and apps!) in the mac world could suddenly assume that everyone else already had a camera set up, even if they weren't technical, and that was the real killer feature. The rest of the industry quietly memory-holed the snide commentary and followed suit.
Volume will drive price down once VR gets Good Enough. Right now it isn't, so I'm glad that Apple is playing to their strengths by taking swings at substantive challenges -- like the fact that VR makes the wearer look like a complete dope -- rather than becoming discount VR vendor #312.
Or when they release a phone with no keyboard, no apps, that couldn't even do 3G speeds. Followed by the iPhone funeral parade held by microsoft. Or when they release a tablet. Everyone was talking about how that was merely a content consumption device and no one would want it at that price point. Later everyone was concerned that Apple would cannibalize its laptop market.
Apple has a history of doing products that seem expensive and weirdly overspecced at the beginning, and then stick with it if they truly believe in it. OTOH, there are also clearly products that Apple killed because they didn't work out. But I believe it's still to early to tell where the Vision line is going.
They got lucky, many of us remeber a Apple that was about to send everyone home for the last time, and that only did not happen due to a set of lucky accidents that turned out great.
> I remember when apple got universally panned for putting cameras in laptops.
Damn you just reminded me there was time laptops didn't have cameras. Like phones!
They're smoking something if they think anyone is buying this for 3.5k when it has exactly zero game & app support - discretionary income is going to be spent on things that are fun for deep immersion in a hobby, or else something that can be shared and enjoyed with others.
Disagree, it needs to be better and different, not worse. Every other Apple product is sleek and fashionable, this is a big goofy VR headset. A VR “screen for your face” device would probably be a little better but only in the sense that it is better to not waste a bunch of money on R&D for a device that is not going to be bought.
For a real attempt, the UI needs to be augmented reality you can wear walking around, and the form factor needs to be a pair of normal glasses. It is certainly possible the tech doesn’t exist yet. But that won’t convince people to buy a silly version.
They need cameras for tracking your position and orientation. Also, tracking your eyes can be beneficial in many ways, i.e. enabling foveated rendering, not just for showing a blurred face on the external screen.
Arguably had this thing shipped during peak of COVID bubble spending, say summer 2021 - summer 2022 it might have absolutely killed.
You need cameras either way. If not for passthrough then for tracking. Or you use Lighthouse tech but its even more expensive.
Isn't it part of the Apple way to release expensive and weird products at times to keep Apple in the minds of people as a luxury brand. Things like $400 wheels for Mac Pro or the $1000 stand for the external display.
I can see AVP as being half luxury and half tech-demo/devkit for a more budget friendly device.
> to keep Apple in the minds of people as a luxury brand. Things like $400 wheels for Mac Pro or the $1000 stand for the external display.
I have never seen anyone look at those two examples and think “luxury”. Even the most ardent proponents of Apple products laugh at those prices and think they are absurd. With good reason. Who ever is going to look at computer wheels and think they’re a sign of luxury¹?
¹ Yes yes, someone surely will, just like there’s someone for everything. I’m making a general point.
Rich tech fetishists. I worked for one for several years and he had every fancy Apple gadget they ever made. On a positive note, I frequently got his castoffs when he got bored with them.
That was directly addressed by the footnote.
I'd wager they overstuffed this thing with sensors and high quality tracking to gather good training data, and the next model will be as effective with fewer cheaper sensors.
I do not think the price is only issue. Problem with VR headsets is that you need to commit your self to use it.
Personal computing did not reach mainstream until smartphones. Even notebooks were too much of commitment for most people. Maybe AR [0] glasses could go in path of smartphones but VR headsets are polar opposites to smartphones.
[0]: Actual augmented reality that is projected on top of real vision - not recorder reality with camera like in case of this product.
Probably more like "what would I use this for" is a basic question that can't be answered right now.
Time will tell if a "killer app" is found.
Yeah it really feels like a devkit they sold in hopes someone would come up with the killer app because they hadn't figured it out themselves yet.
It's a shame as it seems like they maxed out the tech specs, but given the state of the art it still ends up being too low resolution for true MacOS productivity replacement, while also being too heavy & tethered to a short lived battery pack.
Maybe a worse-is-better version that is cheaper/lighter will sell more for entertainment uses.
Exactly. They need to cut the price in half and focus on entertainment. Thats the only thing I hear friends talk about who still use theirs AVP. Wearing it longer than a movie becomes too strenuous.
I guess if they just called it a devkit, nobody would have bought it. But, with the specs, price, and the ridiculous form factor, it was a devkit in all but name.
Except there is so little investment in devs and the ecosystem that even as a devkit it falls flat. VR/AR is a teensy niche of simulation enthusiasts and a large group of people who essentially play 30 minutes of beat saber occasionally. That's not exactly a thriving market, and Apple explicitly eschewed that market entirely, because nobody sims on a mac anything, and there are no controllers to play beat saber with.
Where are the grants to devs to buy and develop something good for it? Apple just kind of expected everyone to do that work for free for them. Watching movies on an airplane is not a $3500 use case. Mirroring your desktop to a head mounted display that is too heavy and cumbersome to be a $3500 use case. Putting iPad apps into the air is not a $3500 use case.
Where's the killer app? What even IS a killer app for head mounted displays? They've been around for 30 years now. It has never been an insufficient hardware problem. The original oculus devkits were genuinely terrible, but VR IS a killer app for sim enthusiasts, so they rushed to implement it into everything they could straight away. Euro Truck Simulator was one of the earliest integrations. But that's not an Apple market and never will be.
If someone wants VR/AR to be some stupid ShadowRun heads up display for managing all the info you encounter in the world, that app should be built and iterated on first. How many average people even run an "organize and remember everything" app? What percentage of iPhone users even use the damn calendar?
I’d like Apple Maps to show up in my field of view. In that case I could even not have a phone at all. (But not like $3500 want). I agree that nobody has found a really good use case. I do wonder to what extent that is just because nobody has released an AR headset that you’d wear outside.
I have done that with XReal glasses and my phone.
But they still look kind of off when wearing them in public (slightly bigger than normal sunglasses, cable from one ear and other people can see the light from the screens from the side or back).
And the lack of integration is a pain - the phone has to be unlocked so is subject to random taps and swipes in my pocket.
However, an Apple-built Carplay-style projection into XReal type glasses could work very well - the question being how would you control it?
That's the kind of HUD UX that a lower res/contrast/illumination overlay could accomplish like the Meta Orion prototype.
I think segway was an interesting idea, but electric scooters seem to have stuck.
Segway had a slew of high profile injuries that damaged its brand. Then encouraging people to wear helmets on them made people look too geeky.
People love their electric scooters nowadays, and they’re just worse Segways.
Apples headset is expensive and has no compelling software for most people. It was DOA.
> People love their electric scooters nowadays, and they’re just worse Segways.
Not sure about that. The scooter is a >200year old design and there is a reason it subsist to this day. Segways are huge and not as easy to store/fold. Onewheeler are more elegant design and much more compact but awkward to operate when powered off in places you aren't allowed to use it and you cannot carry loads as easily. In that sense a scooter offer the speed of the segways/onewheelers, with the convenience of being able to push them easily anywhere with minimum effort while staying foldable, easy to hide away once reaching destination yet they can carry stuff.
I see noone mention the Segway flaw in real world use - if either wheel loses traction for a moment, the device will spin and dump the rider on the ground. They're laughably bad and uncomfortable to ride compared to a regular pushbike, let alone eBikes.
Scooters are a smaller form factor, but bikes should be the real personal transport winner.
Not to mention you can jump out easily in certain scenario.
"high profile injuries" is a wonderful understatement. The most notable "injury" being the death of the president of the company while riding his Segway [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi_Heselden
That wasn’t until much, much later though. That was like 3 buyouts in.
Maybe ... he bought it out in 2009, which was also when Paul Blart: Mall Cop came out, which served as a eulogy for any chances of dignity for the Segway
Segway was introduced in 2001 and went on sale in 2002. By 2010 it was very much on a downslope.
Segway was in a sense ahead of its time and trying to create a new market segment.
The early problems were it was illegal to use them on sidewalks but also there weren't bike lanes like there are in big cities now.
It was also pretty big & heavy it didn't work for multi-modal like using it for the last mile to/from a train or bus.
So the e-mobility space got won decades later by worse, cheaper products that were smaller & lighter .. being used heavily for food delivery app drivers using them semi-legally in bike lanes. A use case that wasn't imagined in the Segway unveiling.
> helmets [...] made people look too geeky
That doesn't bode well for VR headsets, which also make you look geeky.
I really wish this wasn't yet another platform war. There are already countless Quest devices, apps and games out there. Also, it will be very hard for Apple to beat the Quest 3S price point, we just got 4 headsets so we can all play together.
That's a good point but.. if they have enough inventory that almost points to a sign that inventory is not moving. They may stop producing them until they figure a way (an app) to spark a buying trend.
To be expected, I never understood Apple's point in making such a big thing of a VR headset, they were arriving to the party, as everyone was leaving the VR party, jumping into their cars to join the AI house party down the block.
Additionally at such a price, and with the current developer feelings regarding store practices impose by Apple.
Naturally it turned out to be such a niche product, unstainable to keep going.
The Vision Pro feels more like a spatial tablet than a spatial computer. A computer should be capable of handling productive work tasks such as developing software. Vision Pro's only relevant capabilities seem to be mirroring your computer's screen and acting as a device to run your test apps, just like a tablet.
My experience receiving a Vision Pro demo at an Apple store also involved a poor Apple rep having to keep a straight face showing me basic iPad games when I asked about gaming. This thing has some of the most advanced VR headset hardware and their best gaming demo was some iPad games where you tap and hold to jump over mountains.
Yeah I think it might of worked better if they made it open like a mac/pc where you can run whatever software. Geeky types could have better programing tools, gamers could get fancier stuff.
Apple's billion-dollar Vision Pro dilemma can be solved by the courageously coincidental public discovery of an iPadOS zero-day jailbreak, enabling early adopters to explore the limits of both tablet and headset. This side door can be closed in 24 months, after rolling up the most lucrative use cases into the core OS/API of future tablets and headsets. iPadOS has zero-days aplenty, so this doesn't need much effort from Apple beyond benign indifference.
It's invasive, heavy and more anti social than smartphones. Battery life is too short. Low volumes make software development for it unattractive. Companies keep pouring into ar/vr billions and no sigle killer use case to show.
> Companies keep pouring into ar/vr billions and no single killer use case to show.
Beat Saber did pretty well but then Apple made a headset that can't even play Beat Saber.
Apple has, somewhere deep in its DNA, an almost pathological aversion to become the Amiga -- a ridiculously capable computer for its time that is mostly known today for games. They've always low-prioritized games and its really shaped the company.
I think it relates to how both Steves worked for Atari during their early career, and probably imposed they point of view on the culture.
Other than that their only attempt was the failed Pippin, so yet another reason to hate games, other than those on iDevices, bringing money home.
The problem with video games is that publishers want to get on as many platforms as they can, so they have no loyalty to any specific hardware platform, which goes against Apple’s entire modus operandi - Apple wants its 3rd party developers making things only for Apple platforms, so that it’ll be really hard for customers to switch.
The only way to get around that in gaming is to have 1st/2nd party developers (like Nintendo/Sony tend to do), but making games has never been in Apple’s culture. Movies/TV shows are a bit closer to their DNA, and they’ve started producing those with mixed results - games would be a much taller order.
Really should have done with Meta did and grab one talented group to help them do this. And just work on a portfolio of decently fun, professionally made games. Not like Amazon that tried to just jump headfirst into MMOs and pretend you can buy yourself a fun game.
It's much too late in this stage of the industry to just look attractive for exclusives; the industry standardized (compared to a PS1 disc vs a N64 cartridge) and no one's throwing enough money to carry that plan long enough to pay off Like Microsoft kind of did. Not even FAANGs. But it's never too late to just make good games and foster series your platform is known for, like Nintendo.
But then again, Meta just shuttered that studio despite a hit game series from them, so who knows what's going on anymore?
That isn't a problem, exclusives are a common thing in the game industry as old as it exists.
It is always a symbiotic relationship, what is missing, is that Apple doesn't play their part of exclusives like Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft do (and SEGA in the past).
it's almost clockwork how they will use games for 1 year to showcase something for their hardware... and then proceed for 3-4 years to de-prioritize it until they need to yet again, show off their hardware.
that cycle came back last year when they used AAA games to showcase the power of the iPhone 15 and for devs, talk more about their porting toolkit. The last cycle was showcasing the M1 chip and Apple Arcade.
Yet these came after they actively fought against Vulkan support (and now they are using some form of MoltenVK to help with their porting tech) and hard blocked several cloud gaming platforms. Things that could have made their job a lot easier (and maybe cheaper).
so I suppose in 2-3 years we'll see Beat Saber working when they get serious with VR.
To be fair I am still waiting for a WebGL 2.0 game that can match the Infinity Blade they used to show off OpenGL ES 3 capabilities.
Isn't that the kind of description of the first iteration of many innovative products? The iPad was mocked just as much if not more, it was a big iphone without the phone, with no possibility of multitasking and a plethora of other limitations and yet now tablets are ubiquitous.
It's not hard to see how this product could continue to be streamlined and made more accessible in the future.
edit: typos, clarity
Apple showing up to the party is usually a pretty good indicator of a technology having crossed a maturity threshold: smartphones, tablets, smart watches, wireless earbuds, TV streaming devices, ARM laptops, etc.
Even their “misses” have just been devices that were too niche or bad value propositions for the average consumer, rather than being technically immature (thinking of HomePod here). It’s rare for Apple to launch a device that’s just far too early to be useful even to its target audience.
> Isn't that the kind of description of the first iteration of many innovative products?
VR headsets are at their 6th or 7th iteration in the last decade.
It's not really the first iteration though, the modern VR era started about 8 years ago with the first consumer Oculus Rift and in that time it's been iterated on numerous times by numerous players and none of them have stuck.
iPad sold 300k units on the first day: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2010/04/05Apple-Sells-Over-30...
The iPad was $500 when it launched, vs $3500 for the Apple Vision Pro.
Yes, but what's your point?
"The iPad was mocked" is irrelevant. Many or most products are mocked by some people, even iPhone. Regardless of mocking, iPad was an immediate success. Vision Pro is not. I fully admit that the price of Vision Pro is the biggest problem. But you can't pretend that the first iteration of Vision Pro is just like the first iteration of iPad.
My point is that they are two very different products with substantially different target audiences.
Now, sure, you can say the Vision Pro was not as big a success as the iPad even if you account for that difference in markets, scale, price ranges, etc. But that doesn't mean it's a total failure either, or that there is no future for the product.
Most people who have a Vision Pro, seem to like it. It's unsurprising that it's not flying off the shelves because at the moment it's little else than an expensive toy, and once the novelty wears off it's not like there is that much to do with it at the moment, it's also seemingly uncomfortable to wear for prolonged periods of time. But like I said, it's not hard to see how it could be getting better with future iterations.
So even if there is no perfect correlation between the shortcomings of the first iPad and the larger shortcomings of the first Vision Pro, there is a correlation.
putting aside my bitter cynicism of "Apple hype culture": I do think VR just needs to wait for the tech to evolve into the level of ease of "put on snow goggles" before we get wide adoption. But I also am in the camp where I don't see this being a market with desperate demand. The iPad is a great example because in many ways it's the same: some people read religiously on it, other people are artists and they catered to that market. Then others just use it as a "cheap" computer to put in front of a kid.
These are diverse markets, but far from the general market. I think VR/AR will end up the same.
> there is a correlation.
I don't see it.
Obviously not a universal desription since these issues are not universal, plenty of innovative products without such big issues
tablets are everywhere, can be shared, and do not make people look ridiculous. hell, even my cats have apps made just for them. haven't seen any viral videos of pets wearing a headset.
not being able to see how this is different is very disingenuous. when the ipad was released, nobody had a device like that. apple's headset was not the first. even those the came before did not gain a lot of traction. so apple is not blazing new trails here that people just don't understand yet. this is an accepted as niche product line for certain personalities.
> tablets are everywhere
They are now, and that's exactly the point. And people don't look ridiculous now because they became adopted, but even the first versions of mobile phones made people look ridiculous.
Have some perspective, try to think beyond a lapse of more than two years back and forwards.
How is it innovative?
Well, for one thing being able to interface with it by simply gesturing with your hands, seems pretty unique.
You know perfectly well that you can't use any computer without touching a controller of some kind.
Do I?
"The Xbox Kinect: Your Body is the Controller"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TICbjFtnmk
Reminds me of the Magic Leap. Or even the Kinect. That use case is even more niche than VR, but setup some tracking gloves and you can perform gesture based actions on your PC (don't really NEED the gloves, but it improves precision without needing a special spatial comera).
Crude, but it's technically possible.
That seems improbable and a challenge for many here.
eg: Theremoose - the Theremin Controlled Computer Mouse https://www.instructables.com/Theremoose-the-Theremin-Contro...
In the disability domain voice operations have a history.
It's clear that we are talking about consumer products, typical use cases, etc.
* Who's "we"?
* Was it?
* Remember when the mouse was a niche invention at PARC?
So, what exactly is the point of this line of argument? That some niche forms of touchless interfacing existed already? And thus the interfacing of the Vision Pro is not innovative?
No argument. Just facts.
Statement: "You know perfectly well that you can't use any computer without touching a controller of some kind."
Fact: touchless controls exist.
Speculation: They may become commonplace.
The UX itself is an iPhone-vs-Blackberry style leap compared to every other AR or VR device out there. It's just a fundamentally better paradigm for basic tasks and for mixing a headset (or future iGlasses) with non-VR activities.
The connection to the real world from inside is incredible. You can forget you’re not looking through heavy googles but rather at a screen.
No. The iPad was mocked by tech bros who saw "Worse computer."
Pretty much anyone who had used an iPhone or iPod touch was like, "Oh hell yeah, big iPhone."
Pointing out that the device sucks to actually use in important physical and social ways is the opposite.
Agree. The Quest 3 and Quest 3S are so much better and so much cheaper and can run games. Why would anyone buy a Vision Pro
The Quest 3 OS and UX is much jankier than VisionOS.
Which is a huge downside for something that users are literally forced to stare at.
This so much. Can wear the AVP for hours uninterrupted, but lasted 10 mins in Occulus 3 before getting queasy. Have given AVP demos to dozens of people, offering varying degrees of guidance and everyone just "gets it" after a couple minutes regardless. Eye and hand tracking UI is phenomenal and awesome.
I can't believe MacRumors has stooped so low.
Headline: Apple May Stop Producing Vision Pro by the End of 2024
First paragraph: Apple has abruptly reduced production of the Vision Pro headset and could stop making the current version of the device completely by the end of 2024
MacRumors isnt the site it once was. The amount of clickbait crap on there has gone up significantly. Very much on its way out. Dont bother trying to discuss that on their feedback forums though, its an instant permaban for even suggesting the quality of content might be slipping.
Later on, it also says that Apple was stopped work on the second-generation Vision Pro and is focusing only on a lower-cost device. So that’s actually pretty reasonable.
I personally don't think it's reasonable for a publication to suggest Apple is outright discontinuing a product in the headline, only to reveal that, no, they're actually just making a strategy shift with the product line.
That's newsworthy all by itself. No clickbait needed.
You seem to not realize that the Vision Pro is in fact ending, and work on a new visionOS device that is not a Pro device is what's taking place.
As an AVP owner the thing is an absolute flop and it's not misleading to say that for the foreseeable future the line has been discontinued.
They're definitely slipping more and more into optimizing excessively for engagement at this point.
Does anyone else find it incredible that they are actually making 1000 of these per day. Apple normally does not like holding inventory, so how many of these do they have in warehouses?
Most of them. Either as new units or returns. I'm surprised they didn't stop production months after release as it was very clear the product would be a complete failure based upon price alone.
Hardware aside they've still not found a purpose for this thing to even exist. They should've come out guns blazing with a ton of content for it. Most places would've paid game developers to make games for it (actual games, not the junk on Apple arcade), do special movie extras, fund loads of apps, etc.
They should've had a $2-3bn budget for content on top of production. Instead they just seemed to release it then walk away hoping everyone else would figure out the point of the product and make stuff for free. It failed.
> Some factories suspended production of Vision Pro components as early as May based on Apple's weak sales forecasts, and warehouses remain filled with tens of thousands of undelivered parts.
Next iphone are going to cost more and more, such a failure must have cost them a lot of money.
Whoever releases a pair of non-clunky glasses with eight hour battery that can do sufficient AR for under a thousand bucks will have the iphone moment and own the world. Looks like a race between Meta and Apple. Unless Microsoft has something sneaky in the works.
At the iphone moment most people used cell phones and the iphone was just a better one. With vr/ar it's a bit niche. I don't know how many people would want one even if it was cheap and good. Looking up the stats a lot have been sold but I'm not sure they get used much. We had a Quest 2 knocking around the flat which I didn't use and I did the vision pro demo which was cool but not sure I'd have used one much if they gave me one.
I'll be curious what the collecter's market looks like for Apple Vision Pro a decade from now. I imagine there are far fewer of these things out in the world than Apple hoped there would be, and I wonder how that'd impact long-term scarcity.
An unopened Apple Vision Pro in 50 years would probably be worth a fortune. Should we get one and hold onto it for 5 decades?
Is it Newton bad? Wonder what the morale is for the team working on a clearly not successful product? Do the other device team members duck their head as they pass them by like it's someone you know but they don't that their significant other is cheating? Do they serve up platitudes like "keep your head up"?
I’m guessing they all knew it wasn’t ready to ship, and would likely fail, and fail hard with that price.
Now Meta is out here demoing very impressive glasses - which was the goal Apple had but couldn’t make work - so I’m curious if Meta is likely the more exciting place to work for this tech.
Don't worry, Apple will rip open the Facebook glasses and copy them with a slick new form factor.
Having used both AVP and occulus 3, the AVP is just way better user experience already, no need for them to copy an inferior product. Would expect usability delta to persist, (as well as the price delta.)
SPACE GREY
The Meta glasses reportedly cost $10,000.
Killer for me is how klunky it is for multiple users. Had they supported swapping users seamlessly, I’d have bought two: it would get more use than the PS5 (or TV, for that matter).
That said, almost everything Apple does is personal computing. Maybe AR is just a bad fit until it can fit into the form factor of sunglasses. (And not be shit.)
Huh they didn't even bother to sell it in countries like the Netherlands and Spain yet. Weird.
Anyone who got a Vision Pro: are you still using it?
I remember there was a lot of initial excitement on HN about the possibilities of using it as virtual monitors for work or as a more immersive way to watch movies. Is it good for these applications long term, after the novelty wears off?
Bought it at launch and use it a couple dozen times a week.
For me, the killer function has been doing display mirroring with my Mac and leveraging the environments like Mt Hood or the Moon as a way to get into a focused flow. I love the idea of windowing in a virtual space, but the there is the same feeling of limitation that I get with this device as I get with my iPad. I've used it to capture some VR photos and videos of family, survey the house to identify the source of a water leak, used it for a couple workouts, to play some Xbox games in bed without waking my wife.
Weight only seems to be an issue for me at the 3h mark or so, but at that point I am taking a break. My eyes don't seem to be effected so far and the only visual quality issues have been either due to pancake lense physics or fogging up when the device is cold. App quality has been okish for the most part. I periodically check the app store for something new, but so far nothing that feels incredible. I'll probably buy a MetaQuest Pro after this just to see what that is like
I'm ultimately waiting for the ultrawide enhancement they teased earlier this year and hoping they add a few more environments.
Lessons:
(a) never launch new plaforms without jailbreaks
(b) never disable jailbreaks until the best use cases found by hackers have been sherlocked into platform's core functions
(c) never derive $NEW_THING from $PREMATURELY_FROZEN_THING
It's the best display I've ever had in terms of screen "size" and quality balanced against each other, and it's the default I gravitate towards for movie watching, game streaming, etc, as well as occasional hobbyist things like writing (the environment knob is remarkably good for helping with focus, at least for my ADHD brain). Once there's a version of Virtual Desktop (a local wifi VR streaming app) available for it I'm sure it will also be the best VR headset I've ever used, at least for short sessions.
With that said, I haven't used it for non-hobbyist productive things because the weight and (more importantly) the really bad head strap design makes it awful for use in a sitting-up position for long. I feel like that comfort factor what drags it down most. The passthrough quality and UX stability is 100% there already to be fine wearing it for several hours at a time, including while doing unrelated tasks, if only it was actually comfortable enough for that.
For constrast, see the designs that companies like BOBOVR make for other headsets like the Quest 3 - https://www.bobovr.com/products/bobovr-m3-pro - which look bulky and silly but are perfectly comfortable for long high-activity VR sessions because of the fundamentally better design, even though they add extra battery weight to the headset itself.
Have one, never use it, too lazy to sell it.
Using it as a virtual monitor is tiring. It’s too damned heavy. The FOV is too small. The resolution isn’t terrible but it’s not great either (compared with a physical screen.) I get exhausted after an hour of using it, an 8 hour work day is just too much.
I used to use it to watch YouTube or movies but at some point it just becomes a chore to go get it and put it on when the TV is already there and doesn’t cause fatigue after 20 minutes.
I’ll pay the shipping in a pre-paid package if you’d be willing to part with it.
yep.
spouse works night shift 3 days a week and ill develop on it and/or watch something.
our work has a cloud based ide for web stuff and ill commonly use AVP and virtual display on my personal mac for that and its better than my 2 monitor setup.
its for big nerds for sure and i am that. really is the best value for the best possible screen. i got it to have fun developing for novel xr hardware and watch great movies on the best screen. my advice is not to get one unless youre in that intersection of interests.
personally find it exciting i might be developing on discontinued hardware. always read and heard about hardware thats come and gos but dorks keep building stuff for it. i assumed everything is too well planned and managed these days for me to take part in something like that.
I still use mine for the things I watch by myself (with TV filling its usual role for social watches). I want to try it for other purposes but keep forgetting to.
When my partner wants to watch TV and I just want to work next to them; As a portable monitor that isn't socially acceptable outside living areas.
I remember few people having very positive feedback for home entertainment.
I also wonder if the same people wouldn't have the same benefits with way cheaper AR classes like from xreal[1]
[1] https://www.xreal.com/de/air/
The PPD is good, but a 46 degree FoV is pretty narrow for a virtual screen, and it's fixed in place in relation to your head. One of the big convenience differences of a true headset (even a cheaper one like the Quest line) is that you can move your head around and still have the "screen" fixed in place, so it doesn't get in the way as you look for your popcorn or whatever.
I do too, but I also wonder if the negatives (weight, isolation, heat) become apparent over time while the initial wow-factor wears off.
Edit: Or perhaps the software has improved and it's even better now that it was at launch?
iPod - solved a real user need, developed in 1 year*
Vision Pro - solution looking for a problem, in development for ≈8 years.
It really makes you think how clueless Apple has become post-Jobs ...
*4 years if we acknowledge it was an existing category and Apple just improved on competition
[copy-pasted from my Mastodon]
It is the same Apple after the first time Jobs went away, however this time he isn't coming back.
And while Apple has millions to burn, they better find something else other than doing iPhones.
Funny thing is, Apple probably thought the iPod would be a niche product that would only appeal to existing Apple customers when they developed it. If they did not take the risk, they probably wouldn't exist today.
While I don't think the Vision Pro is a good fit for Apple (most of their products are portable, while the Vision Pro is unlikely to have much uptake outside of the home and office), it is hard to gauge whether it would be adopted without actually bringing it to the market.
I doubt it. MP3 players were popular when the iPod was released. They just took a share of the pie.
Son, I’m going to tell you one word that will change this company forever: SERVICES
It did change Microsoft, and I am quite sure Apple fans won't appreciate a Windows like experience in the name of SERVICES.
Didn't they have a really small number of screens they even ordered in the first place? Did they change their minds from demand, or have they just finally run out of the first production run?
Before its release, I read that Sony had said they could produce 900,000 of the displays per year because the process was so complex. Obviously with 2 displays per device, half that is the maximum number of Vision Pros per year.
I'm guessing Apple and Sony would have invested in improving the process if it had hit expectations.
Sony display had capacity for 1 million screens in 2024. That's 500K devices. They are stopping short of that, but we don't know by how much. I'll estimate 400K devices made and sold in 2024 as the Pro model is sunset and Apple takes a shot at a Quest competitor in the $1000-2000 range.
400k made, sure. Sold? Not likely given we already know they've got a lot of stock. 400k sold would mean they are sold out.
Likely closer to half of that. Dont forget they're still launching it in other countries this year, so they've clearly got ample stock left over.
From what I heard, they will ultimately halt production, assuming no major changes in sales, at around 500,000 - 600,000 produced. Based on my understanding of the sales, they will have a considerable number of units still available even if the production stops.
This seems to be specifically a change in the assembly volume. I imagine they have most of the specialist components, such as the screens, already delivered and stored.
I wonder why Apple didn't go for glasses instead like the ones Meta is doing recently; a less bulky and cheaper product would have probably sold more.
That's the thing, Meta is /not/ "doing" glasses. They had a very limited run at $10K+/ea just for internal testing IIRC. That's very different from a shipping $3.5K product. It's also not clear if Meta could ship their glasses at ~$10K or if they'd need to charge even more.
Apple has repeatedly said that AR is where they want to be and glasses are what they want to do (directly and via leaks) but the tech wasn't there yet. "There yet" can mean "we can't figure out how to get the cost down to something reasonable". The AVP was clearly a "Let's fake it till we make it" product with faux-AR (or maybe it's still just "AR" but faux-"glasses"?) with the end goal of removing the ski visor for just glasses.
I don't know, I just tested the Meta Quest last night and at $300 it looked GOOD. Give it a few years and I bet they could get that level of fidelity into a glass frame @ ~$1000-1200
No, they cannot. Completely different technology tracks with the goggles form factor a dead end and the glasses form factor a decade or two away from consumer costs.
Well the Meta Quest 2 starts $500 so I'm not sure if you were using a MQ2 or MQ3S (which has essentially the screens of the MQ2 from what I understand). I have tried the MQ2 (I own one) and I have tried the MQ3. The 3 is better but the resolution is still not great, the AVP was much better than either. I did like the color passthrough on the MQ3 (vs grayscale on the 2) but I wouldn't say any of it looked "GOOD", it was adequate but still too blurry.
I think I'll end up getting a MQ3 eventually or maybe the next version at launch but I'm just not really drawn to VR. After the first few months of my MQ2 I lost interest and it's just collecting dust.
I think part of the challenge Apple now has is convincing developers who were already on the fence that they should take the plunge now rather than wait for what looks to be a clearly superior form factor.
It’s not like customers (aside from those who already have the hardware) are beating down anyone’s door asking for the Vision Pro.
This is very handwavy, but if Apple does intend to pursue the glasses form factor it would probably benefit them to do the very make the very un-apple move of articulating how investments into developing for Vision Pro will extend into glasses.
> make the very un-apple move of articulating how investments into developing for Vision Pro will extend into glasses
I doubt they will come out and say that specifically but they pushed ARKit and VRKit for year prior to the AVP.
I would assume they said their market research said otherwise.
Personally, I have 0 interest in glasses, but a lot in quality, privacy respecting VR. Just not $3500 of it.
I would have been interested in a $3500 headset if that M1 chip had run macOS, so I could ditch my laptop on trips and take my office with me.
I agree that the OS is the most limiting factor of the AVP. In its current form it's just an iPad with all the downsides that brings. I had high hopes for it as a MBP replacement or companion but MVD was disappointing and so I returned mine.
Were you planning on bringing a keyboard and mouse around with you? VR "gesture" controls are godawful and nothing has supplanted mouse and keyboard because they are absolutely wonderful control methods.
If you ARE carrying around a mouse and keyboard and AVP, that seems like a lot more clunk and silliness than just using a damn laptop. What are you doing that actually benefits from gluing the screen to your face?
I want to be explicit: I love VR and have been hugely into it since the very first oculus dev kits, but other than flight/driving simulators and gun games which all hugely hugely benefit from the physical immersion VR provides, there is nothing worth doing in VR. Not that many games actually benefit from a physical presence. Almost nobody playing FIFA or CoD actually wants to do it in VR. The (really fun and quite well made) CoD ripoffs and other shooters in VR are nearly empty, because so few people are willing to stand up while playing. The Wii made this clear 18 years ago FFS.
I'm still waiting for a single use case that isn't sim driving, sim flying, or shooting, or beat saber. Billions invested into producing something, and still there is nothing.
> Were you planning on bringing a keyboard and mouse around with you? VR "gesture" controls are godawful and nothing has supplanted mouse and keyboard because they are absolutely wonderful control methods.
Yes, either external or the ones built into my MBP
> If you ARE carrying around a mouse and keyboard and AVP, that seems like a lot more clunk and silliness than just using a damn laptop. What are you doing that actually benefits from gluing the screen to your face?
I was hoping to use it as a companion (replacement was always "maybe in the future") initially so I was going to carry the AVP+MBP if things had worked out. Not always, but if I was going to be somewhere for an extended period of time (vacation/visiting friends or family/etc) then I would take both and have the "same setup" that I have at my desk at home (AVP+MBP). This was going to be an alternative to my 3-4 monitors (I have the same desk setup in 2 locations and duplicating everything was expensive and annoying). Unfortunately the MVD was too blurry and VR is too limiting (but mosting the MVD issues) so I returned my headset but that's what I was hoping to accomplish and how I was going to use it all.
> What are you doing that actually benefits from gluing the screen to your face?
For a start you get multiple very large virtual screens that are a lot bigger than the screen in a notebook. This to me is an interesting use case.
Have you actually tried that though? People always bring this up like it's some cyberpunk fantasy but working with a one pound weight strapped to your face is awful and staring at screens situation an inch from your eyes is really really hard on them and absolutely sucks. I bet using VR for 8 hours a day would actually hurt your eyes.
Actual VR/AR desktop mirroring is a thing that exists now. It's a niche of a niche of a niche because it's not a good experience. It's interesting for the five minutes until it becomes unbearable.
Consider that many simracers, the niche that VR is the absolute best for, do not regularly use VR, because it's just too much fuss to put a damn set of goggles on, even when you are already sat in a purpose built simracing rig!
100%, if it run macos it would've been a no brainer.
I believe I am decent earner, but 3500$ is not justifiable from the benefit I get from it. _and I wanted to buy it really bad_
Whether it's VR, "Metaverse", or AI models, I want it to be open source.
I don't want to spend 8 hours a day in some corporation's world, even more than we already are. The incentives are not aligned.
The personal computer revolution (that Apple helped kickstart) was amazing. People could actually run the software locally, instead of a mainframe. People bought apps to run on their computer and videos to run on their own VCR. I feel like the Web started taking things backwards, empowering "the remote server" again, like a mainframe.
Now, we have Netflix, YouTube etc. and the broadband internet hurdle has been surmounted for many. We are fighting the wrong battles with "net neutrality". The real battle should be whether we can host the software on machines of our choice, or not.
> The real battle should be whether we can host the software on machines of our choice, or not.
Evidently there is a market for those who want to run their own software and those who don’t care.
Apple caters to the latter. Meta seems to be taking the more open route.
Luckily pretty much all major VR platforms use OpenXR, so we have a better start than in the past.
When it comes to AI, yes you guys are lucky Meta had that snafu with LLaMa researchers and chose to seize the moment and make LLaMa available freely to everyone. Otherwise it would be quite a different world. Mark Z returned to his open-source roots that he had with Synapse and Wirehog back in the day, before Sean Parker and Peter Thiel “corrupted” him.
But when it comes to everything else, it is the opposite, in my opinion.
Apple sells you the hardware and you install apps locally. It’s not open source, but at least it runs locally. And Apple cares about your privacy.
Facebook is the opposite, it is ad-supported, it will never give you their backend source code or let you run your own social network. They only promote “React” front end framework and other ancillary things. They will try to take your data by hook or by crook (surreptitiously recording your camera and audio as well). Their “Metaverse” play would have to recouo the tens of billions spent on development.
But yeah when it comes to AI, you guys lucked out. Zuck’s image has improved since the first 15 years of “dumbf%[#s” giving him their data. He now surfs in a suit and looks much cooler. But remember — it’s people like Linus Torvalds, Tim Berners-Lee, and all the “BDFL”s of all the languages you use (like Guido Vom Rossum for Python and the Zend guys behind PHP) who really create most of the wealth for the world. If not for open source, you’d be spending more and more of your life in some corporation’s world.
Just ask yourself, when the following technologies enter your home or your body, would you rather all be hooked up to a corporation like the Borg, or at least have your own installation where you have a say:
What do you think the incentives will be for TeslaBot or Microsoft Recall surreptitiously storing everything they can about you, including your passwords?When facing the temptation. Microsoft has already done it. Facebook has already done it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism
But it can go far beyond that. How difficult would it be for TeslaBot to get all the info to impersonate you? All your mannerisms, voice recordings, your heartbeat rhythms, gait, everything?
> and you install apps locally
Through their cloud service.
If we only use 10% of our brains, why doesn't someone lease out the other 90% to billion-dollar corporations?
> I don't want to spend 8 hours a day in some corporation's world, even more than we already are. The incentives are not aligned.
AR will be the 'future' for a very, very long time I think. Maybe there will be a Metaverse chatroom where all the worker bees can bounce around and have a happy hour on Friday or something
Apple 100% has something like Meta's Orion glasses or probably even better as a prototype in their basement.
Instead of an Orion puck for processing - it's your iPhone
Instead of the bracelet for extra precision - it's a future Apple Watch prototype.
They just won't do what Meta did - show off prototype hardware that they know they won't release in its current form and are working towards making viable for mass production.
My guess is the Vision Pro was largely driven by a need to get real world data.
By giving it all the bells and whistles they get to find out about more things and keep it at such a price range that it avoids being viewed as a colossal consumer level failure (instead if it's known by the general public at all it's as a weird but impressive premium level failure)
It was driven by sunk cost fallacy.
All the rumors always said they were working on both in parallel.
I assume they could not yet make glasses happen in a way that fit their expectations or at a reasonable price point.
Even the Vision Pro is a device with big trade-offs (external battery, crazy expensive).
Meta glasses are not selling either. Meta's pathetic attempt to make them 'cool' by using raybans and European models is laughable.
The CEO of the Ray-Ban brand owner says otherwise:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/n...
Granted, it’s relative: “… the new generation of smart glasses have sold more in a few months than the old ones did in two years.”
But it doesn’t sound like they’re discouraged.
Translation: we sold almost nothing from the previous generation.
If the product was a hit, we'd just know about it. We'd see it around, people would talk about it. It wouldn't require an ambiguous comment from the CEO.
Thats like saying I improved my running speed last month more than Usain bolt did in a decade.
It makes sense, it's just too expensive.
But I think they did this more to break into a new territory than to sell units. Of course, they didn't market it that way but that was probably their intention.
Next they're gonna come up with a cheaper device, hopefully below 2000 dollars with most of the things that made the vision pro interesting.
...or they're going to pull out of a market where the smartest people in the world tried to answer "but what is it good for?" in the 90s and failed. I don't believe that Apple is going to hit this one out of the park... we'll see how my comment ages in 5 years.
I'm happy to concede that AVP is probably great for watching movies on an airplane, but that's hardly comparable to the iPhone level of "world-changing".
From the beginning of the Vision Pro, I always expected Apple to take the approach of giving everyone an excellent, Apple worthy headset regardless of price. From there, focus on keeping the specs exactly the same but reducing the price until it's a reasonable purchase for people.
To do what?
Head-mounted hardware needs to iterate fast. No one is happy with a bulky thing on their face. The iPhone moment will be when you don't think twice about wearing one.
> People are going to only read the headline and interpret it as “discontinue”. Like the article says, it just means they have enough inventory until they replace it with something cheaper.
This is such an odd take. Like trying to defend Apple from an accusation that was not made - The headline is a good representation of the news; production was suspended because they are sitting on too much unsold stock. Typically in-demand products with limited availability go out of stock fast and don't sit unsold.
This is why it always frustrating to read any negative news on companies like Apple or Tesla. They have some annoyingly sycophantic fanbase that always wants to downplay and misdirect any bad news.
If Microsoft made some AR glasses that sat unsold and they suspended production, no one would show up to say "actually, it is not being discontinued, nothing to see here". Nor should they.
Apple also have some weapons-grade haters out there. Who’ll take even positive news and use it to be divisive and derisive.
So does Microsoft. Or Google. Or Toyota. Or any other sufficiently large company. They are put under proper scrutiny.
But those are not white-knighted by a fanbase that always feel like they need to protect the multi-billion dollar company from negativity.
Using myself as an example, there are companies I like. I happen to like Nintendo for example. I still call a failed product a failure (e.g.: Wii U), and sometimes I even dislike their successful products (I always hated N64 for that retarded controller).
Why Apple "fanbase" abandon all critical thinking is baffling.
They should have made an sdk that made it easier to port games (and excel). Iirc you had to use their gesture control, there was no way to use kb+m right? At least with other vr you can create a usable mapping to typical FPS controls.
You can connect a trackpad and keyboard to the AVP. Interestingly a trackpad worked but not a mouse. You can also connect a normal controller (like Xbox/PS).
Everyone thought I was crazy for thinking this thing would get no traction. People want to spend less time plugged into screens, not less.
> Everyone thought I was crazy for thinking this thing would get no traction.
I've yet to find someone who thought a $3500 headset would be a smash hit.
HN had fifty people in every thread swearing that nobody predicted the iPhone would be a success so we should all shut up and buy or else FOMO.
It was constant and everywhere. Tens of posters who have apparently zero connection to the company Apple other than "They released the iPhone" as if they've never had a high profile flop, as if they've never had only okay sales of a product, as if they've never tried to change the world and failed miserably, as if Apple never misses.
Because of a single damn product release. One time. At the crux of a phase change in the personal digital device world.
Just, utterly divorced from reality. I feel like these posters are half of my company's management team.
Not to mention the old canard of "Apple doesn't do things first, it does things right", implying AVP success was inevitable, and the chattering classes were too dumb to see it.
Read some of the previous threads. There are hundreds of comments of people inventing use cases, that's how bad people want this to succeed. The problem is Apple's ecosystem for AVP is designed around consumer services like Apple TV, rather than the sci-fi fantasies of the average HN reader.
Or they believe the price to be too high for beta-testing a first-gen Apple device.
Apple products have been successful specifically because they attract the mass market right away.
Early adopters didn't use iPhones, they used HP iPaqs and Dell Axim PDAs running Windows Mobile. iPhones obsoleted them by simplifying the UI so anybody aged 8-80 could use it.
If an Apple product seems like it's for 'early adopters', it's already failed.
> Everyone thought I was crazy for thinking this thing would get no traction. People want to spend less time plugged into screens, not less
Almost everyone I know (and people here on HN) thought this would be niche at $3500. But that doesn't mean people don't want to be plugged into screens. They totally are plugged into screens - just not Vision Pro.
> They totally are plugged into screens
I've seen a backlash in recent years. Most notably amongst techies, ironically, but more recently in the general public. People are waking up.
Maybe? I dunno. I’m tired of my current screens. But I want better ones. I want mass market e-ink monitor and a pair of VR glasses that look like actual glasses. We’re halfway to 2030, where’s the future? I’m still using a laptop, we’ve had those for decades, what gives?
> a pair of VR glasses that look like actual glasses
It's getting closer to that, but not quite there yet. There's Bigscreen Beyond out already, and the Immersed Visor is coming up, and they're a lot closer to that than Quest 3 or Apple Vision Pro to glasses (but also either less powerful and/or more expensive).
https://www.bigscreenvr.com/
https://mixed-news.com/en/immersed-visor-next-gen-xr-headset...
We want more screens, just easier to use them. We are too lazy to even stand up to wear a headset. We want them in front of us all the time, everywhere, without moving a finger, instantly!
I’m perfectly fine with standing up to get and use anything. For me, the problem is that it’s a /headset/ and not something else - as they have a host of ergonomics and comfort issues, causes fatigue and headaches, closes me off from my environment (despite their pass through idea), etc.
I don't think I saw anyone (media talking heads looking for engagement do not count) who said this product would be popular.
AVP user here who is wanting to get less plugged into screens.
What I really mean by that though, is that I want to make my screen time more meaningful. I don’t want to mindlessly scroll, like I often find myself doing, or like I see others doing in places like grocery store lines or on the subway.
The Apple Vision Pro is a very expensive, specialized device. When I use it, it's mostly to watch movies, TV shows, or other immersive content, but it’s still mainly just for entertainment. But I can't just sit in it and disassociate the same way I might my phone--I don't feel that it's built that way.
As for getting no traction, yeah that's correct. It's too expensive. I still love mine.
> People want to spend less time plugged into screens, not less.
Yes. I threw my phone away 2.5 years ago (after my 3yo daughter kept saying "no phone dadda") and it has made my life significantly better. Like living in the 1990's again.
In a land of the distracted, the phoneless man is king.
That being said, I think the AVP is very cool technology, and will have important applications in the years ahead. (Just not mass market for a long time, if ever)
Awww, Apple, don't become Google... I mean, if you go for a product like this, you should be prepared to sink money into it for at least 3 to 5 years. Thats what you owe to early adopters. There is nothing more sad then owning a piece of hardware which totally stopped being supported. Examples like this will steadily reduce the willingness of consumers to play with new stuff. The risk will eventually just be too high.
Did you by any chance by one?
VR tech still isn't ready yet.
It needs very high-res video streams which basically no internet provider/CDN can offer at scale. 40Mbps+ HEVC just isn't scalable. So the only content is whatever can be downloaded to the device itself. A few games? A cool screensaver experience? It's all cool, but mostly novelty tech.
The resolution of the screens is not the resolution of the media you play on it.
You can stream even a 1080p movie to it and it will look fine, because it is playing in "physical" space, not filling your view completely. It is like watching a floating television or movie screen.
For streaming in VR it has to be at least 4K per eye. So 8k in the general case, but realistically it will be higher than that.
Nobody can stream 2x 4K to my Apple VR headset. I can barely get a single 4K stream to my TV!
Success of every modern attempt at VR hinges on limits of self-expression. Meta's torsoverse and Apple's extension of the office failed while Second Life continues on with a thriving virtual real estate and retail market and VRChat makes commercial deals to support a massive yearly furry convention.
Second Life doesn't pretend to be anything it's not, so it attracts an audience who want that authenticity.
Apple and Facebook are the polar opposite of that. They look at a product segment and think "How we do sell this to X million people?" Turns out that regular people that buy iPhones and Macbooks, might not be as interested in VR.
One place you don't see the Vision Pro suspended is on Tim Cook's face. There is weak demand for a Vision so dim and weak. The visionary pros at Apple couldn't see a clear provision for Tim Cook's half-baked Vision Pro. Apple shall proceed without Vision.
To charge $3.5K for something that can only be used by one person is an epic fail of product vision. Like, what am I supposed to do if there are 4 people in my family? Or if I want to use the thing both at home and at work? I get that they’d prefer it if I bought several, but the price point puts that well outside any realm of possibility.
WHAT IS IT FOR???
Immersive porn.
I really hate all of the talk about how this has been received. It was clear to anyone that was not trying to push clickbait headlines that this was never meant to be a mainstream device. Apple may charge a premium for their devices but they also understand the market enough to have lower priced Macs, iPads, and iPhones.
No one thought a $3500 device was going to be mainstream when we see people complaining about phones being above $1k.
The fact that the first one came out with the "Pro" name made this even more clear.
Headlines like this make it seem like it "failed" in some way that is only because we are putting expectations on this to match other Apple products but this is just like the other "Hobby" projects that apple used to classify products like the Apple TV.
The market for AR/VR is incredibly early (if it manages to take off at all) and the technology just isnt there yet. But while we wait for the hardware to catch up why not start working on an idealized vision of what it could work like with its own caveats. I would much rather this than the xreal's and similar headsets way over promising (borderline lying in their marketing) and severely under delivering.
This product will go the way of the Apple Watch. Deemed a failure before eventually becoming the category leader about 3 years and 3 iterations later. The price will come down, the (few) hardware rough edges will be softened, and enough support from the massive iOS developer pool will create a “killer app” that starts to build momentum here.
Misleading FUD from Macrumors trying to get clicks.
> and enough support from the massive iOS developer pool will create a “killer app” that starts to build momentum here
Apple certainly hasn’t helped themselves here by burning so much developer goodwill over the last few years. They may be marketing it as a “Pro” device currently but one of the biggest selling points seems to be immersive video, and Netflix and YouTube both saying no to developing an app for it is not a good look.
On the indie side, in just the last few days I’ve seen multiple Mastodon posts from developers regretting building a visionOS app [0] or considering preventing running their existing iPad apps on visionOS. [1][2]
[0] https://mastodon.social/@harshil/113350016890131979
[1] https://mastodon.social/@marcoarment/113351442738668432
[2] https://mastodon.social/@marcoarment/113356843080972068
I've had the watch since v1 and I've almost gone full circle on it.
Never had sound on, have disabled more and more notifications, steadily fewer and fewer complications until I finally just use the the silly Snoopy watch face instead.
What I do love it for is all the health tracking, and that I have about a decade of data on myself now. Really just activity level and resting heart rate primarily.
I'm at the point that I'd be similar (or, maybe more?) for a display-less slim Apple Fitness Band loaded with all the sensors of the Apple Watch.. and then go back to my analog wristwatch.
All of those things could happen, and it still wouldn't go beyond Oculus Quest levels of popularity, i.e. low.
Apple Watch is a status symbol in the same way Airpods and iPhones are. You're paying partially to be seen wearing them. The same is not true for Vision Pro or any headset. You'll just look like a Alamy stock image that comes up in an image search for 'technology'.
I'm trying to be charitable, but I agree with this take (instead of the "eventually succeed" comment above).
Anecdotally, when I go to a restaurant, the server is often wearing an Apple Watch.
I cannot extrapolate what that would look like for AVP...
Possibly, but I don't think it's comparable because VR/AR headsets—whatever this category is—still has an unknown future. Smart watches had demonstrated use cases and a market before Apple released the Apple Watch. The Vision Pro is more like smart glasses, a category that still can't find a foothold 10+ years after the Google Glass.
Honestly, a lot of the critics would have bought the device for $500. It’s just that the price doesn’t have a selling point that justifies the current pricing
classic mistake to sell hardware without a killer app.
well i can't think of a single killer app for this or any VR headset for me.
at $3.5k there is pressure to position this as a leap forward in solutions to non existent problems.
watching films on a flight or using a virtual desktop don't excite most people.
> well i can't think of a single killer app for this or any VR headset for me.
For a headset the size of a pair of glasses?
* A well-designed HUD that can seamlessly integrate 95%+ of the "utility functions" (as opposed to entertainment functions) from my phone into my field of vision. Calls, messages, navigation, calendar, notes. I never want to look at my phone unless I'm bored.
* One of those "speed reader" [0] apps that will flicker a message at 600WPM at me. This should probably interface with all long-form text.
* Subtitles/translations for the people I talk to.
* An "offline dating" app that only allows you to swipe people you see
I firmly belive AR is the future of personal computing, but the hardware needs to gain an order of magnitude in capabilities.
[0] https://www.spreeder.com/app.php, but smarter (word groups, adjust displaytime for word complexity)
How about have a pair of glasses (iGlasses) with some kind of ability to connect to your iPhone and transfer information via small discrete camera/voice command via airpods. All the processing is done on the iPhone and displayed on the inside of the lens, sort of like a heads up display. Offer prescription services or clear lens and sleek style frames. News, txt, email, video, maps, health info, search, access to Apple AI, etc, etc. I don't need VR, just Terminator style information.
I'm dreaming I know....
Personally, it seems obvious to me that this is the desired end state of AVP-related development, but somewhere along the line they decided that pure AR tech just wasn't good enough yet for the display quality and UX stability they wanted, and so they ended up with the headset as a clunky hardware compromise built around an OS mostly designed for the glasses use case.
I only see discussions about the Vision Pro from an entertainment perspective. To me it is clear that with the capabilities and the price, it should be a professional device to be used in industry, military, and such. Then the price is cheap. But this means that more traditional sectors need to make software that takes advantage of AR.
Rather than halting VR/AR efforts, this seems to be just cutting production of the current model. That doesn't mean there won't be future models but it does imply demand was lower than expected.
We've had 10-15 years of companies trying to make VR (and AR more recently) happen. I just don't think it's ever going to happen.
People are led astray by books like Snow Crash but there are fundamental issues with both VR and AR. Latency is a huge one for both. AR fundamnetally has an issue producing true blacks.
lmao
I wonder if the lack of third party software for it is because the resentment with the App Store has built up so much?
Building an iPhone app? Pretty much required.
Building an iPad app? Almost free when you're building an iPhone app (depending on your tolerance for UI/UX)
Building a Watch app? It's a popular device but is it worth the investment? Most people say no.
Building for a brand new platform where we have to live with Apple's rules? No thanks.
Businesses aren't as resentful as individual developers; IMO the difficulty is that it's really hard to make compelling content.
iPhone suits simple use cases, chat, video, audio, remote controls, utilities, simple games, and with controllers medium complexity games
iPad will do any phone or laptop app, plus high complexity games with a controller
Watch will do data displays, notifications, very small remote controls
Headset? AR, VR, cinema. But right now, that means "Occulus games, first party virtual display, and the kind of static AR content that's theoretically possible on an iPhone but very few actually use*", and AVP is 7 times the price of Meta's headset.
There's useful stuff if can do in specific niches, but I can't tell if e.g. "surgeons use AVP to assist during surgery" is a fluffy headline or a demonstration of value-add, and even if it's useful in this case it remains hard to figure out what this translates to in a mass consumer market.
https://9to5mac.com/2024/10/16/the-vision-pro-is-being-used-...
* some amazon listings let you see the product; IKEA used to have an app for that, then got rid of it, no idea if it came back
I’m an indie app developer building photography apps because I love photography.
I don’t harbor any particular resentment towards the App Store; in fact I am fine giving Apple 15% of my proceeds (I make way less than $1M a year) to handle content delivery, refund requests, minor advertisement, etc.
I bought a Vision Pro on release, and have a number of ideas/prototypes for it.
After a few weeks of hacking, there are two simple reasons why I didn’t pursue development of them any further:
- the APIs are still really early stage (eg nothing around windowing, I’d like to build some pro photo editing apps that’d require advanced windowing functionality)
- even if I were to work around the API shortcomings, take the time to develop a full app, and then release it - then how many sales will I get at most? Maybe a thousand? Compared to the iPhone/iPad/Mac, that’s nothing.
So I figured waiting a year or two for the APIs to get better and more people to have access to the hardware made sense.
Also, I went from considering making AVP exclusive apps to making apps that work on Mac/iPad, and maybe have some bonus features on the AVP - I think that’s a better way to go about it (nothing released like that yet, still in development).
All that said, there’s something magical about the AVP’s high quality screens for photography. Seeing your photos in space right in front of you is definitely one step above looking at them on a phone/tablet/laptop screen (and one step below looking at large high quality prints of them, but that requires a different kind of effort).
You should put a link to your work in your bio it is really cool. Your name gives a clue but I only found your site after adding "software" to the search.
Oh weird, there is a link in my bio! I wonder if HN isn’t displaying it because this account is a new account?
Regardless, thanks for the kind words! (and for those wondering, the link is https://heliographe.net :)
> resentment with the App Store
Not only, in general, over the last year or so, Apple has used every opportunity to antagonise and frustrate developers.
A business wouldn't care about the Vision Pro because there are but 10 people who still own one. The device is limited, extremely expensive and the software platform questionable at best - why did Apple needed to reinvent *Reality APIs instead of joining an existing industry is beyond me.
There are indie devs who still use the vision pro for engagement - flashy posts on the socials etc, but that's not enough to make a dent. Also, for many of them, this is their first encounter with AR/VR where Apple present's their achievements as novel while there are already existing ecosystems from other vendors.
You don't think it has more to do with the tech having hyper-specific use cases and being too expensive for most consumers to just casually own? Don't get me wrong, I think it is wonderful tech, but people pushing for VR/AR to be a big thing are a very siloed, vocal minority that always seems to be baffled when the latest iteration of it goes nowhere. It's because none of it has been practical enough for common consumption, yet.
Vision Pro is not a mass market device the addressable market is very small for any big investment from developers. Until the sales reach in millions Apple will need to develop themselves or pay developers to build stuff for it
My uninformed guess is that aside from the obvious glaring user base size problem, the API is too locked down to build unique, interesting apps and too different/incompatible to port existing ones like VR games.
The most popular apps on Vision Pro sold tens of copies. Not tens of thousands. Tens.
So, for a ~$5000 in hardware costs and unknown amount of dev time you get 10-50 dollars in return.
You don't need any feeling of resentment to run an easy ROI calculation
Not really. It's merely a chicken and egg problem.
Why develop for a platform that has almost zero users? Why buy an expensive device that has almost zero apps?
Agreed - but in the past, Apple has been able to overcome this issue for several new products. If third party developers are understandably less enthusiastic to invest in this platform, Apple could either develop apps themself or pay third party developers to do it (what a novel concept!). But they don't seem willing to do it...
So Google fails, Apple fails, Facebook has been failing for a while. It seems only Microsoft out of the big tech is still continuing its dominance now with AI and things like that. But this is a great time for startups to come up.
You just listed 4 of the top 10 companies in the world by market cap. Failing is an overstatement
Throughout history every single company with the biggest market cap has failed.
> Throughout history every single company with the biggest market cap has failed.
A this point in history Apple has the largest market cap and has not failed. Sure, it will fail eventually but it hasn't yet.
It is failing now
[citation needed]
Not sure where Google, Apple, or Facebook have "failed"... If we are taking a single random product's success/failure and projecting it on the whole company then Microsoft has failed more times than I can count, the most relevant to this discussion being the hololens and the biggest recent history blunder being the Microsoft Phone.
I said they are failing. Not failed. Bleeding will continue for long since we didn't break these up earlier. But companies are either going up or down and anyone with half a brain can see that these three are going down.