I think this whole thing is fairly overwrought - after all, the iPhone launched with zero third party apps (maybe there were a few, but I don't recall that being the case).
Given the volume of VP sales, it feels more like a production-ready dev kit and tool for enthusiasts. It's really the version that people will use to build apps on, so that v2, v3, etc., which will be lighter/cheaper/whatever else is needed to make them more mass-market, won't have the same problem when they launch.
If you're Netflix et al, why support the VP now? Even if it's just checking a box, it still means you'll get some support load. You'll also have to make some design and implementation decisions that will be less-informed than if you wait a while and see what other apps are doing on there.
At the end of the day, is having Netflix on the VP going to generate any incremental revenue? Tough to imagine that everybody buying it doesn't already have a Netflix subscription.
Building for it right now is zero upside and some downside. We'll see a Netflix app eventually, though.
The iPhone was even worse, it launched without support for third party apps. Steve Jobs said that web apps would take their place. The original iPhone was also overpriced and underspecced in some areas and forced you on a crappy phone provider, but it had a significant price drop shortly after release and the iPhone 3G fixed most of the performance issues (mostly around the slow cell modem). Plus Apple released the app store and it was an enormous success, far more than the existing app stores on the Symbian phones.
The browser itself was ground breaking imho. Everything seemed to require a mobile specific browser and those versions of websites looked like garbage.
The iPhone was (as far as I know) the first device that really and truly let you have real websites on your phone (even if it was just a tiny version of it)
I had been waiting for such a device for a long time, and this was the thing that got me over to Apple in any real sense.
There was a wide range of mobile browsers. From what I recall Windows Mobile 5/6 smart phone’s browsers were arguably better than the 1st gen iPhone. Though the phones where overall worse.
Devices were much worse compared to even first gen iPhone. Ironically, it only for worse because the industry decided that using their shitty resistive touchscreen with UI even worse than previous models - menus had large buttons, but apps were built for stylus.
I had an HTC TyTN II windows mobile 6 CE mobile phone. Basically same year as original iPhone. IE was rapidly abandoned and unusable. But with Gmail + activesynch it was like a blackberry with instant email. Opera mobile worked as well as modern browsers, probably better than iPhone. 3G. GPS. Load a multitude of apps self contained onto the huge SD card. It was a much more powerful capable device than an iPhone almost even up to today's standards. But it was clunky as hell and setting up the mobile internet was an insanely complicated process. I'm not suprised the iPhone won out.
Oh, I remember what flash on a mobile looked like in 07. In fact, I remember how taxing flash was on PC in 07. I also remember how vulnerable flash was.
Yeah, it could render more, but it was unusable because no one designed for mobile back then. IMO mobile world was sad until Apple came in.
Symbian was quite good, the only thing was the strange Symbian C++ dialect, which wasn't something sorted out by iPhone until the store finally came to be.
Symbian the OS was solid. Symbian the devices were mediocre. iPhone was much more polished and consumer friendly. Touch screen, size, weight, iOS, the browser, data -- it's hard to attributes iPhone's success to a single thing, but the overall package was head and shoulder above anything else.
Yeah, the iPhone was the first phone where it felt like it was actually possible to browse the web on it. The Symbians I had previously didn't feel like usable browsers.
Funny how now the internet is now regressing itself to be "mobile-first" and almost all websites have become "websites that look like garbage". Even on my phone I still often switch to the desktop versions of websites as they're easier to use. Let alone trying to use a mobile website on a desktop.
> having a browser you could use without thinking about it was huge
This right here. People forget things like roaming and data charges. $500+ phone bills were not uncommon for business travelers. Data charges made smartphones almost a non-starter for the average person. Apple broke that logjam.
and they weren't crappy everywhere, though admittedly they were extremely bad in Silicon Valley until iPhone opened up to other providers, so they get that reputation among tech enthusiasts from sites like HN that are SV-centric
It was Edge, ie 2.5g. It was very slow everywhere it worked at all. But, as the poster said, internet all the time with a flat rate plan was huge. For me, it really changed how I thought about the internet when I had it always with me with zero cost concerns.
It was EDGE and didn't have enough memory to run the browser well, which caused significant slowdowns. Granted, it was still better than literally every other phone browser at the time, but that didn't mean it was a good as it could have been. The iPhone 3G was a significant upgrade.
> but that didn't mean it was a good as it could have been
Nothing is, and nothing can be. Not even if you eliminate cost from the equation. Not even if you eliminate manufacturability, or supply chain availability. You're holding the original iPhone to an impossible standard.
The iPhone was arguably the best product Apple could have made for that price, to be released on that date. Sure it could have been better and more expensive. It could have been better and further delayed. It could have been better and also worse in some other way.
The original iPhone had 2G cellular connection which was slow for the time, and especially silly since, as you point out, it was well powered otherwise. The iPhone 3GS caught it up to other smart phones in the market.
It also launched without cut and paste available in the UI, which again, was silly given how it was otherwise an impressive mobile computer.
While there were obviously people who bought the iPhone as soon as it became available, it was probably the 3GS when it really took off. That's when I replaced my Treo. (I also think I was starting a new and more secure job by then.)
N95 could have up to 4hrs talk time, 8hrs with WiFi turned off! iPhone could do 8hrs. iPhone could also browse the web for 6 hours, play videos for 7hrs, play audio for 24 hours.
N95 was more expensive, with worse software, worse screen, worse battery life.
Lots of Windows devices pre-dating the iPhone had comparable full colour touch screens. Its competition certainly wasn't the "132x65 pixel black and white screen".
Lots of Windows devices pre-dating the iPhone had similar sized full colour screens. None had comparable screens, and Windows certainly didn't have an interface worth touching with a finger.
Sounds convenient, but I remember the backlash was so bad from this news, they rushed out a dev SDK to add that support in. Different time. "No Flash" sounded like a WTF, too.
And now developers (not end users) are whining about not being able to do good [sic] PWAs
Edit: Users may not know what a PWA is. But they do know what web apps based on Electron and I have never heard any user say that they love Electron apps and they would really love to have the same experience on mobile
To be fair, they're only whining about PWAs, because Apple artificially locked down all native apps. Apple forced the developer shift, their own preferences didn't necessarily change.
If you could install + sell iPhone apps freely, like you can with OSX / macOS apps, 99% of developer complaints about PWAs would vanish.
Yes because the developers on HN can make good graphical apps using cross platform frameworks unlike the
- Java developers
- every mobile OS provider ever who said the same thing - Palm, Microsoft, Google (dart), RIM and even Apple at one point had the same “sweet solution”
So exactly what is the difference between a “cross platform framework that runs on top of a VM that abstracts the difference in the underlying hardware” in this case of cross platform frameworks and a web app where it runs on a top of a browser that serves the same purpose and also abstracts the underlying hardware that has the same drawbacks?
I imagine users care far more about how bloated and slow Slack, Teams etc are.
Rather than whether they can side-load some apps that don't already exist on the App Store. Which apart from gambling, porn and crypto I can't exactly think what they are.
This is about whether or not people might complain about not being able to side-load apps.
As a significant content category is excluded from the app store, it seems very likely that some people would like to side-load those apps and complain about not being able to do so.
[Edit] Another reason why people might want to side-load is to circumvent restrictions or censorship in authoritarian countries (e.g VPNs).
If you can answer this question for Youtube and TikTok, you have already answered it for porn tube sites as well. Other categories would probably be erotic themed chat apps, social networks and of course games. And the reasons are just as valid or invalid as for the respective non-porn equivalents.
As far as I'm concerned, almost all apps could be websites.
And what do you actually get from the YouTube app that you can’t do from the website especially now that Safari finally supports notifications from the web? The same with chat apps?
I prefer using the Facebook website over the native app because the in app webview doesn’t support ad block.
I often prefer webapps as well, for instance because I can open multiple pages to keep state I meant to come back to.
But all the same reasons why some apps need native features and why some people prefer native apps are just as valid for porn. It’s not my personal preference.
Whenever a family member bitches to me about not being able to buy kindle books through the kindle app I count that as a non-geeky complaint about sideloading :)
I worked with a couple of people who worked on the original iPhone and they basically corroborated this: the writing was on the wall but the phone wasn't quite ready for it. They needed an out to ship the phone first and the SDK later.
E.g. if I recall correctly, in the early days of the App Store, the guidelines were that if your app could easily be a web app, it should be, and you could have your app submission rejected for that reason.
The plan was always web apps, they're vastly more secure than any other option. That's a significant part of why safari for windows ever existed.
The problem was developers just wanted to write native apps, presumably believing that the only secure apple platform would be converted to the Mac-like experience, complete with malware, etc.
So with no one making actual web apps, in part because the web standards of 15+ years ago were not as powerful, and in part because developers all thought web apps were bad, and ongoing "we want real apps" noise, you got the initial UIKit APIs, which lacked _a lot_ of functionality, and made a lot of things very hard.
Or you can just go all conspiracy theory and say "they would never change their plans in response to market pressure, who would do such a thing?"
Also, although the original iPhone had a full browser, it was pretty slow. Not only was the data slow, but the phone itself was hamstrung by insufficient RAM which caused way too much swapping on complex webpages. Making a webapp that performed adequately was difficult to say the least.
Matches my recollection of it. iOS 3.0, which launched alongside the iPhone 3GS, is when it got copy-paste functionality.
Apple has historically been very comfortable shipping devices without "table stakes" functionality - waiting until they have an implementation they like.
Or sometimes never shipping it, and leaving it to third parties. My iPads still don't have a calculator app.
It also kinda needs to be said that iPhone really took off after AppStore (and 3G and copy/paste and other stuff) became a thing. Before that the market share wasn't that great.
And in the markets it did exist, the carrier options were limited, usually to the worst carriers, because those were the carriers who were desperate enough to accept Apple's terms.
The original iPhone though did come with the YouTube app built in and it’s major use cases were according to Jobs were - a phone, an internet device and an iPod.
The day the iPhone was introduced, the CEO of Google was on stage.
One of the major use cases for the Vision Pro is video and there ars no native apps for the two most popular video sites.
The day that the iPad was introduced. The CEO of Netflix was on stage.
Wasn't the CEO of Disney on stage when the Vision Pro was introduced/announced? From an IP standpoint having Disney on stage over Netflix seems like the better choice...
I wish so much that YouTube would allow fully featured, non-hacky third party clients again, even if only for paid users (similar to how Spotify used to). The clean platform-convention-respecting straightforwardness of the Apple iOS YouTube app is missed.
The fact is, Google doesn’t really compete with Apple. The amount of money that Google makes from Android, pales in comparison to what they make from YouTube.
There definitely were, but feature phone apps weren't great (for reasons involving hardware, app platforms, and carriers), and smartphone (Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Symbian) app distribution was mostly decentralized. Apple's innovation in the mobile app space was the App Store ecosystem.
The iPhone launched with a phone, email and an internet browser (not limited to the mobile internet) in your pocket. I think those were the killer apps, where each one had already proved their value in other form factors.
I think part of the focus on apps is because while portable connectivity is an easier feature for most people to understand and appreciate (though I appreciate this may not have been quite as clear in 2007), wearability is less so, especially where the form factor is socially and ergonomically awkward. Working in AR/VR I know my team is constantly asking variations of "how can we convince someone to put this on their face?" My interpretation of pieces like this is often that they echo underlying concerns over the efficacy of use-cases, and decisions by players like Netflix to port their apps is some (albeit noisy and incomplete) data around it.
I think this is somewhat overwrought, but I think the iphone comparison obscures more than it reveals.
The Vision Pro isn't in a new hardware category. It's actually entering a somewhat crowded field of companies offering headsets of various kinds. The VP is different in a few ways of course, but it's not clear exactly what prevented previous offerings to get wide adoption. If this product is going to be "successful" (whatever that ends up meaning) you would expect something about the VP to diverge from the trajectory of previous offerings. So far, at least as far as apps go, it seems like it's doing worse.
> v2, v3, etc., which will be lighter/cheaper/whatever else
I understand what you're gesturing at here, but this isn't v1 at all. This would be the equivalent of entering the smart phone market in 2015. If Apple isn't able to offer a noticeably more compelling experience with this realease, it does not speak well for their overall vision.
At the time of the iPhone release, Blackbirds were widely available, as were high-spec phones from Nokia and others. We don’t recognize them as smartphones today because the iPhone redefined the category, but at the time, we did.
Netflix hasn't updated the Meta Quest's app in a while. The video quality is awful. Netflix is ignoring this market completely, it's not specific to the VP.
I used the Netflix app on my Meta Quest 3 and never tried it again. It's a bad app, the video quality isn't good, etc.
Apple is going to have to prove to Netflix to support them (or build the app for them). If Apple sells several million of these and watching video is big on it, Netflix will change their tune.
Haven't bothered with PSVR2 either, and have not updated the original PSVR app to the point where it no longer functions.
Netflix is clearly saying "We don't want to be a 3D/VR movie service". Perhaps Apple will pay for 3D licenses and serve them as part of your AppleTV subscription, which would suck, because it would mean no 3D movie support on any other headset.
On PSVR1, Sony's "Media Player" app's only VR option was to display 360 degree mono videos with head-looking. There was no option for stereoscopic playback. YouTube did add a PSVR capable player, but streamed the videos at a very low res. A 3rd party player, Littlstar was capable for playing various 3D video formats (full 360 degree, VR180, and 3D bluray style 3D video), but demanded a subscription, even for local files... It also only worked on one or two codecs with very specific encoding options... and the decoding was poorly optimized, so large videos (only a subset of which is visible at a time, so you need a high-res video), didn't really work. Not ideal.
PSVR1 could support 3D blu rays.
On PSVR2, Sony still has no built in VR video playing app at all. Littlstar has rebranded as Rad, and has been struggling to get playback working. They also plan to make their subscription based on payments via some proprietary blockchain crap.
PS5/PSVR2 Sony dropped 3D BluRay support. It's not clear if it will ever return.
If you have a 3D capable setup Gravity is a must! Avatar and Life of Pi are also some favorites.
There’s also a few gems and lesser known films that were released on 3D Blu-Ray like Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, which was shot in 3D but wasn’t originally released in the format because the 3D fad died by the time the it came out.
They’re hard to watch because 3D TVs were so unsuccessful. You often need a special Blu-Ray player, and I don’t know of any streaming service that supports 3D.
3D TVs were too far ahead of their time. 3D works far better on 4K than on 1080 since each eye only gets half the image, (though the 4K 3D format doesn’t exist) so it would be nice to see it make a comeback on VR. While 4K and HDR are much better I still miss the occasional 3D film.
I've still got a 2013 plasma with 3d and while you lose half of the horizontal resolution (the image is stored twice side by side) it isn't really noticeable in most 3d blu ray movies. Streaming services lose a lot more sharpness by compressing the heck out of their movies.
Most blu ray players (even the 4k ones) still support 3d since the only thing needed is to pass the image with a '3d' flag set. The rest is up to the display.
Personally I'd like to add the movies "Hugo" and "The Martian" ;)
I've really only tried Ready Player One. I've heard the Marvel ones are decent. Anything animated, like a Pixar should be good, since they can just re-render from the 2nd camera location for the other eye.
Be aware 3D BluRays won't play without a 3D display, like a 3D TV, or a PSVR...
For PSVR it will be lower res than ideal, and due to the BluRay player not using the camera for tracking the headset, will drift slowly to the side. (As I said, Sony's not been good for non-game PSVR support).
Finding 3D BluRays is the trickier part. I've found it easier to order region free disks from amazon.co.uk than trying to find anything in Canada.
It occurs to me that I did, in fact, know of 3d movies. I was thinking something more VR focused than 3d, for some reason. Still, I share the curiosity that the psvr2 doesn't support 3d movies, now.
You are underselling the original iPhone, it entered a very different cell phone market, where the same quality tech existed but was hard to find, and the UX on all smartphones was, to be generous, poor, especially for the mass market. Even beloved Blackberry was in need of improvements that RIM didn't even have on their roadmap until the iPhone showed up.
Despite all its initial shortcomings, the iPhone still raised the bar for the entire market, set a new standard that every other manufacturer/developer would be chasing for years.
The Vision Pro is being watched by the mass market and it will be competing against Meta for better or worse. Apple has put in zero effort into removing that appearance. They are not selling a devkit, they are advertising a mass market device at an absurdly high price.
Yeah, this reminds me of the Apple Watch launch. I think Twitter & Slack launched watch apps, but they performed poorly on v1 and they learned people really just want notifications on their watch, so they pulled their apps. Today we just have notifications and it’s completely fine.
That and dev teams are running leaner these days, so it makes sense to wait-and-see for companies with content leverage like YouTube and Netflix.
> If you're Netflix et al, why support the VP now?
It’s a nice beachhead they’re exposing. There might be a niche for someone to build an AI that converts flat video into immersive content, and then plant a bunch of patent land mines around it.
Netflix will have the patents and decide not to do anything with them. They're not idiots. Not making an app and not investing in R&D for future display formats are quite different. The first is reasonable but the second would be unacceptable for a strong video platform.
The thing I don’t get is why Netflix won’t allow their iPad app to be used. They had to go out of their way to disable the platform from using their existing app.
I get not building a new one, but reusing the existing one makes more sense imho.
Probably because support volume still increases even if it's not "officially" supported. And then you can't just tell those people to go away, because they'll be pissed off.
For whatever technical reasons, it might just not work as well as the website.
E.g. maybe it will only display video on an emulated "iPad screen" whereas the website uses Safari's video player that might have many more VR-friendly playback features.
If they wanted to start producing 3D content and charging extra for that, I'd see the reason but I'd balk at them charging more for delivering the same 2D content to a new system.
I wouldn't expect a Vision Pro app delivering a 2D content experience to be dramatically more expensive to build and maintain than their vast array of apps for set-top boxes, hotels, streaming sticks, or the Meta Quest they've already supported but not charged extra for. Why would they draw the line here?
Companies often charge as much as they think customers will pay, regardless of costs. Apple's RAM upgrade prices are a prime example. But I doubt that Netflix would do it on this occasion.
Watch was the same way. They weren't generally available so any third party that wanted to make an app either had to have an in with Apple to get access to even a simulator under heavy NDA or just wait until the thing hit the streets. I think you'll see the same thing here. Of course in this case with the price point being where it is it will probably take a bit to explore the possibility space and get some killer apps that propel the platform.
I am sure there are plenty of companies we are not aware of who have been building apps for the platform in partner with Apple Marketing Dollars for some time.
If Autodesk and Blender don't have a whole team pointed at this, I would be highly disappointment.
I completely disagree. There are a bunch of mixed reality headsets and I think the one with the best apps will win. Good news for APPL, META is messing up their store as well.
The situation is completely different from the iPhone launch though, 99% of mobile devices at the time probably had zero or at most one crappy Symbian app installed. The concept of an App store wasn't even really invented yet.
I think Google Glass would've been a better example. Magic Leap doesn't seem to be targeting the same market at all.
Fwiw though AVP had somehow passed me by (I think I'd heard of it, but didn't know what it was) until this submission. I'm not sure the general awareness is that high, outside of people that follow Apple news/WWDC/product launches/etc., which is also a bubble.
I'm not really sure what you mean by that, but I don't think it's relevant - it clearly wasn't exactly a success, but it did come first, and it was the same kind of idea, what was possible at the time.
the constraints they put on it , specifically fitting all of it into a normalish looking pair of glasses, meant that they really weren't going to be able to give it enough functionality to actually make anyone .. want it.
It is a much more appealing form factor to me than AVP though. I don't want to work at home with huge goggles strapped to my face. I don't want to video call with people floating in space who presumably can't see me and if they can I look ridiculous. I don't expect it to last/take off if it stays similar to how it is, personally.
But normal looking glasses with a sort of information overlay is much more interesting; especially now I have a prescription anyway.
Much of this discussion is centered on how the headset will replace theaters and TV.
I may be an outlier but in our house the only time we watch shows or movies is a social context--usually Friday or Saturday nights as a family. I'm struggling to see how the headset could replace what is in my experience a mostly social activity.
Will it ever be comfortable enough for the binge watcher to watch it all day? I have my doubts.
I think it will be a coexistence and replacement of flat screens will be a very long time away.
There are lots of people living by themselves or at least spending a lot of time consuming content by themselves.
As for comfort wearing this for extended periods of time, we'll have to see. I think that will be the key deciding factor. There was a lot of marketing speak in the original announcement suggesting that they did work quite hard on this issue and made some progress. A light enough device that can provide the experience of having a ginormous screen in front of your nose without inducing headaches, motion sickness, etc. could be a nice thing to have. If somebody delivers such a thing, people will be reluctant to turn them off possibly.
As for replacing existing things, there's a long history of people thinking about new products in terms of how the old one worked. The more interesting question to ask is what new content will emerge for this thing.
> There are lots of people living by themselves or at least spending a lot of time consuming content by themselves.
Is this great? It's a market, maybe, but it is it one we want to incentivize and grow?
Increasingly I feel like we, as an industry, lean too hard into providing lesser-resistance substitutes for mentally and socially healthier lifestyles, and that "we are not making the choice for them, the root problem has to be solved somewhere else" is a cop-out.
The massive amount of effort we spend on boyfriend/girlfriend replacement tech, meet-up-with-friends replacement tech, experience-interesting-places replacement tech is starting to worry me.
That's exactly what they're doing. And as a side effect, everyone wanting to maximize profit means that everything costs money, and that means everyone wants money, and that means money is hard to get!
At least, it's hard to get for people who don't happen to already be at the top of some empire.
Why assume people spending a lot of time consuming content by themselves is bad?
It can certainly be done at an unhealthy level but you can say that about a lot of things.
If it is bad, then you'd have to discourage things like reading books. And I guess, depending on what you think is wrong with it, maybe discourage other mainly solitary pursuits.
Who is the royal "we" here? You don't have to buy this thing if you don't want to. Why are you judging others that might decide otherwise?
I think it's very simple. If this thing works more or less as advertised, lots of people might buy it. I don't think it's a given Apple has another winner here but I wouldn't exclude the possibility. And I was kind of impressed with what they announced last year.
If you live with other people, the appeal is limited. I can see the appeal for my friends who live alone in small apartments. They can get this and a nice pair of headphones and have a great home theater experience. This is something that would be difficult to do in their current situations.
I also see the appeal for people who travel a lot for work. This is probably an amazing way to watch movies on a plane or in your hotel room at night.
I have a wife and two small kids, so I will not be buying this to watch movies at home.
Are there a lot of people who live alone in a small apartment that are willing and able to buy a $3500 headset?
I feel like this entire thread has a blind spot to the fact that this device is very much a luxury item. A 55-inch TV is ~$300. A high-end laptop is ~$1000. High-end noise-cancelling headphones are ~$250. You could buy all of those and still not reach half of the cost of this device.
The only people I can see buying the device are rich people looking for another toy, not as a serious competitor to other entertainment tech.
>The only people I can see buying the device are rich people looking for another toy, not as a serious competitor to other entertainment tech.
I'm surprised at how consistently people think that a technology that is so expensive and serving such a niche will end up having adoption asides from a few wealthy enthusiasts. iPhone 2 suggested retail price was $300 (~$425 in todays dollars) and provided "smart" replacement for your cell phone matching its features 1-to-1 while also providing more than what was available.
If someone imagines themselves buying this to watch movies "on the go" or at hotels or something, they're part of an extremely exclusive club.
> iPhone 2 suggested retail price was $300 (~$425 in todays dollars)
This was back when most phones were still carrier subsidized and required long term service contracts. Per Apple's press release, the $299 pricing required "a new two year contract with AT&T". Unsubsidized price was about double.
Meta Quest's are basically video game devices. It's a much different market than AVP.
Meta is selling hundreds of thousands of units a month, so I don't know if I'd say no one wants it either. It seems to be selling pretty well overall, but Meta way overinvested in some of the stuff and is having a hard time making enough money.
Sure, there are in any of the global cities. I'm in the DC area, so I know plenty of people who have money and live in apartments/condos. NYC is the same way. There are plenty of people in the Bay Area that this describes as well. And then you talk about Western Europe and Asia, and home theater setups are a lot less common.
Even if you have a lot of space in your apartment, it's hard to justify much of a home theater setup, as you will be really limited by sound issues.
At $3500 though you can easily put together a decent-to-great 75-80" home theater system with the latest gaming console(s) and have plenty of money left over for multiple rounds of pizza & beer with friends over. 77" OLED TVs from Samsung & LG are only around the $2000 mark these days, after all. Compromise even just a smidge to a full array local dimming mini-LED QLED TV and you're now down to under $1k for the TV. Surround-sound soundbars that sound fantastic are plentiful below the $1k mark as well and require next to zero setup.
It seems like you need to live alone and be rich enough to afford it such that you likely already have a great home theater anyway and still be interested in the Vision Pro. Or you actually don't want a TV at all for some reason but still want a home theater experience.
I can afford a 75-80” home theater system, but I cannot afford an apartment in NYC large enough to justify buying such a system.
Most people who rent also move at least every few years, so having that large of a thing to move is a bit annoying. Not even mentioning people who travel for work and obviously cannot bring such a system with them.
It isn’t just all about the money when it comes to device purchases.
Presumably in a smaller apartment setting, you don't have any need for such a large TV (or sound system). It should scale appropriately and provide the similar experience at an even cheaper price. A 48" OLED TV, for instance, is much much easier to move.
I don't think those are really comparable. Spending a ton of money on a home theater is a large and static purchase. You put it in your home, and that's it, you can't move it easily or adapt it much. The Vision Pro, on top of having other functionalities, lets you have that home theater experience anywhere. Want o watch in bed? on the couch? outside on porch? waiting at the airport? People spend a lot more on phones because of the portability aspect.
Another HN commenter[0] speculated that the R1 chip could be part of the path towards an Apple self-driving car. Since they're no longer trying to do level 5 FSD, I think one of the absolute coolest things could be using the Vision Pro to see straight through the car into what would otherwise be blind spots. Obviously there are implications to wearing Vision Pro while driving, especially since if the device loses power you will entirely lose the ability to see. The idea still fascinates me though.
Something I've noticed in the past few years is the number of homes I've been in without a TV and the use of smart speakers placed throughout instead of a fixed stereo/surround system.
Seems quite a few folks are opting to randomly binge-stream on their laptop as vegging out on the TV is a thing of the past for them, so no need to have their living space dominated by these types of electronics.
Are those folks going to suddenly find it appealing to strap on a headset with a battery pack for $3,500 but don't want to try that out today for $500?
The appeal of the laptop/tablet/phone veg is the speed at which you can plop and start watching. Futzing with VR headset is kinda not that.
The "personal home theater!" angle has been tried, and failed, so many times now. It doesn't seem like the Vision Pro changes anything to suddenly make it a motivating feature on its own. Which I think is the more telling thing about Netflix's response here. They've been pushing VR movie watching since day 1. And yet now they aren't doing so for the AVP. That seems less likely to be a snub of Apple and more likely to be an admission of "this just isn't something people do or want currently"
It's too early right now and I feel the device needs to make strides for it to be viable for most. The various youtubers pointing out neck strain issues underscore this. We can't gauge much from early gripes on a low production device that hasn't launched yet.
Netflix's engineering staff is expensive and I imagine they learned some interesting lessons from experiments like Bandersnatch. No need to make bets for the sake of innovation, let things play out first. I'm sure there is some signaling involved for the sake of investors showing they're prudent here.
All I'm saying is - to your point - the market may be shifting to where personal consumption devices like this make sense. It's not replacing a TV so much as a laptop.
For some early adopters the experience may be far superior, and if so, a next generation device that cuts the cost and size in half may be the thing that launches things forward. Like the iPhone 3G.
Or it could be sort of a wash and go the way of the 3d TV craze from 15 years ago.
The $500 headset can't really do this well. They may have demoed one in a store and realized this isn't a great experience. You will also not find a lot of people online recommending it either.
I have a Quest 3, and I would much rather watch movies on a laptop or iPad than it. The screen quality is not great. You can see the pixels due to the low-ish resolution. The contrast ratio is not great.
The screen quality is generally good enough for VR games and other VR-specific experiences, however.
A lot of homes are not built with an obvious spot for a TV, especially a big one. Hence all of the people sticking TVs over their fireplaces (which is way too high for proper viewing).
A wall. And power. And furniture to hold the 50 cables and 5 auxiliary devices that go with the TV. And a place to comfortably sit that works with all of the above.
I'm hoping there is a better selling point than a really good home theater for single people. When I was single, having a TV and couch was valuable so that even though they were 95% used alone, they could be shared with guests.
If I was into media enough to spend $3,500 to have a great experience, it would be a bummer if I couldn't watch a movie with someone else occasionally.
I mean, you can still have the TV to watch things with guests.
Or if you're both into the big screen VR experience, you can both wear headsets. Watching movies in a shared virtual movie theater is already a thing and works great. Even better is that you can be in your home and your romantic partner can be in their home (or traveling) and you can still watch together.
Yes, that's preferable when it's an option - unfortunately, that's not always possible, especially when life intervenes. Wouldn't you still want a way to share a space with your partner and watch a movie with them?
I mean, right now it's for the low low price of $500 for a pair of Oculus Quest 2's. Just as big screen, but you'll effectively get 1080p quality on the virtual screen rather than 4K.
Obviously for the Vision we'll wait for prices to come down.
I'm somewhat of a VR enthusiast. But my headset is mostly gathering dust.
There's one use case that I do think I would actually use once it's good enough though. It's using glasses as replacement for computer monitors when doing work. But I'd prefer the Nreal/Xreal Air form factor and price point.
My inner VR enthusiast thinks the Apple Vision is cool but my inner realist wonders if anyone is really going to use anything beyond smart glasses.
> My inner VR enthusiast thinks the Apple Vision is cool but my inner realist wonders if anyone is really going to use anything beyond smart glasses.
My personal prediction - smart glasses as a smartphone replacement, AR/VR headsets as a poweruser workstation machine replacement.
The market segments map out nicely with your prediction as well - almost everyone has a smartphone of some kind (just like i expect almost everyone to have some sort of smart glasses in the future), while a relative minority (even though it is a large one) has poweruser workstation machines (just like with AR/VR headsets in my prediction).
That is, until at least the tech gets insane enough to allow packing full functionality of an AR/VR headset into the form factor of glasses, with an insane battery life to boot. I don’t see that happening in any foreseeable future though, sadly, barring some transformational and unexpected battery chemistry breakthroughs.
> My personal prediction - smart glasses as a smartphone replacement
I still struggle with seeing smart glasses as a viable smartphone replacement unless paired with some sort of peripheral to perform input privately. Doing everything by voice or expressive gestures around others isn't going to work for people.
That’s a really good point I totally forgot about. I would expect it to be controlled by a combo of gestures using eye tracking + some auxiliary input device, like a ring or a smartwatch or something like that.
I agree, for now we have no good or even barely established UX/HCI paradigms for hypothetical standalone AR glasses.
Not that we even have those types of paradigms established for currently existing AR/VR devices, but we are getting there slowly. With each year since I first tried the original HTC Vive, every new device and update slowly but surely made the interactions better, simpler, and feel more “worked out”.
What gives me hope is seeing how the touch-only UIs have changed since the original iPhone release. At first, everyone was scoffing big time at touch-only interfaces ever becoming functional, viable, and widely used. The first third party apps on the App Store were also extremely disjointed and had almost nothing in common between each other in terms of UI/UX. Felt like everything was just spliced together and stamped with “we think this should work.” Not casting shade at devs of those apps, everyone was in that position back then, as there were no established UI/UX for touch-only interface smartphones.
In 2024? While there are still continuing changes, things slowed down overall as the general cohesive UI/UX principles for touch-only smartphones have been established. And they indeed became functional, viable, and widely used devices.
Pupil tracking is in consumer VR devices, I can see it being further miniaturized, especially with advances in waveguiding.
In fact, this might be a great use for Zeiss's holocam tech [0]: high resolution, low definition, grayscale "window" that waveguides some of the light passing through, down to one of the edges, where an image sensor picks it up and decides it.
This isn’t for in-home use, I believe they were talking about use cases similar to using smartphones outside of home. I am not pulling out a bluetooth keyboard out of my pocket on the street when I need to navigate using GPS or look something up.
Btw, pretty much every AR/VR headset I am aware of these days already supports bluetooth controllers and keyboards. For some keyboard models, you can even have them visible and physically tracked in your VR space (I tried it with Quest 2 and apple’s wireless keyboard, worked like a charm).
I actually was thinking of what people by far use their phones the most for (in terms of what matters to them, and perhaps also in terms of time for many): Text messaging. Having a social life others aren't privy to because it's silent and easy to hide from their eyes.
Keyboards in VR are really bad, and the AVP also doesn't have any ideas there (looking at keys one by one and pinching is extremely "peck and hunt").
The closest to a magic AR solution I can think of is tracking so obscenely great that you can project a touch keyboard on a screenless slab without annoyance. Maybe.
Unless you approximate smartphone typing speeds, silently, it's not going to be a smartphone replacement for any masses.
> That is, until at least the tech gets insane enough to allow packing full functionality of an AR/VR headset into the form factor of glasses, with an insane battery life to boot. I don’t see that happening in any foreseeable future though, sadly, barring some transformational and unexpected battery chemistry breakthroughs.
It's not that far fetched if you move most of the hardware to a fanny pack or similar. You can probably get pretty close with current smart glasses (or Bigscreen Beyond) and a (next gen) Steam Deck.
If you live with other people, it could still be appealing. Not everyone wants to watch the same thing at the same time. Also, living together does not mean everyone is family.
> They can get this and a nice pair of headphones and have a great home theater experience. This is something that would be difficult to do in their current situations.
For that price you can get 3 of your friends a nice 1080p short throw projector and studio monitors which will outlive the vision pro and won't cause neck/head pain after an hour.
This is indeed a great use case for people living alone. But then they they'll also get way cheaper options if it's just to watch streaming services. I'd assume devices like the xreal are lighter and cheaper, and the Vision Pro's extra resolution is less an appeal if it's just to watch Netflix.
Putting on my doomer glasses: with the so-called loneliness epidemic and the rising prices of property (forcing people to co-habit with non-family/friends), I can definitely see something like this becoming as popular and perhaps as necessary as mobile phones.
We too have a nice 4k projector. Wife prefers to watch in the living room on an old LCD. She doesn't even mind watching DVDs (no upscaling on this TV). That makes my eyes bleed, but she doesn't care one bit.
Quest 3 doesn't get you a 4k image and you can get a 4k Tv for less than the Quest. It's almost just sharp enough for text but not quite. I don't think you can really make the claim that the Quest 3 is good enough. Probably the Quest 4 though.
It provides immersion. Your brain eventually filters out what little bit of screen door effect there is when watching a movie. Sometimes when I go to the movie theater I forget to bring my glasses, but I still have a good time.
I'd be surprised if anyone thought the Quest 3 didn't render sharp text. I find everything very readable.
I don't think you're an outlier, but on the other side, "I watch Netflix on my laptop / iPad" is a _huge_ market. Yes, there's plenty of social watching experiences to be figured out, but solo watching is an entire industry unto itself.
I'm a bit like you. I don't watch TV by myself, and the idea of plugging into a VR device to do so seems weird.
But I carry my AirPods everywhere and mostly listen to music solo. It's not unreasonable to think that the same happens with TV/movies.
I have a 75" OLED in the living room where I watch things while wearing AirPods Max. Image quality and sound is superb, but I also often watch movies on my iPad Pro in the bedroom (no place to put tv there).
I still get Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision on both devices and with iPad being much closer than TV screen size is alright.
People that watch movies on their phones and smaller ipads are wild. I tried watching movies on Quest 2 - too bulky.
I'm in the same boat. The idea of everyone watching TV in isolation defeats the purpose for me. Even (maybe especially) for sports, where for large swaths of a game it is essentially background content to a cultural gathering. Not to mention issues around comfort and battery life.
Perhaps worth considering that the Nintendo Switch is the best-selling game console of the last several console generations (#3 all-time!), and a core part of its appeal is that you don't have to take over the TV when you're using it. In fact, it really shines as a "people are watching TV, but I want to do something else" device.
(Particularly for kids, of course, which isn't a market that works well with the $4k price of the current Vision Pro. But a hypothetical cheaper future generation...)
I'll admit that some of my perspective here comes from being extremely not a TV-watcher, so "the social joy of watching a show" mostly fails to motivate me. :D
I'm not sure what the killer app for this headset will be, but watching movies/tv shows on it is not it. The most obvious reason being that a passive movie/tv watching experience is already possible on a much cheaper Quest headset and it has not been a success.
For me a killer app needs to make use of the AR capabilities of the headset to justify the cost.
I agree with it coexisting with a flat screen. We go movie theaters with friends and family and watch in silence. Simply having people around you rather than being alone seems to be enough. I think VR will be something in between. In your situation, you’re not planning a night out but you’re also not just flipping on the tv because you’re bored. You have a family ritual to watch a show/movie at a designated time. I do something similar and would be fine with putting these on if it makes watching something more immersive.
Of course it's not going to replace your family's shared viewing experience.
But a lot of people watch a lot of TV solo.
And headsets are actually extremely comfortable for binge-watching because you can lie back in your reclining chair or lie totally flat on your bed or long couch. You just drag the virtual screen up to your ceiling. You can also loosen the headband in these cases.
There's no reason to sit upright for viewing unless you want to.
I don't think anybody believes it will generally replace theaters and TV, just that it will carve out some portion of that. I think it's the same as how in some contexts, watching Netflix on your phone makes a lot of sense. You wouldn't do it on a Friday night with your family, but it isn't absurd to think some TV and movies are watched on a phone screen.
But I was specifically responding to the article which opens with this quote by Om Malik:
>With that caveat, I think both, the big (TV) and biggest (movie theater) screens are going to go the way of the DVD. We could replace those with a singular, more personal screen — that will sit on our face. Yes, virtual reality headsets are essentially the television and theaters of the future.
And the rest of the article lays out a mostly supporting case with the missing apps argument.
I'm a fan of Om's work, but I don't really believe that's what he really thinks. He also says he doesn't understand why people own televisions. Om has been on many hours of video podcasts (TWiT). Apparently he understands why somebody would watch a podcast but not why they would own a television? I don't buy it.
I think that describes the dream-scenario of Apple: Making a controlled AR/VR in front of your eyes so ubiquitous that not only TV-sales and cinemas disappear, but companies no longer advertise on screens and billboards and instead pay Apple to rent advertising real-estate on "personal screens" of their target-group...
The scary thing is that noone is better equipped to achieve this dystopian goal than Apple, already entering the space with a fully protected walled garden...
If I'd be Netflix (or even Disney), I wouldn't rush to support such a future...
I think if the price comes down there will be a low double-digit percentage of people who have a Vision Pro and no television. This would not be too surprising based on the portion of people who do not own a TV today, watching media on laptop, tablet or desktop computers or on their phone.
I suspect there will be a larger portion of people who have both a Vision Pro and a television, and use the Vision Pro for some portion of their viewing.
The "replaces TV" is likely a mental connection between the cost of a higher end TV and the cost of a higher end AR headset being in a similar range where media consumption is a major feature of both. One could maybe justify the price of a 85" OLED or justify the price of a Vision Pro, but not both.
I used to work in the space about 6-7 years ago (not directly on XR hardware, but software that was adjacent to it in the content creation world).
The phrase I kept hearing from film studio/director types was that they didn't know how to tell a story with VR that could only be told with VR (profitably). Note that didn't stop them from trying and there wasn't a shortage of ideas. The point was that they hadn't figured out what would actually resonate with audiences (and make more money than doing what they already knew).
But things are different now. Back then, the problem was that VR in your home was a dead-end. What seemed promising was using it for theme park rides and people at Universal/Disney were super excited about it. So the "story" they were trying to design was something that was mass marketable with IP tie-ins, short enough not to tire the average American and maximize throughput while also minimizing floor space in the places they'd install. That's a very different kind of experience than a film or video game.
I think with cheaper/lighter hardware the profit model could be different and the kind of content you consume with it would become different. I don't think people have figured it out yet, but with hardware changes there's a different kind of story that can work and it just needs the right storyteller to figure it out.
All that said, the problem all these tech bro led companies forget is that content is king in this space and you can't just make some cool gizmo and expect people to buy it when no one knows how to create for it. For all their flaws, Magic Leap was actually smarter about that than their competition.
I've been thinking there could be a market for place-based experiences with XR headsets. Like you go to the Paleontology museum and it gets turned into something like "Jurassic Park". Something like that ought to be a lot cheaper to develop and deploy than a typical theme park ride. I was a little disappointed when I got the MQ3 and found it didn't have the same persistent SLAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_... that Hololens does, mainly on the pretext of privacy, but that does make it a little harder to make an app bound to a specific place.
I see that kind of thing having a window of opportunity between when it is possible and when everybody has an XR headset and there is nothing special about it. The slower XR is to catch on, the wider the window.
> I've been thinking there could be a market for place-based experiences with XR headset
You're not far off, the industry buzzword is "LBE" for "location based experiences." There was a startup that was killed by COVID/mismanagement called the Void that was building some great LBE stuff with tie-ins to Disney IP (Star Wars, Marvel, etc) and had locations in their parks.
There is definitely a market for it, and even "cheap" LBE like escape rooms have kind of proven that there's a market for entertainment that works like a ride.
> The phrase I kept hearing from film studio/director types was that they didn't know how to tell a story with VR that could only be told with VR (profitably).
This was my exact same complaint within my group creating VR content around the same time. Gaming is a no-brainer. It was the live action that was the blocker. Directors want to control the narrative with various techniques like blocking, depth of field, framing, etc. Within VR, all of that control is lost. Within VR means that it is possible the viewer isn't even looking in the right direction as the director intended. Putting the camera in motion is weird for the viewer since the viewer did not initiate it (unless it was something obvious like being in a car/roller coaster/etc).
I think if you ask the question, how do you make a compelling narrative when there's one camera, it can move anywhere on set, and it's sentient? One answer is "that's a video game." And there's definitely a lot of ways to tell a story through gameplay.
But a lot of filmmakers don't want to make video games, and finding new answers to that question is something that VR struggles with today.
> But a lot of filmmakers don't want to make video games, and finding new answers to that question is something that VR struggles with today.
Part of me flippantly says that most directors are making nothing but a demo of a video game since it's all CG anyways.
Another part of me says this is also where the generative AI characters will not be something a traditional director will even be interested in. Part of being a director is working with actors and getting them to deliver the performance they want. There are different types of directors, and the type that are an "actor's" director will not be interested in it at all. Those that are more technical and just want tech to tell a cool story might be interested since it takes that weird human interaction out of the equation.
> I think if you ask the question, how do you make a compelling narrative when there's one camera, it can move anywhere on set, and it's sentient?
There's live theater too. Could be an interesting way to experience front-row tickets for a play. But what could AVP provide that a live play couldn't? Maybe putting the viewer in the middle of the stage, but it would be a pain to keep rotating to witness the action.
My understanding is the economics don't work out for live theater. Most productions struggle to fill seats and have pricing issues. The productions that don't struggle (eg: Broadway) don't want to lower the demand for seats. That said, there is a financing issue with Broadway where productions are getting more expensive but audiences are price sensitive after some point, and with the finite number of seats available there's essentially a cap on the revenue they can bring in.
That's also ignoring the artistic issues with convincing actors/directors to design and conduct performances for audiences in a completely new way, which is the problem I was alluding to earlier.
> Maybe putting the viewer in the middle of the stage, but it would be a pain to keep rotating to witness the action.
This has been done before (I've even been to a few local productions where this is the norm) but you have to keep in mind the production is designed for the venue its performed in and where the audience is located.
I think there's a kind of theater production where you could use VR as a tool to a lot of success but I think the work has to be written for it, a production team that's down with it, a cast that can be trained to do it, and pricing model that makes it profitable.
It's a very hard problem domain that isn't technical. It's artistic, social, and economic.
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I think ballet would be a much better fit than theater, for what its worth.
For you, VR likely wouldn't be able to replace that social context. However for those kilometers apart, it might allow them to simulate it. See for example Big Screen[1] which lets you enjoy a group watching experience.
It might not be as good as sharing real popcorn, but it can be a surprisingly convincing imitation.
We have tried this with a friend recently with that app, and I can tell you it was miles better (in terms of feeling natural) compared to, say having a video call or Discord.
We played a few flat (not VR) games, on a super large screen in a cozy virtual room, with directional audio that is always on. With your attention being taken on what is happening within the game, it's -almost- as convincing as sitting together and playing the same game.
I can already say that this is my favourite way of playing couch co-op remotely. Haven't tried movies, yet I wouldn't expect the experience to be any different.
> I may be an outlier but in our house the only time we watch shows or movies is a social context--usually Friday or Saturday nights as a family.
There's a very clear cultural divide here. You missed a very important point in TFA:
> If you live in Asia, like you live in Taiwan, people don’t have big homes, they don’t have 85-inch screen televisions. Plus, you have six, seven, eight people living in the same house, they don’t get screen time to watch things so they watch everything on their phone.
(Emphasis mine.)
Basically, the point is that watching TV in VR will probably be very popular in Asian markets.
> The iTunes Music Store does still exist, although its revenue contribution to the labels has long been eclipsed by streaming. It’s more important contribution to modern computing is that it provided the foundation for the App Store.
The App Store was a carbon copy of the iTunes Music Store, thrown together very quickly, as shown in evidence and testimony from the Epic trial, but a store for selling 99 cent songs is an extremely bad fit for selling computer software. A lot of the problems with the App Store today stem from its origins in the iTunes Music Store, and unfortunately Apple has done very little to reshape the App Store to be more suitable for software.
As a software developer myself, I have very little interest in Vision Pro right now. One major problem, especially for indie developers of paid apps, is that customers have come to expect free support for new platforms. Last month I finally gave in and made my Mac and iOS apps a universal purchase instead of separate purchases, but to me it's ridiculous to give away a new version for free on Vision Pro when consumers are giving $3500+ to Apple for a new device. Consumers are resentful if they have to give third-party developers any extra money. The level of consumer entitlement for free software is over the top. Apple gets to make all the money from expensive hardware, and we're supposed to be indentured servants supporting any and all new Apple hardware for no profit.
> One major problem, especially for indie developers of paid apps, is that customers have come to expect free support for new platforms
This is an interesting aspect indeed.
Not just the increased customer expectation but also the resulting increased dev-cost.
It looks alot like Apple aims to repeat what they did on the iPhone: Deliver a solid barebone experience, watch and observe what the dev-community does, build your app/service feature-backlog / adjust your revenue-share model based on the 3rd party apps that succeed.
But now the ramp-up complexity to make a good app is much higher than it was back then for the $1 Flashlight App, the $2.99 iBeer App or Fruit Ninja.
The question is whether there are again enough devs who are eager to do all the upfront invest to "throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks" on behalf of Apple...
It’s very funny you mention Fruit Ninja, because I got a email that seems like Apple specifically ensured Fruit Ninja is ported to VP. BeatSaber alternative?
Consumers find it easy to justify a hardware purchase: it's tangible, and save for requiring an electrical outlet (which is ubiquitous in our society), runs anywhere. Software is, in some regards, intangible, and is constrained to certain platforms. It makes it easier to dismiss, even though it's no less work to make great software.
And that has not been helped by freemium and ads supported platforms. When I first got into computing (around windows XP SP2) if something was free and not open source, it was viewed with suspicions. Piracy was rampant, but they’re already not your market. It’s easy to buy software when it’s fulfilling a real need.
IMHO this has been one of the reasons the push for subscription-based pricing has been successful - it helps you pitch services that provide value, rather than software the user can leverage to create their own value.
> Last month I finally gave in and made my Mac and iOS apps a universal purchase instead of separate purchases, but to me it's ridiculous to give away a new version for free on Vision Pro when consumers are giving $3500+ to Apple for a new device
Depends on your model.
If you are charging individually for new features, it wouldn't make sense to have an entirely new platform as a free thing.
If you are rolling features into incremental paid version upgrades, it could make sense to have AVP support be one of the features of a new version. Product v1 has an iOS app, v2 is a universal app with iOS and Mac support, v3 includes iOS, Mac and AVP.
If you are charging for ongoing maintenance which includes new features, it makes sense to give your entire user base an ever-increasing value. AVP support may just gets rolled in as a feature their subscription gives them.
To do it the other way and require two product purchases or split subscriptions for AVP is a tiered model. Tiered models IMHO are more something that comes from necessity, when the price to support development with a single tier increases the base price to the point where you are pricing out too much of your market. You justify customers paying more by giving them more features, which in turn gives you more revenue to support development for all users.
Tiering is often more of a large development team problem than an indie problem, but for workplace-oriented apps (where you may have personal or corporate buyers who are willing to pay different amounts) it still winds up being a pricing consideration for indies.
I suspect tiered pricing to be a thing for AVP for a while for this reason - developers deciding an AVP owner will have extra spending capacity. I'd recommend pricing though to recognize that the platform success will be defined by it managing to cannibalize some iPad sales, and that on a five-year timeline you may again be pricing out sales by requiring a "Pro" AVP purchase. Plan the pivot.
I don't know that this is entirely true. Statistically, Apple users are far more likely to spend money on apps and in-app purchases than on any other application platform. Mainstream users may feel entitled to free apps but Apple users typically don't fit that mold. Also, you just kinda made the same case as the author in that shareware and other trial apps are probably what's needed here.
> Statistically, Apple users are far more likely to spend money on apps and in-app purchases than on any other application platform. Mainstream users may feel entitled to free apps but Apple users typically don't fit that mold.
Yes, Apple users are willing to pay for software... once. But then they want that one payment to apply to every Apple device: iPhone, iPad, Mac, Watch, Vision Pro, etc. They don't want to pay separately for each Apple platform.
What's your source for that? Apple subscriptions also dwarf the next closest provider. I don't think Apple users care about paying once or more than once so long as they have access on all their devices.
My source is myself! I am an App Store developer. Did you miss the part where I said, "Last month I finally gave in and made my Mac and iOS apps a universal purchase instead of separate purchases"? This was because customers were constantly confused and complaining about it.
I wonder if this could be changed some if Apple allowed some different pricing models. I've never pushed an app to the app store, but I imagine it isn't granular enough for this. But if you could offer 3 price points. One price point for the software on each platform then perhaps like a bundled price point. Say, $5 for the mac version and $5 for the phone version. But $8 for both platforms.
I can see some frustration with idea of paying for the app full cost separately. But I think I would be less annoyed if I can pay for both in a single transaction. Even if it wasn't at a discount for the bundle, $10 for both.
> One price point for the software on each platform then perhaps like a bundled price point. Say, $5 for the mac version and $5 for the phone version. But $8 for both platforms.
Apple sells the story that with their technologies it's easy to port apps between platforms. Sometimes they do the work themselves to make it seem like that's the case, too. So the reason that users expect it is that Apple has conditioned them to think that it is the case.
(1) All of these video apps, including Netflix, are on Meta Quest, which makes it all the more of a snub. (It's a dirty little secret that apps are highly portable between VR and AR headsets because they are almost all written in Unity anyway)
(2) If you're thinking about buying an AVP and not thinking about buying an MQ3 at 1/7 the price you're not thinking or at least you're not an technology enthusiast you're an Apple enthusiast.
(3) So far all the video apps (not to mention remote desktop apps like Immersed) I've seen have a poor user interface for situating and controlling the virtual screens. It doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem but it's somewhat startling that it hasn't been addressed. Maybe AVP will point the way to something better.
(4) I tried the "VR camera" view of NBA games on Xtadium. I've lately taken a shine to sitting in the front row at college games (Newman Auditorium is rarely full so usually I can sit courtside with a $8 ticket) so the "courtside view" was appealing to me but: (a) my 20Mbps DSL connection is not slow enough to support it (though every normal streaming service works fine) and (b) the perception of space around the camera is really strange. I just can't say it is really any better than watching an NBA game on an ordinary TV.
Once you get your AVP (or if you "think different" and get an MQ3) you will realize there are some troubles when you try to synthesize views out of multiple cameras in different spots and even a camera like
that shoots great pano video will get strange results when people get close. The problems I am having w/ it have to do with the network and camera so I don't see it being better on AVP.
This is true, but also these apps tend to be poor quality.
I have a Quest 3, and I suspect a lot of the people who are thinking AVP and not Quest 3 haven't liked Meta's pitch. A lot of the metaverse stuff is silly. It was a poor pitch, and it wasn't remotely ready.
Beyond that, the Meta Quest 3 doesn't have the best screens, so things like watching video aren't actually very good. The passthrough is comically bad, so any AR stuff is really a no go.
The only things the Meta Quest 3 does well is video games and video game fitness experiences. The reason to consider the Quest 3 is almost 100%, "do you want to play VR video games without breaking the bank?" That's it.
The Vision Pro is not making that pitch at all, and doesn't even support motion controllers.
I don't think there is a lot of cross shopping between the two, and I don't think people looking at the Vision Pro are just Apple enthusiasts. They simply aren't that interested in video games, but are interested in the other experiences Apple is touting.
Do you own a Quest 3? I disagree on a few points here.
> Beyond that, the Meta Quest 3 doesn't have the best screens, so things like watching video aren't actually very good.
Is it as good as a 4k OLED TV? Obviously no, but it is the by far the best screen watching experience I had away from a TV. So if you want to chill in bed or a travelling for work and spend a lot of times alone in hotels it is by far the best media consumption device.
Another point are immersive 3D VR videos which is a completely new dimension and let me tell you there are a few really great things to watch, which you cannot replicate on a TV.
> The reason to consider the Quest 3 is almost 100%, "do you want to play VR video games without breaking the bank?" That's it.
see above about watching stuff. Another point are social experiences like VR chat, which I would not consider games.
I also have two OLED TVs, and no way I'd watch the Quest 3 over that. But I also own a 12.9-inch iPad Pro, and I'd much rather watch movies or a TV show on that. I'd also much rather watch on my desktop monitor.
The 3D videos are a nice diversion, and I do them from time to time.
I almost entirely play video games and workout apps on my Quest 3.
Hard to say about the passthrough. The MQ3’s passthrough is terrible from an eye chart perspective but the latency and spatial perception are good enough you can throw and catch a ball without any trouble. The Apple Vision has cameras far away from the eye centers to support the front screen so it’s going to have to work harder to reproject images and it may be functionally worse. We’ll have to see.
>(2) If you're thinking about buying an AVP and not thinking about buying an MQ3 at 1/7 the price you're not thinking or at least you're not an technology enthusiast you're an Apple enthusiast.
I don't think this follows. I haven't used an AVP myself but apparently they are much nicer to use than an MQ3. If $3.5k is not a significant expense for you then you might as well get the premium product.
If your primary interest in VR is for gaming then the AVP is mostly a downgrade from the MQ3, due to the limited input options. There's no proper VR controllers with IMUs, sticks, buttons and triggers, just your bare hands. You're not going to be able to play something like Beat Saber or Half Life Alyx on the AVP to any satisfactory level.
If you want to do spreadsheets in VR then that's your prerogative, but it's still not accurate to say the AVP is a more premium substitute for the Quest in general.
I think the most interesting feature of the AVP is the eye tracking which could not only project your avatar to the front of the device but might be able to make an avatar good enough that you could jump into a Zoom call from an AVP. That's one of those things that would make it possible to travel and pack an XR headset instead of a laptop
That eye tracking though also supports dystopian scenarios such as being able to change the world right from under you by only changing things you're not looking at, "reading your mind" by seeing what catches your eye, etc. The kind of thing that makes people afraid that Facebook is involved with this.
The Quest controllers work great for a range of applications. Hand tracking has come a long way since the painful experience of holding your arms up high so the Hololens 1 can see them but I don't know if AVP's hand tracking will really be as versatile as the Quest controllers and Apple's the sort of company that will go down with the ship because they think there is something unclean about a design... But on that other hand they've got that battery pack.
The Quest has really good VR games and also the kind of media apps that this article is talking about. MQ3 came with a great MR demo game: they opened up the API for MR apps as soon as the MQ3 hit the street but they have been slow to get third-party MR apps through the app store, I just got my first one the other day.
The Quest's graphics capabilities aren't that great by modern standards, certainly if you are a serious gamer with a powerful gaming PC you have seen games that are much more detailed and impressive... I would say that the graphics of Asgard's Wrath 2 are pretty similar to those of Metroid Prime. On the other hand there is something really special about being in a space.
The AVP is a lot more powerful and on paper could synthesize better graphics but it's not so clear to me how it works out in practice. I think how the 2004 game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas lets you travel in a huge world with no loading screens in a Playstation 2 with 36MB of RAM... An experience which is still uncommon despite having phones with 1000x the RAM because it is a lot of work to tune up graphics. Similarly you see most of the games that are on Xbox and Playstation and PC are also on the much less powerful Switch.
Part of the reason Horizon Worlds has failed is that they were trying to make an easy authoring experience that would be accessible to people who don't use traditional 3D tools which comes with all sorts of limitation, not just in the amount of geometry you can have or the number of players, but that you can't bring in your own textures. In the end it all has to fit in RAM in the headset. Maybe you pay 7x as much for 7x the capacity on an AVP (so a world could have 140 max players instead of 20) but often you give people more resources and they just waste them... Look how cloud gaming never developed exclusive titles that did anything that you could only do with cloud gaming.
> That eye tracking though also supports dystopian scenarios such as being able to change the world right from under you by only changing things you're not looking at, "reading your mind" by seeing what catches your eye, etc.
For better or worse Apple isn't allowing this kind of thing, the eye tracking "cursor" is only ever known to the OS itself and apps only receive "click" events with a snapshot of where you're looking when the OS detects the relevent hand gesture. Apps are never allowed to know what you're gazing at passively.
It's a good move for privacy, but it's very limiting for games since they will only have (accurate) head and (not so accurate) hand tracking data to work with.
I suspect there will be ways of getting this information though, it would be incredibly hard to design the foveated renderer such that you can't figure out where the eye is by e.g. positioning different amounts of geometry on the screen and then timing frames.
Apple hasn't made it exactly clear AFAICT, but I suspect that foveated rendering might only work in the managed RealityKit environment where Apple controls the entire rendering pipeline, and not inside applications which implement their own rendering from the ground up using Metal, for exactly that reason. There's nothing in the documentation about foveated rendering in Metal apps, and it is something that engines would have to be explicitly aware of if they do any kind of off-screen rendering.
I don't believe you get mouseover/"glanceover" events; you have to define your focus visual behavior declaratively. Rendering of that behavior is then not visible to an app with default entitlements.
Of course, Apple's store means they can just forbid gaming the system.
BTW I find Apple/Meta's focus on meetings so fascinating. As a mere employee I can't imagine being excited to do meetings in a more immersive way, when we collectively agreed to disable cameras on most of our calls for stress reduction.
That would be better with family, I guess, but then $3500 of material and getting kids and elderlies in VR is quite an hurdle.
On AVP's performances, I fully agree. Currently, running the Quest as a PCVR headset, and thus aleviating the base computing part, still requires a pretty beefy PC to run the games at full quality. And even laptops have a hard time getting enough power and cooling to run at decent speeds for sustained periods.
While the AVP has an M2, I wonder how far that would go when it comes to games that actually push the envelope (or apps that are as underoptimized as VRChat ?).
Regarding the meetings: VR meetings are much less fatiguing because you aren't staring at 12 people who are staring back at you. The spatiality and body language make a huge difference.
The corporate implementations are bad, but they'll eventually take some lessons from VRChat.
VRChat stands out as one of very few “multiplayer” experiences in VR that are successful. Sure you might have somebody jump into tutorial island yelling “I am a furry! I am a furry! I am a furry” but I also had positive interactions with people right off the bat whereas there was no way I was going to get somebody in Horizon Worlds how to work the stupid fishing rod.
I think we're not talking about the same thing. The main sources of "zoom fatigue" (camera on) I see are:
- having to show you pay attention to people speaking when you're actually looking at documents (or doing something completely different if you didn't need to pay attention).
- being stuck where you are as you can't just go to the kitchen or feed your cat while someone else is presenting.
VR solves none of that, and having your whole body captured makes it worse (to note, the AVP doesn't allow moving past some small boundary I think ?). We're still in the fantasy that meetings are something you should be 100% focused on, and double down in a "it doesn't work because we aren't doing it enough" cross training way.
I truely believe the appropriate future of meetings are holographic slabs floating in space representing each participant audio only, Evangelion style.
This can be done without VR though. Mozilla Hubs meetings, for example, right on my ThinkPad screen, don't suffer from the zoom brady bunch problem and it didn't require a dedicated device that's twice as expensive.
Meta has captured the home and family segment with the Quest devices, as evidenced by the number of kids you hear in social spaces and games. No parent is going to hand a $3.5k device to their kids when a $300 Quest will do the same job.
Although Asgard's Wrath 2 is a pack-in game for the MQ3 it plays fine on the MQ2 and doesn't take advantage of the more powerful processor of the MQ3 and only includes a tiny amount of MR gaming as an afterthought.
All of these video apps, including Netflix, are on Meta Quest, which makes it all the more of a snub.
Yep, its a bit of an elephant in the room in both this and the linked blogpost that the authors seem completely unaware that this is an already well-established medium use case that Apple is very late to.
I don't think it really needs to be stated that everything Apple does is an already well established medium that they're late to. They didn't event smart phones or smart watches or set top boxes or smart speakers or the personal computer or or or
Netflix is barely on the meta quest. They haven’t updated their app in years despite everyone begging them to do so. Netflix didn’t even develop their app on meta.
I’m not sure what Netflix is thinking when they are releasing a video game that no one wants instead fixing their meta client
Because video is a terrible use for a headset, especially feature-length movies or TV series. I'll bet the number of people willing to watch for that long with a brick strapped to their face, unable to comfortably drink or eat, is extremely low. Netflix is probably seeing this app used for a couple minutes before consumers realize it sucks and go back to some real VR experiences, or resume on the TV. No wonder they're not launching on apple vision.
Probably because VR glasses are barely even a tiny drop in the bucket for Netflix. And the amount of people who are only watching Netflix on a VR glass (and thus would cancel their sub if it's not nicely viewable on the glasses) is tinier still.
You have a valid point. I’m complaining because Netflix is developing a Stranger Things VR game that no one wants, instead of updating their streaming client.
Honestly, I think VR games are already a bigger market than VR streaming apps. So I see more reason to invest in a VR game (even if this one turns out to be shitty) than to invest in polishing a VR streaming app.
At least with the game, there is a theoretical market if the game turns out good. The market of people who will subscribe to a streaming service based on the quality of their VR app seems to me to be ~0 today.
> (2) If you're thinking about buying an AVP and not thinking about buying an MQ3 at 1/7 the price you're not thinking or at least you're not an technology enthusiast you're an Apple enthusiast.
I bought the Quest 1 when it was an Occulus product and stopped using it the moment they started enforcing Meta anything within the device. I could not care less if it is a 1:1 hardware equivalent as long as it has anything to do with the Meta empire. The last I checked, my Quest 1 refuses to function on my home network because of the filtering I enforce on my router...
The "technology enthusiast" crowd is highly heterogeneous
Porting a Unity game is way harder than you think, especially on a VR headset where Netflix would have had to tune things to specific hardware to get video frames syncing properly. The entire UX has to be redesigned. Not to mention that Unity apps are second class citizens until they're rewritten as "immersive apps."
> (2) If you're thinking about buying an AVP and not thinking about buying an MQ3 at 1/7 the price you're not thinking or at least you're not an technology enthusiast you're an Apple enthusiast.
It depends on the use-case. For productivity, Quest 3 doesn't have the pixels per degree so it is "almost usable" as a desktop replacement, but not quite there.
A better comparison is a Varjo headset for $4k - $12k which has similar capabilities.
At the low production volume they have right now they're clearly targeting the super premium market and developers who want to get in early, so they have good apps ready when the AVP hits the mass market.
It's not like the first revision of iPod or iPhone was a global phenomenon over night either. They were also full of compromises and flaws. I know maybe one or two people who got the first iPhone. I'm the only one I know who got the second gen iPod. But with the third gen of each of those I know dozens who got into it.
I think in the next two generations, the Meta's headsets will go up in price and functionality to be closer to AVP in both. Apple's will stay stable (letting inflation "reduce" the price) or come down a bit. By the third generation AVP will still have a hefty premium, but maybe more in the 2-3x range, and it's not like that has been a problem for Apple in other market segments.
Developers who wanted to get in early could have snagged a Hololens 2 or a Meta Quest 2 and gain a whole year over the AVP. (I did get a Hololens 1 real cheap and found the software story was absymal, when MQ3 came out and got really good reviews but startling little buzz I concluded I couldn't afford not to get an MQ3)
Apple's APIs and UX guidelines are very different. There are some ports (like Rec Room), but building a visionOS-native app means the only thing you'll be able to take with you is your spatial design awareness. (Not nothing, but a far cry from being able to develop your app ahead of time.)
“If you’re thinking about buying an iPod and not thinking about buying a Sansa Clip at 1/6 the price you're not thinking or at least you're not an music enthusiast you're an Apple enthusiast.“
As someone who loved his $10 Sansa Clip and never owned an iPod Shuffle, you make a good point. There was no point in the iPod Shuffle, except for Apple enthusiasts.
Actually a good strategy, as such a device would probably work fine for 5 years then you could 2-4x your storage for another 1/6 iPod, or like most iPod competitors buy a new SD Card.
>There are, to be sure, valid business reasons for all three services to have not built a native app; the latest prediction from Apple supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo put first-year sales at around 500,000 units, which as a tiny percentage of these services’ user bases may not be worth the investment
Except for the fact the iPhone users spend 7x more on apps than Android users[1]. And it would be safe to assume Vision Pro users are on the higher end of having extra money to spend.
Apple has made a clear definition for "Rich AF" iOS users and app makers are trying to look the other way? Their loss. Hell, even having a list of iPhone users that pre-ordered the Vision Pro is worth targeting $$$$
> Except for the fact the iPhone users spend 7x more on apps than Android users[1]. And it would be safe to assume Vision Pro users are on the higher end of having extra money to spend.
Here's the crucial question, though: are Vision Pro owners actually going to spend extra money on third-party software, or are they just going to demand that their current iPhone/iPad apps be supported by the developers for free on Vision Pro?
Apple will see extra revenue from Vision Pro, but will third-party developers?
Neither iPad nor Watch (or Apple TV) have been big revenue generators for most developers.
> Here's the crucial question, though: are Vision Pro owners actually going to spend extra money on third-party software, or are they just going to demand that their current iPhone/iPad apps be supported by the developers for free on Vision Pro?
> Neither iPad nor Watch (or Apple TV) have been big revenue generators for most developers.
I think the answer is "it depends", but for many apps having a separate iPhone and iPad version has been something their user base has disliked. An iPhone app which is separate from an iPad app but otherwise identical is subtractive - I get less value being limited to my phone. Its not subtractive enough for them to say "lets pay double my original purchase price to get the iPad version".
Likewise, having the iPhone app work on iPad is additional value - I have selected and paid more for an app for having good ecosystem support.
Chances are your Apple TV or Apple Watch app has greatly limited functionality due to the interactivity limitations of those platforms, so you simply cannot charge much for these incrementally. Again, providing proper support (depending on your app) is instead a differentiating factor.
I don't have a first-party app that I can port to AVP. However, I would not be doing so to get some of those exclusive AVP dollars based on them buying something equivalent to a mid-tier pro laptop. Instead, I'd be there as a differentiating feature and for the potential promotional aspects of being present.
Some of this comes from personally being more subscription/services oriented in thinking; I really dislike the idea of selling someone software with dubious unpaid support, fueled by a decreasing amount of new sales as I reach saturation for my software.
>Except for the fact the iPhone users spend 7x more on apps than Android users[1].
Sure, but rich people with frivolous spending habits are a finite resource. After a while you run out of rich people you can monetize so your growth slows to a crawl.
Apple's not quite as upmarket as Porsche. But it doesn't really matter. We've already tested iPhone vs everyone else, and Apple has been winning for well over a decade. The unit count doesn't really matter. The profit is what matters, and Apple is making 80% of the profit with 20% or less of the units.
Apple is the VW<->Audi spectrum of the market. You can get whatever the Rabbit from the 90s has become (ipad/macbookair) all the way up to an a4 type (think mac pro tower).
> After a while you run out of rich people you can monetize so your growth slows to a crawl.
Neat trick: create an ecosystem that genuinely helps your users live well & prosper, increasing their wealth so they can spend more money. It’s a circle of something!
Toyota has about 4x the profit per second compared to Porsche, but at 36,996 employees compared to Toyota’s 375,235, I think I would rather try to build a Porsche shaped business which seems more sustainable and obtainable.
kind-of... When Ferdinand Piëch ran VW he turned it into a high end brand from the late 90s until 2010 or so, with quality actually higher than high end luxury brands at the time and some crazy high end models like the V10 twin turbo Touareg, and the W12 Phaeton. Even the Bugatti Veyron supercar, the fastest street legal car in the world at the time, was initially planned to be released as a VW model. Weirdly, VW was selling higher end models than the affiliated Audi/Porsche brands for a while. A spec'd out VW from that time period makes a high end BMW or Mercedes from that era feel really cheap. Even the cheaper models like the Beetle and Golf felt really high quality compared to just about any other car at the time.
Customers couldn't really bring themselves to pay the high end luxury prices VW was charging for something with a VW badge, so they went back to making low end cars... the current VW lineup are again all pretty low end cars.
Luxury/performance car brands like Porsche, Lambo, Ferrari, Rolls, Bentley, etc. can't exist stand alone, they just wouldn't be profitable enough if they had to develop everything in house.
Hence why most of them brushed with bankruptcy and had to be bought out by bigger conglomerates that give them access to the supply chains and economies of scale the likes of VW or Fiat enable.
It's how the famous Swedish SAAB went bankrupt. They were spending most of their budget on developing a decent media infotainment unit, instead of using a terrible already developed one form the GM parent company.
So you think it's likely people will get a new Netflix subscription for their Vision Pro?
Also, even if Vision Pro owners spend 70x more than Android users, with 500k VP users vs 2.5 billion Android users, there's still not that much reason to invest in VP.
I read most of this, and it's interesting, but carrots-and-sticks aside, is it not possible that nobody is doing native apps for this thing simply because it's a $3500 product in an entirely new category that (to a first approximation) nobody owns or will own in 2024, and that could vanish from the market in a year or two if there's no uptake?
I think it's totally reasonable for developers not to invest in the platform at this point, but Apple is definitely in this for the long term. Everyone is aware this is not a mass-market consumer product; the hardware is probably great, but in every other respect this is effectively a public beta.
If Apple scraps the idea, it'll be because the second and third gen were huge failures, and that's probably at least five years away.
It's even worse than that, this product is additional to smartphones or computers and by not supporting it you aren't even losing a single customer since they have other main devices.
Well I think there is also the 'what does a netflix app look like in vr and specifically vision pro' to contend with. Sure they could cross compile the current app and I assume you'd have a rectangle with the current ipad interface floating in the middle of your vision... not very exciting.
The disney app with native 3d movie support is exciting, i haven't read the description enough to say if they place the screen in an environment or if you have the ability to just 'stick it in a window' off to the side of a web browsing session or what.
I've played around a bit with a Valve Index and various virtual desktop software. There is something there. Most of them allow you to put app windows all around your 3d bubble etc. I have yet to see anyone talk about actual productivity software on the vision pro. A couple of videos of people browsing photos etc. But what does xcode look like, how does it change, is the pixel density high enough to code on. As someone who has done a lot of multiweek on-site trips where I spend a lot of time pounding out code on a laptop with no extra monitors in a hotel room, being able to have virtual multi monitors has some appeal.
One use case this would immediately solve for me. Is travel.
When I travel I'm usually in an airbnb, hotel room or temporary rented apartment for months at a time.
Usually I may not even have a desk or a tiny one in the corner.
Having the ability to increase my area of productivity via this device from a 14"/16" laptop. Intrigues me quite a bit.
However, the current weight factor and fov (rumoured 100deg) puts me off right now.
Should apple do something similar (or another competitor) like the big screen beyond and 210 deg (starvr) with a much later iteration. The value proposition for me would make it an instant purchase.
I'm more than happy to sit this round out. But the new product segment is something that I and probably many people are interested in. I know Apple will innovate and more importantly push the whole industry forward. I'm watching and waiting with interest!
I agree. Granted it's out of my price range for the time being, but a device to make a plane more bearable while giving me a screen that doesn't require craning my neck on the other side would be a huge deal.
Even for travel, most people travel in groups, even those who live alone or with non-friends. So, media consumption while traveling is even less likely to be happening alone (except on the plane) than at home.
I'm not saying your own use-case is invalid. But it doesn't sound like a good strategy for Apple.
But there is a lot of business travel where people are flying just for a day or two for sales meetings etc. And given they power frequent flyer programs clearly there are a lot of them.
Having done many such flights I would much rather a Vision Pro than a cheap LCD hotel room TV.
LOL at people who think VR will be a mass thing anytime soon.
All these tons of app developers on the market that can do JS/Java UI code will not start writing 3d or even 3d enhanced graphics apps anytime soon. So the VR is just inconvenient screen that you can only see yourself and gives you headaches, with nothing that a normal screen couldn't do.
On top of it no one has any motive to start supporting Vission Pro - either as a big tech competitor of Apple, or just independent developer to get rekt by 30% fees for a handful of users.
I have two Quest devices and even kids don't ever use them because they suck in their very nature. Terrible hassle for everyone involved, can't use it for all that long and so on. And if the kids don't use some tech it has no future, because an old geezers like me are even less likely to do it.
I think the premise of this article is flawed. It will not hurt Netflix or YouTube or Spotify's business one bit to not have a native app. It's not like they will be locked out of the platform. The web experience exists and is good enough.
However, it also costs those company nothing for development because it's already there. Even converting the iPad app would take development, testing, and adding extra QA cycles to every release thereafter.
This way those companies can get great data on which customers actually have a headset and how many and how much they pay now (because everyone will probably try it at least once).
Then they can make a data driven decision on if there are enough customers to justify the expense of dev and maintenance. The consensus estimate is that they sold 200,000 units. That is nothing in terms of customers, even if every one of them has a Netflix subscription.
Apple had such low sales expectations that they opened up Vision Pro for employee discount before the launch. Usually employees don't get a discount until 4-5 months after launch after interest has died down.
This decision does not signal that those companies don't believe in Vision Pro -- it signals that they want to wait until there are enough users to justify it since everyone already has access to their product on Vision Pro.
I think this is 100% it for many companies. Predictions are Apple sells in the hundreds of thousands of units this year. There is no market any of these companies/products care about that has that small of a user base.
Once Apple starts selling millions of these, and the demand is there from users, we will see companies change their tune.
Spotify, in particular, doesn't make that much sense. Even amongst Apple Vision Pro users, I would be surprised if music listening is a big use case for this device. All of these users will already have their phones and other devices to listen on. There is nothing about the Vision Pro that is particularly good for music.
Video, however, may be something the Vision Pro does exceedingly well.
> Even amongst Apple Vision Pro users, I would be surprised if music listening is a big use case for this device. All of these users will already have their phones and other devices to listen on.
The main application would be to listen to music alongside whatever else you're already doing, similar to using Spotify on any other kind of computer. I'll begrudgingly use the website, but I'd prefer to have a native app.
> There is nothing about the Vision Pro that is particularly good for music.
I am curious about the spatial audio solution, especially as it's integrated with all of the other environmental sensing (i.e. the audio can "bounce" around your room). I have a quadraphonic mix of Dark Side of the Moon that I'm looking forward to listening to :-)
My #1 use case for the AVP I ordered is productivity followed by consumption. If I can get my MBP as a large 4K screen in the AVP and I'm productive in it then I can do away with my 3-4 monitor setup I have at 2 locations and open up the places I can work productively to nearly anywhere.
I have no doubt HN will be inundated with AVP posts like this but if I don’t see anyone beat me to it I’ll dust off my blog and post something after I’ve given it a try. I love my Apple products but I won’t hang on to a $4K paperweight if it doesn’t meet my expectations.
Ehh, you can get used to almost anything. People complained about the weight of the AirPods Max but there are plenty of people who use them all the time/all day. I think any discomfort with be temporarily and worth "powering through", or at least that's my hope. I'm probably going to be wearing my 8hrs a day as soon as I get it and if it doesn't work or if the productivity isn't worth it (and/or the consumption isn't breathtaking) I'll consider returning it for sure.
It's not the weight, it's the balance. The MQ3 plus the elite strap weighs more than the AVP by quite a bit and I did some 5+ hours days playing Asgard's Wrath 2 over the Christmas break easily though I did take breaks to recharge myself and the headset.
My Quest 2 and 3 were also both balanced with a battery in the back. Neither of them felt as great as the Pro. I feel that the main difference is the halo form factor instead of ski goggles hugging your face tight. Of course, this preference isn’t universal since some people hate the halo style.
I feel that like with meta headsets, Vision Pro’s comfort problem will be sold by 3rd party straps
I seriously question this each time this is brought up.
I needed multiple monitors when we had 1024x768 and smaller. I now code on a dqhd that could fit 10 of those old monitors. I still use 2 other displays. Why? Reference. Nothing will be faster than the flick of your eyes to the alternate display. When constructing optimal copy pasta it’s impossible to beat.
But the obvious use case to augment a large mirrored macbook screen is native vision apps (safari, etc.) with windows open to the documentation / references that you'd naturally have on other screens.
Generally there's 1-2 apps that are native MacOS apps that I require when developing, and the rest could easily be independent windows of safari, slack, teams, whatever to supplement the main screen.
Ideally we would have a large curved screen or support for multiple virtual monitors in AVP but for now it looks like we just get 1. It will be a change but with window management utilities (like Magnet and friends) I don't think I'll have a huge issue tiling my windows on just 1 monitor. I use 3x2K monitors now so 4K (that I can make whatever size I want) should cover my needs.
Also, like the sibling comment says, I plan on seeing if I can pull some of the apps I run out of the virtual display and use the iPad apps instead. Copy/Paste/Drag support will make or break that for me though as I don't plan on accepting anything but exactly what I can do on my computer. But maybe iMessage, Slack, and Discord (and definitely Home Assistant) can run their iPad native apps instead of needing to be on my virtual display. Heck, maybe I just fall back to the desktop if I need to. I'm also not sure yet what the story is on using a wireless keyboard/mouse/trackpad with your laptop, as in can I use it in AVP or is it only for use on my virtual monitor? Maybe continuity comes into play there? It should if it doesn't already.
Everything says it’s over 4K per eye and that you can have a 4K virtual monitor. Where are you getting your numbers? I can’t find anyone saying 3.3K per eye and 1080p screen.
I have a VR headset, I think it's amazing. The game play is incredible, it's like the Wii all over again but so much more immersive. I will never watch a full movie from start to finish due to discomfort. It's just not worth it. Unless they made the Vision Pro like the Bigscreen headset I won't be in the minority.
I've read the tweet people will start using VR headsets on airplanes. Is that realistic? I mean due to size of the battery, size of the whole device (on your backpack or such), comfort etc?
I've watched movies for ten hours with a VR headset on a flight, only stopping for food and bathroom breaks. The AVP should comfortably tackle all the issues I had with that (rear-mounted battery, resolution, facial interface comfort, controllers, tracking), and I'm looking forward to taking it on my next flight :-)
> "You know, the fundamental problem here is that headphones are a miraculous thing. You put on a pair of headphones, and you get the same experience you get with a great pair of speakers, right?
> "There's no such thing as headphones for video, right?There's not something I can carry with me that I can put on, and it gives me the same experience I get when I'm watching my 50-inch plasma display at home."
Yeah I could see that. But he also introduced the iPod, which people listened to 95% of the time with headphones. Granted, you could still plug it into a speaker at a party or in somebody's car.
Maybe the flopped iPod HiFi was a reaction to Jobs' feelings about the iPod isolating people. Who knows?
I think he mostly cared about selling a lot of products.
The collaborative-working-environment, potentially on the go (from your hotel room, not a dedicated space or something) stuff looks really cool, but also very niche (and is only cool if it actually works well, obviously).
They may find enough of a market to prove out and further-develop the tech. I'm pessimistic about AR in general until/unless the hardware develops a lot further, but it's possible they'll carve out enough of a market with this to use it as a testbed and proving ground for later, lower-priced (and/or far more capable) versions.
Decent PCs used to cost this much or more, inflation adjusted.
I am pretty sure Steve would not have launched the Vision Pro. I remember his 1997 WWDC fireside chat where he said:
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology. You can’t start with the technology then try to figure out where to sell it.”
Given that, I don't think having a large screen strapped to the front of your face is a great customer experience.
I had an iPhone on launch day. Compared to phones of today it wasn’t great, but compared to some of the phones it was replacing, it was fantastic. I was coming from a Moto Razr, so it was pretty much better in every way. For the smart phones of the day, there were a lot of things they could technically do on paper, but no one did, because they were too clunky to use. The iPhone solved this. The features it did have were a joy to use and easy to figure out and discover.
There were also some pretty easy jailbreaks after not too long, which allowed for 3rd party apps before Apple had an official store.
I think the only things holding back the original iPhone were the price and production volume. As I remember, it sold out quickly. And everywhere I went people were every interested in it. The guys selling cell phones at the mall were trying to stop me to see it, a girl at the bar said having that was better than a puppy. Pulling it out to use it was like being a celebrity, everyone started paying attention and trying to get close to it; it was a very strange time. I don’t recall anyone saying they didn’t want it due to a lack of features, other than people online looking for clicks or who had a history of Apple criticism.
It's going to be a typical new category release for Apple where v1 has some very obvious flaws that prevent it from mass market penetration, which quickly get cleaned up in v2.
But I'm talking more like culturally / philosophically, I don't think Steve Jobs would have marketed it this way or wanted it framed this way. To that point I'm not sure he'd have green lighted the product at all. It can be very dystopian. The silly eyes thing seems like someone along the way realized that and is trying to mitigate it poorly.
Apple is at its best when serving me, and building software like Safari that protects me from predatory conglomerates like Google.
Apple is at its worst when acting like a predatory conglomerate itself, shoving crappy payola recommendations in Music, and squeezing the app store as a revenue-maximizing monster.
Netflix would be crazy to spend a penny supporting Apple in any kind of new-media venture.
I'd love to see an anti-trust breakup of the media side of Apple from the systems + hardware side.
I don't see the use case for Vision Pro being watching TV or movies. A lot (most?) people watch while doing other things, and many do it with someone else in the room. Are a husband and wife each going to have separate Apple Vision Pro headsets, put them on, and watch TV side by side in a virtual space? It's hard to imagine this.
The use case I like is working by myself in VR—being able to take a fast computer and large display with me on the road. As a remote worker, I can theoretically work from anywhere, but in practice I miss my 35" monitor, and can't effectively change my workflow to swap in a 13" laptop screen instead. But with the Vision, I could have everything, for one high price, and it's appealing enough that I've at least thought about trying it.
The Quest 3 is pretty admirable for that purpose. The resolution of the Vision Pro will probably make the experience a little better, but not significantly so. You're still going to be bottlenecked by the quality of the content itself.
Ah, for amateur content creation people will probably be using the newer iPhones, no? A focus of Apple's marketing has been 'record 3d video on your phone, play it back on the headset'.
Not having controllers is absolutely ridiculous with this. I know it's focused more on AR, but what, can you not plug it into steam and use it in an FPS? What would you do, make finger pointy gun gestures? Is it only Apple Store apps and they're going to not allow anything like that?
My friend wants to buy one and use his Xbox controller. Just stupid.
I have 3 VR systems. Vive, Q2, Q3.. I have Skyrim installs with 300-500 mods, Assetto Corso with my racing sim wheel/seat. How am I doing any of that with this? How do I swing a sword? My Q3 supports hand gestures. They're nice when using virtual desktop sort of things, but in a game? no way. No tactical feedback sucks.
I don’t see why Apple should ship the device with controllers when they don’t ship iPhones or MacBooks with controllers.
And while many games are better with controllers on iPhone/iPad, most games work without them. And I’m sure that’s what Apple has in mind for gaming on AVP. Based on my experience with VR so far I’d actually be more excited for controller-less games. I think there’s a lot of potential for innovation there. Half-Life Alyx was amazing experience. But it was a one and done thing for me. Beat saber I could keep playing for a long time and if you have good hand tracking - and it seems AVP’s is excellent - you could just hold a stick or nothing at all.
I’m sure there will be third party controllers for AVP down the line. But like anything gaming related, it’s not Apples first or even second priority.
It's not really for "traditional" VR gaming. The Quest is a console; the VP is a computer you can work on, with an OS designed for it. (I own six VR headsets and have an AVP on the way.)
I love gaming and would like Apple to support it more, but it's not the reason I'm interested in the AVP. They're looking into it [0], but it's just not that relevant to them right now, and that's OK.
Do you have a specific use case in mind or are you going to get it and figure out how you'd like to use it?
I'm sure it'll be great for AR stuff like training people in surgery and things of that nature. AR in education will be amazing, being able to walk through Rome, etc in History classes.
Movie watching (I've been holding off on watching Dune for this!), general-purpose computer-y stuff (browsing, writing, media consumption, etc), game streaming, using it as a larger display for a MBP, seeing what people build, and (maybe) building some things myself.
In general, I want to treat it like an iPad / MBP hybrid with enormous virtual screens that I can take around with me. There's a lot of potential for what could be built (especially with the AR stuff you mention), but having access to the majority of the iPad ecosystem, MBP mirroring, and other miscellaneous features already makes it an enticing device to me.
Which problem did the Apple Watch (specially the first version that launched) solve? Or the HomePod? Genuinely curious. I can personally understand the problems that all other products did solve, but not for these 2 examples in particular.
The apple watch is a health device masquerading as a watch with digital enhancements(Apple Pay, Notifications, Messaging/Phone calls, etc)
You may not remember(or been alive), but in the 90's there was a whole slew of these Life Alert type devices that would call 911 for you if you were an old person that fell and hurt themselves. The Apple Watch is basically the ultimate replacement for that, along with exercise/health features AND it happens to tell the time.
The first version you had to call 911 yourself, but they quickly figured out how to let the device just do it for you, which is where it sits today.
I don't know anything about the HomePod, so I won't comment on that, but Amazon seems to sell a bunch of those speaker devices, so someone must be using it for something?
You’re overplaying the hundreds of years part. While the first wristwatch dates back almost 200 years (developed for the Queen of Naples), pocket watches were the rule until World War I, when they were mass produced and marketed at soldiers in the trenches. The mass market wristwatch industry developed from that point on.
I like my Apple Watch, but it’s an iPhone accessory. It doesn’t fulfill a specific need, but provides a suite of enhancements to my phone and can take over a few functions from it.
(This comment was written in response to an earlier version of your comment, but the main part still seems to be there but reformatted).
Nobody bought an Apple Watch because they wanted something on their wrist that told time and were underserved by that. I say this as someone who bought the first version and actually does like something on my wrist that tells time. People bought it for the digital enhancements, which started out kind of confused but got more clear with time (health, notifications).
I mean.. sure, but those are hardly "problems" that needed solving with an Apple Watch. Another digital watch, simpler / cheaper would do just fine. Same for the HomePod, solutions to those "problems" have been around for a while.
If you compare the solution/problem pairs you described and take into account how good of a solution those products are to those problems, I don't see how they "solve" the problems significantly better than an already existing, cheaper alternative, which is not the case for the iPhone, iPod, AirPod, mac book, etc where they (on their initial launch) addressed a particular market need significantly (very significantly) better than the alternatives.
And I'm speaking this as someone that owns 1 of every product category Apple currently ships, so I'm by no means dismissing the quality of the watch or homepod, etc.
[edit/addition]:
Furthermore, the Vision Pro could just as well solve similar problems to similar results as the ones you described -- for example, the need for a incredibly high quality media consumption device, portable. Or an infinite canvas that seamlessly pairs with your other Apple devices, etc. If that's true, then I would say the Apple Vision Pro should has the same utility to its target audience as the other products Apple's released on the last decades years.
> Another digital watch, simpler / cheaper would do just fine
You're conflating being unique vs solving a problem.
You don't have to be unique in what you solve.
There's lots of blue cars sold every year, why does Ford/GM/Toyota exist if they all do the same thing - which is sell blue cars? Then Tesla 10-years ago starting selling their version of the blue car and are doing exceedingly well.
It's because the fundamental problem being sold is actually, people wanting transportation.
What fundamental problem/need is the Apple Vision Pro solving?
Again, I'm not being a hater of the device. I'm genuinely curious to understand.
I do agree that one doesn't have to be unique. My comment was more about the grandparent point about Vision Pro being the only product in the last 20 years to not solve a problem. My point was that if Vision Pro addresses no problem, neither does the Watch or HomePod. If Watch or HomePod do address problems, I don't see how the Vision Pro doesn't.
Sure. I would say that's fairly minor thing, although I admit that's subjective. But given the comment I grand-parent comment, I presume they were referring to more substantial problems / solutions.
[edit] Don't mind to downplay how useful that feature is to you, as it is also very useful to me. Just wanted to make it clear I was trying to find more substantial problems that the Watch/HomePod has solved.
My Apple Watch is definitely the most optional of my Apple devices. I mostly just wear it hiking. Day to day I don't get a lot of notifications and I just wear a cheap Timex that goes years on a battery.
This is literally what people say with every Apple launch. I remember people including myself talking about how useless the iPhone was. This was written from an iPhone :/
The need people had is, wanting a phone you can carry with you anywhere (not tethered to a wall).
While the original iPhone might have had limited functionality (no 3G), it still solved the fundamental need people had - which was a phone they can carry anywhere.
What fundamental problem/need is Apple Vision Pro solving on Day 1?
(I'm not being a hater, I'm genuine curious to know/understand)
Cell phones existed before the iPhone came out. The iPhone didn't solve that problem any better than a regular Nokia phone at the time. It's not about the problem it's solving, it's how it solves it. Apple solves problems in ways that actually make using the product enjoyable.
B: Are you ignoring having unlimited data and a useful browser that you can use anywhere? I bought the first iphone the day it came out because I had been looking for a product like that for ages but all the browsers were kinda clunky and/or they were limited to wifi/extremely terrible data prices.
Yuppies in city apartments watch videos, probably on their phone on the sofa or in bed, don't really have space for a TV or surround sound setup. This brings them a compact alternative to that, if Om Malik's review is to believed.
Yes, especially in high-CoL areas, or with people who frequently travel, or with people who just don't want to have a huge TV and associated hardware in their space.
I am Apple customer and owned multiple VR headsets since 2016. Stepping outside the Apple ecosystem is always painful. They are definitely scratching my itch.
While it did some fitness tracking (especially the heart rate stuff which couldn't be done with a phone), it certainly wasn't promoted as a fitness device.
There was all that stuff about "connecting" (where you could send doodles and heartbeats to your Apple Watch wearing friends) and they made a big deal about watch apps and notification management. And of course the "luxury watch" aspect (gold watches that go out of date in a couple of years - sheesh).
It's only after a couple of iterations that Apple doubled down on the fitness side of things.
I am only commenting of what the Apple Watch actually solved. The marketing was bad and I agree. The Apple Watch series zero was useful for me and others but it was something concrete that the watch does solve while the Vision Pro is different.
The first couple AW gens didn’t really have much of a fitness angle, though. The hardware and software for health tracking was very lacking. It was only later on that they pivoted hard on fitness and did a big marketing push with the “three rings”.
I beg to differ. People dicking around on their e-watch during in person meetings or social settings where they should be paying attention to who is speaking, is just as socially rude as those on their phone.
As great as the hardware seems, the Quest 3's support of basically every Android app ever made plus native apps plus PCVR apps which are free with the purchase of their native Quest counterpart makes it much more appealing to me. Now that they seem to be adding native support for converting Apple's spacial video, I'm having a hard time seeing any advantage other than increased clarity that I would get from moving from a Quest 3 to a Vision Pro right now, but like everyone else, I'm eager to see what they do for the next iteration. Seems like a great dev tool for now.
There is a non-insignificant number of people that would never buy or use a Meta product because of their data and privacy issues. The Quest 3 is nowhere close to the AVP simply because of that.
I respect that point of view, but Meta has over 3 billion monthly active users. This is a large enough potential customer base for any product. I also find the privacy options on the Quest perfectly adequate, and I'm curious if there's any specific option you feel is missing or if it's just their tarnished brand reputation that causes the lack of trust.
How do you get those Android apps without sideloading? How do you find them? How do you participate in the wider Android ecosystem?
The AVP has a much stronger OS and software ecosystem play; you can just download and use your regular iOS apps, and multitask with ease in a variety of scenarios.
I want the Quest 3 to be able to compete with that, but it's not there yet. Perhaps Google and Samsung will be able to pull it together for their take?
You do have to sideload, and that will turn off plenty of people, but probably not most of the people here. It's just a matter of following the instructions on the Sidequest website. For my use, just putting F-Droid on it gives me access to everything I would want, including other app stores. After that, everything is installed and updated like any other Android device. I wish the interface supported more than running 3 apps side-by-side, like pinning apps to walls of environments, which Apple seems to be doing. I'm sure that Meta will end up copying popular features of the Vision Pro in time, just like Android and iOS have been copying each other for years now.
I think "really great TV" isn't good enough for mass appeal. I think even for a group of wealthy early adapters, the novelty may soon wear off. It's heavy and you're constrained, can't do much else whilst watching TV.
And let's face it, the way people consume "TV" is quite different from what the ad suggests. Most video is consumed in short format, rapidly, whilst messaging someone. I'm sure watching some epic movie using this device is incredible, but that doesn't mean this device has a use case for lengthy daily usage.
Consuming media on a larger screen is also not really a game changer. I upgraded my TV by 20" in size, and you get used to it in a single day. At home I have giant monitors but I don't mind working with the smaller screens at work. I have the time/money to watch lots of movies in a cinema but can't be bothered as my home screen is good enough.
Note also how most people that have an iPhone, also have an iPad, but the iPad is only marginally used as the tiny iPhone screen is just so much more practical and flexible.
Bigger screen doesn't cut it. You need top notch VR content that is spatial. Problem with that is 99.99% of app developers cannot deliver it. It is extremely difficult and costly to produce.
In general, I don't believe anything that is heavy and worn and still largely isolates you from your surroundings will work. And I'll admit that I hope it fails. We need less screen time and less isolation, not more.
So much spilled ink reading tea leaves, i.e., tortured historical analogies. We have market data on existing headset efforts, and we will have data on the adoption of the Vision Pro very soon. I'm not sure who this analysis benefits other than firms catering to day traders.
"Apple can’t convince streaming video companies to check the “allow iPad app” box."
If you saw what happened to the music companies and you are big enough you can get around all of the nonsense that Apple can leverage against you why do what apple wants?
If people are still talking about the AVP in six months then Netflix can tick that box or they can port the Netflix VR app which already exists on Meta Quest to the AVP.
They haven't touched that app in years, and it's not very good. I'd prefer they enabled using the iPad version over using that app - at least I'd be able to use Apple's window placement for the video!
The real problem isn't that giant companies aren't supporting the Vision Pro with AR-capable innovative apps. The real problem is they aren't even releasing their existing iPad apps with the "works on Vision Pro" flag checked.
> It’s certainly possible that I’m reading too much into these absences: maybe these three companies simply didn’t get enough Visions Pro to build a native app, and felt uncomfortable releasing their iPad versions without knowing how useful they would be.
I think it's just that simple. It's a low-volume device for now that doesn't justify native apps. Even enabling the iPad app requires testing and, likely, modifications. It's quite possible the Netflix web experience is better than the Netflix iPad app.
Apps are probably not going to come out until Apple releases a lower-cost Vision for the masses.
Also given how draconian Apple is around NDAs and app store terms, I wouldn't be surprised if the companies read the terms and decided "we will wait until the legal/business side of this is as simple as developing for iOS." Only getting one headset and being required to pay $3500 is annoying, but Apple also imposes a lot of soft costs for this kind of prelaunch hardware.
I bought a Meta Quest 3 and it also seems to miss apps that were there before on the Oculus Rift a few years back.. at least I recall having a Google Earth app, now I can't find it.
Because Google never updated the app to support the Quest or released it on the Quest store, which is a different store than the Rift, and probably has different requirements.
You could try the Wooorld or Wander apps, though, as alternatives, which are on the Quest store.
You can use the MQ3 as a PCVR headset by plugging in a very fast USB 3 cable and in that case you can use the Rift version on the Quest to run Google Earth. I was also looking at this model
I know you can use a Quest Link cable to play some things on the PC store and almost included it, but I didn't see Quest on the supported platforms for the store page and assumed it needed to be on there explicitly if it was going to work.
I'm now cross-referencing it with Lone Echo, which I know works on Quest 2 and 3 since I played it recently, and it also only says Rift and Rift S for supported platforms, so yeah Google Earth probably still works on Quest 3 via a Link cable, especially since it still has new reviews as of January 2024 on there. Haven't tried it myself though.
Feel like a mistake that Apple makes dev opt in/out to iPad app support, same issue on M-series Macs there are iPad app that just don't show up in the app store on Mac because the dev didn't check the box to allow it.
They could perhaps warn that the app isn't tested for the device but otherwise allow all iPad apps on Vision Pro and Mac's.
We could replace those with a singular, more personal screen — that will sit on our face
Its not going to happen. Strapping something to your face is fun for a little while but its not going to become the primary means of doing _anything_. It's just damn uncomfortable, no matter how light and expensive you make it.
Yup. I just want to fast-forward through the "omg this changes everything" hype articles from first time VR users in the grip of peak novelty euphoria and get to the "I've not touched my AVP for 6 months" dehype phase.
I enjoy VR but I feel really done with headsets. I find them more irritating to wear than covid masks and look how folk feel about those. Itchy sweaty forehead, dig into your cheeks, head straps messing your hair, can't lie down on your side, scuba face when you take it off. Once the genuinely awesome experiences get old and passe, it becomes pretty tiresome.
Its not the same. Glasses perch on your nose. VR headsets have to have the edges pushed up against your skin to avoid light bleeding in from outside. Its great for thirty minutes or so but mainstream consumers are not ever going to use these headsets as the primary means of watching movies or bingeing on boxsets.
I think this was more a reference to the current ski-mask like VR goggle rather than a lightweight think like Google Glass (or indeed, a regular prescription glass or sunglass). Having my fair share of VR hours under my feet, I would agree: it's tiring !
I just want glasses that will give me a solidly good experience of one >= 27” monitor (or more), ideally dual 32”, for remote and airplane work on text based content. Wake me up when that happens.
Disney hasn't been doing so well content wise so I don't think such a partnership would matter much. After the last Avengers movie and the unsuccessful star wars trilogy, no-one really cares about disney IP anymore.
The iPhone is a pro-social technology, enabling, at least in a virtual sense, for you to connect with people through the interface. You can argue whether it has reduced a lot of in-person socialization, but the function remains the same.
This VR stuff is completely anti-social. It is a dystopian vision of the future where your sensory system is sealed off from the world, controlled entirely by corporate entities. There is a reason that it has not taken off yet-- nobody other than the tech executives want it to succeed.
1. You can do the same thing in VR. Many VR apps are online and multiuser with voice
2. VR’s higher immersion makes #1 more appealing. I regularly play ping pong with relatives who live thousands of miles away. Mini golf and bowling are also popular options. The immersion also makes it easier to interact with multiple people at the same time compared to a phone.
3. We’re already transitioning to mixed reality
You really need to at least try a modern VR headset for yourself before coming to a strong conclusion.
Same. I bought a Vive a few weeks ago but it is currently in the mail being returned. The technology as it is today is just not quite there yet, in my opinion. The biggest letdown was the lack of peripheral vision. To see something clearly, I'd have to move my whole head to face it head-on directly. Doing some research, I discovered that is just the way it works right now. It will be interesting to see if the VP has an answer to this problem.
Vive is the worst option because they insist on using bad fresnel lenses instead of fish eye lenses. As you’ve pointed out, fresnel lenses tend to be terrible and HTC’s are the worst in that class.
The Big Screen Beyond is really the only affordable choice for PCVR that isn’t out of date and isn’t Meta.
Don't buy a VR headset just to experience Google Earth for twenty minutes. It's a terrible, old as crap VR app, the fidelity of global scenery is terrible and will never be good enough to be any more than a novelty, and it is by far the worst app for motion sickness, which is insane because it's worse than doing loops in flying games!
Google Earth was cool back in the day especially hooked up to a Logitech 6 DoF controller. But it hasn't been materially updated in years AFAIK. I'm not even sure which of my Macs it's installed on at this point. And the controller drivers don't work any longer.
Well, I’ve been wishing this for so long… more than 6 years now. And the app has not been updated ever since. It’s sad because I’d like to use it to discover geography
Meta is still the best all round value. If you refuse to go with it, then the next best option is the big screen beyond. Total cost would likely run $1500 with controllers, assuming you have a VR capable PC
According to ChatGPT, my 34" widescreen monitor is equivalent to a 340" TV at 10ft away.
So, yes(?), however I certainly don't like watching movies at my desk. I may or may not feel the same way about the Vision Pro. Time will tell!
Now it would be great if I could sit in a "theatre" with others, let's say my family, thousands of miles away. We could shadow cast, Rocky Horror style, in real-time.
I have multiple Macs in my house, a couple iPads and tons of iPhones .. what I really want more than anything is to be able to access any/all of them with virtual screens.
If Vision Pro provides this experience - seamless displays of all devices on a single headset - then that is the point where I immediately invest.
I'm too old for 3D games, they make me puke. But if I can sit comfortably in a lounge chair with this thing strapped to my noggin and access all the machines in my house, for work (code), then I'm sold.
YouTube and Spotify not having an app at launch is really surprising to me, more surprising than Netflix. Could well be a case of "we'll wait and see before we sink money into a native app," and I don't think YouTube, Spotify, and Netflix are the killer apps that will sell the Vision, but a surprise nonetheless.
I think the vision of the Vision is what's going to sell the Vision. First to really wealthy people, and then, if and only if the price comes down _dramatically_, to those wealthy people's friends who see it and think it's cool/useful.
The part in the beginning of the article...
> If you live in Asia, like you live in Taiwan, people don’t have big homes, they don’t have 85-inch screen televisions. Plus, you have six, seven, eight people living in the same house, they don’t get screen time to watch things so they watch everything on their phone. I think you see that behavior and you see this is going to be the iPod.
...isn't very compelling to me, because, at this price point, someone who has to live in a house with 8 people isn't going to be able to afford the Vision. Maybe the Vision will prove the use case and create an industry of knockoff competitors, but I don't know. Personally, I'd rather watch a movie on my phone than have a headset on for 2 hours at a time, completely blocking out the outside world.
Later in the article...
> with a VR camera at every game it televises would, in my estimation, make the Vision Pro an essential purchase for every sports fan.
... That's a bold prediction. Are sports fans bullish enough on VR, or primed to be primed to become bullish on VR, to want to watch games on a headset? The 8 people in the house, with users already watching on their phones, situation doesn't seem to apply here, and "watching the game" is itself often a social experience, which would preclude shutting yourself away in a headset.
All of the discussion of streaming service buy-in is muddled somewhat by the state of flux the streaming industry is in right there. There's been a lot of consolidation in the last few years and the business models of streaming are changing. Building a device on the current landscape of streaming seems like a risky idea to me at the moment. They should really put a DVD player in the Vision just to be safe /s.
All of this kind of assumes what the primary use case for the Vision will be. We don't know yet exactly what consumer adoption and acceptance is going to look like, whether it be a media consumption platform, a productivity platform, a gaming platform, or a combination of the three and more.
I still have low expectations for the Vision, but if anyone can sell and normalize a new technology it's Apple. We'll see.
It's surprising Apple went ahead and released this product that will 100% be a flop in the market. Many hoped Apple would have the "killer feature/app" that would make AR/VR relevant, but instead they launched yet another uncomfortable doodad: 8 years after HoloLens, at the same price, and only marginally smaller, with the same exact number of killer apps - zero!.
If businesses don't buy these in bulk, this will be an Apple Newton v2. Likely to be uncomfortable/look stupid and be stupidly overpriced as well for what you get.
I'm sure Apple is in a much better position than in the mid 90s so they can probably absorb bad sales and these headsets will shrink down soon enough and get killer apps and get cheaper so the real question is who's going to build the Android of VR and take the non-walled garden market?
Meta Quest. It even runs on Android. For that matter, so does Magic Leap 2. If they deign to do so all the "usual suspects" who make Android phones could make Android-based VR headsets.
As much as the media has been obsessed with the train wreck that is Horizon Worlds, it's a well kept secret that Meta Quest has an app store that works like the app store on a game console. You can even sideload phone, tablet and TV apps and they "just work" most of the time.
There is no working "metaverse" and even meaningful multiplayer games are thin on the ground, but no shortage of good single-player games and what I'd call game-adjacent apps.
It's little recognized that XR apps are highly portable because they are almost always based on portable frameworks like Unity. In fact, just about every XR headset supports WebXR which makes it outright easy to make web-based virtual worlds
these work with desktop, phones and tablets as well as most of the AR and VR headsets. All it takes is that you "think different" and choose to live life outside the app store.
When was the last time Apple’s success depended on business bulk purchase? Apple didn’t become the highest market cap company in the world selling expensive phones to businesses in bulk orders.
Luckily the fanatics don’t care about looking stupid as proven with the wireless ear buds. There’s also probably a large enough fanatic culture where this will be a niche product for a generation or two. While they claim it’s the best selling headset or something.
Given the volume of VP sales, it feels more like a production-ready dev kit and tool for enthusiasts. It's really the version that people will use to build apps on, so that v2, v3, etc., which will be lighter/cheaper/whatever else is needed to make them more mass-market, won't have the same problem when they launch.
If you're Netflix et al, why support the VP now? Even if it's just checking a box, it still means you'll get some support load. You'll also have to make some design and implementation decisions that will be less-informed than if you wait a while and see what other apps are doing on there.
At the end of the day, is having Netflix on the VP going to generate any incremental revenue? Tough to imagine that everybody buying it doesn't already have a Netflix subscription.
Building for it right now is zero upside and some downside. We'll see a Netflix app eventually, though.