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Apple Vision Pro Battery Isn't Hot-Swappable, Switching Requires Restart

HDFan said:
With the power off how well can you see?



A USB port such as on a plane likely will deliver less power than if you are connected to the power supply. Will it be able to charge faster than it is discharging?



Sleep mode uses power. The sensors that would be needed to wake up the unit if it is picked up would have to be powered.
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Deep Sleep (Hibernation) doesn't. It saves system state and turns off. And resumes when turned back on.
Antoniosmalakia said:
That's what I thought.

The comment I replied to, I think, was suggesting it was 'just' magnetic and rotated freely to negate snags on the cable.
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To me it seems that the lock is more than a magnetic lock. It may attract the connector magnetically, but it needs to make it difficult to unplug by accident to avoid crashing the session. That's why it has the circle at each end to align when connecting. We'll know tomorrow.

EDIT: I just noticed a previous comment confirming it twists to lock. Sorry for being repetitive.
 
Isn't that great? You buy these goggles for 3500$ and also have to reboot the system every 2 hours. Microsoft is sure to laugh its ** off.
 
DarthDon said:
Isn't that great? You buy these goggles for 3500$ and also have to reboot the system every 2 hours. Microsoft is sure to laugh its ** off.
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Why do people keep saying this? You don't have to reboot. Just plug it in to another battery or the wall adaptor, like any other Apple device.
 
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DarthDon said:
Isn't that great? You buy these goggles for 3500$ and also have to reboot the system every 2 hours. Microsoft is sure to laugh its ** off.
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You can plug in and use and/or charge while plugged in just fine without restarting, you just cant swap to a different battery without restarting. It’s annoying, and they could have mitigated it by putting another charging port on the headset itself, but it’s not as ridiculous as you’re making it sound. You dont need to actually restart every 2 hours

I suspect most folks buying one will not buy a second battery, and will never run into this particular issue
 
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Such a non issue.

Who is using this thing out of range of an outlet? Even if you wanted to wear it at a Starbucks you'd have a plug available.
 
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seek3r said:
[...] they could have mitigated it by putting another charging port on the headset itself [...]
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No, they could not have. From a nitpick perspective, it could never be a charging port, because the AVP itself has nothing to be charged. But even purely technical, this port would require the correct voltage/wattage, which is - according to information currently known - nothing a standard plug could provide. So at the very least that would mean an additional power supply and cable for this additional port, or some power transformer inside the device.
A lot of additions for - as mentioned multiple times - a non-issue that would probably not plague many actual users.
 
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coredev said:
No, they could not have. From a nitpick perspective, it could never be a charging port, because the AVP itself has nothing to be charged. But even purely technical, this port would require the correct voltage/wattage, which is - according to information currently known - nothing a standard plug could provide. So at the very least that would mean an additional power supply and cable for this additional port, or some power transformer inside the device.
A lot of additions for - as mentioned multiple times - a non-issue that would probably not plague many actual users.
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I dont think you’re envisioning either option of what I am.

1) If they had put a USBC port on the headset it could charge the battery and also allow swapping the battery while connected (think how you could hotswap a battery on the old macbook pros and powerbooks - plug in, pull battery, new battery, unplug). You could theoretically *just* route power if you wanted to the battery, think how the ipad’s magic keyboard’s usbc port provides power but not data to the ipad to charge). It would need additional power circuitry to allow hotswapping though, yes

2) they also could have put a battery port and its connector on either side, allowing you to connect another battery before disconnecting the first one

I was mostly envisioning 1, which would, indeed, count as a charging port, the exact way that a powerbook’s plug did. 2 however, which could still count as a charging port if there’s bidirectionality on the batteries (which you’d want so plugging in on one battery could charge both if both were connected at the same time), would probably be a better option for a device with the exact current design otherwise both ergonomically and because with the current design the power board is in the battery
 
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Return Zero said:
What? That's my whole point, you just plug it in before the battery dies like any other device. It doesn't have to be powered off at all.
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You would have to disconnect the first battery before connecting the 2nd. Once you disconnect the 1st battery there is no power and the current device is powered down.
 
HDFan said:
You would have to disconnect the first battery before connecting the 2nd. Once you disconnect the 1st battery there is no power and the current device is powered down.
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The battery pack is a part of the device. When you plug the VP into a wall, you don’t plug into the headset directly—you daisy chain through the battery pack. If you need extra battery life, same thing—just daisy chain a regular usb-c battery (and also save yourself the $200).

I don’t get why people think you have to buy a second VP battery pack and swap them. That’s neither economical, nor convenient (can’t see it while you’re wearing it), nor in almost any use case necessary.
 
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I'm not an electrical engineer, and there have been already 200+ posts on this particular issue, but...

  1. I don't know about recent iPhones/iPads, but the ones I owned over the years were non-hot-swappable — all of them. For the past decade at least, the battery is even impossible to change by a 'common' user without access to specialised tools (which obviously you can buy, if you really want to do it yourself). I'm pretty sure that all models I have seen so far do not allow a battery to be replaced while the iPhone/iPad is turned on. Why should the AVP be different?
  2. My most recent Mac turns 10 this year, so, again, I can't say about newer models. It's an old MacBook Pro, and the battery is not accessible to the end-user — exactly like the iPhones/iPads. I haven't asked, but when I replaced the battery I shut down the Mac first, and it was booted up with the new battery in front of me. I can assume that the Mac was turned off during battery replacement.
  3. I have some even older Macs around, still in working condition (obviously, they cannot run any software made by Apple — but they have no issue whatsoever in running Linux and continue to be up-to-date :) ). These were from the generation that still had a user-replaceable battery. And, indeed, they're hot-swappable — if you plug the Mac into the mains socket. Mind you, this is not recommended at all by Apple (you can do it, but you can also blow a few fuses by mistake), and it was never intended to be used that way.
  4. Other types of desktop Macs, as far as I know, do not contain a battery and require to be constantly plugged in to mains, so the issue would be moot for those.
  5. And, of course, other Apple devices such as the (discontinued) Time Machine or AirPort (or whatever it was called) and possibly the Apple TV (I don't have one, so I cannot say for sure) are always plugged in to mains, and have no battery whatsoever.
  6. All battery-powered devices I have ever owned or seen by Apple (and that even includes the Newton!) will usually shut down safely when they detect that the battery charge is too low to keep the device operational (hibernation mode). No data is ever lost that way, even if you replace the battery after that incident.
I conclude, therefore, that at least for the old hardware I've got, Apple never provided a hot-swappable solution for the battery.

So why should they do something different for the Apple Vision Pro?
 
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Gwyneth Llewely said:
I conclude, therefore, that at least for the old hardware I've got, Apple never provided a hot-swappable solution for the battery.
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My understanding is that some PowerBook G4 models had a pretty beefy PRAM battery and you could swap the battery when it was sleeping (rather than shutdown or in a hibernate mode).

All the Apple pages about it seem to be down, unfortunately.
 
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DavidSchaub said:
My understanding is that the PowerBook G4 had a pretty beefy PRAM battery and you could swap the battery when it was sleeping (rather than shutdown or in a hibernate mode).

All the Apple pages about it seem to be down, unfortunately.
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I plugged in to swap my two batteries on my powerbook g4 FWIW back in the day
 
I still have a 12” G4 PowerBook. You had to shutdown to change the battery pack and there was an explicit warning not to have the AC adapter plugged into the PowerBook without having a battery installed
 
After trying this out, I think this is actually a non-issue. I was able to pair a third-party USB power bank to charge the external battery of the Vision Pro directly, and it charged all the way to 100% and stayed at that level.

It will be a bit inconvenient to carry another battery on top of the already external Vision Pro battery, but it's not terrible. From my quick testing, the Vision Pro USB-C input supports 20V Power Delivery - so optimally get a power bank that supports the same 20V USB-C PD output.
 
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Chuckeee said:
Did you mean 20W? Watts as opposed to Volts.
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No I meant volts. The USB-C PD standard supports inputs / outputs of various voltages, like 5V/9V/12V/15V/20V. (not too sure about the 12/15, I may be misremembering one of them) - in my testing on a power meter the voltage was 20V, but the power is of course dependent on the current as well, I think it was 14W on a 70% full battery? so less than 1A.

I'll need to test it more to be sure about what power range the battery input itself supports.
 
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