Apple Vision Pro is 'Over-Engineered Devkit,' Says Former Oculus Head

[gbc204]

nearly every impression I've read about the Vision Pro has been so far, wrong IMO after owning the device
- solo knit band is more comfortable than the dual band
- passthrough is blurry while some reviewers say it's amazing.
- it's not any less comfortable than my Quest 3
- have no problems wearing it for 2 hours straight

I thought the dual band would be way better, and switched between the two for the first week, but the the solo knit band is just easier to wear and adjust and overall more comfortable. Especially if I have to scratch the top of my head.
I've definitely worn it for an entire movie, and it's not the most comfortable, but doable. As far as passthrough... It's good enough that I can do an entire sink full of dishes while watching a movie, and that's about the most I need from it, so satisfied enough... For a v2, though, I would definitely take a form factor closer to, like, the old athletic glasses Kareem wore or something, even if it meant ditching the exterior display.

 

[Exxhara]

The fact you wear it with no discomfort doesn’t prove much, other than perhaps the fact you have a very strong neck or high tolerance to pain and discomfort. Pretty much every review I have seen points out the opposite and how heavy the unit is and how painful it is to wear it for more than a few minutes. A single data point saying otherwise it is just an outsider, not an evidence of anything.

This is not true. I've seen actual users that have indicated the experience varies because of how people are wearing it too. Essentially, if you place the headband too low or too high and aren't able to balance the AVP correctly on your face then of course you'll have discomfort. Some people have worn the thing hours at an end with no issues. Some changed out their light seal and the fit was much better and more comfortable. There are a lot of factors and these "reviewers" are only using them for a short span and not necessarily integrating it into their daily flow. Just another thought.

 

[Shalev Lazarof]

The start? I remember playing with a device like this in a tech conference back in 2017... it played video, audio, virtual reality games, etc. If anything Apple is kind of late to the market, as usual.

Also, the Quest has been in the market since 2019 I believe... and it has close to 1000 games available.

the start in apple world, all other tech is irrelevant because the platform is different.

 

[coolfactor]

Aoole need to follow up with a vastly improved model immediately, but they won't.

Other than emergency bug fixes, Apple doesn't _need_ to do anything on anybody's schedule except their own.

 

[coolfactor]

I can see why he's saying it is over-engineered based on the examples he brought up. It probably would have been a better move for Apple to release a cheaper regular Vision non-pro model to test out the waters before going big on a Pro, they clearly went for gold.

Apple needed to leapfrog existing products. Otherwise, the press would eat them for lunch more than they already have.

Just imagine a Vision headset that was _less_ than a Quest. They'd be the laughing stock.

 

[Sevendaymelee]

Anyone who is old enough to remember the pre and post Jobs era already knows how much the company misses their genius visionary. But up until now, it's been easy to miss. With VR, Tim's inability for (no pun intended) vision is sorely evident. This is the type of product that needed to do what the iPhone or iPad did, and instead, it's just a complete disaster. I would put it in more of the Apple Newton camp than the iPad, and that's really saying something.

The company needs a visionary.

Badly.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

The founder of Oculus:
The Apple headset is so good.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1657828947877560323

So, someone not tediously poring over specifications (and, probably, someone that doesn’t feel their engineering toes have been stepped on by someone doing a better job )

 

[Unregistered 4U]

By making the Vision Pro optics slightly out of focus, Apple has achieved "way smoother graphics across the board by hiding the screen door effect (which in practice means that you won't see pixelation artifacts)."

Next, we’ll see Zuckerberg following up with touting their “artisanal, free-range, organic pixelation artifacts, the kinds your mom and dad loved, faithfully represented in our cheap device!”

“They have way smoother graphics, but they’re not showing pixilation artifacts folks are used to from quality headsets like Metas. Gotta tell ya, I like our pixelation. I like it a lot.”
—Engineer that thinks pixelation is a good thing.

 

[0339327]

He’s not a “competitor” at all. He doesn’t work for Meta any longer and in fact, makes valid points about how the AVP is superior. You clearly did not read the entire article. The author of the article clearly states that he is a VR ENTHUSIAST and was so even prior to working for Meta.

I read the article and was making a joke. Hence the . He is still in the business and not working for Apple, thus, still a competitor, but I was just making fun.

 

[richinaus]

yep, I thought it was a dev kit before it launched and still think it is.
Suffice to say, I am getting one for dev work

 

[Surf Monkey]

People complain about the weight, but when the Army moved from the old Kevlar helmets to the ACH, the ACH felt positively light at 1700+ grams! I'm not sure I'd even notice 600 grams, especially with the dual band! Of course, I'm a lot older now and not nearly in as good a shape as I was back then, so maybe I'd notice the 600 grams ;-)

It’s about where the device’s center of gravity is and where it rests that weight on your body. A helmet’s center of gravity is where your head goes and it distributes its weight in a circle around your head. The vision’s center of gravity is in front of your face and it concentrates its weight primarily on the bridge of your nose and your cheeks.

 

[Surf Monkey]

Apple needed to leapfrog existing products. Otherwise, the press would eat them for lunch more than they already have.

Just imagine a Vision headset that was _less_ than a Quest. They'd be the laughing stock.

Well, it seems pretty obvious at this point that Apple did not leapfrog existing products at all and that the press around the device has been mixed at best. Just imagine a Quest that’s only marginally better but costs 7 times as much.

 

[Surf Monkey]

Anyone who is old enough to remember the pre and post Jobs era already knows how much the company misses their genius visionary. But up until now, it's been easy to miss. With VR, Tim's inability for (no pun intended) vision is sorely evident. This is the type of product that needed to do what the iPhone or iPad did, and instead, it's just a complete disaster. I would put it in more of the Apple Newton camp than the iPad, and that's really saying something.

The company needs a visionary.

Badly.

I remember both the pre-Jobs era AND the original Jobs era, as I’m sure many here also do.

There are a lot of parallels between the Jobs-less middle era and today but I continue to believe that the most apt and illuminating one is the Newton Message Pad. It was a great idea… on paper. But it wasn’t executed with a clear vision or subjected to a high standard of owner utility. Instead it appeared rushed out to satisfy Apple’s financial goals, heavily revised as they realized what it should have been from the outset and then finally abandoned as too compromised.

Apple is a design company. It can not thrive with a spreadsheet guy like Mike Scully, Gil Amelio or Tim Cook at the helm. It needs someone who cares about products. Who cares about user experiences. Who has a fundamental concept of the possibilities and who has the ability to discern which are potentially valid and which are DOA. Tim and the others appear to delegate too much of this critical work and in Cook’s case he’s actually very pointedly replaced designers with operations managers across many critical teams.

Me? I’m hoping that Craig Federighi advances to CEO at some point. As far as I can tell he’s the only public facing Apple executive who still has the creative fire.

 

[AeroEd]

All it’s good for is watching movies and tv will always be better, so for 3500 it’s a joke, I have the quest 3 and barely use it

I use my quest 3 way more than my oled tv lol

 

[turbineseaplane]

I use my quest 3 way more than my oled tv lol

You are firmly in the minority out there my friend

 

[mdriftmeyer]

Exactly. With Meta partnering with LG for production of cheaper MicroLED displays, AVP could fail miserably due to such a high cost. VR headsets aren’t like phones where the screens are everything and if a competitor makes the same screens for cheaper, consumers will more than likely choose the cheaper option. There are many other companies that produce phones with superior phone screens compared to the iPhone, in fact the majority of them are more superior (refresh rate) BUT that clearly doesn’t effect why consumers purchase iPhones. VR headsets on the other hand will be much different.

Apple is the world's leading patent holder for microLED technologies. If anyone can legally make cheaper microLED displays it is them.

LG already is partnering with Apple on microLED display projects.

 

[wbeasley]

I'm old enough to remember VGA as a huge progress ^^

or colour instead of green or amber...

 

[chouseworth]

It can not thrive with a spreadsheet guy like Mike Scully, Gil Amelio or Tim Cook at the helm.

What do you mean by “cannot thrive”? So Tim’s thirteen plus years as CEO and Apple’s having become the most highly captitalized company in the world have all been in our imagination?

 

[Tailpike1153]

I'm old enough to remember VGA as a huge progress ^^

You kids and your newfangled gizmos. Computer screens only need be two colors. Black and green. VT100 4eva!

 

[Silverado]

Wild that this guy has worn more VR headsets and has more experience with VR than you, yet, somehow he is “wrong”. If you actually read the entire article, he is quite positive about the AVP and states several factors that makes it far superior to other VR headsets. It seems as all you have done is picked out the negatives and why he is “wrong”.

I, too, find the solo band much more comfortable than the dual band. In fact the dual band is painful to wear. I also wear it for hours. I think comfort and band preference are dependent on personal tolerance and face shape. The problem is to see experts make snap judgements like that.

 

[truthsteve]

I thought the dual band would be way better, and switched between the two for the first week, but the the solo knit band is just easier to wear and adjust and overall more comfortable. Especially if I have to scratch the top of my head.
I've definitely worn it for an entire movie, and it's not the most comfortable, but doable. As far as passthrough... It's good enough that I can do an entire sink full of dishes while watching a movie, and that's about the most I need from it, so satisfied enough... For a v2, though, I would definitely take a form factor closer to, like, the old athletic glasses Kareem wore or something, even if it meant ditching the exterior display.

At the very least in V1, if I'm gazing on a nutrition label on a box or attempting to read something that's obviously text, perhaps visionOS can take a high res snap, use iOS' photo cut/drag out feature and display it clearly in my vision.

 

[Surf Monkey]

What do you mean by “cannot thrive”? So Tim’s thirteen plus years as CEO and Apple’s having become the most highly captitalized company in the world have all been in our imagination?

This again?

Market cap is… fine. It isn’t the only goal. In 100 years will people care that Tim Cook made a lot of money for his friends or that Steve Jobs stewarded the iPod, iMac and iPhone?

Furthermore, it’s VERY ironic to hear supposed Apple fans make a statement like that. I’m going to assume you don’t really remember the days before Apple was dominant? Because countless Microsoft and Bill Gates fans would throw down the whole “most valuable company = best company” as some kind of trump card all the time. “Ha ha! Conversation over! Microsoft is the world’s biggest company! You Apple fans should just give up and let your inferior OS die!” Straight up fallacious nonsense.

I’d hope that we, as Apple faithful, would want to avoid the inherent hypocrisy of crowing about Apple’s current market cap as if it’s actually some kind of overriding metric of success and quality. It isn’t.

Tim Cook’s 13 years at Apple have been largely a case of surfing the Jobs wave IMO. Even the Vision was a Jobs idea. So what exactly has he and his team brought to the table in terms of product innovation, and how long do you suppose that a company of ANY market cap can continue to succeed by simply releasing different sizes and colors of the laurels they’re resting on??

 

[doelcm82]

This "over-spec'ing," says Barra, is "characteristic of a v1 product where its creator wants to ensure it survives the hardest tests early users will no doubt want to put the product through."

This is key! Barra seems to be saying he'd have engineered it to NOT survive the hardest tests early users want to put the product through.

 

[Night Spring]

Tim Cook’s 13 years at Apple have been largely a case of surfing the Jobs wave IMO. Even the Vision was a Jobs idea. So what exactly has he and his team brought to the table in terms of product innovation, and how long do you suppose that a company of ANY market cap can continue to succeed by simply releasing different sizes and colors of the laurels they’re resting on??

No doubt Steve Jobs would have done many things differently if he were still alive. But I don't think it's fair to say Tim Cook is simply surfing the Jobs wave. First, even while Jobs was still alive, Tim Cook was largely responsible for the practical aspects of executing Jobs' vision. It's Tim Cook's supply chain and organizational expertise that turned Jobs ideas and Jony Ive's designs into mass produced products in the hands of millions of end users. Jobs' wave couldn't have risen so high without Tim Cook.

And while you may not agree with all the choices/decisions that went into shaping the Vision Pro as it currently exists, I think it does show that Apple is trying to innovate. Yes, there are aspects of it that make me roll my eyes and think Jobs would have yelled at his team and sent them scrambling back to the drawing board to fix that issue before release. VP would be a somewhat different product if Jobs were still with us. But I also think that a Jobs-led Apple would have released a VP-like product in around the same time frame, because the technology is ripe for it. The details are different, but the overall course is on a track set by Jobs. And to me, that's a good thing.

Jobs was the rare innovator who saw far into the future. Apple should ride his wave as far as it can -- not doing so would be abandoning a great advantage it has over its competitors. But staying on Jobs' track isn't something you can do by siting back and doing nothing. Jobs didn't lay down a solid track Cook can drive on with his eyes closed. He pointed out a general direction, but it's up to Cook to figure out how to actually navigate the tricky terrain. Cook isn't the visionary that Jobs was, but IMO, he is the best custodian of the Apple legacy Jobs could have hoped for. Anybody else would steer off course much faster.

 

[Night Spring]

This is key! Barra seems to be saying he'd have engineered it to NOT survive the hardest tests early users want to put the product through.

If you actually read Barra's article, you see that he actually agrees with Apple's decision to release a "dev kit" that is less comfortable to wear but has more robust features.

All things considered, I do believe Apple’s calculus was correct in prioritizing launching a first-generation product with fewer experience and design compromises at the expense of user comfort.
Barra's blog