If the headset is good enough that people would want to use it for watching movies, and it can run or stream mobile or desktop apps comfortably, and there are a couple of new first party apps in categories like fitness, the chicken and egg problem is somewhat mitigated. And I can see many of the most popular Quest 2 games/apps being ported over, because the cost of porting will be less than developing from scratch, and even a small userbase can justify the costs of porting. The issue with porting is that few apps work well solely with hand tracking, even if the hand tracking were improved.
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Apple's Mixed Reality Headset to Feature iOS-Like Interface, Advanced Hand Tracking, and Will Work as Second Display for Mac
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That will be Apples problem then I guess. However, I highly doubt this headset will be $3k.
The price will only concern me when they launch and it is $3k. Right now, I only like to think about the possibilities and let Apple worry about the price [I think that they will hit the market at the right level price wise].
When I saw Super Monkey Ball on stage during the App Store demo in 2008 I was sold.
That was already quite an old game by 2008 having been released in 2001 where most of us gamers had already played it to death. So it was hardly a revelation, even if it was ported to mobile.
I think it was the idea of an industry titan like Sega doing something with the hardware that pricked my ears up. iOS actually remains as legitimate a games platform as PlayStation or Nintendo; I play just as much on my iPhone as I do on the PS4, Series S or Switch and there are loads of really great games out there. It all started with SMB though.
Yeah I game a lot on my phone too. Football Manager & Score Hero probably get the most play but sometimes it's even good to play something like Chess or Draughts (Checkers) when having a dump.
It's a second display but with eye-tracking, cameras and head interaction. So that data would first need to travel from the glasses to the mac, get interpreted by the app, let's say a shooter game, and then be sent back to the 2x4K 3D screen with almost no lag at all. Seems impossible to do wirelessly unless 80% of the possibilities get dumped.
Maybe the screen is not going to be 2x4K or 240 hertz but even the slightest lag will be a dealbreaker for most applications.
That's very fair, and at the end of the day I think I'd personally choose an increase in frame rate / resolution / response time over the ability to use it wirelessly.
For your average desktop app, it won’t really matter. The headset is still updating the position of the screen with minimal lag, if not its contents. And lag is less of an issue with eye tracking or touch than it is with cursor based selection. With a mouse or trackpad cursor, you are continually monitoring the position of the cursor and modifying your speed to compensate. With eye tracking or direct touch, you don’t need a cursor.
For games you’ll want lower latency, of course.
if you’re using Airplay to stream a 1080P 60Hz monitor into your VR environment, that‘s only 1/32 as many pixels per second as the 8K 120Hz headset is actually rendering. And most of the pixels on your desktop monitor will be stationary from frame to frame, so the actual bandwidth requirements are minuscule compared to what sending the whole contents of the VR headset displays would entail.
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I am sure Apple has realized these issues while designing the product for the past 15 years (some of the first patents came out already in 2008). Previous rumors set the expected weight at 0.7-0.9 pounds range. Now that the battery is rumored to be outside the goggles, I would not be surprised to see the weight be below 0.7 pounds (for reference, Oculus Go with a built-in battery weights 1.0 pounds)
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And HTC has their Vive Flow, which is under half a pound (189 grams) and uses external batteries. Its internal battery is pretty much just enough so you can hot swap the external battery. Apple's headset will be more capable than the Flow, so it will be hard to keep the weight down that much. But I'd be surprised if the Apple device is as heavy as standard VIVE/Index/Quest/PSVR headsets.
This has some interest for the big screen aspect. Think about it, a high end Apple display can run $5k for only 32", but you still have to leave it at home/office. With this setup you can take your display(s) with you, whether that's on the airplane, train, hotel room, or just your bedroom. $3000 is for the bleeding edge early adopters, manufacturing, and corporate customers. In a few years it will be a more acceptable $1k, still hefty, but acceptable versus the cost of a display these days. Plus there are other benefits, complete privacy for your screens, and all the functionality AR and VR bring.
I think the mistake being made is to think these are going to be worn walking down the street. Maybe someday, but I don't think in this iteration at all. My only gripe is if they are going to dumb it down with iOS and make it "iPhone and iPad like," bleh. I hope they make the sum greater than its parts, like Samsung does with Dex.
I think the mistake being made is to think these are going to be worn walking down the street. Maybe someday, but I don't think in this iteration at all. My only gripe is if they are going to dumb it down with iOS and make it "iPhone and iPad like," bleh. I hope they make the sum greater than its parts, like Samsung does with Dex.
There's one justifiable reason to not have it quite as open as a Mac: they want to keep the system UI responsive no matter what the performance profile of individual applications is. The system needs to maintain a consistent framerate so users don't get nausea. Hopefully they can do this in a way that still allows applications with fewer restrictions than iOS counterparts.
When you have limited screen space, the absence of more powerful features isn't that big of a hindrance, but with the huge amount of virtual screen space available, cut-down iOS apps won't cut it.
I find this talk of “corporate customers” way off base. Apple is a consumer electronics company. They have a terrible track record in the enterprise market and I see no reason to believe they’re going to suddenly target that market for their AR/VR product.
As for price, by your logic the Mac Mini should be running around $199 these days. Apple rarely drops prices and when they do it’s quite nominal. There’s never been a new Apple product that, a few years later, cost a third of the launch price. There might be a cheaper AR/VR “mini” headset one day with whatever compromises that entails, but I don’t expect the headset to drop much in price from year to year. There’s simply no precedent for that happening when you look at Apple’s history. If anything, the opposite tends to be true. Prices go up.
Yeah that makes sense depending on what kind of processing power it has, although if they are already talking about keeping the battery separate because of heat then it probably will have a decent processor in it. But it would be such a huge shame if they wasted huge virtual screens on a dumbed down OS.
I don't disagree with you on the corporate side, but you never know if maybe they are exploring other markets, especially this past year.
I do tend to agree with you on pricing through Apple, I was thinking more of the overall market as there are sure to be other companies which will make similar gear looking to capitalize on a lower price. I've always wondered what kind of sales numbers Apple has with their crazy priced products, like their $6k+ monitors or $50k mac pro. Do they actually sell a lot of them, or do they just keep them priced high to give them the look of a high end company?
They will create a locked down OS like iOS, not something like MacOS. If you want MacOS, you’ll probably have to stream it or whatever they’re going to do.
I do hope, even if they keep things locked down, they eventually add something useful like a terminal but I doubt it will ever happen, unfortunately.
You seem to answer your own objection here? The Mac Mini is the cheaper version of a computer that has historically been much more expensive.
The current base model (9th gen) iPad is significantly cheaper than the original iPad. And only half as expensive if you take inflation into account. And the original was already known to be much less expensive than expected.
The last iPod classic was just over half the inflation-adjusted price of the original iPod.
Yes, and like I also said, whatever cheaper model comes one day will also come with compromises. The real question will be, what kind of compromises can be made to make it less expensive but also maintain the experience. Talking about inflation adjusted pricing is also a distraction. No one thinks like that except for people trying to justify a company’s pricing. The average person doesn’t say “wow, this is such a great deal now that I’ve take inflation into account!” Come on.
I’m sure there will be a “mini” version of the headset one day. But it’ll probably be many years down the road. I just don’t think anyone should expect the headset to drop significantly in price year over year, like many have suggested here. This idea that Apple will release some expensive device for developers and “corporate” customers (which is absurd since Apple has a dismal track record in that space), only to drop the price significantly after is pure fantasy. Whatever this thing sells for will be the selling price for years. If you can’t afford gen 1, you’re likely going to be in the same spot when gen 3 comes along.
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Maybe you know something that I don't... but I'm pretty sure that the entire point of augmented reality is indeed that you would look through the lenses at the real world, but with additional information overlayed on top of your view.
Perhaps you're still thinking exclusively of virtual reality?
Apple’s actually making a killing in the enterprise market with the iPad. Companies are rolling them out in the thousands for tasks like airline maintenance (perhaps part of the reason why Apple sells more iPads than Macs in a year).
Today’s $329 iPad is much better than the original $499 iPad in every way. It is only a compromise when compared to today’s better iPads. A cheaper consumer headset will eventually be better in every way than the first Reality Pro.
It’s significantly cheaper even when not taking inflation in account.
If you are sitting in front of a monitor while wearing the AR/VR headset and you want to see what it’s displaying, you’d get better quality by sending the content of the physical monitor to the headset through WiFi or a cable rather than looking at the monitor through the cameras on the headset.