Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Video: Would You Pay $2000+ for Apple's AR/VR Headset?
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
It seems some on here think that’s perfectly acceptable but being who they are, don’t surprise me one bit that they would ?
They haven’t seen the little people in years, Apple doesn’t care about it’s customers as much as some here love to shout it from a mountain top.
Yeah, but a car is an absolute necessity in many rural, suburban, and smaller urban places. While public transit exists, there’s not the money to provide sufficient bus frequency and bus route density to eliminate the need for cars. Even in public transit dependent NYC, there are a lot of cars on surface streets.
People will finance these if it does make enough of an impact in their lives. I’m just not convinced that a gaming device would, nor that any of these other use cases that the VR fanboys suggest will work. (The idea of using conventional desktop apps on one of these is just silly, what’s the value of buying this over the MacBook Pro you could buy at roughly the same price and get better battery life from?) There may be real value in VR (though I’m inclined to think that AR would have more real world value), and the best VR can do right now is gaming and industrial use. And the only people who spend $2000 on a gaming device are the PC gaming niche (who’d never buy an Apple branded VR headset, incidentally), consoles exist largely to deliver gaming at prices people actually want to pay. At $2000, this wouldn’t be a mainstream device and it would largely be limited to the sorts of professional markets that the Mac Pro targets. Could there be value for Apple in that? Sure. But it would have to be $1000 or under if Apple wants it to have mainstream appeal, and it can’t be more than $500 if the only thing you can do with it is gaming. Either that, or this would have to somehow unlock experiences consumers actually want from VR that, for some bizarre reason, hasn’t been offered by Facebook, Microsoft, or Google yet.
The 18k Apple Watch was really an attempt to give the Apple Watch more cachet as a legit watch for watch people. To give the whole lineup more of an air of being a valid watch for watch people to wear instead of a gimmicky product for computer people.
If I wanted to be snide, I could outright claim the VR glasses to be a gimmicky product for computer people. But maybe VR has its uses. Can someone perhaps elaborate on them? I’m not convinced we’ll live all of our leisure time in VR, that sounds awful, but maybe a function that would persuade me to spend some time in VR.
I do know that I don’t want to have VR actively in my face the entirety of my working day anymore than I want to spend that same time entirely in front of my computer screen (which has the benefit of not taking my field of vision) or staring into a smartphone (which has the advantage of being able to be put into my peripheral vision or put down and listened to). Some sort of passive AR experience, where things are AR when it makes sense but things are just regular vision (or maybe pass through VR or can be completely turned off and offer traditional village) when that doesn’t make sense, that would be fine (like how the Apple Watch is a watch when it isn’t in use as something else). But seeing my sister’s and brother’s children makes me wary of modeling smartphone addiction when I have children of my own, and I think VR could be worse in terms of that. Always on VR would be bad for our collective mental health in the same way that the early lockdown was, I find that social media doesn’t necessarily live up to the promise of connection to others it seems to offer (at least not without serious effort akin to the effort it takes to establish genuine connection in person) but does make it super easy to establish a pseudo-connection that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, and VR would probably at least match social media for illusory connection.
Plus, I want boundaries between tech and me. One of the great things about the Apple Watch is that it helps me enforce boundaries between my phone and me. I can look at it for the time, I can filter notifications so that only the essential ones show up on my watch, and I can look up timely information (like the weather, music playback controls, or the subway arrival time for the station I’m currently at) without getting my phone out of my pocket. The VR glasses are going to have to let me maintain those kinds of boundaries, otherwise I’ll just give it a pass.
Another thing, people are almost afraid to be bored these days (though, granted, this dates back in some form at least to the introduction of the Walkman) and turn to smartphones to alleviate that discomfort. But boredom isn’t a bad thing (it gives you time to think, time for mindfulness, time to not always be on 100%), and hedonistic avoidance of it probably is (decreases in attention span and inability to self sooth can result in use of smartphones as a surrogate, in much the same way addiction to substances acts as a poor alternative to the ability to self sooth).
So, what can VR do for me? And what can it do to avoid the negative aspects I’ve highlighted? And is that worth $2000 (which I’ll add is more than I’ve ever spent on a computing object, or even a single purchase)?
Last edited:
I think if Apple release a set of VR headsets and charge £2k, it’ll be much like the AirPods Max. They too are a good product, but priced deliberately so they attract a niche market. I don’t believe for a second Apple want every one of their customers to buy these devices, it’s just a product to boost their catalogue. It’s the same reason they produce ‘Pro’ devices for the niche and ‘mainstream’ devices that will appeal to the majority.
I don’t necessarily see it the same way. I own a pair of AirPods Max. I bought them in part because I couldn’t get a good fit on the AirPods Pro (and I wanted the noise cancellation of those with a design that would either fit in my ears easier or otherwise stay on). The AirPods Max have an additional bonus because, for $20-$30 more (I can’t remember the exact price of the dongle), you can use it as a great set of wired noise canceling headphones, sparing you the cost of buying both a great pair of Bluetooth headphones and a great pair of wired headphones while avoiding those Bluetooth 3.5mm dongles that don’t work especially well. So the Max definitely has value at its price, even if it’s a little hard to justify. The VR headset is likely to have less value for its price.
As Quest 2 owner I agree. I haven't finished Half Life Alyx yet but it's almost worth the price of admission on its own. I only got my Quest a couple months ago and after years of hype I thought there was more worthwhile content for VR, but I guess that's subjective.
I want more music videos like Saturnz Barz for VR. I normally don't care about music videos but for some artists who push their visuals in shows etc it's a welcome avenue.
Gaming doesn’t appeal to me nearly as much as it did when I was a kid. It’s honestly a lot like TV in that regard. I do have a Switch Lite and a few games I play, but I no longer play the sorts of 100+ hour RPGs I used to enjoy. I’d much rather read, spend time with friends, craft, or travel locally these days, especially since I have more money to do stuff out of the house. The only game I play on my phone is Pokémon GO, and that’s due to the social attributes of it as much as anything.
I’m not contending that gaming is a bad application for VR technology, I just don’t think “more immersive gaming” is worth $2000, $300 for an Oculus Rift is probably max what I’d pay for a VR headset for just gaming (and only if a really good game that piques my interest in a genre/series I enjoy shows up).
I think it will follow the same life cycle as the iPad, it will start as a consumption/ gaming platform, then over time productivity will increase via hardware, OS, apps and peripheries. Only then could it replace anything.
I agree. In fact, I'm actually returning my MSI next week, and I'm also planning to sell my Quest. I only paid $150 for it new and it's the 256GB model that retails for $400. I have better things to spend time on but games come and go for me personally. It was nice to play more R6 Siege and beat R6 Extraction as soon as it came out. But highlights for VR for me are Half Life Alyx, Star Trek Bridge Crew, and (I know this sounds ridiculous) Tetris Effect.
I sold my switch 8mos ago or so, I was heavily into Pokemon but I realized that the money-grubbing in relation to game quality wasn't on par. My brother got a lite for free and says arceus is solid, only 15 years late...
My brothers are still more heavily into gaming than I am, so keeping some interest in (or at least awareness of) gaming helps me stay connected with them. And sometimes a new game pops up that’s pretty fun and I voluntarily spend time on it. But gaming in general has gotten to be a lot like TV for me. I like the idea of television and, if just for nostalgia, would love to find a series that I rework my schedule to be able to see when it airs, but I just find it hard to make TV (and gaming) a priority when so much of the stuff not only doesn’t appeal to me but directly alienates me. Why watch a TV show I’ll likely probably hate when I can do so many other things, like make stuff, explore a new place, or learn something new?
Before i would even think about spending 250 bucks for this thing, i would like to see what its purpose is.
I can see a purpose in Gaming, a purpose in engineering but how is this stuff something for the mainstream? Why should i spend more than 250 bucks for something that has absolutly no purpose?
I can see a purpose in Gaming, a purpose in engineering but how is this stuff something for the mainstream? Why should i spend more than 250 bucks for something that has absolutly no purpose?
You could buy an Xbox series X, a PS5 and have enough change for the PSVR and a handful of AAA games. So… nope-a-doodle-doo
Right, the only people who pay $2000 for a gaming setup are PC Master Race sorts, who’d never be caught dead buying an Apple product for gaming.
Yeah it's all reboots by people taking source material and bastardizing for agendas. Like this LoTR reboot coming, or Star Wars milking. Futurama reboot is only upcoming show I'm interested in, and hoping it goes well like the first reboot. Not much in movies, although the Kanye Jeen-yuhs documentary coming up looks interesting.
As for creating, exploring.. I think a lot of people feel trapped from saturation. The double edged sword of plenty of content to choose bringing decision fatigue. I've been struggling to keep up making music lately, and debating getting an M1 Pro for better performance. But at the end of the day, if I can't create with what I have a better system doesn't add more creativity per se, ignoring that a good amount of music software isn't supported yet.
I’m legit kinda worried about the Futurama reboot. I don’t want them to reboot the Fry and Leela relationship (because *bleep* it, they’ve soft rebooted it after each series restart, and it’s harder and harder to give a satisfying resolution each time they do that). Plus, we’re probably gonna get more episodes like the iPhone parody one. (It’s really weird when a show set 1000 years from now tries to do super topical humor, especially when the show doesn’t have South Park’s ability to make a new episode in less than a week and make topical episodes about the current news cycle.)
Media saturation is certainly a thing. Which social network to use, which streaming service(s) to subscribe to, should I watch a YouTube video instead, or play a game? VR has a lot of competition for eyeballs and, unless it finds the ticket to go mainstream in a big way, it won’t get out of the nerdy PC gaming ghetto. It’s funny how people seem to think that geek stuff is popular these days on account of the MCU and similar. But walk into a comic book store, and it’s like being transported into a different universe. Even if you know the characters in the MCU, their comics are a completely different continuity (or multiple continuities), and familiarity with the movies doesn’t guarantee any familiarity with the stories (or even characters, considering that the same superhero can be played by multiple characters in universe) currently in serialization. And the comics themselves are far more niche than the movies that have popularized the characters. I wonder if gaming isn’t like that, either, where it seems superficially mainstream but is actually super niche when you look at it deeper than skin level.
Not a chance.
Apple hasn't come out with a new product category since the 2018 launch of the HomePod, and there hasn't been a new wearable since the 2015 debut of the Apple Watch. That's set to change in the not too distant future, as Apple's AR/VR headset is nearing completion and will likely see a launch in 2023.
Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos.
Rumors about the first head worn Apple-branded AR/VR product have been trickling out for years now, so we thought it would be useful to provide a quick overview of what's coming, including the most recent realityOS information.
Hardware Features
Software Features
- Overall Design - Apple's headset won't look too different from the Oculus Quest virtual reality headset, featuring a curved visor that slides over the eyes and a comfortable mesh base that rests against the face. The visor will completely cover the eyes, blocking out peripheral vision to prevent light leaks.
- Headband - The headset will be held in place by a swappable, adjustable headband that could be made from a material similar to an Apple Watch Sport band.
- Weight - Apple wants the final version of the headset to weigh between 100 to 200 grams. That would be far lighter and more comfortable than something like the Oculus Quest 2, which weighs 503 grams. Prototypes weigh around 300 grams, so Apple may not be able to get the headset's weight quite as low as its target.
- Spatial Audio - One of the headbands that Apple is testing features spatial audio technology for a surround sound experience.
- Display - Apple's AR/VR headset is expected to adopt two high-resolution 4K micro OLED displays supplied by Sony for a high-quality viewing experience that offers up to 3,000 pixels per inch.
- Cameras - The headset will be equipped with more than a dozen optical cameras for tracking hand movements, eye tracking mapping the environment, projecting visual experiences, and more.
- Control Methods - Apple may support multiple input methods, including hand gestures, eye tracking and iris recognition, and a finger-worn control device. It will also detect skin and could monitor expression.
- Chips - Two Mac-level Apple silicon chips are expected to be used in the AR/VR headset to provide the computing power that Apple wants. The headset is expected to be a standalone device that is not reliant on the iPhone or Mac for processing power.
Pricing
- realityOS - Apple is designing a new operating system for the headset, and it's expected to be called "realityOS." Just this week, references to realityOS were found in Apple's source code.
- App Store - Along with a new OS, the AR/VR headset will have a dedicated App Store. Apple will focus on gaming, streaming video content, and video conferencing.
- Media Content - Apple could be planning to work with media parters to create content that could be watched in VR.
- VR FaceTime - Apple is rumored to be working on a VR FaceTime-like experience with Animojis and other 3D features.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has speculated that the headset will sell for over $2,000, and The Information believes it could cost somewhere around $3,000.
Release Date
Apple has pushed back the planned release timeline of the AR/VR headset several times as it continues to work out development issues. There were multiple rumors suggesting that we'd see the headset debut at the 2022 WWDC event, but Bloomberg's Mark Gurman recently said that Apple may further delay the headset until 2023.
At this point, it's looking like we'll have to wait for 2023 to see the headset launch, though there is still a small possibility that it will see a 2022 announcement to give developers time to prepare apps for the device. Apple is said to be targeting the 2023 Worldwide Developer's Conference for a launch.
As for the development issues, Apple is having trouble with heat dissipation due to the high-powered processor, and there are still problems with the camera and the software to work out.
Read More
For all of the rumors on Apple's AR/VR headset, we have a dedicated rumor roundup that aggregates all of the information that we know so far.
Article Link: Video: Would You Pay $2000+ for Apple's AR/VR Headset?
