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What is the point of the Apple Vision Pro?
- Thread starter AndronicusMaximus
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And I can't wait to see it released. There is a lot of use cases for such devices. Productivity - virtual desktops with environments for cooperation / focus. Relax - tv shows, movies and 3d movies. Immersive games with body control.
I don’t understand why someone would need that
Not everything is about the need. You probably don't need the electricity - could live without it with candle lights and wash your clothes in the river... but
I can't help but think that anyone who doesn't 'get' the point or potential of the AVP is a tiny bit lacking in imagination or wonder. I won't be getting one anytime soon, but I'm absolutely fascinated to see what experiences Apple and third-party developers can create with this hardware.
To come out with this price point Apple knows it will have to wow people in multiple ways to persuade a critical mass of consumers to buy one, so I'm personally really looking forward to the reveals over the next few months.
To come out with this price point Apple knows it will have to wow people in multiple ways to persuade a critical mass of consumers to buy one, so I'm personally really looking forward to the reveals over the next few months.
That's why you wont buy it, no problem, and don't fuss about it
It's just....not for you
I think that’s probably true, the Vision Pro has to be more than just a best-in-class VR goggles. But I think it’s about more than experiences, because experiences get old pretty quickly. The kinds of things that work well in a demo do not carry a sustained use of the device.
No it has to be about capabilities. Use cases which convince you to strap on the device because there is no other environment in which you are going to get the work done to your satisfaction.
Version 2 down the road will most likely be smaller with more features as well as cheaper
This is the beginning of a new category…..Spatial Computing and as with all products it’s not for everyone. However depending on the apps and immersive games available will have a good audience
This is the beginning of a new category…..Spatial Computing and as with all products it’s not for everyone. However depending on the apps and immersive games available will have a good audience
Apple Vision Pro is more than an expensive launch product. Apple has two objectives, get their supply chains geared up to create their headset line and get software developers going so their is a large catalog of software for their next device.
Pay attention to where Apple is with its silicon. Apple Vision Pro is using the M1 chip. Meanwhile Apple is already on the M3… By the time Apple releases the second generation headset they will have already developed the M5 chip. The M5 chip combined with the R2 chip is when the Apple Vision headset will really shine. Not only will it handle more powerful applications, it will be lighter, cheaper and more power efficient.
This is when broad appeal for the headset will take place.
Meta knows this since Apple announced their device. Apple doesn’t want this first gen headset to be purchased by everyone. They want everyone to buy the second generation headset.
And why would you want this thing? Well, focus on one single line from the announcement… Cook said “this is the first Apple device you can see through and not just look at”.. See through.. meaning this product is going towards daily active wear.. You should expect having this second generation/future generation device on while you are active in your day…
Chores, shopping, school, organizing, entertainment etc computing whatever you need without holding your device.
The first product isn’t the thing Apple wants you to buy… They want you to buy their 2nd, 3rd, 4th iteration.
Keep that in mind
Pay attention to where Apple is with its silicon. Apple Vision Pro is using the M1 chip. Meanwhile Apple is already on the M3… By the time Apple releases the second generation headset they will have already developed the M5 chip. The M5 chip combined with the R2 chip is when the Apple Vision headset will really shine. Not only will it handle more powerful applications, it will be lighter, cheaper and more power efficient.
This is when broad appeal for the headset will take place.
Meta knows this since Apple announced their device. Apple doesn’t want this first gen headset to be purchased by everyone. They want everyone to buy the second generation headset.
And why would you want this thing? Well, focus on one single line from the announcement… Cook said “this is the first Apple device you can see through and not just look at”.. See through.. meaning this product is going towards daily active wear.. You should expect having this second generation/future generation device on while you are active in your day…
Chores, shopping, school, organizing, entertainment etc computing whatever you need without holding your device.
The first product isn’t the thing Apple wants you to buy… They want you to buy their 2nd, 3rd, 4th iteration.
Keep that in mind
This is the Henry Ford quote right? If he’d put it to his customers what they wanted, they’d just have asked for a faster horse.
Nobody within or outside of Apple knows how this is going to play out. Is the Apple Vision Pro another iPhone moment, as in "that's the device we all wanted the whole time?" Or is it a another 3D TV moment, corporations need to sell new stuff but we aren't always the good little consumers that buy everything and anything new, especially when it means wearing something uncomfortable? I'm expecting the second, but, just like everybody else, I don't have a crystal ball and we'll just have to wait and see. Probably the truth is in the middle, it'll make a big impact in some niche usage areas and with some dedicated home users, but it won't become ubiquitous like the modern smart phone.
I think the point is doing many things much better/more enjoyable. The discussion is usually about what something can/cannot do (whether it has a killer feature), but the past has taught us it's mostly the contrary.
The iPhone couldn't do anything "new". The iPad was dismissed as a big iPhone, but the combination of many factors (like screen size and quality, thinness, battery life) made the experience so good that people wanted to use it instead of their iPhones/Macs. It's always a grey scale, but there's a threshold where the product becomes enjoyable, useful, etc.
There are obvious downsides with headsets (mainly comfort and battery life), but the question is: is the experience so good that we'll assume those tradeoffs? Most of us haven't been able to try it, and it's hard to answer without that, specially with a device where UX is central to its value proposal.
But I think there are two main reasons to be optimistic:
- Almost all of us think AR is a great theoretical idea. But it needs extremely good execution in practice: a bug in a PC/phone OS is just a bug, a slight distortion in an AR view takes you out from reality, and ruins the whole experience. Apple has focused (and based on early testers, delivered) on those points, like eye tracking, screen resolution, hand occlusion, stability of rendered volumes in the space... getting ALL of this right is essential, but at the same time extremely hard.
- Apple has the greatest record on being right with their "big bets". People will argue that they've had failures, but it's never been the case with a "big bet". They launch a new product category every few years, among all possible new product categories they could have researched, and commit to it. We're all human, they can of course fail, but I take Apple seriously because they don't launch dozens of completely new products to see what sticks. They've researched for years, worked, tested and they decided this is their next big bet - and I trust their decision-making skills.
The iPhone couldn't do anything "new". The iPad was dismissed as a big iPhone, but the combination of many factors (like screen size and quality, thinness, battery life) made the experience so good that people wanted to use it instead of their iPhones/Macs. It's always a grey scale, but there's a threshold where the product becomes enjoyable, useful, etc.
There are obvious downsides with headsets (mainly comfort and battery life), but the question is: is the experience so good that we'll assume those tradeoffs? Most of us haven't been able to try it, and it's hard to answer without that, specially with a device where UX is central to its value proposal.
But I think there are two main reasons to be optimistic:
- Almost all of us think AR is a great theoretical idea. But it needs extremely good execution in practice: a bug in a PC/phone OS is just a bug, a slight distortion in an AR view takes you out from reality, and ruins the whole experience. Apple has focused (and based on early testers, delivered) on those points, like eye tracking, screen resolution, hand occlusion, stability of rendered volumes in the space... getting ALL of this right is essential, but at the same time extremely hard.
- Apple has the greatest record on being right with their "big bets". People will argue that they've had failures, but it's never been the case with a "big bet". They launch a new product category every few years, among all possible new product categories they could have researched, and commit to it. We're all human, they can of course fail, but I take Apple seriously because they don't launch dozens of completely new products to see what sticks. They've researched for years, worked, tested and they decided this is their next big bet - and I trust their decision-making skills.
The most obvious use case to me is the ability to have the equivalent of multiple monitors condensed into a pair of googles that you can easily bring around with you (women can even slip it easily into their handbags). The problem with other VR headsets like the quest is that the resolution tends to be too low to work comfortably from, the UI is often crap, and you can't see what's around you once the headset is worn (which makes even mundane tasks like drinking a cup of coffee near impossible).
I assume someone like MKHBD could travel overseas with a 16" MBP and Vision Pro, then once he has a chance to sit down, plug in his Vision Pro into his Mac and get a larger display that he can edit his videos on. This doesn't even need to be back in your hotel room, anywhere with a desk and chair will suffice.
It may sound overkill (and plenty of creators can get work done using just the laptop screen by itself), but I find that its often easier to justify a purchase if it can actually make you more productive. Of course, this also assumes you are able to wear this whole day and still interact with the world around you without getting motion sickness.
It also looks like it could be the ultimate consumption device. Imagine sports being streamed in spatial video, and viewing it felt like you were there at the stadium itself. In theory, if this can be done right, you don't have to put up with constantly switching amongst different camera angles. If I want to see the score, I can just turn to my side and look at the scoreboard. It could even extend to concerts and other live events.
There's also the potential for interacting with AR without needing to constantly hold my phone up. In short, the vision pro makes sense in any scenario where the smartphone is suboptimal.
The Vision Pro is an alternative to a computer (actually it's a solution to iPad multitasking), not a multi-display peripheral for a computer. People keep thinking about it as if it does what their fantasy of computing would do, when it doesn't.
It's analogous to the iPad, which went years of not being the device people thought it was going to be, by not having a proper stylus, or filesystem (or the Mac-like cost people were expecting). Finally, Apple threw in the towel and made the iPad Pro, which is what it should have been from the start - a version of Microsoft's Surface Pro, albeit giving it a better drawing experience, but being a worse computer.
Which he won't be able to do, because the Vision Pro only allows a single-screen mirrored wireless VNC remote connection to a Mac.
It doesn't let you abstract your Mac's apps so that you can have an editing window, with separate free-floating palettes and gesture control etc - what it offers is exactly what VNC offers on an iPad, when you Mirror the Mac's display. At present, it doesn't even add anything to the Mac (as far as I've seen), the way the iPad adds a drawing tablet function with Sidecar
It's not going to provide a larger screen, in terms of pixels, for the Mac than a laptop's screen - in fact it will be significantly lower quality because the pixels of the Vision Pro are distributed across the full width of the user's field of view, rather than being concentrated within the narrow field of view of the laptop's screen.
This is the thing for iPads - despite all the attempts to make them Computers, they remain consumption devices with some niche creation cases, usually created by denying drawing tablet functions to the Mac's screen - if Macbooks had the iPad touchscreen and could use the Pencil, probably the majority of the iPad Pro's sales would vanish overnight.
Go into any medical professional's office, especially mobile therapists, and they're using Surface Pros because iPadOS has too many roadblocks to be a general-purpose computer (I tried it for months).
I don't think the Vision Pro will have the onboard power to do tasks that people think a headset will enable for content creation, and I think it's going to be as annoying as trying to make an iPad your only computer.
But as a rich person's toy for interacting with Apple's in-house iCloud apps - Facetime, content viewing etc, that's probably the sweet spot.
I don't think the Vision Pro is going to have the tools to make AR content in AR/VR - I think it's going to be a viewer, but pople making content for it are still going to use PCs, the same way people making games for Apple platforms (Apple Arcade etc) do that overwhelmingly on Windows.
I bought a surface pro and use it to code. I always wished it had the iPad OS polish. The windows software is not near ipadOS in terms of design and polish and quality.
Now I use the quest Pro since launch a year ago because i don’t have a space for external monitors. I also could not wait for the quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro was not announced. The AR experience is extremely helpful and joyful! You don’t want to go back to the iPad or surface after projecting large screens in AR. I wish it was 4K quality though but for the price. It’s worth it. The quality is not near the Vision Pro though!
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It's for the cows
Russian cows get VR headsets 'to reduce anxiety'
The herd was shown "a unique summer field simulation program" in a bid to boost milk yields.
www.bbc.co.uk
I was thinking that Vision Pro might be the first technology that executives might be able to work without calling for help.
They might be able to find their memos, read their assistants' findings, participate in "face-to-face" meetings, and more without someone having to feed them every bit AND work their computer and phone for them.
They might be able to find their memos, read their assistants' findings, participate in "face-to-face" meetings, and more without someone having to feed them every bit AND work their computer and phone for them.
I'm going to be completely honest with my 2 cents.
The Vision Pro will fail. Same with the original Apple Watch Gold editions after 1-year. They will sell less than 100K units in the first year.
- Battery life is trash at 2hrs. Required to be connected to a wall outlet.
- Complex buying procedure if you wear glasses
- Question of whether or not Vision Pro causes headaches, migraines.
- Outside of the "techTuber space", will any serious office worker use this with Final Cut or their Macs.
From Meta quest to PSVR2, VR headsets are a long way to go.
The Vision Pro will fail. Same with the original Apple Watch Gold editions after 1-year. They will sell less than 100K units in the first year.
- Battery life is trash at 2hrs. Required to be connected to a wall outlet.
- Complex buying procedure if you wear glasses
- Question of whether or not Vision Pro causes headaches, migraines.
- Outside of the "techTuber space", will any serious office worker use this with Final Cut or their Macs.
From Meta quest to PSVR2, VR headsets are a long way to go.
You haven’t tried VR/AR yet then. I was a big iPad fan until I bought the Quest Pro! The AR experience is phenomenal. you dont want to go back to iPads or macs. You should at least try.
AR and VR has really come a long way but you just cannot wear these for too long. It's definitely niche and not ready for the masses like smart phones. Finally, being tethered to power is a no go. That's just silly.
I work in VR in 4 hour sessions, with a tethered headset. Time disappears in a properly immersive environment where you're walkin around and interacting with three dimensional subjects. Fatigue is no different to any physical labour.
I can't say whether that will happen in a "floating iPad Apps in space" - the full body experience of VR is part of what makes it a good working environment.
Tethers are irrelevant to work-scenarios. Higher quality visuals, and faster data connection is more important to the proprioceptive fidelity of the experience. Managing the tether is a subconscious activity after an initial few hours.