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What is the point of the Apple Vision Pro?
- Thread starter AndronicusMaximus
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3d movies, external displays without needing to lug around external displays, visualization of 3d models in the real world, etc.
not everybody will need or want it, especially at the initial price.
price will come down, performance will go up and new apps will come out before most people have a real use case for it.
If you haven't seen actual 3d movies using VR, i'd suggest doing so, even with something like a quest 2 - the 3d really actually works (as opposed to the dodgy home cinema 3d we've had in the past).
Don't think of the initial vision pro as an every-person consumer product. it isn't. it's a bleeding edge tech preview basically, and it won't be until v2 or v3 at least (like the apple watch) until it gets any significant userbase.
And that's fine. Without something out there, there's nothing for anyone to experiment with or develop apps for.
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My point was its just not for the masses like smartphones. This product category is just too niche at this moment.
I'm expecting it to be the Mac moment. A splashy opening with lots of "ooh's" and "ah's", but the Apple II's kept selling WAY more units for almost a decade after. Only when looking back we can see what an enormous impact the paradigm introduced then has had on computing in general. 5 years from now, maybe even 10 years from now, Vision Pro might still be a niche product, living alongside Macs, pc's, iPads, etc. But 40 years from now, those last ones will seem quant, and the vision pro will be seen as the one that changed it all. That's my expectation...
To be honest, so were smartphones when the iPhone arrived. The masses had Nokia's and Sony-Eriksson dumb phones back then. Blackberries and Windows Mobile phones were only "popular" in a very niche way.
As I keep saying - the nmber of people who get scalpel surgery on their eyes to avoid wearing glasses each year probably exceeds the number who have ever worn a VR helmet.
People should keep in mind that it's possible headset-based computing will only ever be a niche best used by specific industries. Pervasive glasses-based computing might work out as more of a scifi macguffin than a ubiquitous paradigm.
Even when the iphone arrived, it didn’t really hit its stride until the iPhone 3G-S or 4 (or possibly later).
The original iphones whilst a cool device had a lot of limitations. The step from 3G to 3G-S (i never had an original as they didn’t ship to australia) was a massive leap in performance. PLus we got stuff like cut and paste!
Absolutely, and as a Gen-1 product the Vision Pro puts a lot of important infrastructure into place. Things like an app store and an OS and developer tools, with Apple levels of quality and support.
I think we can expect the first generations of software to be expensive — Apple has made a platform for those with means, not common consumers, and I think the software will be pitched at that, to get decent returns out of small sales.
But I think you have to see the long term. It will take years, possibly quite a few, for the product to become mainstream.
Yes, but those were portable and had similar form factors. You shoved it into your pocket when you didn't need it and was not intrusive as a headset. For this to be viable for the masses, the size of the product would need to be the size of a pair of sunglasses. I just can't picture anyone walking around with this thing strapped to their heads.
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As a developer- I will certainly clone any meaningful simple app and make it free. It will be a race to the bottom with me around!
It is a tool to help Apple’s marketing team sell people an item they don’t need. Basically, Apple is exploiting that old saying “a fool and his/her money are soon parted”.
I remember being super critical of the iPhone when it first came out, for exactly that reason. I’d had copy and paste in my Symbian and Windows ‘smartphones’ for a few years.Even when the iphone arrived, it didn’t really hit its stride until the iPhone 3G-S or 4 (or possibly later).
The original iphones whilst a cool device had a lot of limitations. The step from 3G to 3G-S (i never had an original as they didn’t ship to australia) was a massive leap in performance. PLus we got stuff like cut and paste!
But when my GF got an iPhone 3G-S the jankiness of my crappy devices became really obvious. A year later I got an iPhone 4 and have never looked back.
It going to be quite a hard sell. That said, we all thought the same about the smartphone and the tablet devices, and now they’re ubiquitous.
Apple aren’t selling a high end VR headset here. They’re selling a head mounted computer, which is a whole new thing. We’ve yet to see whether it lives up to the promise or if the concept gets widespread adoption.
It’ll likely come down to whether or not app developers enthusiastically produce great apps that use the platform in a way that can’t be replicated on a traditional device. And Apple will definitely need a killer app or two, which I haven’t seen yet.
I like the idea and I’d like it to do well. I’ll be watching the US release closely to see how good users think it is in the real world. When it eventually arrives here in the UK, we’ll probably know which way the wind is blowing.