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Why Doesn’t Apple call the Vision Pro what it is, a “hobby”?
- Thread starter XboxEvolved
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I suspect it’s the opposite - the people already using VR, seriously using it, are probably the least interested in Apple’s solution, because they know the graphical hardware requirements to drive a serious VR system are significantly above the capabilities of an iPad Pro, which is what the Apple headset is.
The people who seem most excited about Apples headset seem to be people who’ve never done actual work in a proprioceptively immersive 3d environment, and are fantasising about a different 2d computing - hanging flats in space.
When the billionaire designer architecture of the demos reaches the clutter of human life backdrop of their real homes, the failure of “see through” AR computing to live up to the promise will be as utter as that of high modernist domestic architecture‘s inability to cope with knick knacks.
Also ordinary glasses you have the Apple headset experience in, that’s at least 10-15 years away.
Tim Cook doesn't even want to put it on his head for 1 hr of demoing it, forget 8hrs a day.I agree with this. On the flip side 10 years ago, naysayers were preaching that no one wants to watch anything on tiny screen for more than 3 minutes, yet people are watching full movies on their phones instead of on a TV.
Just like he is the one presenting everything else Apple announces? If you haven’t noticed, he doesn’t do a single one of them, likely because he knows he is either bad at it or just really boring.
I mean, basically nobody got to see or use the iPhone between the announcement and the day it launched, except for four hand-picked reporters who were under embargo.
The iPhone wasn’t the instant succes we like to make of it, it wasn’t like the iPad, immediately selling millions.
Was the iPhone a “hobby” for those reasons?
That is understandable, because what they demoed at the launch was less a functional product, than it was a series of pre-rendered animations triggered by touch events. Second in fraudulence only to the time NeXT "demoed" a system, that was actually a laserdisk player hidden under the table.
The iPhone also had to have its price cut by several hundred dollars in the first couple of weeks, IIRC.
Vision Pro has that incredible potential to be the future of pretty much everything in our life. Hobbyists will likely enjoy it too, but the applications for Vision Pro are literally endless.
Anything that requires more graphical performance than within the scope of a current iPad is by definition beyond the end of the applications for the Vision Pro.
Indeed, I agree but there are some GIANT problems.
1: Normal people don't want to wear a chunky headset on their face.
2: It's a totally solo experience, even more so than a phone or tablet. Every member of your household would meed to own one to share anything with you.
3: It's vastly too expensive. Love them or not, Meta seem to have realised than $500 ish, is about as far as you can push such a device now if you want anything other than a tiny level of adoption, and even that is way too much for many.
I'm sure Apple will sell as many as it can make for some time, and those with big budgets, Super Apple fans, YouTubers and Reviewers will all be buying them, and to start with sales and news will seem amazing.
Then we'll hit some dead zone and the very very slow slog will begin before the next version which will still be vastly too expensive still for normal consumers ($1500 perhaps)
If this cheaper model is worse, then the 1st model buyers won't want it, and as it's still too expensive to temp those who are nor very interested then who's going to buy that?
I do wonder if Meta has the right idea. Start with a low end model, and gradually build up your audience/user-base over the years, then you can gradually create better models at higher prices, bringing the customers with you.
In the same way it happened with smartphones.
It's going to be very interesting to see how Apple fills the gap between this 1st model, and a future model they wish to sell in bulk.
The fact that you can walk down the street while wearing it seems to have escaped most sceptics. You could, for example, create a very detailed model of a large area by using the camera and instructing the user to walk around in certain ways. This could be used in architecture to plan and renovate buildings. Or replicate spaces elsewhere. So two people in different cities could walk around a virtual environment together, like a holodeck.
Having the camera look at your fingers could be a superior and more flexible replacement for the mouse and keyboard.
OK here's the problem - you're looking for uses for it, rather than its use being obvious.
- If you wanted to create a LIDAR 3D scan of an area, there are already tools which do this, tools which don't require strapping a huge, peripheral-vision-excluding, "hey look at me I have money" screaming device over your most important sensory faculty. Tools which scan in all directions, and get all the data, not just what you look at.
- The Vision Pro's graphical capabilities, its ability to create detailed virtual spaces, are limited to those of an iPad. You're not going to be experiencing detailed virtual spaces, because the GPU in the device can't sustain the geometry and textures for real world simulation.
The problem with the Vision Pro is that it's an expensive upgradable simulation price headset, with a cheap consumer disposable graphical capability. It's an example of Apple having the technologies necessary, and looking for a use that will allow monetising those technologies, rather than setting out to solve a task, and creating technologies to suit that task.
I have to agree, especially with something feeling off about how they presented it. I was actually shocked they didn't take the opportunity with the Vision Pro to return to live keynotes. Maybe they will do a more in-depth keynote in the future- that is what it truly deserves. It does feel like they are just making it for the VR/AR hobbyists that can drop $3500+ on a new toy instead of positioning it for the masses from the start.
its not there yet for the masses though. They need to get this out for early adopters and developers to create for it. My money is on 3-5 years for a more mass market appeal.
In a way, but the competition already have this kind of capabilities (Microsoft Hololens, MetaQuest 2/3/Pro). So in a way this niche is already filled.
The difference is that the Vision may be the first device you'd actually want to wear outside, with it bordering the verblen good territory.
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And this makes my point that it is a "hobby" right now. The content is not there, and people believing that Apple is betting the company on it are getting ahead of themselves.
I want to reiterate that people really do not like putting stuff on their heads and especially their eyes, and for something like this to hit the masses like the iPhone, iPad, or Mac, it will have to be incredibly light, and compact, like sunglasses. That or it would have to be something like the holodeck.
However, in 4 years, I do see it meeting its peak and likely outselling all of the other things out there even if they are cheaper like Meta Quest. Still, the price would have to be around $1500 for it to get sales like that, and I'd still consider it a niche/hobbyist product.
I still predict that this is a huge mistake and will die on the vine. It's a by product of having too much money and not being able to discern what is actually a good idea and what is not. I call it the Howard Huges effect.
yup, people get surgery, scalpel surgery on their EYES to avoid wearing glasses. But sure, pretend wearing glasses is going to be a huge paradigm for doing 2D computing.
glasses are too dramatic an alteration in appearance and too individualistic for one company to offer enough styles to satisfy a critical mass to be an “always on” thing. So what are people going to do, be constantly taking off the glasses they wear to put on the Apple glasses, which will probably be kept in a glasses case… that better than just pulling out a cellphone and looking at the screen?
…or is the plan to offer a smart lens capable of being cut & installed in any frame, but thin wire frames are amongst the most popular style, where is the power supply kept?
we’re decades, not years from smart glasses of similar profile to spectacles, and the graphical needs for immersive 3d workspaces & environments are going to grow to overfill the capabilities of the best GPUs on the planet (Nvidia) on an ongoing basis, until generated worlds are equivalent in quality to reality. Again, that’s decades away.
Totally disagree but that’s ok. I am not sure that your demand for the quality being needing to be ‘reality’ is the actual goal.
Augmented reality name describes exactly what it is - it is augmenting your life by providing additional information/ experiences etc. not trying to replicate it or pretend it is real…..
Put it this way, gaming is nowhere on the Mac, because Mac graphics hardware is under-performant, expensive, and carries a whole device replacement upgrade cost, in a field in which graphical hardware demands and developers interest will grow to fill the capabilities of the leading edge. AR & VR are the same. For the same reason that game developers don’t flock to the Mac, I think what you’re going to see on Apple’s headset (because it won’t attract cutting edge 3d centric developers) is just a bunch of iPad apps, floating in the air. It’s going to be a less convenient iPad, not an immersive computing revolution.
what Apple is offering is a device that should cost about the price of an Xbox Series X, for 10x that price. It’s an iPad that will suffer vastly increased obsolescence over a flat screen iPad, because it’s much earlier in the acceleration from low hanging fruit than current iPads are.
Hanging flats in space is solving the iPad’s multitasking failure. That’s pretty much it.
"And it's useless for business because it doesn't have a keyboard!" Steve Balmer.
Thanks for informing me on what I have direct experience in, but it’s all good.
You seem to be expecting triple A gaming with nvidia 4090 level graphics. You are not the customer then. Quite simple really.