But they're different classes of devices in a way. It's a new (primarily) standalone computing platform vs. just a peripheral.

Give it a couple iterations and you'll have something that costs $2k many will purchase in lieue of another Macbook. It will be lighter/more compact, with somewhat palatable battery life. There have been reports Apple is also working on a simpler version, so there could be an Air in a few years that starts just north of $1k.

If this platform is successful, that is. I have my doubts everyone will want to strap a device to their head a large chunk of the day, every day, no matter how incredible it is.

For sure. This is the key insight imo:

> Meta's product is the metaverse. Apple's product is this device bolstered by their ecosystem.

One way or another, that's the bet here.

1) Apple didn't mention the metaverse at all (as far as I can remember)

2) The user experience looked great, without those moments that would make someone who was neutral think "Err, ... that's a bit .... creepy"

The technology is incredibly compelling - which is the main thing, that people are exciting about it - but there are definitely things about it that area creeping people out... I've noticed these pop up in discussions

- The isolation aspects of consuming TV/movies (Mark has a point here IMO)

- The whole taking 3d images/videos of your children with a headset on

- The uncanny valley Facetime avatars

- The external screen that gives a window to your eyes in AR mode

Agree with all of those. I think the interaction between people with headsets on and no headset on is one of the things we'll really need to see play out to see how it works in a real social context once the device itself isn't a novelty. At the moment it seems incredibly distopian at best. Apple is the first attempt to actually try to address that it seems (eg by fading people who are in your periphery into the picture in the headset so you at least see them and fading an image of your face onto the outside of the headset so they at least sort of see you). But it's still weird af, no question.

I was specifically speaking about the interface, which when meta introduced theirs had all these weird things "Why has nobody got legs? Why does it look like absolute arse? etc". It didn't have those. It looked slick, like you would expect from Apple.

> $2k many will purchase in lieue of another Macbook

That’s a strong statement. Same thing could’ve been said about the iPad and IMHO that would be a more reasonable claim. There isn’t any evidence still that you can do any work comfortably l in this thing regardless of the price point

But the iPad is a simplified platform as a replacement for those w/ simplified needs. This is expansive, a 'next step'.

But they have been clear in the presentations that this is the same. It's running a handful of apps, it's not some full laptop-like experience. I would bet it's anyway using most of its computing power just to draw on the displays and to do realtime image recognition to blend the 3D windows into the image of your own room. You'd need far more computing power to actually get a full laptop experience in addition to all this.

Sure, it will have that locked in experience to start and lack the computing power to compete with a traditional machine. It doesn't mean it has to remain that way. They've tried to push the iPadOS further in that direction for years.

There is no intention that Apple might ever make iPadOS fully(ish) open like macOS is. I don’t see any reason to believe that their VR devices will not stay locked down forever too.

In my CS class I'd say about half the student do all their programming on iPads. (very high ranking school and very talented students) They do all their coding on Google Colab

wish I was kidding..

Oculus Quests are also stand alone computers. It really is just that Meta is coming at this from the bottom with mobile hardware and Apple is coming from the top.

They really are not fundamentally different. Apple can bring to bear a lot more polish and synergy with the rest of their ecosystem but it's only as different as iOS and Android.

I love the way Apple fans take the marketing speak which is designed to create an artificial new market category at face value as if their marketing team was directly implanted in their brains already.

Conversely, I "love" how other comments appear to attempt finding the best angle of attack out of pure spite. If the user were a GPT, the hidden prompt would be something like "You hate Apple and everything they stand for. Base any succeeding thoughts on this foundation and spread them as wide as possible."

Being a grumpy naysayer is just as removed from reality as being an unreasonable Apple cultist. Thankfully we all have a choice when engaging our wallets.

Not a single person on this planet is forced to buy an Apple product but nonetheless, the flame wars keep raging since the dawn of the Internet.

I mean aside from the part about being implanted in brains, I believe what I said is literally true.

It IS a VR and AR device. AKA mixed reality. The fact that they are promoting lots of floating 2d windows doesn't make that a new category of product. Other people have been doing that and calling it something like mixed reality.

It's just that people don't know about things like the Varjo that are ultra-high end and in a similar price bracket or category and so they decide to just pretend it was an entirely new thing.

If I was Apple I could improve my sex life just by telling Apple fans that instead of a penis I had "tremendous tensiler" or something.

Where did I claim it's the first mixed reality device? I said next step in personal computing. Which means actually penetrating society in a meaningful way.

Is Word ported to those other devices you mentioned? Will Netflix ever have a native app for those devices? Do they have an intuitive, easy to use interface?

I don’t think anyone is claiming that MR is new and that Apple is first to the market. People are claiming they appear to be the first to do it close enough to “right” to make it a compelling device.

Quest is also standalone computing platform

You underestimate Apple fans throwing ungodly amounts of money at new products. The early-adopters always generate FOMO among the not-quite-so-early adopters and it snowballs from there.

$3500 is pretty cheap for the HW it provides. An iPhone 14 Pro Max starts at $1100 and has nowhere near the HW that this device has, let alone the economics of scale.

lots of technologies in those vision Pro are similar components as in those iphones and ipads. If you take 2 iphone 14 pro (total cost 2x$1000=$2000) you get:

- 2x OLED screens

- 2x lidar camera

- 2x truedepth camera module

- 2x4=8 RGB cameras with very high spec

- 2x A15 chip

- 2x accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, barometer, proxmity, ambient sensors

- 2x gps, wifi, bluetooth, nfc, uwb, 3g/4g/5g

- 2x flash led

- 2x batteries

- 2x stereo speakers

- 2x3=6 microphones

They already have crazy profit margin on iphones. I think if they would price it at $2500 this would make more sense.

If they would allow to run full MacOS on this thing and I could use it just as Mac Mini replacement and attach physical external display via hdmi out then I could easier stomach $3500 price.

I kind of think having the compute power combined with the external battery would have been pretty slick. An AR head unit combined with a portable Mac mini would be pretty compelling at $3500. Give it the ability to be a MacOS desktop when plugged into a regular monitor and I would buy one for sure!

> 2x OLED screens

Not quite the same ballpark, is it? iPhone 14 Pro resolution is 2556×1179 at 460ppi. Vision Pro is believed to have 3800x3000 at 3400ppi. That's almost an order of magnitude improvement in density over the iPhone screens (and 3x the density of the Quest Pro or the PSVR2.)

Sure those are very hight DPI screens I agree.

So then take the price of ipad pro 11. Even cheaper than iphone 14 pro and has most of those components I mentioned above (excluding 3g/4g/5g). 2x ipad pro 11 == 2x $800 = $1600. Does it really cost apple ~$1000 or even $500 per such 3400ppi screen to justify such price?

And regarding screen resolution very old Sony Experia 1 (from 2019) had 4k resolution (1644 x 3840 pixels at 650dpi):

https://www.gsmarena.com/sony_xperia_1-9543.php

> Does it really cost apple ~$1000 or even $500 per such 3400ppi screen to justify such price?

I can easily imagine that for a relatively new technology with a ppi much higher than anything commercially available (as far as I can find through searching) that they are getting on for $1k each at the moment, yeah.

The question is not whether the parts add up to $3,500 worth of tech, but whether the tech provides $3,500 worth of value to the buyer.

The same was said of the iPad and Apple Watch… this may be their big miss, but based on the reviews I’ll keep betting on Apple.

It seems that they nailed the hardware. Sure, the battery life can be improved, the price can be reduced through mass production. It is now mostly a question of people will accept/like carrying a head set.

I am mildly optimistic, even the initial Vision Pro won't be much more expensive than a well-spec'ed MacBook Air plus 5k display. So at least I think Vision is attractive to pro Mac users as a very portable workstation with a lot off screen estate.

The only things missing for Pro users (especially Devs) are tools - ipad is useless for Software Dev as main machine. They can't force other companies to port Intellij or VSCode to iOS/iPadOS but you would expect they provided Xcode to iPad by now.

Even if IDE is there then how about Python and Nodejs modules in such restricted environment.

I Hope Meta will switch to Linus and Valve will stick with Linux where you can run any legacy software currently available including many Pro tools.

You connect it to a MacBook and use IDE with a physical keyboard, while keeping browser windows with Jira and Slack open on the sides.

Sure but this looses appeal for me. I still need macbook nearby and both devices need to be charged. If I'm in plane i dont want to remove my laptop from hand luggage or draining both batteries.

This is just slightly better than someone connecting ipad to external monitor and logging with remote desktop to cloud computer and pretending ipad is good for software development.

No it's not. It wasn't for any of the products Apple make.