They claim full desktop office suite support, but it won’t run Excel. iPad runs Excel - and Logic and Final Cut and Photoshop and Affinity Designer and Outlook and…
But regardless, VP is clearly positioned as a laptop display replacement, which is I think more realistic; iPhone can also be a laptop replacement (it is for many iOS users who don’t have computers) but realistically many people find a lot of value in both computing paradigms.
The big question is if MS has a special Vision AR VR experience
I would happily spend $3.5k on an insanely portable, wraparound, multi-monitor setup for my $1k MacBook.
If this thing works anywhere close to as well as they say it does for that use case, I won’t be able to get my credit card out fast enough. The fact that it could be used independently is just a cherry on top.
Pretty sure one 4k window is more than enough to handle the things I can't do on the Vision natively.
Even if it's MacOS, what do you think the answer to that question will be?
You'll work near to your laptop. Programs will run directly on the laptop, but the windows (not the entire desktop) will stream to the headset. Vision Pro will manage "the space" and your laptop/desktop will run the heavy lifting.
The CPU in Vision Pro is more than powerful enough for most tasks; It's the exact same CPU that Apple are shipping in many of their laptops.
With the continuity workflow, I'll always need bring both my headset and my laptop with me if I might want to do anything beyond what the headset can do by itself. I'm also concerned about the additional latency that continuity will probably introduce.
Yes, continuity is a useful feature for when I'm doing stuff that does actually need the extra processing power of a proper workstation, but it shouldn't be the only solution.
(The cynical part of me is pretty sure it know the answer. Apple wants a locked down ecosystem just like they have on the ipad and iphone)
Development, Design, Video Editing, etc, etc still require additional capacity than what the Vision Pro is offering.
They'll likely need to put something comparable to the iPad M2 in there to manage heat. That iPad M2 has about 1/3 the performance of my MBP M2.
Add in the fact that you're rendering a spatial world and you quickly have a lot of resources tied up.
I also think that if this were a feasible use case, apple would promote it. They are clearly positioning this headset as adjacent to the dev space, based on price and how they previewed it. And Apple is one of those companies that if you find yourself swimming upstream against how they want you to use it… it might be reason to find a different platform.
Add in the need to render a very large virtual space and you end up with a lot of capacity being used by default. That's likely fine for "iPad like tasks" (web-browsing, email, messaging), but it seems insufficient for anything requiring processing or memory.
It's not a family. It's the exact same physical chip. You can also check Apple's technical specs too. They are both listed as "8-core CPU with four performance cores and four efficiency cores".
The only real difference between the ipad, macbook air and 13" macbook pro is the cooling solution. The ipad is fanless and the macbook pro has a fan. If you had a longer-running benchmark, or a sustained workload you would see a larger difference, but not that large.
This remains the holy grail for work focussed headsets. Can I truly replace my laptop with it?
It seems the Vision Pro allows you to pair and cast screens, but not replace an entire macbook pro. A disappointment for sure but maybe it will be available in V2, V3, etc.