Do you share your iPhone, iPad, MacBook Pro, AirPods or Apple Watch with friends and family? It’s touted as a work machine first and foremost right? Do you share your work laptop with others? Apple exec logic I’m sure.

I get what you’re saying and it’s hard to describe (and never really does it justice) the experience of this technology. It’s something you have to experience yourself to understand.

It shouldn’t have to be explained that dedicated video game hardware and personal mobile computers have very different use cases and sharing cultures around them.

Do you share the use of your tv with friends and family?

Regardless of Apple's marketing, for the vast majority of people this will be a media consumption device first and a media creation device second, just like the iPad. And you absolutely share your media consumption devices (television, game consoles, iPads) with your family/housemates.

And in a lot of families, parents will buy each child an iPad or a cheaper tablet.

But there will be enough people who will by the headset for them to sell all they can make in the first year.

I share my PlayStation and AppleTV with friends and family. And, yeah, my kid regularly uses my iPad and family members definitely use one another’s phones on occasion. Also the Vision Pro is expensive enough that not every family member will get one — if there’s one in the house it sure would be cool if everyone could use it.

It sure sounds like anyone in a household can use it but if anyone has a different eyeglass corrective lens prescription (very likely unless everyone still has 20/20 vision) from the primary user it’s a very substandard experience.

They showed in the demo the switching lenses was easy as they are magnetic.

Likely the upfront issues would be getting everyone their personalized lenses, but actually using seems like it would be easy.

They’d better sell a good storage solution for those lenses too otherwise they’re going to get lost or mixed up easily

Apple already does laser engraving for products bought in the online store. For the price point of this thing, they can probably move engraving into the retail stores (not long ago, I bought a laser engraver for my hobby 3D printer for a few hundred bucks -- they're not expensive, certainly not by Apple Store standards).

As for getting lost, Apple already has their AirTag technology. While I don't know if that's already in these lenses, it doesn't seem like it'd be difficult to add.

Even if they’re magnetic and easy to swap, it sounds a LOT clunkier than just handing someone an iPad. People are going to lose the lenses all over the place.

Heck, my dad loses his phone multiple times a week, necessitating a quick phone call to track it down. Are the lenses going to include built-in AirTags so people can locate them?

So how do you propose you make a good experience for people who need prescription glasses?

I don’t have a proposal. I’m skeptical of the entire market for this product. I’m taking a wait-and-see approach and I’m looking forward to reading one-year followups from early adopters.

Heck, I’m even skeptical of the iPad. I own one and I use it so seldomly that I have to charge the thing up from 0 every time I use it. But I recognize that a lot of people love them as consumption devices and a few as creation tools for some niche purposes, such as digital painting.

I suck at optics, and optics is a hard topic, so I say it will full humility: I’m always surprised that headset manufacturer can’t correct for most of these vision issues in software.

i don't think that is at all possible.

I think you'd need to be able to control the direction of each photon coming out of the screen, so that it landed in the intended place on the retina after going through the misshapen cornea/lens. That's basically what a corrective lens does. Doing it dynamically for each thing we call a pixel indeed sounds like science fiction.

you could do it with lasers, using lasers to draw directly on the retina. I don't think there would be any way to do this with a pixelarray type screen.. maybe if you could map each pixel to a point on your retina and then modify the rendering .. maybe. the concept reminds me of a generative art piece that Kyle McDonald built: https://www.fastcompany.com/90167836/disco-meets-computer-vi...

Essentially pile up a bunch of mirrorballs. Point projectors at it. Then map where each pixel from each projector ends up on the walls/ceiling/floors.

And my sons bought their own PS4s because they wanted to play online games against each other at the same time and not have to share it.

I think it is just a weird coincidence, but in this thread price and share-ability seem to be negatively correlated.

Consoles, AppleTV, and iPads are at the lower end of the price range here, right? (Well, you can get an expensive iPad of course).

Laptop are expensive but personal, phones… definitely personal, tend to be a little more expensive maybe?

I dunno, it isn’t a straight line correlation but I don’t think the fact that the Vision Pro is expensive tells us much.

In have a Rift CV1, I enjoyed showing it off to people and got some party-game type things (Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes is great for showing the device off). But I don’t use it much solo, and I’ve shown it off to all my friends already, so I don’t use it much. Don’t get me wrong, it was fun, but it hasn’t integrated into my daily life.

If I were Apple—word of mouth is good, but I’d hope the Vision Pro becomes something that sort of gets embedded in people’s lives to the point where they don’t care to show it off (either because it becomes personal like a laptop, or because it becomes boring like a monitor).

I agree. I’m much more likely to allow someone to borrow a $329 low end iPad than my $1300 iPhone 12 Pro Max.

Your comment is greyed out as if it was downvoted a bit, which seems quite bizarre to me.

I think we’re pretty clearly talking about a small number of contrary data points, here? I’m not trying to prove a general trend at least, just point out that we should at least double check the assumption that expensive implies shared.

If someone is really invested in that idea I’d love to see an argument for it, rather than silent downvotes.

I haven't downvoted but your first post point out that it's negatively correlated. It seems to non correlated. An example is a car shared by family.

I know plenty of middle class parents who bought their teenagers an old beater because they didn’t want them driving the car they needed to get to work or their expensive car.

Wrecking your first car is almost a teenage rite of package.

Again we are talking about people who are willing to spend $3500 on a headset. Not exactly the demographic of people who are “sharing a family car” and that don’t statistically have separate cars for the parents and don’t either buy their kids a car or subsidize them in some way to help them buy their own.

I know I never let either one of my sons drive my car alone and I bought myself a new car and handed my older one down to my older son and bought my younger son a car before he had a license.

Eh, you have a point. I am not exactly keen on sharing my Valve Index with people because hygiene is important to me. My wife can use it if she wants to.

However, we're talking about a 3500 US dollar (without tax) device and a novelty. Of course people are going to share it if they can.

The iPhone was basically sold by owners showing future owners the pinch zoom and making them try for themselves.

I'm in the camp that sees ipads and phones as personal, non-shared devices, but you are hitting the nail on the head here.

Ipads are regularly shared in families and vision pro is more expensive than a top range tv which is shared in households. It's a hard sell if if can't be adapted to be used by multiple family members at its price point.

It’s pretty reasonable to share iPads and Macs between people, especially people who can’t afford individual devices for everyone separately. If I bought a VR headset for $3500 anyone being able to use it would be extremely useful

What’s the overlap of people who can’t afford multiple $330 low end iPads and people willing to spend $3500 on a headset?

They do sell more expensive iPads. Not exactly unreasonable to want to share a $1000+ nice iPad Pro among a few people rather than buy multiple bottom tier devices.

I’m not letting any kids borrow a $1000+ iPad Pro.

Who said kids?

Yes, it’s indeed very common to share iPad with kids and to have a laptop shared amongst family members. That’s why users exist and were such a hugely requested features of iPadOS (something Apple actually took ages to acknowledge because well, Apple).

Apple doesn't want to share even for iPad, as they don't implement multi user feature (except educational usage). I expect that it's same for Vision Pro, and it seems to natural for me. (I argue iPad should support multi user or guest)

You can. The Vision Pro supports a primary user that retains settings/user account/AppleID and a secondary user with gets a “guest” account that resets.

How does that work if everyone in your family requires different prescription lenses?

Based on how these work on many existing VR headsets including Quest 2, these are just insets that you can just take out. Probably held magnetically as well.

Interesting - where did you read/see this?

As described during the keynote, they’re magnetically held in place. You would need one set per user.

As someone that wears glasses with VR, it’s awful. The light gasket presses against them, gets tangled. The band presses against them. I can see why they didn’t bother making it an option, since I often put my headset away because of the discomfort. This is why the quest pro has optional light blockers, and why I never use mine. Leaving enough room for comfortably wearing glasses would make things huge.