The first iphone didn’t have copy/paste.
Apple will always prioritize critical scenarios over nice to have. None of these things are technically difficult, it’s just time. I’m willing to believe they released too early, but at some point you have to start learning from real users.
What fools Apple engineering management must be, then!
Compositor work isn't tremendously hard when the graphics primitives are already done.
UI state handling and input is a majority of the work from there. I've implemented this work before. A large portion of my background is in compositors and UI primitives.
What's really cool about having window backing layer handles, is you can do all sorts of crazy fun stuff in the office and show off to your coworkers or tech demo that basically will never make it to production because it's totally impractical.
The best example of that which actually did end up in a final product in my opinion was Windows Flip 3D. Totally fun implementation, I'm sure.
Try it with a full suite of Mac Apps and you’ll find it falls apart because they aren’t all well behaved.
You are making this sound much more complicated than it really is.
The trivial case is simple. You are imagining it's all the trivial case.
Remember the original comment was the claim that Xorg could easily do remote windows years ago. This is only true using the low performance path that modern operating systems have universally rejected.
In fact, there's already a project for it on GitHub. https://github.com/saagarjha/Ensemble
480 lines total, including comments, headers, whole shebang.
It's all of the edge cases and UX refinements that takes time.
- [Profit on basic innovation] Did they want to wait and see how their customers would adopt VisionOS's native free-floating windows, so as to avoid cognitive overload by commingling with MacOS windows?
- [Benevolence to fellow competitors] Did they not want to takeover the existing market of virtualized VR desktops?
The Vision Pro is effectively using AirPlay to mirror the whole screen. If you used AirPlay to mirror each window as a whole screen, you'd run out of bandwidth pretty quickly.
The windowing system in MacOS, Quartz Compositor, also isn't built to stream window information. Right now it has a big built in assumption that any windows its displaying are on a screen it also controls. It was probably too big a lift across teams to also re-write the graphics stack for MacOS for the launch of the Vision Pro. Hopefully they get it working in the future, but neither of these problems are easy to solve.
Literally nobody has done it. It's beyond ridiculous that you can't already show or duplicate an application window on any display you want and allow it to be controlled from anywhere it is visible.
Searching for ways to do this lead one into extremely niche software ecosystems. Please is there any collaboration app out there that makes it seamless to toss windows around like everyone actually wants?
This would mean the goggles would be basically just a dumb display for the Mac. It would also be weird to try to move an AR app onto your Mac.
Even classic Mac OS, which wasn’t designed to be “rootless” could be run that way could have its windows mixed with OS X windows in the classic days.
As others have pointed out, there is already a PoC app that is doing it, so it seems if Apple wants to, it’s completely in their power. However, does this match their vision? (pun intended) Time will tell.
They just haven’t done it.