As far as viewing with other people, this doesn’t seem like an insurmountable challenge. They have the theaters, they have Personas, they have spacial audio, and other Apple devices have features for watching content together with friends. Put them all together and it seems like if several friends had Vision Pro they could feel like they were sitting in a theater room together while watching a movie. I’m not saying this will be easy, but it seems like all the building blocks are there. The Personas are probably the big weak point, especially looking at someone next to you, but with the focus on the movie, I that’s probably the least important part.

It really isn't though, at least not for long, as of mid 2023 there are publicly showcased compact lightweight prototypes with 240° FoV.

Exactly. You know what is the best "goggle" type display I ever saw (and I tried quite a few)? Recent FPV goggles (hdzero) that have 1930*1080 OLED displays at approximately 46 degrees fov. I'm very glad the manufacturer decided to use the his low fov instead of increasing it to 55deg and more like others. The picture is insanely crisp, and looks better than looking at a 4k display. Another huge benefit is that entire picture fits within your "focus cone" so there is no need to gaze around. It is not a VR display, it's purpose is different, but it shows us what visual quality is possible.

I'd love if manufacturers, if they can't make 16k displays that fill the entire fov, create variable pixel density displays. Best quality in the center. Deteriorating towards the edges. That would be much cheaper, but then for good illusion one would need eye tracking and motorised optics which would probably be more expensive in the end...

Oh, well, I'm pretty happy with my fpv goggles (for fpv) I just wish there was a way for them to display different picture for each eye. They already have head tracking, I wonder what VR would be like with this huge ppi narrow fov goggles. Would it be more or less immersive?

It's perfectly doable, but there's still a hint of fuzziness and we're still a couple generations away from crisp LCD text.

I care about my eyes, so I use a 4k screen at 2x scaling for coding, and will not use the Quest 3 for work, unless that involves playing games and watching videos.

We can't see what's in our peripheral vision clearly, so they should be able to get away with most of the FoV being blocky af, shouldn't they?

This can also be achieved with 3rd party apps. On Quest, this is already a reality with Big Screen.

Apple can do amazing things, but they do also fairly regularly make terrible things.

It really lends itself to the phone being a tool, rather than a device for endless entertainment. It also suggests it is an accessory, with the desktop/laptop being the home base, rather than the phone being a primary device.

It really bothers me that the phone is now at the center of the ecosystem. It seems like the hub should be something that isn't as vulnerable (to theft, loss, or drops) as a phone.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

It's a gimmick priced as 2.5 monitor stands.

0.85*0.85 => 0.73

Other combinations of distances and virtual sizes can be calculated in the same manner.

My work setup as a 43” monitor set about 1 arm’s length away. I can just touch it when my fingertip if I stretch slightly. In a virtual space, I’d probably go slightly larger, maybe 45-48”, pushed a little further back.

But then, you usually don't buy a 4k screen because you can perceive the individual pixels either, unless you are creating content that requires that.

I suspect it aligns easier with the quality concerns of reality and not with virtual components - if I can use a monitor through the screen with no noticeable loss of quality or additional eye strain, there's no reason to think a virtualized monitor won't be at least as good.

A screenshot would be blurry because of the foveated rendering

The device doesn't even have a power button

Not having buttons obviously doesn't prevent there being a screenshot function, just as lack of screenshot button on iPhone hasn't prevented it from taking screenshots, and just as the VP's lack of buttons doesn't prevent users from interacting with it at all...

- gigantic (virtual) screens showing your photos/videos in a spectacular way

AND

- a incredibly small, light, comfortable, and almost unnoticeable (e.g. glasses) headset

then, yes people will absolutely use that instead of actual photos printed on paper.

Obviously we're not there yet.

While I wouldn’t move back just to go into the office, I absolutely miss the ability to look at a specific person while talking in meetings, and for other to have the context about who you’re looking at with head turning or gestures etc…

In a Teams group chat, I’m always talking to the whole wall of faces essentially. Only by context of the conversation can you figure out who someone is talking to, and even then their webcam might be off center or on a separate monitor from where they’re looking and you don’t even pretend to make eye contact. There is no way to break out into an isolated side conversation or select your gaze and there’s a lot of value there.

There’s also the concept of sharing a virtual room with a person I’m collaborating with. Drawing on a whiteboard, walking around pointing at things on the monitor and such. The feeling of a shared physical space is powerful for collaboration.

Anyways, what I’m trying to say is this: The thought of replacing all human interaction with tech is of course depressing, but I don’t view this like that. This is technology that can meet people where they are and improve an existing experience. I’m not moving away from my family, esp. as my parents get older, and I will remain working remotely for the company because I very much enjoy what I work on, my team, and the way the company treats me.

This tech is a step towards making the shortcomings of remote work less impactful. It’s stupid expensive and the first iteration so it’ll have problems, but I’m much more excited by Apple’s approach to this than Facebook’s nonsense. Excited to see where it develops and how it’s adopted as it becomes cheaper.

This has always been the case and this technology has been around for a while. I'm surprised Apple would have chosen to use it for user input.

one reviewer said they kept hitting "No" and "cancel" when they meant "Yes" because their natural progression was to look at the buttons in order, pick out the one they want to press but actually click it after they finish scanning all of them with their "mouse" paused on the one they want to hit. It's kind of fascinating that the VisionPro's input method works so well when it does work that it tricks people into doing this, because they really do just expect it to work like magic.

The problem is the Vision OS has no cursor. Cursor position is critical. Your eyes move around a lot more than your cursor moves, but in Vision OS, cursor position and eye position are the same. Very annoying. Maybe they could put a little cursor in the center of the screen that you could move around with another gesture.

Everything you've said is reminiscent of the reviews of the first iPhone.

Eventually the Moto X came along. I thought it was the perfect phone. Its voice assist features worked better than most voice assist features even today. You could easily do everything you wanted to do with the phone in your pocket and your earbuds in.

It had the perfect size screen. It had a great ambient-on watch-face screen that looked nice sitting on your desk among clutter. The dimple in the back was a really nice touch, it made it like a worry-stone[0] in your pocket. It had a lower resolution, but I kinda liked that about it. I think Motorola was bought or something, but whatever the reason, the next phone in the series ditched everything single thing that made the Moto X special.

Those two devices were both my favorite mobile computing devices, and probably the closest I've come to getting fan-angry about a company screwing up their own magic.

More to the point: you might have been able to see it at Motorola, but even looking back, I don't understand why Razr couldn't have won against the iPhone. The Razr was a surprisingly capable little machine!

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worry_stone

I wouldn't call Motorola a failed acquisition - Google bought Motorola as a shield in an increasingly litigious environment: this was the age of Apple going "thermonuclear", Microsoft and patent trolls were wantonly shaking down Android vendors, and beginning to circle Google itself.

Motorola (under Google) had the best value-for-money smartphones - their midrange was solid, and reasonably priced while everyone else was continuously shifting to flagships, with each release priced higher than the last.

From the outside looking in, Google appeared to dispose Motorola to make Samsung happy - Samsung had been complaining loudly and widely about the Motorola acquisition, and openly flirted with other mobile platforms as a hedge.

Motorola shareholders got paid, Google got the patents it wanted, Samsung remained the 600 lb gorilla in Androidland, Lenovo got a good brand and keeps making ok phones to this day. So, not a failed acquisition by any reasonable measure

Google was searching desperately for revenue diversity and was acquiring pretty hard at the time. I think the intent with Moto was to acquire a hardware shop and establish a market leading brand to compete directly with Apple. They eventually arrived at Pixel by building it entirely in-house. That Moto got raided for IP and spun out to Lenovo did not meet those (high) expectations. There was no need for anyone to take a loss but I think Google wanted to make a whole lot of money and did not.

1. It was a crazy time. The winning consortium - which included Apple and Microsoft - invited Google to join their $4.5B bid; which would have made the patents entirely useless as a defense of Google against Apple or Microsoft. Google wisely declined, but bought Motorola less than a year later for $12B. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jul/02/google-pi...

Source: I was supposed to run the dogfood program in the NYC office. I never got the watches, but somewhere I still have the USB extension cords and the (then quite fancy) chargers with dual USB ports, one for your phone and one for the watch.

And they still do under Lenovo. Multiple-day battery, almost stock Android with very useful enhancements.

I was hopeful for the post-acquisition Motorola but it didn't quite pan out. The IP salvaged from the purchase was always a big part of the deal so it wasn't really a loss, just not really much of a win either.

I have an iPhone mini now, but it's still not small enough to 100% operate one-handed, at least not without grip adjustments. The Moto X wasn't quite a flagship phone, but it came close enough. I can't even find a properly one-handed phone anymore

Apple certainly wasn't the first smartwatch, but anyone who owned one before that was obviously a geek (said lovingly). Apple made the first mainstream acceptable smartwatch by smoothing over a lot of the complaints about their competitors, while adding some of their own in the process, just like the Vision Pro. It took a few iterations, but today people from all walks of life wear smartwatches. Certainly not as ubiquitous as smartphones, but Apple made smartwatches a standard piece of tech that millions of people own and they made plenty of money along the way.

The Vision Pro will probably be similar. For example, anyone wearing a VR/AR headset on a plane today would likely get stares. I bet a few years from now there will be several people on every plane wearing one of these. That doesn't mean Apple will make the best VR/AR headset or that VR/AR headsets will be a piece of tech that everyone owns, but Apple is capable of mainstreaming a piece of technology in ways that the Facebooks and Googles of the world aren't even if that is due to their marketing prowess and the strength of their brand just as much as their technical expertise. And in that sense, the thing that is more important than any of these reviews dropping today is the Super Bowl commercial Apple has almost assuredly bought to show this thing off in two weeks.

I remember a friend talking about load balancers when they were first came on the market 20 years ago. Cisco had this thing called "localdirector" which I believe couldn't handle load in the first place, while competitors did load balancing in hardware.

I was puzzled why people bought them.

My friend said, "Look, people buy $1M of cisco equipment, and they can just add a line item for one or 10 of these with no friction"

So, I think Apple made their watch a "line item". People buy a phone, and they need cables and the watch is sitting there, and they say "ok!" and try one.

(aside, I love my garmin watch. I just put it on my wrist. I haven't hooked it to my phone or connected it to the internet. It is great with battery life. I track my sleep, which seems to be when most people put their apple watch on a charger. I put my watch on the charger during my shower, which is all it needs)

Same as the Apple Watch.

...to top it up to 7 days of charge

Really? Why do Apple fanboys make these kinda claims.. same as wireless Bluetooth pods, or fingerprint readers, or faceID. There are ample examples of these done well on the hardware side prior. The main advantage Apple has is its seamless integration with software, which of course it pairs well with iOS because nothing else is allowed to.

Their problem was that none of the features was _usable_. It was like they released the first MVP the engineering team got done and forgot that people needed to use it too. But it gave them a bonus and another line on spec sheet, so all was good.

For example Nokia had Copy & Paste years before Apple. But it was shit. They _had_ it, but you could copy very specific text bits to other very specific locations. Even Android had the same issue, you could copy some bits not others.

Apple isn't innovating, they haven't for a long time. They rarely come up with something "new" that _nobody_ has done yet.

What they are pretty much the best at is getting the tech everyone else has tried and packaging it to a usable form factor for the normal non-Hackernews consumer.

Wireless BT headphones existed before the Airpods, but they made it so seamless even my mom could do it and hasn't needed any help with them. Open box, insert in ear, done.

To be fair iOS copy and paste is still shit today, selecting and copying/pasting is really one of the worst experiences on iOS.

My point was more about the fact that you can copy an image in most apps and paste it to pretty much any field anywhere. It'll just work. Same with other rich data.

You couldn't do that with any previous C&P implementations, there were hard limits on what you could copy and where it could be pasted.

They weren't the first smartwatch, but Apple is the company most responsibly for changing arbitrary societal metrics of "mainstream acceptance" like the percentage of people who would wear a smartwatch on a first date. That seems like an obvious observation and a "win" even if smartwatches aren't as ubiquitous as smartphones. I think the Vision Pro will follow a similar trajectory of success in that it will take years before anyone uses that word "success", but a few years from now you'll get on a plane and notice more than a few people wearing headsets and that will be because of Apple.

We'll adjust.

IF they manage to produce some AR device that 1) you almost won't notice you are wearing 2) it has pass-through light capabilities so being real AR and not VR mimicking AR, THEN it can get mass-adoption, at least for office workers or to replace big TV screens.

first apple watch was afailure and immediately fixed by the watch 2

>Apple made the first mainstream acceptable smartwatch by smoothing over a lot of the complaints about their competitors,

if anything apple set back smart watch development, the real groundbreaker was Pebble, but thanks to apple the smart wtach market is a stagnant perpetual compromise to justify low battery life with overpowered chips and bright screens, when all we really want is week-long batteries, e-ink always on displays, and physical buttons to work well.

i say this as an owner of at least 2 apple watches over the years. pebble never had a chance, but android's watch software has always suffered on trying to play apple's game instead of finding a true advantage

It's entering a crowded market that isn't even that big. As the premium option.

Climbing that hill is going to be a very tall order.

Apple's brand will not be a moat, either.

Zuck's initial response to Vision Pro [1] was the correct one.

> From what I’ve seen initially, I’d say the good news is that there’s no kind of magical solutions that they have to any of the constraints on laws of physics that our teams haven’t already explored and thought of. They went with a higher resolution display, and between that and all the technology they put in there to power it, it costs seven times more and now requires so much energy that now you need a battery and a wire attached to it to use it. They made that design trade-off and it might make sense for the cases that they’re going for.

> But look, I think that their announcement really showcases the difference in the values and the vision that our companies bring to this in a way that I think is really important. We innovate to make sure that our products are as accessible and affordable to everyone as possible, and that is a core part of what we do. And we have sold tens of millions of Quests.

[1] https://www.roadtovr.com/apple-vision-pro-zuckerberg-reactio...

That said, I don't think this will be an easy market for anyone. It's low attachment, low critical app.

I want to believe.

Iphone 1 was a collosal PoC. Slow, most of web didnt work. Its only appeal was the full touchscreen, which of course sucked to type on, but looked cool (which is the reason people bought it mostly). Everyone that needed mobile compute functionality was still on Blackberry and some other devices.

There was a time during early 2010s where the iphone was better than everything else due to native hardware and in house software and updated functionality. However by 2016 Android caught up, and since the first Pixel came out it pretty much has been ahead ever since.

I remember the first time I saw an iPhone. It was 2am at a house party with a bunch of 19-25 year olds. Pretty much everyone stopped drinking or dancing and played with this dudes phone for three hours.

and motion controls. Between the Nintendo Wii and the first iPhone people were obsessed with motion controls for some reason.

Given what was available at that time (I was using a Windows Mobile O2 XDA AND a Blackberry at that time), the iPhone was simply magical. The ability to browse the full web on the go and a proper mail client, was amazing.

Worth the money to travel to San Francisco from Singapore just to get one (and the cost of the AT&T SIM masker to spoof it on the local Singapore telco network)

As for email. Proper email client? It was pop3 only, and you had to manually tap to fetch new messages.

The internet on anything mobile was pretty painful when it launched in general. Websites weren't optimized for mobile, mobile data was unusably slow. Most people who wanted portability were using things like netbooks, which you could actually multitask on.

Blackberry was the goto for actual phone because it was much easier to type on due to the best keyboard at the time, well developed software for things like email, basic browser, e.t.c.

Ill leave you with this staplepiece of internet history: https://maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=iphone/

Iphone 1 set the stage for tech jewelry.

I could've sworn that "it's easy to type on" was the one weird trick it did right? Though perhaps I'm just misremembering the media; my first iOS device of any kind was the iPod touch with retina display.

Something about Apple having a temporary monopoly (or possibly monopsony) on capacitive touch screens, where everyone else was stuck with resistive ones?

Typing on the original iphone wasn't perfect, but it was generally better than tiny physical keyboards in many cases

There was a whole era of autocorrect and the memes that came with it due to how much it was being used with touchscreen keyboards.

Of course the advantage of a full screen for things like web and media was more important, and making fullscreen phones was cheaper, so physical keyboards died out. The size of the screen increased as well.

It’s not a trope if it’s true. Most hard core nerds didn’t get it until they had tried it hands on (including myself, I panned the device hard until I tried it). Then it was the exorbitant price point ($650 at a time when nobody really paid for phones). Then it was the lack of hardware keyboard. No “real” apps. No copy and paste (even my older at the time Symbian S60 devices had that). The list goes on and on.

I get it, if you were at another phone manufacturer, you might’ve been scared, but the reality is the iPhone didn’t really pick up steam in the market until 3G or 3GS.

AR though, that's something the public hasn't shown much interest in yet. These products are looking more like the Segway (which was once supposedly going to revolutionize transportation) - cool, popular in a few niche markets, but not the revolution that people imagine them to be.

People also forget that using a stylus with a touchscreen made it a pretty crappy phone, and they weren't ergonomic to hold up to your face with a lot of the larger PDA-like ones. The Windows devices with sliding keyboards were pretty decent as a compromise in terms of size and features though. But boy were they expensive in the UK at the time as they were generally imports from the USA.

Back in 2010 there were rumours of Apple building TVs and cars. Those would be weird because they're in areas where Apple had no experience and no software content to provide.

I used to go back and forth to Shenzhen all the time trading refurbs and by 2010 I straight up would not buy anything other than Android devices because 1) iPhone was actually more expensive in mainland China due to it being a grey market item back then and 2) demand for everything else fell off a cliff.

As someone who bought the original iPhone, it was extremely impressive, but had many many flaws. The browser was practically unusable over 2g and the whole pinch to zoom the New York Times desktop site was never actually practical.

I think the parallels are clear.

I also bought the original MacBook Air. Now that truly was terrible and stupidly overpriced. More expensive than the Vision Pro when adjusted for inflation, and with major functional problems. Today it’s the world’s most popular laptop.

These googles are as bespoke as it gets, are priced at 7x the competition and more than a flagship laptop, steer clear of the most popular existing use case, which is games, and offers... what exactly again?

That's quite some difference.

Neither of these statements is remotely true.

Not even remotely.

Anyway, I bring that up because when the iphone came out, it really did do something different than the locked-in feature phones of the time; I did have to look it up to refresh my memory (https://www.cnet.com/pictures/original-apple-iphone-competit...), but its competition in that year was a lot of Blackberry-style physical keyboard and resistive touch screens running Windows Mobile. I do want to highlight the LG Prada, the first capacitive touch screen smartphone - came out in the same year the iPhone was announced, and it along with the HTC Touch on that page had a similar screen focused form factor.

Nothing on Vision Pro is comparable to things like Beatsaber, VR Chat, Pavlov.

Hard to tell if the hand tracking could handle those sort of experiences currently.

“marvelous display, great hand and eye tracking, and works seamlessly in the ecosystem, … The Apple Vision Pro is the best consumer headset anyone's ever made”

Yes, they also list a bunch of flaws. But the people trying to make out that the reviews are saying it’s a shittier oculus quest are not being honest.

I had an HTC touch when iPhone came out and I was most envious that you could do two finger zooming in Google maps instead of tapping zoom buttons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistive_touchscreen

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#Capacitive_touchsc...

But I agree, Apple is absolutely good at taking all this tech at the right time and making a compelling product. Steve insisted on glass/capacitive and that is just the best choice. Also, the UI didn’t feel like a layer (that you could easily get out off) as with touchflow. I’m also an iPhone user atm. Switched from Android about 3 years ago. The whole experience feels like higher quality to me still now. Although I have friends that would argue against that.

If we weren't busy with Symbian vs Linux internal feuds, and the Microsoft deal, things would have turned out much differently.

The first iPhone, yeah, it had some detractors, but I don't think the kinds of criticisms the parent poster gave ever really applied to the iPhone. To succeed, the iPhone didn't have to be this utopian product; it just had to be more useful than its main competitor, which was dumbphones. People who complained that it was missing features the Blackberry had were working from an unstated major premise that the iPhone was initially targeted at enterprise users, and I think that everyone who wasn't too busy being a pundit to see how the world works could see that that quite transparently wasn't the case. There was even a time period where I had both an iPhone for personal use and a Blackberry for work.

And I think the criticism about entertainment is spot-on. By contrast, despite being extraordinarily limited compared to even the very next modal, the first iPhone was fantastic for entertainment, precisely because it was good for fostering shared experiences. It didn't take long after the device came out before you'd see groups of people clustered around an iPhone, looking at photos together on that big, vibrant, gorgeous screen. That was something that none of its competitors could do. And you better bet that people saw that happening and started wanting to have one of their own so they could have fun, too.

I do think we're still in the "wait and see" phase for this product, but, unlike some of the original iPhone criticisms or cmdrtaco's original dismissal of the iPod, the criticisms this article points out feel really personally relevant to me.

- incredible amounts of hype

- loving the design

- loving the touchscreen and input (directly contrasting folks worrying about the eye tracking now)

- a sense (at least from cnet and pcmag) that it's really just an overgrown iPod so they keep comparing it to an iPod (compared to the vision where folks get that it's a new category for apple and have good comps outside anyway )

There are definitely similarities in terms of complaining about missing features that apple's probably going to add soon anyway (keyboard showing up in portrait and stuff). Lots of complaints about not supporting flash but we know how that went. Also apparently the headphone jack position was annoying.

What I'm not seeing in the current vision reviews - and maybe it's impossible to see this in real time - is some feature that has the chance to change literally everything that people arent able to comprehend just yet. These reviews being relatively dismissive of this web browsing on your phone thing is absolutely hilarious in hindsight. The only similar thing in the vision is - the passthrough eye thing maybe? Nothing else seems particularly baffling.

I'm glad I read some of those reviews. The vibe I'm getting is - the iPhone was doing something fundamentally weird with this whole smartphone thing that reviewers just didnt get, so they kept reviewing it as an iPod with really bad voice calling and a browser and being confused by all the hype. The vision though? It's a vr/mixed reality headset, we know what those are like, and apple didn't throw any real curveballs.

Like seriously idk what people want from those reviewers. If they were 'accurately' predicting an outlier product like the iphone I doubt their wild fantasies would be accurately predicting much else

https://slashdot.org

I wonder what new site, and what new euphemism, will replace the "hug of death" and "the orange site" in 2044?

(Hopefully not robots that go around actually hugging people to death…)

I let the next guy explain what a mailing list was.

I do think future generations of AVP will do well. Iterating and applying learnings and customer feedback will make this a good product.

So, I don't know if I agree with this considering Apple has such a large cash cushion. They can easily make missteps the first few generations until they figure it out.

Early Apple Watches focused on luxury and personal communication with loved ones. But later iterations de-emphasized all that and pivoted to being a health and fitness band and some subset of iPhone features like cellular phone calls and texts (instead of the weird heartbeat sharing stuff we saw at launch of the 1st gen device)

The trick was to just buy the smartphone outside of the plan. Then you get unlimited data at half the price. I'd pull gigs of data a month on my "dumbphone".

In general, UX design is the argument people used to (and still do sometimes) run to "prove" that the device was better when it was clearly not. Fancy icons dont make a good UX, functionality does. You dont say copy and paste is good UX, you say its a feature.

Not sure how people don't remember what a revelation the capacitive screen was. It was miles better than most Nokia phones that mostly used resistive screens (not saying that Apple invented capacitive screens but they most certainly made it popular) and the navigation with the simple home button and everything else being instant feedback with the buttons on the screen was better than anything else on the market from what I remember. The keyboard especially was incredible with that light tapping sound and instant keystrokes appearing. While it wasn't functionally better than most phones (famously less functional than a Blackberry), it was very much the leader of the pack in details that ACTUALLY contribute to good UX. Just as the iPod and the clicker wheel was ahead with the instant feedback and usability of rotating the wheel to scroll at high speeds through hundreds of songs

When iPhone came out, the mobile internet was so shit and screen was very low res, so the benefit of having a full touchscreen was minimal (mostly being able to select things directly, but that was a very small advantage). Mobile web wasn't a thing. You had to have wifi for any real speed. And if you had wifi, you were likely in a building where you could sit down, and there were things like netbooks and mobile pcs that were just better than the iPhone for doing web stuff. Even people with iPhones still mainly used them as iPods and phones before 3g cellular.

The keyboard on Blackberries was in fact better UX because it was easier to use and faster to type on, without any delay in appearance. The on screen keyboards were all shit until swipe typing became defacto standard.

And then you look at the drawbacks, like no removable battery, no microsd expansion, no shit proprietary cables that would break, no copy/paste, e.t.c, all of them absolutely make the UX horrible.

Apple didn’t fix any of them.

I never heard this complain before. Can you explain more?

VR avoids this since they just make up their own designed world instead, while most AR glasses avoid this by having actual transparent glasses and reflecting images off them instead. The Vision Pro is more ambitious and tries to pull off both AR and VR, resulting in these compromises.

Completely untrue. The original iPhone required a 2-year contract with AT&T/Cingular. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(1st_generation)#Releas...

The contract issue had more to do with how the phone interacted with the network. IIRC, AT&T was an exclusive provider because of the backend requirements (visual voicemail notification maybe?). I assume the contract was in part because they wanted to recoup those expenses.

Here’s a news article from the time that says that AT&T didn’t actually start subsidizing the phone until the 3G arrived.

https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/wireless/phones/2008-07...

Also, the subsidy might have been from Apple, if anyone… Apple got a kickback of $10/month per iPhone user. They might have used that to keep the price lower, but that wasn’t from ATT’s side of the account until the 3G followup.

https://www.wired.com/2008/01/ff-iphone/

The original parent post claimed that it did and implied that this was the reason why it was so successful. They also implied that the new Vision Pro would need similar subsidies to be successful.

I’m not quite sure the killer feature is there yet for VR headsets. But if the usability is better for the Vision Pro than the Quest, et al., it could still be successful, regardless of the cost.

That's completely untrue. The original iPhone DID NOT require a 2 year contract, you could absolutely buy it on a prepaid plan. Yeah, you had to "fail" the credit check to get offered the prepaid plans, but all you had to do was put "999-99-9999" as your SSN in the activation screens to get them.

Also it was a totally stand out appealing device accessible to everyone with immediate value to everyday people.

This however is coming after a decade of existing AR/VR consumer electronics and still misses the mark

... no?

Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Palm, Nokia, Symbian, Maemo?

They're just a consumer goods company. Sometimes they make good things people don't appreciate at first. Sometimes they make bad things that people don't appreciate ever.

Their track record is better than the mean, but comparing every criticism of a first-gen Apple product to the iPod/iPhone launches is unserious. Of course some people panned any given new thing on Earth.

And this isn't even in response to someone predicting that AVP would fail, but just that the 1st-gen AVP is an immature product. The 1st-gen iPhone was an immature product! It's delusional (and discrediting to Apple!) to think the iPod, iPhone, OS X, Intel Macs, M1 Macs, etc. were as mature at launch as the later iterations we associate those technologies with now.

Whatever, it at least gives a startup an opportunity to build something unique - it's just sad to see your old friend start going senile.

Most of Apple offerings are good:

Watch

iPad

Mac

iPhone

services

Are they really expecting this to just be a hard problem initially that they get better at over time? When is the last time they launched a "so so" product?

[edit]

Looks like I pissed in someone’s cereal. Didn’t mean to, but different strokes, and all that…

I was just recounting actual personal experience, which, I suppose, isn’t popular, hereabouts.

Just for context, I have been writing Apple programs, since 1986. I am totally committed to their products, and their vision (although I have no opinion, –yet– on their Vision), and have every right to be critical. Those of us that have been on the ride for that long, have seen a very bumpy road.

Not a great first impression. Also while I can view Apple Maps via a third party like DuckDuckGo, you can only report a map issue through an Apple device, so I guess it's staying wrong.

Still weird either way.

In smaller countries though, it's total rubbish. Samoa, travel guidance is nearly non-existent. Tahiti, very patchy. In those countries, Google Maps was perfect.

However, one bug that is a showstopper in AM is the dreaded “can’t reach the server now”, which I get probably more than half the time I try to use it, and with apparently no solution other than wait.

As a result, I just removed it from my phone.

But it gave me a route where I need to turn left right after taking a right-turn ramp, except that the left turning line are separated by road dividers before the exit of the ramp. So I would need to either go wrong direction and do a 180, or bulldoze the dividers. As a comparison, Google Map never gave me that route in the past.

This happened in a moderately sized town so I guess I will still stick to Google Map for now.

Ridiculous.

Gmaps also helped by enshittifying itself.

I don’t see the VisionOS play here and wonder if it’ll be Tim Apple’s first major fail at the helm. There’s no clear set of competitors or established industry for Apple to just polish like they have with most products. There’s not an obvious large tam for VR headsets and I’m skeptical optical ar is close. I don’t get it but I’m sure the internal Apple and board view it as a strong thesis.

Still glad it’s this and not a car.

Looking forward to how it plays out.

* A pub that doesn't exist - there is one about 15 miles with that name, but there's never been one called that here.

* The local church is in the wrong place

* The opening hours of the local cafe are wrong (11:30-3:30 instead of 10:00-3:00)

* Business names aren't correct

Generally, if you are in a city it is fine, but don't use it if you are rural.

The first Watch was awful. I love my Series 8.

Don't get me started on the first Mac...

You have to put it in context with what passed for a smart phone back then. No web browser (they sort of existed but were extremely cut down and not really usable), small screens with limited software, very limited connectivity that was very expensive.

A valid criticism was the lack of physical keyboard, which phone-jockies found a deal breaker, but in all other ways a phone with decent apps, a large screen, a real web browser designed around and provided with unlimited internet connectivity was always going to be a hit.

It wasn't even that expensive compared to other phones.

I am sure someone with quibble that some other product technically had something similar first, and they are probably right. But the iPhone demo was the first time I had seen anything quite like it.

Turning on a light bulb, ordinary light in the house, meh, ok, then swipe your hands out over the counter and the recipe pulls up. That's the 'oh wow' moment. Then grab and throw a song to a Homepod connection. You know what I mean...

There's a gap someone can shoot, maybe 3 years tops. Honestly though, the developer ecosystem is just so tight, continuity so powerful, doing this solo requires more than what the whole MFi program offers.

At the time my feature phone had much better MMS, video calling, and J2ME apps. The first iPhone was a joke by comparison looked at through that lens, and detractors generally were looking at the fact it was this hobbled 2G device missing features that were common in other, cheaper phones. Oh, and the camera was absolute garbage, too.

MMS worked well enough but was/is pretty limited. Video calling existed but postage stamp video at 8 frames per second was not something that anyone wanted to actually use. And don't get me started on J2ME, an ecosystem so vast that Google didn't even bother to include it in Android even though they are both based on Java. Although other phones had better cameras, none took what we would call an acceptable photos today.

What people did use all the time was the browser and only the iPhone had a decent one. That was the only thing that mattered. Heck, the iPhone wasn't even a very good _phone_ and even that didn't matter.

I based my purchase of phones in the early to mid 00s on whether they came with the full Opera Mobile browser.

I could use just about everything online the same as desktop, that didn't rely on flash of course. The screen size was small but surprisingly wasn't a big issue as everything else was a massive improvement.

Oh Nokia 3660, how I loved thee. I actually chose the 3650 and then 3660 because they seemed to be the best smartphones at a standard sized. I just couldn't justify qwerty.

I definitely do not think that opinion was widespread. If anything I think that the biggest discussed shortcoming of the first iPhone was that it was only available on AT&T.

It didn't multitask, even though other pocket computers for a Long Time had at least the appearance of multitasking. It didn't have the ability to install any additional software, even though other pocket computers for a Long Time handled third-party software just fine. It didn't even have a copy/paste function, even though [WTF? Srsly, Apple?].

All of these things were eventually corrected by Apple, but it was pretty awful until they were corrected: For quite some time, the iPhone was just a rather fancy touchscreen music player with telephone and SMS programs tacked on.

(More damning: All of these things were corrected very quickly by third parties via jailbreaks. Some of us were having a ball with first-gen IOS devices very early on in the game, but Apple wasn't any help in getting that accomplished.)

And to take two of your examples, multitasking and 3rd party software, yeah, other pocket computers had them, and they generally sucked hard (see, Windows Mobile). Even the lack of copy/paste - other phones had them, but there was (and honestly still is) considerable debate over how it should be implemented given multitouch was new.

It seems like the Vision Pro 1 has the M2 so that when the Vision, or Vision Air comes out, it will be at least as powerful as the first Pro. And the Pro 2 can have the M3.

But from various PalmOS devices to whatever Android device is in my pocket right now, carrying wired headphones has never been a thing for me for whatever reason.

So as a Google Voice user since it was still called GrandCentral, having Google Voice available on a Wifi-connected touchscreen pocket music player called an iPod Touch was simply never very useful to me: The OG iPod Touch was lousy as a telephone, since it lacked all of the basic parts (like a microphone or an earpiece) that made telephones useful, and SMS was not yet in its heyday back then either.

I got much better use of the service with my dumb phone with T9 text input and transcription of voicemails to SMS, and my dumb phone worked anywhere instead of just where I could find a Wifi network.

Jailbroken, the iPod was an amazing pocket computer with a brilliant display, thin profile, and exceptional responsiveness to touch input, especially with third-party apps and improvements installed. It was fun having a real *nix userland installed on it, and it sure seemed novel to SSH from it.

By default, though? Almost useless except as a music player -- a task that previous iPods did better.

(I mostly used my OG iPod Touch to take offline notes. It did OK at this, but previously-used PalmOS devices did better in terms of input speed and portability of those notes.

Even relatively high-end aftermarket car stereos at the time were afraid of it: "Oh, why sure I can play music with your iPod!

Except.. is that an iPod Touch?"

"shun shun shun")

It had the only truly usable mobile web browser. Windows Mobile's IE was trash, and the browsers on Palm OS, Blackberry and Symbian were laughable. This was the killer app (especially on Wifi, EDGE was not great).

When trying to use the iPhone seriously, at some point it wouldn't receive calls anymore (just silently crash the deamon receiving it, you'd never know if not told by the caller afterwards), drop active calls when battery was too low (single digit), call quality could be horrible, stuff would crash from time to time.

Memory would leak like a sueve from everywhere so rebooting the phone every now and then was good hygiene. It's only after the 3GS that it stabilized, otherwise antennagate would have been just another tuesday IMO.

It was still a stellar device, but not a fully reliable device in any way shape or form.

Compared to all the smartphones of the time, it was a slow toy with no apps and a 2G connection that was completely worthless

It looked nice though, and eventually it got an app store (unnoficially first), and the overall UX was a clear winner (nobody believed touch screens would ever replace blackberry style devices!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_iPhone

> When Apple announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007,[38] it was sold only with AT&T (formerly Cingular) contracts in the United States.[32] After 18 months of negotiations, Steve Jobs reached an agreement with the wireless division of AT&T[39] to be the iPhone's exclusive carrier. Consumers were unable to use any other carrier without unlocking their device.

I don't know how they did it, but "life finds a way" ?

> I didn’t even use my iPhone in the US

So you can't really describe the experience for the several different US carriers which it didn't work on, and thus can't really say it worked on any other network. Verizon was a network it didn't work on, and thus fails the "any other network" standard you set earlier.

It worked on any GSM network. Tmobile for instance. Verizon and Sprint were the exceptions in the US, since they weren’t GSM.

It is not being pedantic to point out someone is saying something massively untrue.

Your comment makes it sound like anyone could just easily take an OG iPhone and run it on any network, but in reality, to US consumers it was only a few smaller networks and only after breaking an expensive contract. See how that's more than just a pedantic difference?

Albeit not from the computer nerds who knew what they were getting, but the general public who thought they were buying a phone on par with the Motorola, Nokia or Panasonic phones in term of reliability.

It was incredible and obviously a game changer.

Also, it took over a year to be able to write apps for it.

JS Web apps were not “apps.”

Before Steve stood on that stage in 2007 and demoed the first iPhone, most people had never even seen 'swipe to scroll'. The first iPhone absolutely kicked the arse of everything else. So what if it was 2G that was how most phones were back then. The only objection anyone could think off (e.g. Ballmer) was that it was expensive.

The first two iPhones weren't as innovative as they make them,just more polished than other symbians with cameras and internet, it took off with apps really in third iteration.

I think visionpro has lots of opportunities in the next iterations, early users will provide feedback this gen.

Yes they were. Multi-touch in particular was a revelation. Making a big screen with one physical button is a simple idea, but making it work well was the hard part that nobody else had figured out.

Those first iPhones were dog slow, sure, but they absolutely defined how smartphones work ever since.

I don’t think this was my experience at all. The first iPhone was always snappy until they started adding random crap everywhere (e.g. by the release of the iPhone 4 the original was near worthless without really old firmware)

Yet we're supposed to give to consider the iphone a revelation because of multi touch. I had the iphone 3g. It was a more polished experience than other phones but that revelation part was just not there. Apps made it big, later.

I swear people treat iPhones like a cult.

It was a full unix OS, not some mobile-specific trash like the others (Symbian, Windows Mobile, Blackberry). Capacitive touch wasn't an invention, but a premium form of touchscreens (most were resistive).

Having nearly 60fps high quality 3d accelerated animations on a phone also contributed to a heavily premium feeling for the software. It enabled things like Inertial Scrolling, which among other things (like first class typography afforded by using OS X, and a fully standards compliant web browser), none of which were "innovations" in the sense of "we came up with this first", but more exceptionally good engineering in service of a great experience.

In almost every way (apart from the "traditional phone metrics" like 2G ironically), the iPhone was a huuuuuge leap forward from the status quo.

It might be true that anyone else could've done it. But nobody else did. It wasn't just luck that Apple did.

The iPhone was the first one that I actually used to take pictures and play music. It wasn’t the first to have those features (and the edge network was super slow), but that polished experience is what made it work. And made it clear to everyone how we would interact with phones for decades to come.

It was a technological inflection point. That’s why it is looked back on the was it is.

There was a "cult," all right. It consisted of people like Steve Ballmer plugging their ears, shutting their eyes, and denying the obvious.

Clunky and sorta useless, but “a new class of device”… eventually

Apart from that, yesterday I just played Pickleball with a guy who used his apple watch to keep score. It was a little odd at times but seemed like a cool use.

All of them! The first version of the iPhone, iPad, iPod, watch, AirPods...

They all had similar reviews. "Seems like a tech preview, not really ready for general use, too expensive", etc.

The idea of 'spatial computing' or a heads up display that augments your vision and gives you eye tracking input to manipulate UIs in your visual field seems clearer superior to looking at little glass displays (meta agrees). If you can project out a future where that hardware becomes better and better it's a pretty powerful interface paradigm.

Eye tracking as an interface for this can get pretty close to telepathy if done well.

I ordered one - it's the sort of thing you really have to play with yourself imo.

The first iPad was ok only because it truly was "just a bigger iPhone". But they didn't really make features that were unique to the iPad and took advantage of its bigger screen for a few versions afterwards.

I would say the main function of an iPod OS is finding what you want to play, not actually playing it.

It was extremely easy if you tagged your mp3s properly.

The first iPad was similarly expensive, thick and underpowered. It wasn't until a couple generations in that it was good.

Btw, don’t forget visionOS 2.0 is just 18 weeks away. (Source: WWDC is every June and every platform gets a version bump, as we saw with watchOS launching in April then getting a 2.0 immediately after at WWDC.)

I've been wondering how much this is part of the context here. He may feel some pressure that he hasn't really launched a new major product category from scratch in all his time as CEO and if this has been running 10 years as a project now, that it would be a blemish on his legacy to not get it out the door before he leaves. Perhaps without him there it would even be binned which would be even more pressure to deliver it.

Contrary to all that he really seems a bit ambivalent about the device himself, having never allowed himself to be seen publicly using it.

As far as I can tell Tim Cook has never pretended to be a product guy. He seems perfectly comfortable being what he is: a ruthless operations guru bent on efficiency. In every profile I’ve ever read he’s not really the one making hard product decisions, and seems content to leave that to others better suited for it.

And I would argue the M-series CPU are pretty major as well.

Wikipedia's citation that the Watch began in 2011 after Steve's death is incorrect. It began in 2010 under Steve's direction after the acquisition of Bob Messerschmidt's Rare Light, which brought hearth rate monitoring tech to Apple. Messerschmidt was assigned a team by Steve. Don't blindly trust Wikipedia, folks...

As for the others I just meant platform products, none of those have their own OS until homeOS later this year. None of them defined new product categories for Apple - for instance the AirPods were an iteration on EarPods, not a new product category. Apple was already shipping a home speaker product before HomePod, which was an iterative product without its own software platform for developers. M-series is iterative tech, not a new product category. The Motorola ROKR wasn't an Apple product. But sure HomePod is perhaps Tim Apple's one original new product category before Vision if the 2006 Apple Hi-Fi counts as a distinct product category.

No one would call the iPhone an existing product just because Apple shipped the iTunes collaboration phone with Motorola.

> Ive began dreaming about an Apple watch just after CEO Steve Jobs’ death in October 2011. He soon brought the idea to Dye and a small group of others in the design studio.

https://www.wired.com/2015/04/the-apple-watch/

Source?

Edit: But since it is still so new, it could not be until WWDC 2025 that visionOS 2.0 gets announced.

it'll be a beta

This is not accurate, FaceTime has Share Play. Any app that leverages it can build a synced entertainment. Example out of the box, Apple TV, Freeform, Apple Music.

I wish the SDK for Share Play was not tied with FaceTime, since it limits you to only people you have their iCloud email or phone number to. Big Screen on Quest was a great app that leveraged the idea of multiple users in the same VR session, based on interest, Quest just lacked the quality.

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/shareplay-watch-liste...

That might not be their primary goal, but the device could appeal to that demographic either way if the other features are appealing enough.

[0] https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4085828-a-record-share...

2. 52% of media viewing in the US is done alone.

I know zero people who have eliminated their TVs for a headset. Apple isn't going to change that.

2. And so the vision pro isn't even viable for 48% of watching. That's a huge percentage, and shows that nobody is getting rid of their TVs for this.

2. Setting it up is as trivial as setting up Zoom

3. You’re still ignoring the fact that the majority of media consumption is done alone. It’s not all or nothing either. People both watch media alone AND in groups depending on the context.

Besides, how would you know the problem isn’t solved if you don’t use a headset yourself?

The reviews haven't mentioned it, but SharePlay [1] is OS-level functionality and the press releases mention using it with movies, music, and games.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10087/

Or maybe it’ll be another homepod

But nope, nothing more interesting came, and OS updates ruined performance so badly that I happily returned it to my employer 2 years later and opted not to buy my own until 2021 (for exercise and notifications only).

I think about all the apps I'm running and switching between on my computer now, using shortcuts and toolbars and docks to arrange, hide, and switch between them. Everyone using multiple apps on visionOS just looks chaotic.

I once had a second portrait monitor next to my ultrawide. I had to get rid of it because it was just too tiring to be constantly turning my head so far to look at it. It didn't work out.

I cannot imagine how uncomfortable it would be if each app needed to be in a different physical space that required turning my head to use. Painful.

At a deeper level it depends a lot on the question of does Apple want this? If they do then all these will be solved over time. But if they actually see MacOS as a legacy integration then they simply aren't going to invest in encouraging people to use it. I'm waiting to see indications on which way they are going to play it.

"Ensemble (formerly MacCast, before the lawyers had something to say about it) bridges windows from your Mac directly into visionOS, letting you move, resize, and interact with them just like you would with any other native app. It's wireless, like Mac Virtual Display, but without the limitations of resolution or working in a flat plane."

And this is a quite hard limitation, since the Mac has to actually render those windows and then stream them to the goggles over radio. So, without quite a bit of magic, you have a limited amount of pixels the Mac can draw and send.

iPod was the size of a beefy wallet, but was good enough.

iPhone was glorified plastic and websites looked like crap, no app store. But hey, it worked well enough.

That said... this isn't accessibly priced and what's the hook? Like if this launched the same time as Pokemon Go or WoW were taking off alongside it it'd get the social momentum all the other options had.

Also it's better than the competition in key was, but differentiable ways...? AR/VR could very well take off but it's not this year.

or, how often do we believe other people are clicking something with out looking at it?

im examining this for myself...hard to feel organic while im actively focusing on it, but i at least glance at my mouse pointer target while traversing the pointer towards the target across my screens

I also started thinking about it reading the reviews, and the main cases to me are:

- checking something before commiting an action: for instance reread the product name before pushing the purchase button. The pointer is already on the button, I keep it there while checking the order, so I just need to click.

- focus switch: pushing another window to the forefront doesn't need a super accurate click. I assume most people eye ball it like me and will click on a emptyish part of the window from the corner of their eye. Same for moving the focus away.

- scroll and type like situation: mostly when using a document on the side while taking notes. My eyes and focus will be primarily on one side (with quick glances on the other), while the mouse/trackpad movement will be on another.

I think we'll discover a lot more instances of this.

assuming that, in the AVP UX, the user could not linger hand-gesture focus on the button then immediately click after verifying whatever info they are reading as they will have to move the eyes up (to read lol) then back down to focus the hand-gesture control back onto the button

timestamp where reviewer discusses this idea

This is a disingenuous argument. Your other points are much more valid than this one. You don’t have a VR headset to interact with other people in the same room. If you want to watch a movie with other people around you, there are many other (cheaper) ways to do that (and Apple can sell you a nice AppleTV to do it).

I don’t know why, but while I feel multiple monitors helps my productivity a lot in Windows and Linux I find myself not caring as much in MacOS as long as the screen is big enough. I think it has to do with my habits around how I use the windowing in each. I tend to teasselate and arrange them in MacOS while I tend to maximize or lock to screed edges in Windows.

Iirc though, there are diminishing returns fairly quickly beyond dual monitors.

Me personally, the sweet spot is three total screens.

I have tried eye tracking as primary input method some years ago in another setting, and I very much did not like the experience.

That's how it works on the Vision Pro. I didn't really feel annoyed by it, but make sure the device is calibrated to your eyes, or the results might not be that great.

I wrote a long comment [1] months ago when the Vision was first announced expressing my skepticism about the use of eye tracking based on my person experience with the tech. At the end I said, "maybe I'm wrong." Turns out I wasn't.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36220097

Is an AR productivity tool really so hard? Apple owns the whole stack here. Nintendo can do Mario Kart AR in your living room with an RC car, but I can't get unlimited AR desktops for software development etc?

What you don't get is Mac windows intermingled with AVP windows, it's just your Mac screen as one window that you can move about. It sounds good though, and there has been a fair amount of movement in screen sharing over the last few macOS releases which suggests more could be coming here (like multi-screen support).

I guess for the Apple ecosystem we've gotta wait for some software updates to make it more useful. Not that I can justify paying my own money for the Vision Pro or Simula One.

[1] https://youtu.be/a3uN7d51Cco?t=16 [2] https://www.vrdesktop.net/

You can't because it's computationally impossible. There is simply no computing device that can render unlimited high-res desktops at 60Hz per eye.

Not to mention the need to stream all that data to the headset - since you're not going to put a high-end graphics card needed to even attempt this in anything approaching a wearable form factor. Good luck getting multiple 4k or even just HD streams between your laptop and your AR headset over Wi-Fi.

Not a stretch the same thing could be applied to a virtual desktop environment especially when you have eye tracking.

That bar shows a small lower-res preview of each of the desktops, it is not rendering all the desktops at full 4K res. Essentially the smaller a window appears on the screen, the lower effort is needed to draw it.

Vision has both of those. People will conveniently ignore all the downsides of it, like they do with current Apple products.

Why would you want presence in an action movie? Cool, in an exciting sort of way.

But presence in recording of your family? That's powerful stuff, for everyone!

That feels like the long-term hook. iCloud to handle obscene storage amounts as a service. iPhone to generate new recordings. Vision to play back recordings.

And the dastardly brilliant part is... the more 3D video you record... the more valuable a Vision is to you.

>> Capturing -- One of the more remarkable things to watch? Your own home 3-D movies. Apple introduced “spatial video” for the iPhone 15 Pro a few months ago, and I started recording my sons with it. Watching the videos in 3-D in the headset now is almost like reliving the moment. The Vision Pro also captures these videos and photos—you just hold down a button on the top left.

lol, literally the only use case I could convince myself to spend this money on (hey its cheaper than an XDR ).

Even then I was having trouble convincing myself since.. all indications were you wouldn't want to wear this more than a few hours at a time, so ultimately you still need the real physical monitors for the other 80% of your workday.

It's basically what the SimulaVR guys are aiming at, and I'm surprised Apple didn't go this way with their Mac integration. Especially because the native visionOS apps do seem to behave just that way.

But there are 3rd party solutions that will let you do just that though: https://github.com/saagarjha/Ensemble

Do the math of how much bandwidth like three windows/screens (because with this model each window is basically its own screen) at 4K/100hz/10bit color each would take.

You're at limits of TB4 _very quickly_.

You can compress the image, try to do something smart with foveated rendering (only stream the windows that users are looking at; but that breaks if you want to keep a window with logs in your peripheral vision), use chroma subsampling, etc; but those all are varying trade-offs with relation to image quality.

You don't need to send every pixel for every frame uncompressed.

It would be more like VLC, not sending pixels that aren't changing. And you don't really need 100Hz either. You can't read that fast anyway, the content could refresh lower than that as long as the actual window is moved at 100Hz to avoid nausea.

I really doubt the Mac display functionality as-is is refreshed at 100Hz with full pixel fidelity without compression. WiFi can't handle those kinds of speeds reliably.

If you would just trivially stream all windows to the vision of course it will at some point be at the limit of current technology. But I would assume a company like apple has the means to push the state of transmission media (rather than just using a now 4 year old standard) and be able to think of something smarter than „just stream all windows in maximum quality even if the user doesn’t look at them“

I can also imagine it having some weird privacy implications; like Mac apps somehow monitoring this and tracking whether you're actually looking at them, etc.

Another option would be handling rendering on the Vision Pro rather than the MacBook so pixels don't need to be streamed at all.

The primary problem I would guess here would be latency though so maybe not feasible. The other possibility is if the actual rendering happens on device instead of streaming pixels. It would dramatically decrease bandwidth required.

I think there's a solution somewhere for this.

I had not seen the Glove80 before, it does look pretty nice. Though I would prefer a bit smaller. I don't really use F keys, and use layers for things like arrow keys.

Glove80 has hot-swappable tripod mounts, so I attach it to my chair, or I use clamps to attach it to a table, or to short tripods standing on the floor, or to very tiny tripods that can give the keyboards an extreme near-vertical angle on a desktop. Very easy to get an ergo setup going when traveling this way.

For sure there will be some hardcore indies that just love developing for vr.

There will probably be some game studios ready to go.

TikTok will probably be there.

But, why would Netflix, Spotify, every productivity tool…go out of their way to work on this thing at a time where most are diving deeper into PWA’s?

For spatial computing, they’re going to need to improve the dev situation or accept that safari is the star of the show.

Here's a screenshot of 4 windows plus the deskop.

https://pasteboard.co/hPKLrKgp5vjy.jpg

This features has been there for nearly 9 years?

(note: In my view there was passthrough and I could see my room but the screenshot function didn't include that).

It seems limited to desktop + 4 popout windows but I know it used to support more because when I first got the Rift I tried to see if I could get 6 videos running + desktop all at once. It worked.

There are issues though

(1) it's just showing the desktop's image, that means it can't adjust the resolution of the window. Ideally you'd pick a devicePixelRatio and a resolution and it would re-render but no desktop OS is designed to do that.

(2) It's Microsoft Windows, not an OS that Facebook controls which means they're at Microsoft's mercy and whatever features Windows supports. No easy way to add better VR controls. For example, IIRC, you can't size a window directly. Instead you need go to the window showing the full desktop, size it there, that will then be reflected in the popout window. If that's not clear, there are 2 size. The size in VR. The resolution of the window. If the window is a tiny 320x240 pixel window on your desktop and you make it 5x3 meters in your virtual space, all Oculus can do is draw those 320x240 pixels. You can go back to your desktop, size the window to 1237x841, now Oculus can draw those 1237x841 to your 5x3 meter VR pane. But, since Oculus doesn't control windows (or maybe they're lazy), there is no way change from 320x240 to 1237x841 by directly manipulating the pane in VR. Instead you need to do that in the desktop pane in VR.

(3) IIRC it's got some weird issues with the active window. Since it's really just grabbing the textures of the Windows OS compositor and showing then in different spaces, that's separate from Windows' itself's concept of which window is the foreground window. So, as you select windows, you can see on the floating window of the "desktop" the front window keeps changing.

These are all really just a function of (2), that Facebook doesn't own the desktop OS.

The same problem would exist with the Mac. Apple, since they control Mac, could maybe make it work but it would be a huge change to MacOS. They'd effectively need each app to run on its own screen and each screen to be a different resolution and device pixel ratio. Plus they'd need to map in all of the other features to mac MacOS to be usable in AR

But I'll give it a try, thanks!

And yeah Apple would need to do some changes to macOS to make this work well, but as you say they control it. If they really view this as the future of computing they should really make it work.

The idea of SimulaVR is that it replaces your window manager so they avoid some of these issues by taking direct control. But that's something that only works on Linux.

the way RDP works is the code to actually render a window or desktop gets sent over the network and is ONLY rendered on the remote client.

this is not only more efficient but also allows for fun things like rendering remote apps directly on your local desktop mixed in with your normal local windows

I think all the wear comes if you’re sitting up wearing it, though. For passive consumption (or thinking between moments of work), you can just lean back or even lay down, which will take the pressure off your head/face.

No idea if it does this, but the obvious use case is for people who aren't physically present - but letting them somehow share a physical space. It could potentially be awesome for friends/partners who live far apart.

may be apple expect every person to buy one. Didn't facebook recently try something similar?

Eh... I prefer empty cinemas

No loud babies, no popcorn sounds, no people explaining the plot to people not paying attention, just me and the world of the film. Bliss.

There’s a video circulating of someone cooking while wearing it and gingerly pinching a virtual timer and placing it on a pot of boiling pasta.

It looks so stupid that I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.

Maybe younger people might think differently but for me, this stuff is dead on arrival because of simply how uncool and stupid it makes you look when you use it.

We all look stupid staring at our black rectangles, with notches at the top, with little headphone stems sticking out of our ears. It looks stupid at first and then you get over it

1. They are more "worn" than "used"

2. They conceal your face while wearing

So maybe cultural acceptance might take a while...

EDIT: typos

Do we really though? Reading a newspaper or book would be stupid as well

I'm so old I remember the N-Gage 1st gen being ridiculed for the "sidetalking" feature.

Now we have millionaires on TV talking to their phones like it's piece of bread they are about to take a bite of and nobody bats an eye.

Sort of virtual assistant.

That could be useful to people to avoid burning or forgetting stuff.

Do you mean a Mac's external monitor visible through the vision pro AR view?

This has been know for at least 30 years in the eye tracking business and it even has a name - The Midas Touch problem.

I wanted to see how it is possible but sure enough, I found a paper from 1995 that cited even older research about this.

https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~jacob/papers/barfield.pdf

> They expect to be able to look at an item without having the look cause an action to occur.

So this doesn't seem to be a problem that Vision Pro has?

Yeah, Apple Vision doesn't have this problem, because eye tracking is used just for pointing; not for clicking on items.

> some form of ‘‘clutch’’ to engage and disengage the monitoring

The paper does talk about other challenges with look-to-select, even if it is biased by the thinking of back in the day:

> Unlike a mouse, it is relatively difficult to control eye position consciously and precisely at all times.

You have to remember that the historical setting for much of this research was to help paralyzed people to communicate, and pushing a button or the modern pinch-touch was not really always an option.

Let's say I want to click on the "reply" button below this text box. If I'm perfectly honest, I DO look at the button for a moment, then I move the mouse pointer over to it. But then right before clicking, my eyes switch back to the content I've created to observe that my click is having the desired effect on it.

I'm not actually looking at the button at the moment I click on it, but I DID look at it just a few milliseconds prior to the click. Why can't the UI just keep track of what I looked at a few milliseconds ago, to figure out that I actually wanted to click on the button, and not in the center of some text box?

One issue could be maybe I thought for a moment about replying but then changed my mind and decided to edit the content some more. But the UI has decided that I meant to click the "reply" button and so now it's been submitted prematurely. Yeah, I can see the problem now. The position of the mouse cursor is meaningful when clicking, and the Vision OS doesn't have a cursor. Cursors are important.

Not on a plane they don’t. Not in a hotel room on a business trip.

IMHo, the Vision Pro is for being somewhere when you’re nowhere; not for being somewhere when you’re already somewhere.

The hypothetical use-case that the GP is talking about here, is AR -facilitated collaboration — people in your "see-through" view of the world being able to interact with the AR objects in your field of view, or vice-versa. Being able to AirDrop something to someone's iPhone by dragging a file from a window over to their body that you can see through the lens. You and your SO on the same flight, next to each-other and both wearing headsets, able to see the same set of shared/synced AR objects, and therefore watch the same movie. That kind of thing.

While this is an intended use-case for the Vision "platform" as a whole — it's an implicit promise of the whole "spatial computing paradigm" phrasing — I don't think this kind of AR-facilitated collaboration was ever intended to ship with the Vision Pro.

Why? Because, nobody in the Vision Pro's target market — at least as Apple would have it — wants or cares about AR-facilitated collaboration. I'll get to why in a moment, but in short — it's because it's the Vision Pro. And like Apple's other Pro products, it's mostly intended to be something possessed by an individual but owned and managed by their employer.

Now, Apple clearly intends to build VR -facilitated collaboration — but hasn't yet. That's what all the reviews mean when they say "the collaboration" is half-baked in the Vision Pro. The people in Apple's target market for this thing, expected VR collaboration, and it's not there. But that's an entirely different thing from AR-facilitated collaboration.

The Vision Pro as a specific product offering, almost certainly came out of Apple employees doing pandemic WFH, and realizing that all current "remoting" solutions sucked. Especially if you're a hardware engineer and trying to get a good look at a 3D real-world prototype of a thing. The people who are actually there in the office could just come in and stare at a real 3D-printed prototype. But the WFH people had to settle for looking at a 3D model on a screen... or maybe setting up a Windows machine, connected to an Oculus Quest, and using special compatible CAD software, in order to be able to do a walkaround. And that CAD software definitely didn't let them just paw at the 3D object with their hands.

The Vision Pro is clearly aimed at the "high-fidelity sensory feedback" half of the remoting problem. It's thus the complement to the companies who build telepresence robots — those robots solve the high-fidelity presence and interaction half of the remoting problem. (And you could really do some clever things by combining them!)

But note what else Apple released during the pandemic: Freeform, a piece of collaboration software. In fact, Apple added collaboration features to many of their first-party software offerings during the pandemic.

Apple never thought they'd extract their best work from their WFH (or now, travelling) employees by having them "show up to the office" with a telepresence robot. They rather expect that the best platform for all their engineers — in-office or otherwise — will be a digital office: one made of collaborative apps. And specifically, "level-of-immersion responsive" collaborative apps — apps that can switch between (or be compiled for) both lower-fidelity 2D screen-based UX, and higher-fidelity 3D spatial UX, on the same codebase.

It's this sort of 3D spatial collaboration-app UI experiences that the Vision Pro lacks in 1.0 but will clearly add later. (Which is why Apple cancelled WFH as soon as they could: their "solution to the remoting problem" isn't baked enough for them to usefully dogfood yet!)

But this is effectively VR-facilitated collaboration — working with other people who could be in arbitrary places, in VR or just interacting through a screen, where you see their VR avatars (personas) instead of seeing them. It's "Metaverse stuff" — but don't let Tim Cook catch you calling it that.

But AR-facilitated collaboration — i.e. having other people who are part of your work, present in the room with you, with some or all people in the room wearing Vision headsets with the see-through turned up, and where people wearing the headsets are interacting both with shared AR objects and with others present in physical space (rather than their VR simulacras in VR space)... this all has zero relevance to the remoting use-case. If you're in the office, then you're not going to be wearing a Vision Pro... because you can collaborate by just getting people in a room, and using various screens (AirPlay on an AppleTV display for shared viewing; your Macbooks for running collaboration tools; etc.)

Now, AR-facilitated collaboration is likely a use-case for the "Vision platform" as a whole. (Otherwise, why bother with the AR OS features?) AR-facilitated collaboration, is what a self-employed / freelance creative professional — someone who isn't remoting into some [idea of an] office, but who does have people [e.g. clients] physically present around them who they need to interact with them and with their work — would want. AR-facilitated collaboration would therefore be the defining use-case for a later "Vision Studio": a "prosumer" model targeted at such creative professionals — the same sort of people who buy themselves a Mac Studio. It would match the Vision Pro's targeting (which, if you haven't considered it, will almost certainly end up squarely on "businesses buying these for their remoting employees" — even if the early adopters are individual tech nerds.)

> cameras are still cameras, and displays are still displays.

Anyone remotely familiar with the state of development in those areas would be aware that “even Apple” can’t cheat Reality (punintentionally).

Those left still raving about and/or hoping for a game changer will be greatly dissapointed - or only in it for the line go up.

The whole concept will be a niche product for many years to come and will stay an isolating experience.

First Gen is usually awful

This is not awful and maybe even closer to 2nd gen

Everything starts somewhere

Most things are ready for the masses by the 3rd or 4th gen.

At the end of the day, this is Apple testing the waters and trying to get a positive cash flow to help offset significant R&D...what they're showing is pretty impressive in a number of ways, even as it's lacking in others.