I also have been telling people that VR is magical and that while both current hardware and the current software has issues it will get better and that this stuff is going to have a big impact on humanity... only, I've been telling people this for just shy of a decade now ;P. I don't see the Apple Vision Pro as either the product that made any of this magical nor is it the product that made any of this viable... it is just yet another incrementally-improved product in a category that has been on the verge of getting it right for, well, forever.

It's worth doing a vision pro demo in an Apple store if you can. I'm not planning to buy one in its current state, but it was immediately obvious that this was entirely new territory. It moved a piece of technology from fiction to reality in my mind. The eye tracking is hard to believe without having experienced it.

I'm not ready to say that this device will be responsible for such a large technology shift as the previous person, but I think it will play an large, perhaps pivotal role on our way to the next thing.

Disclaimer: I know a lot of people compare this to a device that I can surmise was meant to do a lot of similar things made by Meta; I have not tried this and may be attributing first-mover credit to Apple for things that Meta may have done similarly well. My comment is made from the perspective of somebody who has never experienced eye tracking in any capacity before.

Somewhat ironically, I have no interest in showing people my AVP, I use it for hours everyday but showing it to people feels weird in the same way showing your neighbor your workstation and monitors feels weird. (Part of that is, of course, that I’m not going to give them my laptop to run Mac virtual display, which means they won’t fully “get” it anyhow.)

In contrast the quest devices are practically begging to be shown off but lie in disuse a majority of the time, especially if you don’t have time for gaming.

As it improves, I don't question that it has a future, and some people like it so much they're working on it and writing apps now. The question is how many years from now before a larger mass of people are using it?

The OP talks about the Internet, but the Internet started some time between the 1969 first ARPAnet transmission and 1974 paper on the Internet protocol. Out to 1993 most people were not consciously using the Internet, it was a rather niche thing. With the release of the Netscape web browser in 1994, the inclusion of IP networking capability in Windows 1995 etc., this began to change.

One could say this about AI as well. Up until 2019, Norvig and Russell's CS textbook "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" had only a ten page sub-chapter on neural networks. The now recognized as groundbreaking 2012 ImageNet competition victory by Krizhevsky, Sutskever and Hinton, was greeted with skepticism and disinterest on this forum ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4611830 ). The ideas for connectionist AI were there starting with McCulloch and Pitts 1943 paper, so that's a lot of development where things still weren't really happening until around 2012 or even 2019.

Some people can see the potential in things decades in advance, but they can take time to move into the mainstream, and it is difficult to determine how long that can take.

Other companies had MP3 players for a few years first. The iPod exploded.

You listed some good examples yourself. Windows 3 was nice but it was 95 that really made it big. The Internet existed but it was Netscape that made it takeoff, followed by AOL.

There’s always an invisible threshold. You can make something in a category but until it passes that threshold it doesn’t really change the world. It could be price, speed, ease of use, some new piece of technology, or a combination of all those factors.

Existing VR headsets obviously sell well enough that an industry exists, but it’s nowhere near ubiquitous. It hasn’t hit that threshold (assuming it exists for VR). Apple clearly has set their own bar, much higher than others, hoping that they’ve hit that magical point or at least gotten close enough to it. Today that cost a lot of money like the original Mac.

Going from the quest one to the two to the three has increased sales but I’m not sure it’s done anything to really approach that magic inflection point. Who knows how long it would have taken to get there. Maybe the quest four or five would, maybe the eight. We still don’t know where that line is.

But Apple is really pushing and that makes it interesting to watch if nothing else.

I see statements like this about AI too. How can something be bigger than the technology it is built on? The AVP is a computer. AI is a computer accessed through the internet... any computing device that accesses another computing device is further extending the "impact of computers and the internet." I don't get it. Maybe I'm too caught up on the semantics.

Element Symbol Percent mass Percent atoms Oxygen O 65.0 24.0 Carbon C 18.5 12.0 Hydrogen H 9.5 62.0 Nitrogen N 3.2 1.1

Edit: but point taken, we could go down the rabbit hole forever. Definitely not as cut and dry as I was making it out to be

> Apple isn't a big enterprise player as far as (except for development)

They never really went after the tech companies themselves. The way Macs dominate certain development fields is a result of their popularity with consumers that drove companies to adopt the tech to attract talent. Me and many colleagues 5 years ago weren't interested in web startups using a Windows dev environment. Not saying there's merit to that, but my main point is that Apple focused on the end user(which happened to be a burgeoning web dev class during the last 15 years) rather than enterprise.

I think it's further evidenced by how relatively slow Apple has been to deploy some management tools that are more common in Windows-land. Anecodtally it feels like 3rd parties filled the gap on that side for Apple for quite a while. MDM, other IT tools, repair networks, and more recently self-repair kits were all much slower to deploy than how Microsoft (think Dell) went after their corporate customers.

iPad are the best versions of "tablets", if we see tablets as a frozen in time "large iphone" version of the concept. Android tablets perfectly fit the category and Samsung is the only distant competion (yet Samsung has Dex, which is increasingly showing its teeth)

But they're way behind in term of tablets as touch enabled computers. Chromebooks have seen more adoption as schools and orgs couldn't justify iPad's price, the top of the line is above what the iPad has to offer, and the Surface Pro took the spot of the North Star of the category, to use the article's metaphor.

So yes, I'd agree with parent, Apple could have made the "what is a computer?" marketing campaign a reality, but didn't have the courage to canibalize their mac line.

"640K software is all the memory anybody would ever need on a computer."

This isn't to say that VR won't improve and find some useful niches, but the idea that it could have anywhere near the global impact of smart phones seems wildly optimistic to me.

I wish you were right. But, man, look around. People are immersed in their mobile devices. No one gives a shit about their surroundings anymore.

For some reason this illogical phrasing that totally excludes the value proposition has become the standard phrasing for arguing why VR/AR won't succeed. It makes no sense. You haven't expressed any part of the value proposition of the product, only a negative aspect of it, so why are you assessing it's value based on that? I could assess the value of a car as "a metal box you are trapped inside of for hours on end" or a phone as a "fragile object that requires constant charging" and decide these products will just never make it.

Of course people don't want goggles strapped to their face. But we already know they will do it, given a value proposition because humans do exactly that : they wear glasses and sunglasses and hats quite happily, sometimes all day long.

AI does a whole lot more than that. I imagine that the vast majority of content people consume will at some point be created by AI perhaps with some marginal human input. Probably before your VR vision becomes a reality.

I don't see how anyone can say this with a straight face. VR/AR just isn't there and won't be there for a lot longer than people think. Everyone always acts like we're -so close- but then we just aren't. Hololens and Oculus are over a decade old, and honestly when I first demo'd both ages ago, they were incredible (especially Hololens.) If I put on a headset now, sure it's better but it's still stuck on that same idea and seems to fundamentally misunderstand how humans interact. Apple's newest product is no different. I think the future of wearable devices looks a lot more like the Meta Ray-bans with some sort of small HUD than a full computer strapped to your face that you can't wear anywhere (without being socially ostracized or robbed).

Every time I see an intent by companies to increment my time spent with a computer, to watch their ads, buy another thing I don't need ... I know that I should be doing the exact opposite.

We also know that people are perfectly willing to wear something on their face to be able to see better, and willing to carry something around in their pockets to be more connected -- glasses and phones.

So I think the only real barrier is technical feasibility: can you make it small enough, light enough, power efficient enough, and, of course, affordable enough?

AVP and Oculus clearly aren't there yet. Relative to smartphones, I think we're at the "Palm III" or maybe "Palm V" level of things. I personally have no idea if a path forward to the "iPhone 3S/iPhone 4" level even really exists for VR headsets.

But if it does and we get there, I think there's no doubt that these headsets (probably just goggles at that point) will take over the world, like phones have.

I just don't agree, because VR's input system is fundamentally flawed. The Verge actually did a good video on this, the input of VR is just wonky. It makes you want to rip your headset off and just use your laptop/tablet (and I'm aware they can act as companions, but at that point...why do you need the headset?). I just don't see how that's going to change anytime soon. There also -are- physical limitations, for one, it's exhausting to wear for extended periods. You have absolutely no peripheral vision, and how is that going to be solved? Even if you made it light, unless it's as light as a pair of glasses, it's not going to be something I want to put on for several -hours- a day. You can't walk away from it; you have to physically remove it.

The best move imo, for VR/AR is as a "background" tech, it can physically remove us from our devices and shouldn't be a new fully fledged computer I'm putting on my face. You also have to understand that generations after Millennials are steadily enjoying -less- "in your face" things, and I think that's the right. I think the future is going to look a lot more like "Her" and a lot less like "Ready Player One," at least on the mass market.

This can change in 30-50 years, but right now? It's just a gimmick and junk drawer tech. Unless there is some crazy jump in the tech in the near future (I doubt given Hololens and Oculus and now Apple have only marginally improved it over a full decade,) I don't see it as anything that is going to penetrate my life.

Except it isn't, because the density just isn't there. The PPD is incredibly low, which is why you have to make things "huge" to compensate. And while huge screens are great for watching movies, it's not great for a lot of other things. It's not comfortable to move your head back & forth just to read a line of text.

In a hypothetical future where these microled displays have 3-5x the density they do today then this starts becoming competitive with today's multi-monitor setups. Except those will also have had improvements to them as well. And even then, the number of people with multi-monitor setups is also pretty small. That's not a smartphone-level revolution or impact.

I don't believe that for a second. Even 50% lighter and it's still going to be more uncomfortable than not wearing one. All so you can have a blurrier screen?

If/when it gets to the weight/comfort of normal glasses then sure. But that's at least a decade away. Probably more.

I'm not so sure about that.

Even after 36 years of wearing glasses (current ones weight barely 20 gram), they still bother me, and I fiddle with them constantly.

I am perhaps missing your point, but if people will be able to experience incredible VR worlds, couldn't people happily spend their time sitting in tiny windowless rooms rather than physically travelling to a beach?

A beach seems like the former, and cities and minor attractions seem like the latter.

The immersiveness for entertainment is neat, but this seems like a relatively minor use case in the grand scheme of things. And with gesture based controls, gaming is pretty much a non-starter.

Do you really envision a future of families hanging out together on the couch, each member with their own VR goggles…? Halfway through my return period, I realized that I much preferred reality.

FWIW, I love my Quest for the occasional gaming romp, but little else.

This feels like a comment from Blackberry or MS making fun of the first iPhone.

As the article mentions, this is an intentional thing they've done to cover up the remaining vestiges of the screen door effect. The better the screens get, the less and less they'll have any reason to do it.

With the questionable state of Moore's law, and the battery powered nature of the device, it might be awhile before tech catches up. Faster components would use more energy. We need to balance performance with battery capacity, and I expect the product that really catches on will have more of both.

I predict it will go the way of 3D TVs. Most people don't want to walk around with half a kilogram of computers inside goggles strapped to their faces.

[1] https://candrewlee14.github.io/blog/2024-03-07_apple-vision-...