Apple just launched their AR/VR headset called Apple Vision Pro.
Apple Vision Pro is Apple’s new $3,499 AR headset | The Verge
A big but preliminary step toward mixed reality.
theverge.com
Do you have any initial reactions?
Top comments (44)
It feels like so many of Apple's last decade lead up pretty seamlessly to Vision Pro.
It's not clear whether this product will ultimately matter much, at least in the near future, due to some clunkiness like external battery and lack of obvious utility with some of the experiences they demo'd.
However, it's pretty clear that they have a really consistent strategy — with Apple Silicon at the center.
It feels like an iPad -- a device for consuming, not creating -- with a novel interface. I was initially pleased to see the "move your Mac desktop to the AR interface", but once I realized it was the whole desktop, I was massively annoyed. I want to be able to move all my individual windows into the space as individual windows, not a single unified interface. It feels like it's anathema to the whole AR experience.
Surely they will eventually support 3D window management on multiple planes.
... and the utility of that? Beside being cool, I mean. I need something more to buy a device with a price tag of several thousands of $$$.
I, personally, work most of the time with one window that takes the whole screen, switching between windows using Alt-Tab.
I was just bouncing thoughts off the other comment.
But I do agree with your points.
The number of features and technologies that have shown up in the phone, watch and elsewhere over the past number of years, that flow together into the capabiities of the new device - think room-scale LiDAR, hand tracking, Siri (ok eh maybe Siri is a stretch...), handoff, etc etc - they have been building this in the open for some time.
I should get to writing my own full post on this, but some thoughts I'm borrowing back from my past self yesterday when I was live commenting on the event on Mastdon... (we also did a deep dive on the last minute rumours on our podcast which dropped right before the presentation, and will revisit the actual outcome this week)
First of all, my view is that this is Tim Cook's Legacy product as CEO. He's been bigging up XR/AR for a long time, and this is really the product he has seemingly pushed towards throughout his tenure at the top. The WWDC presentation needed to be slick, polished, and have wow factor. It did. In spite of myself, I'm curious to try this thing out.
There's a lot of folks reacting against the headset - price, aesthetics, experience, use cases, social awkwardness etc - which is not surprising. I’ll be watching to see how quickly or virally the presentation affects the rest of the industry / how far other companies instantly pivot to this same sort of direction. That was the impact of the iPhone, remember - suddenly every phone had to have a touch screen, camera, a similar-to-iOS experience. Let's see what comes from this: that's the real test for Tim Cook's Legacy
I think that the WWDC preview "did what it needed to do" in terms of sprinkling the Apple magic, but I want to see and hear how well this actually works, and it is nowhere near a widespread adoption price point (though, nor was the first iPhone, or Watch, etc). This could be the start of a technology wave, but I think the current form factor will be off-putting for many many people for a long time, in ways that other personal devices like tablets and phones have succeeded in avoiding. I maintain some skepticism. Tellingly, I noted that no Apple presenter wore one…
There are two important differences here
A smartphone is a small object that you can put in your pocket and a touch screen is a really convenient interface, smooth to use. If you want to know when the next bus will arrive, you reach for your phone in your pocket, type "bus timetable" and you have the answer. Smooth, fast and convenient.
The iPhone was something new, 3D viewers are around since long time and despite the periodic hype, they never became really popular. Sure, you can have applications where they can be useful, but I fail to imagine people having "virtual parties," the guests in their homes with a clumsy viewer above their eyes, drinking some virtual beer (I heard descriptions like this).
Who's paying that amount of money for an entertainment device? So I guess Apple wants people to use it for work... but I haven't seen any reason why I should want to work with such a device on my head.
Unless Apple releases an SE edition for $1000 (for entertainment - their Disney deal is genius!) they will lose big against Meta with this device... I guess.
Haha yeah, they tack on the “Pro” idea but they also emphasize Disney stuff which is obviously not for professional purposes. “Pro” is just so they can justify the price and sell to super rich.
I imagine they're launching "Pro" and plan to go down-market later with the "non-pro" version. That's what I assume from the naming convention, and it makes sense here.
Has Apple ever gone in this "Pro-first" direction since they adopted that convention?
At this price they absolutely had to start with “Pro” 🤪
Feels like the apple watch all over again. Limited market testing, but confident in experience to finally release. I think its something we'll have to wait 3-5 years to see the results. Happy to see though Apple marketing still refuses to use "tech specs" when introducing products however. All the hype stuff is still there, it just doesn't matter to most consumers when going to a store. At the end of the day this will live and die by the adoption rate on both ends and wondering if Apple is going to look away at that one market that would probably push this thing forward (that industry always has).
That’s a reasonable take
I'm worried that none of the demos were real, which cries "not ready yet" and I thought it looked a little odd. Super impressive tech though!!
That’s a really interesting thought. This is technically the first product they’ve ever launched with really can’t be actually demo’s for real though.
Failure due to lack of use cases. Allow me to explain:
Gaming. Apple killed gaming when they decided to outdate OpenGL and then go their own way with Metal instead of Vulcan. That immediately made porting AAA titles unprofitable. Current game portfolio on Apple is garbage, mostly iPad clickers. For price of Apple headset you can get both PlayStation and PlayStation VR headset. And I doubt any serious games will arrive on Apple Vision due to limited popularity and weak hardware (M2 3D capabilities ale ~2 generations behind current leaders).
Office work. No one will spend 8h with headset on, no matter how comfortable it will be. Meta experiments clearly showed that. Buying this headset for occasional work in the train or during flight is kind of pointless because you will need keyboard/mouse anyway and that makes whole solution a weird patchwork of a simple and more portable laptop.
Outside work. This will have huge contrast issues. Dimming is made by LCD layer and transparent screens and Google glasses failed for a reason. One simply cannon block enough backlight on demand to achieve good contrast. My guess is that this tech is no different and will be completely unusable in daylight.
Video calls. Without camera?
Home cinema. Virtual screens are offered by every VR headset and never got popular. And Apple Vision is outside of budget for people to whom it may be beneficial in this aspect - living in small apartments without space for proper TV setup.
To be fair - I see some use cases for Augmented Reality, like for example you can order furniture for your home while walking and virtually placing tables in rooms. But those rare cases will not give this product traction it needs. It will remain "cool gimmicks".
But they mentioned a release that solves your first point on the porting issue.
Nah. Even if you have Vulkan to Metal transparent translation layer there will still be so many issues to solve with ARM builds and general macOS system API differences that porting will remain nonexistent.
Apple may throw big bag of money for studios to compensate porting costs of few bigger titles to have something to show. But paying for porting even 10% of last 5 years AAA titles to build reasonable game library is too much even for them.
This is intentionally not designed for gaming. There's no need for it yet, it's too costly on both ends. Let Sony, Valve, and Meta work on that end and they can work on the other end.
Here's another post on the Apple announcements in general
Apple's New Announcement at WWDC23
Anurag Vishwakarma ・ Jun 5 ・ 1 min read
Kind of funny that all their apps are just screens. Makes sense from a compatibility perspective, and I'm sure more truly immersive stuff is coming later. But kind of funny how unambitious these experiences are so far.
Already possible since 2013, check for example Vipaar solutions.
There are already tons of glasses they can use. That are cheaper. Also compatibility plays huge role here. I would be very cautious to invest huge pile of money into developing training soft on very expensive and closed source hardware (this is whole new OS we are talking here) that may be abandoned any time.
Technically it's under the apple OS ecosystem. Half the apps are lifted from iPad and mentioned you'll be able to leverage iPad apps here. The abandonment is true,however that's true in any developing market, and this is a company with the cash flow to weather the storm.