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).
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” 🤪
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.
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".
I wonder about use cases outside entertainment -particularly areas that benefit from a 'virtual guide' such as surgical training or vehicle repair, where the trainer* could have the same viewpoint / sensory input as the trainee*, and the trainee can see the trainer's virtual limbs, exactly where theirs need to be? Such use cases have been around for decades, but nothing in the AR world has been usable enough (too clumsy, not accurate enough, etc.) to make inroads yet.. maybe these are slick enough?
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.
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
Honestly, it looks OK.
People are going on about the price, but there are plenty of expensive business-oriented VR headsets on the market already, and this isn't particularly out of their range.
I didn't watch the demo, because I'm generally uninterested in Apple stuff until it's ubiquitous enough that I have to deal with it in real life.
What they've done as far as I can tell is make a better hololens. It supporting their regular app store is an important step, because that's missing from things like the Quest.
The higher resolution is an incremental improvement in VR tech as far as real people are concerned, but it's a good thing.
So it's... ok.
Apple in one announcement both gets back to it’s roots and demonstrates how out of touch the company has become. For Vision Pro to be successful, Apple had to price it for consumers, but instead offered a product that is more for use by enterprise. Apple doesn't have the greatest track record with enterprise, giving up the server division at one point due to lack of sales. What were they thinking?
Think different. For sure. This opens up a new product category, but for whom?
Apple had a case study. Virtual Boy was way more expensive than SNES and Nintendo didn’t sell many. Making a new AR device so expensive compared to even the highest end Mac baseline is a mistake. Vision Pro is DOA.
Can't wait to be on a flight sitting next to someone with their Vision Pro without AirPods.
That is a weird situation. Open-ear sound for something that is so personal.
To the larger point, they certainly know they're not going to sell that many of these, and they're setting up to eventually go down market (at least a bit down market).
It doesn't really affect their bottom line either way, but I wonder what the threshold is for them to sell so few as for it to be embarrassing.
You sound like one of those critics during the early days of the smart phone.
Key difference though: we aren’t in the early days of AR/VR. Apple is so late to the market and the market has already proven VR is a niche product. For VR fans this could be an exciting product, but for a lot of people Vision Pro costs around 10% of their annual income so I can’t help but think all the time and energy that went into development will be a loss for Apple. They have tons of cash, but when they sacrifice resources from other areas on a loss it will hurt them in many ways. MacOS barely has any new features. The first bullet on the MacOS Ventura marketing page talks about “stunning” new screen savers.
The Vision Pro was presented mostly as a consumer product, but if the Vision Pro is out of reach for most consumers and is meant to replace HoloLens those customers in enterprise can afford it, but HoloLens is largely a failed product that didn’t gain wide adoption, it just has some niche uses in some industries. So why would Apple go after that? Apple, the company that killed it's server organization because it couldn’t sell servers, the company that let an employee who pitched enterprise wifi routers leave Apple and form a company that made 1.9 billion in revenue last year, up 47% year-over-year (Ubiquiti Networks). Apple has little business in the enterprise space and has stumbled in recent years (and rebounded IMHO) to support creative professionals. How do they think they can swoop in and take market share from Microsoft or Magic Leap for that matter, and why should they try to steal market share from a smaller company like Magic Leap?
Earnings remain to be seen and we won't see them until next year, but I can't believe it will look good. This move was incredibly risky for Apple, but will it pay off? Only time will tell. I'm doubtful.
If you have an opinion as to why Vision Pro was a good idea for Apple or how it will earn revenue for the company, let’s hear it.
We weren't exactly in the early days of smart phones when the iPhone came out, but here we are today. The VisionPro release kind of mirrors the iPhone release. Like you said, Apple isn't in the enterprise business, they produce consumer products. And they've positioned the VisionPro as a consumer/work product (killing two birds with one stone).
The pitch I've seen for most VR headsets go along the lines of meeting/gaming, who cares about meetings. I live in a country where Apple products are very expensive, yet many people own them, so I don think price would be an issue.
The important things are providing compelling use cases and making the product accessible. They've done the first part, the other part is yet to be seen.