I really can’t unsee the ski goggle look lol
this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
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Eh ski goggles are cool. A lot better than the competition's VR look!
Scuba Steve!
Something Apple totally missed with this was the gaming industry. If Apple had put more effort years back to make Mac Gaming a thing, they could have easily reeled in VR ports of so many cool games. Even with their current catalogue of games, it's meagre compared to what Windows has.
Exactly how many people do they think are going to fork out 4 grand for one of these things? Don’t get me wrong, I really want one. But like hell paying that much for it. I’m gonna wait a while until the price comes down.
The first iPhone was unreasonably expensive for really not much usability. Edge network only. No webapps designed yet. No app store. Not even a compass.
The first one of these will be like that, then if it catches on at all there will be a "worse" model that doesn't have as nice of a casing but is more usable and maybe comes with some sort of phone plan or something. I'm hoping this actually does catch on because VR is already so cool, but is waiting for that "connection" with others to happen.
For an example, the best connection experience I have had in VR was the zero gravity sports game Echo Arena, specifically in the lobby. They did such a good job with the 3d sound it actually felt like there was someone above me talking. But since there is no eye tracking, eye contact cannot be a thing. If they nail that though, work meetings in a virtual environment COULD be a thing. Spending time with family from hundreds of miles away COULD possibly work okay. Not as good as in person but a reasonable substitute.
But they have to nail it. Right now that one or two experiences is the best I have had. The rest just felt like halo on the Xbox 360 over Live. Cool, but not like they were sitting in the room with me.
I had the original iPhone. it was $500, which is about what I paid for my original Razr ($400), but it did 1000x more. only in retrospect was it clunky and awkward to use— at the time, it was like magic! Everything else at the tie was far, far inferior. it did far more than anything else in it day than most people had ever seen, and it was so much easier to use. and, as far as functionality, that came quickly later. also, the edge network was just about as good as anything else, as not that many people even had access to 3G yet. but even $500 isn’t $4,000. that’s a huge leap and not really a solid comparison considering that the Vision Pro isn’t really a mobile device at all— it’s a VR Mac with a full-on M2 chip and an R1 co-processor for all the VR stuff.
But, even considering the high-end optics and so on, it should only cost about $2k-$2,500 before offering processor and memory upgrades based on the pricing of their other Macs.
edit: for $4k, it should have an M3 Pro, 64GB of RAM and 2TB of storage.
But, even considering the high-end optics and so on, it should only cost about $2k-$2,500 before offering
Based on what?
There aren't options with just the resolution and high quality low latency passthrough for that price before you add the computer part.
Originally iPhone was not subsidized by the carrier, I paid nearly $1,000 for mine. I also was not aware of Mac rumors and the 3g came out a couple months later.
You must have gotten it indirectly - I still have my 1st gen, 8gb iPhone and it cost $799. I took it out of the country and rooted it soon enough to use it in The Netherlands, but there was a price drop weeks later and it was hundreds cheaper.
Yeah, it cost a lot more outside the US the first year
For some reason I was remembering my brother spending like $700 for his original iPhone, whereas I waited for the iPhone 3g and spent like half. Mine was plasticky vs his solid feeling phone, but mine technically did more with the 3g network and even a compass! I was hoping this scenario would happen but maybe it's wishful thinking and incorrect memory.
the 3G and 3GS (the 3rd one) had a polycarbonate backing and came in black or white. they were also available in both 8GB or 16GB models for $500 or $550 IIRC— but you could get them severely discounted if you signed up for a wireless plan ($99/$149). the original model only came in the 8GB model for $500 with no sign-up discounts.
It’s expensive (and too expensive for me), but if you put it next to a MacBook Pro with a few upgrades it’s the same price and those get bought without thinking about it.
To become more mainstream it definitely has to be cheaper, but there’s something bothering me about how all the other prices are acceptable.
MacBooks are more of a working device and the upgrades are optional, the starting price is cheaper, I know. Still, these price points aren’t unheard of for Apple.
They were selling $999 monitor stands. Apple customer are easily milked.
Apple is alot of things I don't like, but stupid (from a profit/business standpoint) isn't one. Apple sell alot of products that I think are hot garbage and would be embarrassed to own, but they're not for me as a consumer, and they tend to sell a bazillion of whatever it is and make a ton of money.
Even trying to put my biases aside though, I cannot fathom what their gameplan with this is though. Even if it was a good deal and great product, a pretty huge proportion of VR headset purchasers are PC gamers, and that generally isn't a demographic that is Apple leaning. So the buyer for this is a person who uses VR regularly (probably a PC gamer), but also someone who is Apple leaning enough to get this vs. an Index or Vive, who also is willing to pay an A.B.S.U.R.D price premium for it (it is pretty impressive hardware to be fair, but not 3-4 times the cost impressive).
My guess is that they're intentionally taking a loss on this, putting it out as a halo product that gets talked about a ton (that's already happening because of the price, like they did with the mac pro wheels), and generally get a ton of attention on this without selling many (but just enough to get user data and hardware information to iterate on) and THEN in a suitable amount of time they'll release one that will genuinely be competitive, at a big price drop, and sell a ton.
I think you got the target audience wrong, this isn’t a PC gaming headset. It doesn’t even have or support VR controllers.
This is more of an iPad replacement, second screen, productivity and consumption device. And it’s going to be the first one that actually has a big library of regular apps from the very start. Arguably the bigger market, not just for gamers.
And seriously, while you can ignore the pixels on the vive/index in action well enough, they're there, and they're extremely obvious and unpleasant on text. There are a couple third party options that get in the neighborhood on resolution, but shockingly, they're also really expensive.
Yeah 100% I'm not for a moment knocking the hardware, it is genuinely impressive stuff and will pretty much be industry leading when it releases, most of my confusion comes from where it stands as a saleable product.
You're correct that the target audience will be media consumption; the miss - if I'm reading the GP correct (and, for the record, I tend to agree) - is that the majority of VR focused activities are game-based. There is certainly a contingent of health/fitness apps out there, but that market and content is trivially small by comparison. Could Apple come out with some really killer app? Sure - there's always the possibility of a twist. Looking at the intersection of user input and iOS-style apps, you're back to (mostly) passive consumption. I'm a huge believer that VR/AR is the future, but I'm struggling to see how these are going to function as an iPad replacement, second screen (primary screen, like Immersed, in special cases I can see), and productivity are going to find a foothold, given the limitations of the OS and lack of connectivity outside of the ecosystem.
They're literally not even calling it VR. The focus is all about AR (labeled spatial computing), which is a space that basically doesn't exist because nothing on the market can handle it without massive deal breaking compromise. The goal is the same as the iPhone, though, democratizing app development. Their AR tools on phone lower the barrier to entry enough that solo developers can make and ship AR-capable apps far more easily than they could otherwise, and that's what they're leaning on.
The Vision Pro isn't the mass market device. It's an enthusiast product/devkit. But there's nothing comparable to put it up against. The space can't develop with insufficient hardware, because low resolution in the display or any meaningful latency or quality drop to the passthrough are showstopper flaws to anything but games and movies.
What they call it is irrelevant. Removing the 1/8 jack was "brave". Faulty antenna design was "holding it wrong". An incomplete area of screen pixels is a "notification island."
Lots of headsets already have AR. Is it primary? No. Is it underdeveloped. Yes. Is apples implementation of pass through /overlay vision going to bring vr/AR into the mainstream? Well certainly not at $3500 a pop. What will matter is what useful, life changing or must have applications arrive. The simplicity of mobile app development didn't bring us full blown CAD or CFD or Desktop-level Photo, Audio, and Video production on our phones. It ushered in 100 fart sound apps and bunny ear filters. Even today the PS and other creative apps on phone and tablet suck compared to their companion desktop apps because, even with desktop level processors like the M2, complex manipulation of data is still hindered by the interface.
As I said, I HOPE this will find the next big thing. And maybe a $3500 3D viewer for 100 new fart apps is the path. But (IMHO, of Course) they're leaving a lot of users - the vat majority - on the sidelines with their target audience.
What they call it is critical. It speaks to their vision for the product, and Apple does an exceptional job at having their vision stick. Removing the headphone jack launched wireless headphones to the moon.
Zero headsets are meaningfully capable of AR. "We'll show you a high latency low quality poor color passthrough so you can sort of move around the room without removing your headset" isn't AR. Projecting an absurdly low quality image onto glasses that show the world without doing any processing on it isn't AR. Nobody is going to develop AR apps for either of those types of hardware because neither of those are useful. Phones are capable of limited AR, and those are used to the extent a phone is capable of, which is putting objects into your room to visualize them.
The Vision Pro is the first product out there that has the bare minimum hardware to even approach AR. Without Apple's weight behind it, it would still be in a great position purely on the strength of its capability. With Apple and their software (including the already very rich and accessible AR libraries they've had in developer's hands for iPhones for a while now), it's almost impossible for it to fail.
$3,500 is expensive, but it's absurdly cheap for the capability compared to the VR market. Without the passthrough and without the full computer, just the resolution of the display is already in the multiple thousand price bucket at a bare minimum. If they priced it at $10,000, it would still be completely unmatched for what it offers. The $3,500 price point is insanely aggressive.
You apple fanboys are just so cute. The AR in Apple's headset will be laughably pathetic in 5 years. Their internal panel resolution is 1/4 of that already in testing by Meta and others - and even those advanced panels are barely at the resolution of the human eye. Vision pro is DVD quality to Full HD resolution on the human scale of acuity - passable but not great. They've included a 20W processor - a good one - in a headset that resolution that will get choppy and low texture on a dedicated 500W RTX4090 card (I'm curious how the advanced M2 handles the 6K/120Hz when the M3 can't even hold 30Hz on a similar pixel/clock count on the desktop with full cooling). By the same toke, saying that the existing quality is unusable is laughable. Will the VisionPro be better? I have no doubt. For $3500 it had better be. It's going to be a solid $1200 headset, I'd say, if it gets to that price by the beginning of 2025. If its 2026 before a real succssor...well, maybe it can come out at the same time as the "revolutionary" foldable screen Apple is "inventing" for their phones.
It's cool kit, but it's not revolutionary. It's just one more step which is in danger of failing because of the size of the potential userbase. And that potential failure actually makes me sad because I think it could be much more.
I totally agree that relying on in-headset processing and not being able to hook up to a computer is a massive mistake for any headset and will relegate them to being stuttery paper weights in a shorter time than you'd think (look at the processors in "smart" TV's for a similar situation to reference.)
Of course there will be better. That's irrelevant. The only thing relevant is that it's unconditionally impossible for worse to be functional. My argument wasn't that Apple would be the only AR headset that will ever exist. It's that it's the first where AR isn't a lie. It's the first that a developer with a brain would consider making software for.
The idea that photorealistic rendering is required for AR to be useful is moronic. So is the idea that rendering at full resolution is needed. The resolution is mandatory so your eyes aren't bleeding 10 seconds into looking at text, because you could be blind as a bat and see the giant pixels if you step down much. Nothing more, nothing less.
Existing quality does not exist. There is nothing on the market that passes through the real world with low enough latency to use for literally anything that isn't very slowly repositioning yourself in a room. There are options that are transparent and can kind of sort of do really rough shapes and have them be visible, but that's it.
You're patently wrong, have you even used passthrough on other headsets? Apple as usually loves to market things as if they're the first to do it, but like usual they're just iterating on what others have done (and to be fair, usually doing a good job of polishing it up), but to say that passthrough on other headsets can't be used for "literally anything that isn't very slowly repositioning yourself in a room" is wildly wildly false. Other headsets do this pretty competently.
Yes. They're dogshit. Not mediocre, not bad. Complete and utter unusable dogshit without a single redeeming quality. The fact that even mediocre passthrough doesn't exist is the entire reason there are no AR apps.
There's a reason every YouTube tech enthusiast in the space, who routinely experiment with all of them, had their minds blown by the Vision Pro, and it's because there's literally nothing on the market that resembles actual AR regardless of price point.
That would be a bigger market, IF non-gamers had interest in VR. You make fair points, but I really really don't see the average person putting on a VR headset to consume content, even at a lower price. The "weirdness" alot of people who aren't in the tech or gaming space about buying/using a VR headset I think is a huge hurdle for Apple with a product like this.
The game plan is the same as the game plan for the Mac, but they're going to run it in a fraction of the time because they already have the playbook. Apple's not in the business of "intentionally taking a loss," Apple is in the business of slowly iterating products into platforms over strategic time spans. That's exactly what they'll do here.
The OLED displays are severely supply constrained; I doubt Apple can produce more than one or two million in 2024. With so few units available, there are more than enough dyed-in-the-wool Apple fans and die hard VR geeks with $4k to burn to guarantee that it will be sold out until 2025.
This first million will create an ecosystem for the platform in the form of third-party software and enthusiast communities. The successful launch will entice more suppliers to make the OLEDs, increasing availability and reducing cost. That paves the way for a sans-Pro Apple Vision for $2,500 sometime in 2025 or 2026. The cycle repeats: more users, bigger community, more evangelists, more word of mouth, more software, cheaper components, and then Apple ships Apple Vision Air in 2027 or 2028 for $1,500. Then in 2030, Apple Vision Air 2 comes out but the original is still for sale at $999.
Now we're looking at Apple's standard good/better/best product matrix that they use for the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac, and we're also looking at a relatively Mac-like price range starting at a grand but with options running well above $5k.
The original Mac sold for $2,495 in 1984 which is about $7,000 adjusted for inflation. Apple's kicking this new platform off for half the entry price. No one knew what the heck the Mac was supposed to be for in 1984 either, but the entire desktop computing paradigm was forged in its image. We're now looking at a second Mac.
Agreed, when I said "intentionally taking a loss" that was referring to the short term. In the long term, like you said they're fairly likely to build this into a large lucrative platform. Great comment, you've made excellent points throughout, thanks for the good discourse :)
I still don’t get what the compelling use for these is supposed to be. There’s nothing they’ve shown so far that doesn’t seem more awkward and intrusive than it is beneficial, unless maybe if you exist in true isolation at work and at home.
They sell tens of them!