- Users of those services will be steered toward the web
- Searches indicate apps from Meta may also be unavailable
Bypass paywall: https://archive.ph/4kfYI
the ipod filled a hole in the market. wtf is this solving for?
To be fair, a lot of people were wondering the same thing when the iPad was announced. Now there’s like a billion of them out there.
They were wondering that for the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, the Apple Watch, and AirPods. I’d bet that in 10 years a decent portion of the population will have some sort of headset, Apple or otherwise.
None of those had a point nearly as questionable as this headset thing. The ipod was an advanced mp3 player, which was very popular and common tech at the time. The iPhone was an advanced phone with a large touchscreen, which was rapidly becoming very common at the time. The iPad was an advanced tablet, which was a concept that had already been tried many times by many other companies by then. The air pods are just advanced wireless earbuds, which nobody could ever deny were rapidly becoming more popular.
VR headsets are fundamentally different from all of those, in that there’s no technological and social precedence quite like it. People used mp3 players and watches and phones before Apple did something new. Nobody was wondering the point of a better mp3 player that could hold massive amounts of songs. But the history of humankind says nothing about the masses’ willingness to walk around in public with big ass high tech ski goggles strapped to their faces. VR is much, much more unknown compared to those.
People understood what the iPhone was about immediately. Heck, they knew before it was even announced.
Same for the Apple Watch…ish. People didn’t know exactly what area it would end up focusing on, but the idea of getting and responding briefly to notifications without getting your phone out has always been appealing.
AirPods people have, again, always understood the appeal of. People are/were just angry at the option of using wired headphones being taken away.
Occulus sold more headsets than Microsoft sold Xboxes. And that’s 2021. https://x.com/JackSoslow/status/1471549480595955716?s=20
no, they werent. the ipad replaced the netbooks everyone wsa using until tablets became viable. again, an actual use case for a product.
theyve been pushing these headsets for years now, and theyve gained little traction and not solved any of the common problems.
anyone who thinks this is will some popular thing everyone will be doing is smokin the reefer, or just not paying attention
do you seriously think retail consumers are the demographic Apple is trying to capture right now?
talk to some creative professionals & craftsmen. my company used to work with hololens on a regular basis but there way too much jank in how it performed in a live setting. If the Vision Pro provides even the same level of utility but manages to make live object rendering & tracking consistent and reliable, they’re going to sell truckloads. Hollywood alone has probably 100 different ways to use this tech on set to slim creative workflows and save time (and therefore money). a $5000 headset is practically a rounding error when your principals cost 10x that per hour.
How have they been “pushing these headsets for years” considering that we’re literally discussing the launch of this product?
The iPad always made 100% sense to me. The first Smartphones were fun and just joyful to use for simple Tasks. A lot of stuff was managed at a system level and Apps and games at the time were genuinely made very well and were great to play / use. Also keep in mind that at the times phones were at best 4". So getting the same experience on a much bigger screen always made sense to me.
Its only now that people try to use these things as a laptop replacement where they fall apart. But i.m.o. that was never the point and people got gaslit by marketing to believe that using a tablet as laptop replacement is viable.
Monitors. It’s not there yet but imagine a world where you have like 8, 30-inch, 4k monitors in a giant grid and it costs like $600. That’s the endgame here. Get VR tech to the point where it’s better than buying physical displays for general productivity.
Though in that case, I’d rather have these virtual displays driven by my PC, not some bs apple ecosystem.
And their resolution and size are arbitrary. Those have meaning in the physical world because they are physical objects that need to have dimensions and must fit those pixels within that space. For virtual displays, it’s only limited by how much of your field of view would you like to dedicate to each display and how high is the resolution of your headset.
And this is only really scratching at the surface of what AR might be capable of. Why use virtual displays when windows could be displayed floating without a display? Why use windows when UI elements could be floating on their own? Why show a screen playing a video when you could render the video as a semi-transparent 3d scene happening around the viewer (other than the obvious "because it’s in video format, not 3d)?
That said, I’ll wait for someone else to do it since apple likes to take good ideas and simplify them down to the point of frustration.
the use cases ive seen would never use this, like 911. having run a 911 center, this product would never be implemented despite the 8 giant monitors at each station.
this is just an incredibly niche product, with very niche uses… and realistically its a toy that might be also used by some very specific industries.
Why not? it’s a lot more space efficient; it’s a lot more power efficient. The only thing holding it back is cost and comfort. I’m a developer rocking 4 monitors standard for work and I can absolutely imagine a world where I just have a desk, a keyboard, and a headset.
The resolution isn’t quite there yet, and I think the headset is too heavy to wear for 8hrs a day, 5 days a week (plus leisure if you’re a gamer or hobbyist)
No you can’t.
The resolution is not close to sufficient for a monitor with any meaningful amount of text on it. Your eyes will be bleeding in about 2 minutes.
I don’t understand how that would work, I work a lot across multiple spreadsheets and looking from screen to screen is ideal. Moving my eyes to look from division to seems straining.
From what randos on the net have said the next closest headset that doesn’t require a computer to operate costs $5k+ so from an enterprise standpoint they could more cost efficient there. So apparently it might appeal to the enterprise market.
I have seen much dumber, much more expensive tech in the wild in offices.
If it lives up to the hype, it could replace 2-3 desktop monitors (or convince some executives it can, anyway). It’s about the same price as two Apple Studio Displays. I’ve seen offices with very expensive standard equipment. $3500 per employee isn’t all that much to begin with if it’s legitimately useful.
I’m just genuinely confused by the value proposition. $3500 seems to be about a 1000% Apple Tax over comparable tech. I’m sure the interface will be slightly nicer, but the Venn diagram of those who need the unique benefits of Apple’s product overlapping those who have this much money to spend has to be very small. For business or personal use.
The best explanation I’ve seen is it would be nice on airplanes so you can watch movies and not have to awkwardly scrub past everything that might offend the toddlers behind you.
Admitably I have too much money, but I might buy one of these in a few years as a monitor replacement. Depends on how good it is and how good the alternatives are
Here’s the state of the art VR: https://www.bigscreenvr.com/. You’d need that plus Valve base stations and controllers, so about $1500 total. It’s miles ahead of anything anyone else is offering, especially Apple. You can’t demo it to others though, it really does only work for the person that it’s made for.
I’ve seen the LTT video on that. Trouble is I’d need a computer to power it since my work computer struggles as it is. I work from home and the office and being able to use it in both environments would be helpful. Base stations are a pain in the ass to setup when you want to switch location a couple times a week.
One of the standalone headsets make a lot more sense for my use case. I’ve been thinking about getting a quest 3 but I need to use one to see if the fidelity is good enough. I wish there was a linux based headset I could tinker with but the VR market is still young. Hopefully Valve will pull a steam deck in VR.
Okey, so Apple would have to make client apps to those services by themselfs… Oops! All proprietary.
Windows phone. Originally Microsoft put out a number of apps as web wrappers, but the mobile YouTube site kind of awful. So Microsoft wrote a YouTube app of their own that was actually kind of great and allowed you to download videos and play audio in the background and basically actually work right. Google threw a fit and basically made Microsoft delete the app.
Windows central still has a bunch of articles from the time up.
https://www.windowscentral.com/search?searchTerm=Phone+YouTube
I wonder if Apple’s continued 30% crusade is a factor.
I’d guess it’s mostly just a low volume set of use cases. So few people are on iVision (my new name for this) that it doesn’t make sense to devote development time to it.
Same problem the windows phones had
The vast majority of “apps supported on Vision” will act as a floating screen in front of you. So essentially the same as a typical iPad app. Doubt it takes any development time at all
Have you ever worked with Apple SDKs? They’re kinda a mess. They’d still need a dedicated team to build, support and manage the app, and they clearly don’t feel it’s worth it.
It’s still 4-5 full time developers at least. Probably a full few teams also including marketing, legal and a few other departments.
Pretty much every other platform charges 30% too. Steam? 30% Xbox? 30% PlayStation? 30% Google Play? 30% Samsung Galaxy Store? 30% YouTube Ad Revenue? 45%!
The only one that doesn’t is Epic, which charges 12% and recently it came out that they were struggling to make the store profitable.
So, not sure why Apple gets singled out here.
Why bother with making any apps these days when you can just build a web app and have it work across platforms.
Because they almost always universally suck across platforms. Only exception I’ve seen thus far is Figma.
First thing comes to mind is app integration with vision pro. I guess web app is not native enough for what they want to achieve
Because once you add all the tracking and advertising, and try to prevent ad-blockers, they don’t work as well. You’re also limited in tracking by restrictions all browsers have to some extent
Thats a big oof. Imagine buying this thing, going into the Appstore and not even finding YouTube and Spotify! Would immediately dampen my mood.
This feels a bit like Smartwatches (Android Wear and Apple Watch) all over again for me. Where already at launch the third party “App” selection was really underwhelming with Major Apps like Youtube, Spotify, … absent and it never getting much better.
But I get it. Apple always talks a big game about how much they love developers and how awesome they are but in reality they treat them like shit. Now Apple needs them and they give Apple this middle finger. Rightfully so!
