oh god, where do I even start?
first of all, the whole article reeks of bias and entitlement. “I don’t like VR so other people shouldn’t have it!!”
then, it all sounds like this guy never even tried any VR headset, or maybe he puked copiously after his first test.
and he’s constantly baiting and switching: “tim cook only interest is in squeezing money from us rather than releasing new products!!”, and right after “tim cook released a new product and it SUCKS!! even my mother said it!”
I bought a Rift CV1 in 2016, I’ve been waiting for some real VR since the first time I tested a rudimentary headset at a tech convention in 1996 playing Doom and some other VR game. it’s sick. I love it. I spent 10 hours a day in the headset during the first month, then I discovered simracing and it was an absolute blast. But the CV1 suffered the lack of direction outside of gaming. the screens were way too low resolution, it needed a powerful PC, it needed cameras, it needed joysticks, had no pass through so all of this stuff really didn’t make it for an optimal experience outside of gaming. I’ve ever since dreamed a way to use VR to work, and it seems like apple did it… or at least is in the process to.
Apple is not Google, so the Vision Pro is not going away. they’ll keep on refining it and bring it forward because that’s the future. you can’t judge it by now, we’re 5-10 years ahead of mass adoption of this tech, but we can already see what’s going to become.
unfortunately the tech suffered a big, big blowback caused by the boom of cryptocurrencies… we’ve all been waiting for more powerful graphic cards in order to cheaply manage VR, but nVidia was more concerned about making easy bucks selling to bitcoin farms rather than serving their loyal customers… and so VR took a hit around 2020 due to lack of cheap availability.
Facebook created the quest in order to detach their product from the whims of a terrible company like Nvidia, and that has somehow helped. but the Quest is and remains an entertainment product, not something that you can rely on for working.
I think the Vision Pro will be a revolution for those doing 3D modeling, or even programming. When the guy in the article says “you’ll get isolated in your tech!!” I think he knows he’s full of bullshit, because cubicles DO exist and people working at a PC screen is now more isolated than ever.
maybe his job is typing rants from the couch of a hotel on his iphone?
Good or not, it’ll always be a walled garden, so supporting them just promotes their bullshit.
It’s crazy to me how many of you people don’t understand this - most people like the walled garden. It’s fine if it’s not for us techies. That’s not who it’s for.
Maybe it’s because us people hate corporate loyalty and anti consumer practices. And corporations are like lemmings, they see one company doing it and they all wanna follow.
I don’t think people like the walled garden. I think they don’t know what it is even. They assume they can’t buy a competitors headset/watch/tv because it won’t work, and often they’re probably right because apple refuses use open protocols. But I don’t think they draw the line between the two. It’s not because of apple refusing to implement something it doesn’t work. It’s because “the competitor is bad”, or because they don’t have the “deep integration” between the two or something. It never occurs to them that if you just make the API public it suddenly “just works” for everyone.
You people crack me up. Such a small little bubble you live in while pointing fingers about being in a bubble.
If you can’t see the purpose of an eco system that sucks.
To lock customers in, to make others feel excluded, all leading to more profits… It’s simple, everything they do is to try and make you buy their shit by making it inoperable with everything else…
That and the price is the problem, in my opinion at least. What it can do looks quite impressive I think and has some nice ideas not really done commercially at the consumer level before.
But, I suspect it’ll be another iPhone. It will rule the roost for a short time and then someone will come out with a comparable product, for noticeably less that will work with other hardware too and connect with other non-apple software.
But, I guess for those in the ecosystem (who already have big pockets already for this kind of thing) it looks really good.
There’s already competing products just like with the iPhone. If this thing succeeds, it will succeed despite that, not because of it.
Facebook created the quest in order to detach their product from the whims of a terrible company like Nvidia, and that has somehow helped.
Facebook didn’t create shit. They bought the Quest. They bought hyper-evolved, time-traveling 4th dimensional being, actual fucking rocket scientist, benevolent hyperintelligent architect of the post-singularity simulation we all live in, John Carmack, and then he got sick of the Meta bullshit and left.
Yeah that’s not correct. Facebook bought into the oculus project in a share swap/cash deal with Lucky Palmer. Carmack joined the project later because he believes in VR in a big way and he contributed very important parts of the rendering methods to greatly improve performance.
Carmack was interested in making his own VR headset prototype to show off at e3. He found Palmer Luckey on mtbs3d, showing interest in Palmer’s headset prototypes. Carmack duct taped some hardware together with Luckey’s headset and made a demo to show off at e3 2012. Carmack was absolutely responsible for kick-starting VR to where it is today, with the help of Palmer.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
hyper-evolved, time-traveling 4th dimensional being, actual fucking rocket scientist John Carmack
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To me, this seems like a big misstep for Apple. Granted I’m no fanboy, but I’ve appreciated Apple’s design and products over the last few decades. This to me just seems half baked. And that’s not something I expected from Apple’s hardware. I personally don’t think I’ll ever wear a computer on my face for more than 30 minutes at a time. Even if the weight goes down dramatically, it’s just not a convenient experience. The last thing I need with my technology is more inconvenience.
It feels extremely brute forced.
I would have assumed that they had waited until they had transparent displays that were better than everyone’s, or had some unique way of combining passthrough and normal cameras that were better than others, but they really just announced basically a Quest Pro with some 3DS displays slapped to the outside. I’m pretty sure everyone at Meta’s reality Labs division sighed a pretty big sigh of relief, I suspect they were all worried that it was going to be an iPhone launch where everyone at Blackberry realized they were working on completely the wrong tech, and instead they just witnessed them launch a fancy and expensive version of what they’re already making for the mass market.
Apple products were never really ergonomic, so having over half a kilo dragging down your face seems to be a normal continuation of their design language. The battery on a cable however and the outside-facing screen seem like obvious bad design decisions that just contribute to the unpleasant weight distribution.
And it tries to sell a VR device as an AR device without any real killer use case other than integrating it nicely into their other products. Alone from the tech it’s impressive. Their new R1 and M2 chips do great work and the price reflects how much effort was put into it. But that alone doesn’t sell the device.
Even the positive reviews were mixed and pointed out grave flaws.
In my opinion, for this to take off it actually needs to provide significant advantages for people to accept wearing a comfortable sensor suite plus computer on their head in front of their eyes. We haven’t seen any of this yet… from any product in the space.
Well less than 30 minutes at a time is good because the Vision Pro battery only lasts around two hours and you can’t swap batteries without turning it off.
You can do a lot of things with the Vision Pro that you can’t do with other headsets, but I don’t understand why anybody would want to manage their calendar events in VR, and it seems like there are a lot more things that you would want to do with the Vision Pro that you can’t. If it were really an AR device like a modern Google Glass it would make sense, but with that form factor and a battery life of two hours it can’t really become part of you like that.
Are you aware that you can plug the battery into a power source and use the headset for as long as you want while the battery charges at the same time?
You can, but few people will. It’s not the image Apple wants the device to have. In their promotional videos, the people are constantly wearing the headset and never plugged in.
I think it really comes down to what developers do with it in the next couple of years. If they don’t devise some really interesting and meaningful experiences unique to the headset hardware I think it’s a dead end product no matter how much Apple pours into it.
Not to argue with you, but was there ever a ‘failed’ apple product ? Genuinely curios.
I think something with this, too (and that you sorta hinted at), is that it doesn’t seem to provide any additional benefit to what we already get with the iPhone, iPad, Mac ecosystem. That’s an ecosystem with a huge and established user base. Obviously this could change as developers step in to do the heavy lifting, but… Will they want to? Is it a good investment to spend thousands of hours on an app that a fraction of users of an already niche product will use? I think it’s very telling that some of the biggest developers (like Spotify and Netflix) opted out of Vision Pro.
It’s going to take some very talented, very risk-tolerant developers to make a $3,500+ headset go anywhere. And as of now, Apple is providing very little incentive.
Man that is one vapid piece of writing. VR is definitely a thing - there’s a whole market of devices, accessories and apps and experiences made for it. If your articles hinges on the idea of dismissing something that exists because you think it’s pointless then your article is reductive. Reductive posts on forums are thing but paragraphs of reductive reasoning is proof that some people need to touch grass now and then. I have no interest in Vision Pro but complaining that VR is pointless isn’t what I need to do to justify my lack of interest.
Only a billionaire would think people would pay $3500 to watch a VR representation of a TV. They seem to be promoting as a bulkier version of Google glass.
VR is an expensive product that causes nausea in a significant number of people. It’s something that can damage the eyesight of young people, so it’s not for children. Who knows if extended use can damage the eyesight in adults. Guess we’ll wait and see.
Metaverse was a failure because people aren’t going to pay to chat with people in a world of legless cartoon characters that looks like it was designed to run on a PS1. One of the big requirements for a social media platform is that it’s accessible for most of the day. I’m sure Mark Zuckerberg can throw on a headset when in his limo or when he’s on his yacht, or even when he’s in a meeting, because who’s going to tell him he can’t use that in the workplace? But for most people it means it’s a social media platform that’s only accessible at home and only if it doesn’t make you nauseous. And one that looks like ass.
They’re trying to pivot to it being a gaming platform, which it should have been from the beginning. But now were talking the video game business. How many AAA titles are going to be ported? Is a gaming platform that young people aren’t going to be allowed to use going to be successful?
There isn’t really a solid business case for these products. Sure maybe when the tech improves, costs come down, and they can get buy-in from video game studios for it, it might be a thing. But for now it is just another future-tech grift that impresses shareholders.
Sounds like you don’t know much about the VR market in general. It is actually a popular segment of technology that has been growing and improving for decades.
It’s not going away, and Apple may have the next level of the technology already on the market. IDK but I’m not buying one. I already have 2 other VR headsets that do all that I need. I play VR games on my Index system about 5 times per week. It has superseded my interest in almost all 2D games.
I also know several other people from young to middle aged who have VR systems and we all quite enjoy being able to make use of the tech.
You lost all credibility when you said
It is actually a popular segment of technology that has been growing and improving for decades.
Which you wasted no time before saying! VR is great and the idea the person your responding to is posing is stupid and misinformed.
VR has been tangibly growing / developing for a decade at best.
I keep remembering the Apple Watch release in parallel to the vision pro’s release. The first Apple Watch was so awkward and had no real purpose other than an extra notification display. But over the years the Apple Watch found its footing through iteration and iteration and is now a great health tracker with a bunch of cool uses.
In 6 or so years the Apple vision headsets will be awesome… but so should competing VR/AR.
The difference is that the Apple Watch was not that awkward compared to actual watches.
It was the size of a mid to large sized normal watch, and it’s battery lasted roughly a day and could be charged overnight next to your phone.
The Vision Pro is not the size of a pair of glasses, you can’t wear it nearly as long, nor can you use it like them. It’s not asking people to replace an existing device with a smart one, it’s asking them to use a whole new thing.
