Apple Vision Pro Vision Pro

I would encourage anyone who has a chance to book a Vision Pro demo at an Apple Store. It changed my mind in the following way: Previously, I thought AVPs were expensive, ridiculous and useless. Now I think they are expensive and still mostly ridiculous and useless. I saw the immersive movies and the immersive sports experiences. If they had AVP support for MLB/NBA games in my market I would absolutely buy a subscription. I think they have Lakers now but I don’t care about that. From what I understand, there’s still a chicken and egg problem for Meta and Apple with regards to content and devices. It sucks because both companies are flush and could fix it if they wanted to. The device itself still costs too much though.

> Your concerns are completely nonsensical. With all due respect, my concerns are not nonsensical but borne of my daily use with Apple Vision Pro and my awareness of the limitations of dwell control. Iterating on this idea with a device lighter than Apple Vision Pro and improvements to dwell control would likely be required before this could ship to larger populations of disabled users, but that is not what is depicted in the video. My sense is that the possibility of an accessibility affordance with people who are severely disabled is driving opinions in this case more than the reality of what’s available. To my mind, much of these AX announcements are reminiscent of the circumstance that led John Gruber to author “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino”, which is that these are not shipping features but ones slated for “some time later this year”. I’m a huge AX fan and work directly in the domain space, but something about that video in particular coupled with my near-daily use of Apple Vision Pro doesn’t feel right.

You could be right. I think the novelty wears off, in part, because there is too much friction relative to the benefit. I’ve used YouTube with a phone headset. It’s cool, but kind of annoying. The Vision Pro was also kind of annoying to put on and set up. And with both, the content is limited. So how much annoyance is someone willing to put up with for something that doesn’t has much content and only provides are marginally better viewing experience? Televisions, computers, and phones, have very little friction and more content than a person could consume in 100 lifetimes. This makes the simple screen hard to beat. I’m also remind of something I heard a film director say when being critical of the 3D movie fad… all movies are already 3D. There is depth in the shots when looking into the screen, no one really needs stuff flying out at them.

^ agree with this take. If you're slow with tech, then this is amazing! And I think Apple has been great at making interfaces that are natural to use and easy to get into if you're not tech-savy. But for someone who's used to multi-task, or perform operations without looking at what I'm actually operating on, it sucks. I tried using keynote to create diagrams in Vision pro and the experience was so infuriating, I had to painfully look at everything and keep my focus on them while I also tried to repeatedly snap my fingers as the Vision Pro failed to detect it half of the times. I just want controllers.

I got the Vision Pro, and I'm quite sure that replacing desktop monitors at home or in an office is not something people will want to do. The technology isn't there yet. It's heavy, the external battery and its cable are obtrusive, the field of view is small, and you would still need to use a keyboard and a mouse. There's also a bit of lag with the passthrough video and it jitters when walking around. Maybe in a few years, despite many people having suboptimal monitor setups.

The Vision Pro's failings are IMHO not software or hardware related but a poorly executed platform strategy for content. Apple's reflex to build walled gardens has crippled the effort. And it's not the first time. Their Apple TV strategy was held back for years as well. Great hardware. Very cheap. You can plug it into any TV. It's not a bad game console even. But it lacked games. And streaming TV channels. And for a long time also streaming content. Apple fixed that eventually but Apple TV remains a distant competitor to more main stream platforms such as Netflix, which works on just about anything. Just like Youtube, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO, Disney, and all the rest. Apple TV at this point is an also ran that apparently is barely profitable. A few nice TV series but very much a niche player. The Apple TV hardware is more or less irrelevant at this point. And despite the name, Apple never made a TV or much of a dent into conquering the living room. Macs are great for gaming in terms of hardware. But other gaming platforms dominate the market. And Apple's walled garden approach is so effective that Steam's proton doesn't work on its platforms (so far). And its attempt to convince game developers to use Apple specific SDKs like Metal and build platforms are not really making any dent in the overall gaming market, which now eclipses Hollywood in terms of revenue and budgets. From a developer point of view it remains a highly crippled platform. And the Apple tax isn't helping. Se…

I don't enjoy basketball and I think the Vision Pro is a crazy stupid product --- but this does look cool as hell. Let me know when they make it work with a real sport.

VR. Tried a VirtualBoy back in the 90s, then those VR glove things, then eventually an HTC Vive and Oculus Quest. They were all cool and fun for a few hours, but having a sweaty heavy thing on my head quickly got tiring. And the games were generally crap that focused more on an "experience" than a gameplay; they felt like barely-interactive movies rather than the nuanced and complex gameplay that's usually on PC. Then Apple tried to take it the ultra-luxury route and that was an even bigger turnoff. I think by this point I'd only be interested in some barebones monitors-in-glasses for watching movies or doing work on, none of the other unnecessary stuff. -------- Also, home assistants. Alexa and Google Assistant seemed to hold so much promise at first, but they're still so bad a decade later, the third-party ecosystem is awful, and both companies seemed to have completely given up on improving them at all. Maybe the AI boom will revive interest in them at some point (with a natural language to API layer), but I guess there's just no money there, so probably not...

400k is a pretty small number. Apple spent years on VisionPro with a large team. This means so they are likely in the red (unprofitable) on VisionPro. This ignores the opportunity cost of the VisionPro team working on something else. Apple could have made normal fashionable glasses with a screen aka The Apple Watch / Apple AirPods strategy - but for eyes. But they went the heavy ski mask strategy with 2 hour battery life.