Lots of surprises on the downside from all the reviews. Pass through much more limited in quality with motion blur, pixelation, distortions, limited color and dynamic range. The eye tracking driven input method which was seen as holy grail turns out to be annoying after a while because people don't naturally always look at what they want to click on. Personas straight up aren't ready. The lack of AR features is the biggest surprise. They tried hard to avoid it being a VR device but all the actual high quality experiences, especially the ones people are impressed by are the VR ones.
For me the biggest issue though is that it can't fulfil it's primary use cases:
Want it for productivity? it can't run MacOS applications and if you want to use your actual Mac it can't do multiple monitors.
Want it for entertainment? people want to enjoy photos, videos, movies with other people and it can't include them. Even if they have a Vision Pro, I haven't yet seen any sign of ability for multiple people to do these things together.
All up, it all seems far more immature and dev-kit stage than I was expecting.
The biggest thing for me, from the Verge review, was the limited field of view. Apple sold it as filling the users entire field of view and it sounds like that isn’t the case. When I first saw the reality of the Microsoft HoloLens, that was my disappointment there as well… Google Glass as well. I don’t want to feel like I’m wearing an AR device, as so far, that’s what everything has looked like. Limits of the technology, sure, but until that is solved I’ll have a lot of trouble throwing money at it. I still plan to head to an Apple Store at some point to try it out for myself.
As far as viewing with other people, this doesn’t seem like an insurmountable challenge. They have the theaters, they have Personas, they have spacial audio, and other Apple devices have features for watching content together with friends. Put them all together and it seems like if several friends had Vision Pro they could feel like they were sitting in a theater room together while watching a movie. I’m not saying this will be easy, but it seems like all the building blocks are there. The Personas are probably the big weak point, especially looking at someone next to you, but with the focus on the movie, I that’s probably the least important part.
The end goal here - multiple people who are isolated by the technology they're wearing experiencing a simulacrum of human interaction mediated by that technology - is not only unbelievably depressing but also honestly just really boring. We've already built this. It was called the "metaverse" and it sucked. Everyone left.
I've been telling people this for awhile, the biggest issue I have with the available VR headsets is the limited FoV. It causes unneccesary neck strain having to move your head as much as you do to look at things.
in some ways even the reviews seem to be placed by Apple (same as they provided the exact photos of the device the media printed). all of them seem to present a full view with floating widgets, when there's really no way to photograph them
> The eye tracking driven input method which was seen as holy grail turns out to be annoying after a while because people don't naturally always look at what they want to click on.
This has been know for at least 30 years in the eye tracking business and it even has a name - The Midas Touch problem.
It doesn't seem like a 'problem'. For new tech, the emphasis should always be on pro users first (even if they don't initially adopt it because of the long lead times for those industries). So if you're designing an oil rig with these, a pro user would probably want to be able to independently interact with an element while looking for the next element since that's more time-efficient. Seems like a better term might be the 'Midas Touch Axiom'.
Seems like you could just implement a simple delay to solve this.
Let's say I want to click on the "reply" button below this text box. If I'm perfectly honest, I DO look at the button for a moment, then I move the mouse pointer over to it. But then right before clicking, my eyes switch back to the content I've created to observe that my click is having the desired effect on it.
I'm not actually looking at the button at the moment I click on it, but I DID look at it just a few milliseconds prior to the click. Why can't the UI just keep track of what I looked at a few milliseconds ago, to figure out that I actually wanted to click on the button, and not in the center of some text box?
One issue could be maybe I thought for a moment about replying but then changed my mind and decided to edit the content some more. But the UI has decided that I meant to click the "reply" button and so now it's been submitted prematurely. Yeah, I can see the problem now. The position of the mouse cursor is meaningful when clicking, and the Vision OS doesn't have a cursor. Cursors are important.
But decoupling hand gesture from eye tracking should not be that hard: the external cameras could just follow the hand and put a pointer on the screen.
> if you want to use your actual Mac it can't do multiple monitors
lol, literally the only use case I could convince myself to spend this money on (hey its cheaper than an XDR ).
Even then I was having trouble convincing myself since.. all indications were you wouldn't want to wear this more than a few hours at a time, so ultimately you still need the real physical monitors for the other 80% of your workday.
Instead of having multiple virtual screens I would prefer a lot more if I could simply spread individual Mac windows around my virtual space. In mixed reality the whole concept of a virtual monitor makes no sense, it's just an unnecessarily limiting abstraction you could easily do without. The whole room is your "desktop".
It's basically what the SimulaVR guys are aiming at, and I'm surprised Apple didn't go this way with their Mac integration. Especially because the native visionOS apps do seem to behave just that way.
Keep an eye on Immersed.com, they have an app that does this with a slew of VR devices, and I expect they will support Vision Pro if they can. They also have the Visor.com that is supposed to release later this year
> all indications were you wouldn't want to wear this more than a few hours at a time
I think all the wear comes if you’re sitting up wearing it, though. For passive consumption (or thinking between moments of work), you can just lean back or even lay down, which will take the pressure off your head/face.
>The eye tracking driven input method which was seen as holy grail turns out to be annoying after a while because people don't naturally always look at what they want to click on.
This has always been the case and this technology has been around for a while. I'm surprised Apple would have chosen to use it for user input.
I was curious about this so I tried surfing the web and seeing how I click on things. I am literally unable to click on buttons or text inputs without actually looking at them. If I try to only use a corner of my eye, I miss the buttons 90% of the time. How do people not look at what they are clicking?
Wow, I remember when it was announced, to press materials gave the impression that it would be closely integrable with macOS. I was picturing using VS Code from within it. Which I guess I could do if I set up VNC... but I'm not paying thousands for that.
Is an AR productivity tool really so hard? Apple owns the whole stack here. Nintendo can do Mario Kart AR in your living room with an RC car, but I can't get unlimited AR desktops for software development etc?
It does Airplay from a Mac to the headset. You look at the Mac and then tap the "connect" button that appears in mid air above it. Apparently it's very seamless and has good latency.
What you don't get is Mac windows intermingled with AVP windows, it's just your Mac screen as one window that you can move about. It sounds good though, and there has been a fair amount of movement in screen sharing over the last few macOS releases which suggests more could be coming here (like multi-screen support).
Yeah I’d love to use one for PCB design at a cafe, but I don’t even own a Mac. I’m not going to drop $5k for an experience I can already do with my old laptop just a little bit fancier.
I'm surprised we still don't have an X-like "render on the drawing device" model. Rather than sending pixel, you send a higher abstraction model from which the UI can be drawn.
> but I can't get unlimited AR desktops for software development etc?
You can't because it's computationally impossible. There is simply no computing device that can render unlimited high-res desktops at 60Hz per eye.
Not to mention the need to stream all that data to the headset - since you're not going to put a high-end graphics card needed to even attempt this in anything approaching a wearable form factor. Good luck getting multiple 4k or even just HD streams between your laptop and your AR headset over Wi-Fi.
I can’t get over how goofy and stupid it looks, and how awkward those gestures are.
There’s a video circulating of someone cooking while wearing it and gingerly pinching a virtual timer and placing it on a pot of boiling pasta.
It looks so stupid that I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.
Maybe younger people might think differently but for me, this stuff is dead on arrival because of simply how uncool and stupid it makes you look when you use it.
I'm not really an Apple fan nor am I going to buy this thing, but this seems like a criticism that goes away as soon as everyone does it.
We all look stupid staring at our black rectangles, with notches at the top, with little headphone stems sticking out of our ears. It looks stupid at first and then you get over it
Yeah, saw the WSJ review with that video, but in all fairness, I think only someone who doesn't cook would think that cooking with this thing on your head might be a good idea.
Maybe, but if you had an app that allows you to define kitchen + appliances. You could eaily made a game/app that tells you what to do. Take stuff out off fridge, cut it up... ping your virtual pot needs stirring, go back to cutting, ping turn off the oven... and so on.
Sort of virtual assistant.
That could be useful to people to avoid burning or forgetting stuff.
We just got the 'larger iPod' version of Spatial Computing. If your primary interface is a screen, it's still screen computing, not spatial computing. They literally had everything teed up to do some wild proximity things (AirTags, Homepods, etc) - and they gave us a strap on iPad.
Whatever, it at least gives a startup an opportunity to build something unique - it's just sad to see your old friend start going senile.
This iPhone trope has gotta die. I worked at Motorola when the iPhone came out. Every single engineer knew this thing would blow everything else out of the water. It was one of the largest leaps in consumer tech devices ever. I assure you the Vision Pro is nowhere close to that.
The first iPhone, yeah, it had some detractors, but I don't think the kinds of criticisms the parent poster gave ever really applied to the iPhone. To succeed, the iPhone didn't have to be this utopian product; it just had to be more useful than its main competitor, which was dumbphones. People who complained that it was missing features the Blackberry had were working from an unstated major premise that the iPhone was initially targeted at enterprise users, and I think that everyone who wasn't too busy being a pundit to see how the world works could see that that quite transparently wasn't the case. There was even a time period where I had both an iPhone for personal use and a Blackberry for work.
And I think the criticism about entertainment is spot-on. By contrast, despite being extraordinarily limited compared to even the very next modal, the first iPhone was fantastic for entertainment, precisely because it was good for fostering shared experiences. It didn't take long after the device came out before you'd see groups of people clustered around an iPhone, looking at photos together on that big, vibrant, gorgeous screen. That was something that none of its competitors could do. And you better bet that people saw that happening and started wanting to have one of their own so they could have fun, too.
I do think we're still in the "wait and see" phase for this product, but, unlike some of the original iPhone criticisms or cmdrtaco's original dismissal of the iPod, the criticisms this article points out feel really personally relevant to me.
I checked a couple of those old reviews and a couple things that seemed to be a common take with the iPhone that definitely aren't holding now:
- incredible amounts of hype
- loving the design
- loving the touchscreen and input (directly contrasting folks worrying about the eye tracking now)
- a sense (at least from cnet and pcmag) that it's really just an overgrown iPod so they keep comparing it to an iPod (compared to the vision where folks get that it's a new category for apple and have good comps outside anyway )
There are definitely similarities in terms of complaining about missing features that apple's probably going to add soon anyway (keyboard showing up in portrait and stuff). Lots of complaints about not supporting flash but we know how that went. Also apparently the headphone jack position was annoying.
What I'm not seeing in the current vision reviews - and maybe it's impossible to see this in real time - is some feature that has the chance to change literally everything that people arent able to comprehend just yet. These reviews being relatively dismissive of this web browsing on your phone thing is absolutely hilarious in hindsight. The only similar thing in the vision is - the passthrough eye thing maybe? Nothing else seems particularly baffling.
I'm glad I read some of those reviews. The vibe I'm getting is - the iPhone was doing something fundamentally weird with this whole smartphone thing that reviewers just didnt get, so they kept reviewing it as an iPod with really bad voice calling and a browser and being confused by all the hype. The vision though? It's a vr/mixed reality headset, we know what those are like, and apple didn't throw any real curveballs.
Most of the issues listed by @zmmmmm are the same issues plaguing other VR headsets for a decade now: motion blur, pixelation, distortions, fake looking colors.
The iPhone was subsidized by mobile carriers and/or interest free payment plans. I don't see that same path for this VR device, but maybe I am missing something.
And the touch bar, and the magic mouse, and ping, and mobile me, and hi-fi.
They're just a consumer goods company. Sometimes they make good things people don't appreciate at first. Sometimes they make bad things that people don't appreciate ever.
Their track record is better than the mean, but comparing every criticism of a first-gen Apple product to the iPod/iPhone launches is unserious. Of course some people panned any given new thing on Earth.
And this isn't even in response to someone predicting that AVP would fail, but just that the 1st-gen AVP is an immature product. The 1st-gen iPhone was an immature product! It's delusional (and discrediting to Apple!) to think the iPod, iPhone, OS X, Intel Macs, M1 Macs, etc. were as mature at launch as the later iterations we associate those technologies with now.
I wonder given all this... what the expectations are at Apple from a higher up/board/executive standpoint are
Most of Apple offerings are good:
Watch
iPad
Mac
iPhone
services
Are they really expecting this to just be a hard problem initially that they get better at over time? When is the last time they launched a "so so" product?
Apple Maps falls in that category. Maps was bad when it came out but after years of effort (and a lot of money), it's pretty good now. That was no small feat given how good Google Maps already was when Apple Maps started.
Tim Apple reportedly overrode the design team on launching it prematurely relative to their typical standards in order to enter the market and begin iterating before waiting too long. It’s the first new product category made under his leadership and he’s eyeing retirement, as context.
Btw, don’t forget visionOS 2.0 is just 18 weeks away. (Source: WWDC is every June and every platform gets a version bump, as we saw with watchOS launching in April then getting a 2.0 immediately after at WWDC.)
The first two iWatches were borderline pointless/bad.
The first two iPhones weren't as innovative as they make them,just more polished than other symbians with cameras and internet, it took off with apps really in third iteration.
I think visionpro has lots of opportunities in the next iterations, early users will provide feedback this gen.
So-so in what way? This product is clearly a toy. Which is to say that it is genuinely new. Maybe like how the Apple II was when it first came out. PCs were quite expensive back then too, if I remember correctly. This really will take time. All the important technological things were toys before they became tools.
Newton and to a much much lesser extent the first iPod and iPhone. But really the Newton while a product that I love and a super profitable line was the last time Apple created something that had so many rough edges.
"Want it for entertainment? people want to enjoy photos, videos, movies with other people and it can't include them. Even if they have a Vision Pro, I haven't yet seen any sign of ability for multiple people to do these things together."
This is not accurate, FaceTime has Share Play. Any app that leverages it can build a synced entertainment. Example out of the box, Apple TV, Freeform, Apple Music.
I wish the SDK for Share Play was not tied with FaceTime, since it limits you to only people you have their iCloud email or phone number to. Big Screen on Quest was a great app that leveraged the idea of multiple users in the same VR session, based on interest, Quest just lacked the quality.
I think OP meant you can't include other people _in the same room_. If I want to watch Netflix (well, Apple TV, since Netflix doesn't have an app yet), my partner is completely out of luck if I do it on an Apple Vision. Unless he too has the money for one and we FaceTime each other to sync up our watching experience.
I want to watch stuff or collaborate on projects with my wife on a plane or in a hotel, you just haven’t seen these use cases from Apple yet because the product lacks it in 1.0
"Ensemble (formerly MacCast, before the lawyers had something to say about it) bridges windows from your Mac directly into visionOS, letting you move, resize, and interact with them just like you would with any other native app. It's wireless, like Mac Virtual Display, but without the limitations of resolution or working in a flat plane."
It does for apps running on the goggles themselves, but the Mac integration feature just shows the Mac's screen as one window, kinda like Remote Desktop on Windows.
And this is a quite hard limitation, since the Mac has to actually render those windows and then stream them to the goggles over radio. So, without quite a bit of magic, you have a limited amount of pixels the Mac can draw and send.
My launch day Apple Watch was unbelievably bad. Not even good for telling time as the raise-to-wake feature was so flaky. So by the sound of it, the Vision Pro might be starting in a better position than the watch.
Watch v1 was just awful. Those laptops with butterfly keyboards and the first gen Air were also completely broken in their own ways. If Apple manages to keep iterating on this device, they might eventually have a winner
My job at the time gave me a brand new Series 2 and it was annoying to interact with... when it was new. Dropped frames, missed touches, etc. There was still a little bit of lingering hope there would be "killer apps" outside notifications and exercise.
But nope, nothing more interesting came, and OS updates ruined performance so badly that I happily returned it to my employer 2 years later and opted not to buy my own until 2021 (for exercise and notifications only).
> The eye tracking driven input method which was seen as holy grail turns out to be annoying after a while because people don't naturally always look at what they want to click on.
I wrote a long comment [1] months ago when the Vision was first announced expressing my skepticism about the use of eye tracking based on my person experience with the tech. At the end I said, "maybe I'm wrong." Turns out I wasn't.
i generally agree with the sentiment of this post. it does appear to be a beta/dev kit. i will say that the productivity criticism is a BIT unfair. It may be the case that you can only have 1 MACOS display, but you can have many non macos apps running right alongside the 1 macos display. You could have your macos display doing things that only macos can do, and then run the vision pro version of discord or teams or safari or whatever else you would use that has an ipad/vision version as floating windows separate from the macos display.
iOS/visionOS lacks good window management tools for this though and since macOS Apple has not demonstrated they can build them for new platforms. Maybe visionOS will motivate them to actually get it right, but that hasn't been shown off yet.
I think about all the apps I'm running and switching between on my computer now, using shortcuts and toolbars and docks to arrange, hide, and switch between them. Everyone using multiple apps on visionOS just looks chaotic.
I once had a second portrait monitor next to my ultrawide. I had to get rid of it because it was just too tiring to be constantly turning my head so far to look at it. It didn't work out.
I cannot imagine how uncomfortable it would be if each app needed to be in a different physical space that required turning my head to use. Painful.
yes true - a lot depends on the integration in that scenario though. Can I seamlessly copy and paste rich content between the, drag and drop, does the mouse seamlessly move from my Mac desktop to the safari window next to it, etc.
At a deeper level it depends a lot on the question of does Apple want this? If they do then all these will be solved over time. But if they actually see MacOS as a legacy integration then they simply aren't going to invest in encouraging people to use it. I'm waiting to see indications on which way they are going to play it.
Its not gonna flop, for the same reason that Apple desktops dont flop. Anyone educated in basic modern technology can easily see that for the price, you can build a custom desktop that blows any Mac one out the water, but people still buy them because of 2 things: styling and ecosystem.
Vision has both of those. People will conveniently ignore all the downsides of it, like they do with current Apple products.
I think this product will be a slow burn. They are getting developers engaged now and subsequent generations will bring broader appeal while the software will get more refined and apps will expand in availability. I don’t think it will be a flop it will just take a while to get going. And they must absolutely know this given the current pricing.
I think that eye tracking perhaps could be used to enhance gesture-based input methods though. It could provide a hint at which object a gesture is directed at in cases where that would be ambiguous.
I have tried eye tracking as primary input method some years ago in another setting, and I very much did not like the experience.
It's going to be a great, sneaky way of installing an ad blocker onto wetware - users will train themselves to not even gaze at anything resembling an ad, lest they look at it long enough for the headset to register it as a click.
To me, 3D home recording playback is a huge use case.
Why would you want presence in an action movie? Cool, in an exciting sort of way.
But presence in recording of your family? That's powerful stuff, for everyone!
That feels like the long-term hook. iCloud to handle obscene storage amounts as a service. iPhone to generate new recordings. Vision to play back recordings.
And the dastardly brilliant part is... the more 3D video you record... the more valuable a Vision is to you.
>> Capturing -- One of the more remarkable things to watch? Your own home 3-D movies. Apple introduced “spatial video” for the iPhone 15 Pro a few months ago, and I started recording my sons with it. Watching the videos in 3-D in the headset now is almost like reliving the moment. The Vision Pro also captures these videos and photos—you just hold down a button on the top left.
This was always going to happen. The human eye has a field of view and dynamic range no display technology can hope to match anytime soon. The future of AR is not reprojecting the outside world on a screen; it is screens which can become transparent.
For that to happen we would need a transparent display that can block light. Seeing content on an additive display will always look somewhat transparent, with no hope of displaying blacks.
The augmentation on the vision pro look so much better than on a HoloLens2, it's like looking at 3d printed objects.
AR Passthrough is the big v 1.0 feature for this generation of headsets...I'm sure Apple and Meta were developing in tandem without knowing what the competition was doing. It's a really need addition that brings significant improvements...and I could see Apple developing it as 'this is streets ahead' where Meta was just improving tech they already had.
At the end of the day, this is Apple testing the waters and trying to get a positive cash flow to help offset significant R&D...what they're showing is pretty impressive in a number of ways, even as it's lacking in others.
> Want it for productivity? it can't run MacOS applications and if you want to use your actual Mac it can't do multiple monitors.
I don’t know why, but while I feel multiple monitors helps my productivity a lot in Windows and Linux I find myself not caring as much in MacOS as long as the screen is big enough. I think it has to do with my habits around how I use the windowing in each. I tend to teasselate and arrange them in MacOS while I tend to maximize or lock to screed edges in Windows.
Unpopular opinion: multiple monitors are a meme for most uses and almost everyone is better off having a single screen and using their fingers to move the viewport accross virtual desktop spaces.
> Even if they have a Vision Pro, I haven't yet seen any sign of ability for multiple people to do these things together.
No idea if it does this, but the obvious use case is for people who aren't physically present - but letting them somehow share a physical space. It could potentially be awesome for friends/partners who live far apart.
The eye-tracking thing doesn't surprise me at all, but I am surprised anyone thought this was a holy-grail sort of interface, in particular that Apple didn't rule it out themselves fairly quickly. Eye-tracking data is always a gigantic mess - it's why it's presented as gaze averages rather then direct replays.
Every hit from Apple had lots of initial (VALID) gripes, but the experience was worth it to advance the core product and eventually eliminate or accept those limitations.
iPod was the size of a beefy wallet, but was good enough.
iPhone was glorified plastic and websites looked like crap, no app store. But hey, it worked well enough.
That said... this isn't accessibly priced and what's the hook? Like if this launched the same time as Pokemon Go or WoW were taking off alongside it it'd get the social momentum all the other options had.
Also it's better than the competition in key was, but differentiable ways...? AR/VR could very well take off but it's not this year.
> Want it for entertainment? people want to enjoy photos, videos, movies with other people and it can't include them
This is a disingenuous argument. Your other points are much more valid than this one. You don’t have a VR headset to interact with other people in the same room. If you want to watch a movie with other people around you, there are many other (cheaper) ways to do that (and Apple can sell you a nice AppleTV to do it).
And yet you literally have early access reviewers regurgitating talking points about how this will redefine the television-watching and movie-going experience.
genuine curiosity, how often are you clicking something without looking at it at least for a moment?
or, how often do we believe other people are clicking something with out looking at it?
im examining this for myself...hard to feel organic while im actively focusing on it, but i at least glance at my mouse pointer target while traversing the pointer towards the target across my screens
I also started thinking about it reading the reviews, and the main cases to me are:
- checking something before commiting an action: for instance reread the product name before pushing the purchase button. The pointer is already on the button, I keep it there while checking the order, so I just need to click.
- focus switch: pushing another window to the forefront doesn't need a super accurate click. I assume most people eye ball it like me and will click on a emptyish part of the window from the corner of their eye. Same for moving the focus away.
- scroll and type like situation: mostly when using a document on the side while taking notes. My eyes and focus will be primarily on one side (with quick glances on the other), while the mouse/trackpad movement will be on another.
I think we'll discover a lot more instances of this.
One of the aspects of the device that has been under-realized is that when mirroring your desktop/laptop display to the AVP, you can't break out its applications into different areas. You can't pull them away from the desktop window.
This is one of those things that Apple never claimed was supported, and yet there's something about that behavior that feels like such a natural intuitive implication to the technology that a lot of people feel alarmed or even cheated when they realize it's not possible (yet). It's been funny to watch the various discussion threads as people pop up talking about their shocked realization and disappointed feelings.
Update: I did realize when watching the WSJ video that the "mirrored" display actually appeared to have greater "resolution" (more pixels in height and width) than what she had on her laptop. So that's something.
It seems very reasonable this will be a future feature. I've long suspected iPad OS' stage manager feature shipping so half baked was really more of getting the platform ready to support multiple apps and easier manipulation (from a developer perspective) of the double buffered "window" textures - given Vision Pro is based on iPad OS.
With Stage Manager on macOS now, it feels like they have all the primitives in place to "transpose" macOS stage manager windows textures to Vision OS/ the iPad OS foundation.
Though this will be tricky to get right for all apps. Will be interesting to see if it's a macOS App store only feature/ API, opt-in, or some other option
They can already do this with the desktop composition software they use today. All the windows are virtualized onto backing layers that you can draw anywhere and add effects to. It’s how window shadows work, and how certain window effects are done.
They shipped iPad Stage Manager half-baked, to get iPad developers ready for double-buffered windows, so they could eventually ship the visionOS macOS integration half-baked? Doesn't sound right at all to my ears, even though I'm stoked for my order!
EDIT: -5* doesn't make sense, this is the most polite way you can point out that getting macOS apps windowed on visionOS has ~0 to do with double-buffered windows on iPad OS. n.b. I didn't use half-baked, OP did.
On Windows of all places (95ish to MEish) there was a remote tool called radmin and it had something that I wish companies had embraced: it hooked in to (maybe even before?) the window-rendering functions and sent the changes over the network. It’s hard to explain exactly what I mean because everyone is so used to streaming pictures of the screen over the network (if they even use remote access at all), but you could have less than 20ms latency while controlling over the internet while using tiny amounts of data (50kbps? 100? not sure but somewhere around there).
OSX had the opportunity to follow that path before settling on the “render windows, capture the screen, compress the image, send it over the network to be decompressed” VNC-style remote access that’s bog-standard today, and if they had Vision Pro would be set up to be an absolute mind-blowing macOS experience.
This is how Windows Remote Desktop used to work - it would forward GDI instructions to be rendered remotely.
It falls apart as UIs got richer, browsers in particular: they're entirely composited in-app and not via GDI, because GDI isn't an expressive enough interface. So you end up shipping a lot of bitmaps, and to optimize you need to compress them. You might as well compress the whole screen then.
> On Windows of all places (95ish to MEish) there was a remote tool called radmin and it had something that I wish companies had embraced: it hooked in to (maybe even before?) the window-rendering functions and sent the changes over the network. It’s hard to explain exactly what I mean because everyone is so used to streaming pictures of the screen over the network (if they even use remote access at all), but you could have less than 20ms latency while controlling over the internet while using tiny amounts of data (50kbps? 100? not sure but somewhere around there).
This has been done many times before (see e.g. X Windows) and has known downsides. Off the top of my head:
- You need the same fonts installed on both sides for native font rendering to work
- Applications that don't use native drawing functions will tend to be very chatty, making the total amount of data larger than VNC/rdesktop/&c. style "send compressed pictures"
- Detaching and re-attaching to an application is hard to get right, so it's either disallowed or buggy.
isn't that how Xorg remoting used to work as well? the display server and client are separate, so whether the pipe was local or remote didn't matter. In principle, Wayland could do it too, I think, if there were a way to synchronize texture handles (the Wayland protocol is also message-based, but IPCs GPU handles around instead of copying bitmaps.)
I guess one downfall is that that your pipe has to be lossless, and there's no way to recover from a broken pipe (unless you keep a shadow copy of the window state, and have a protocol for resynchronizing from that, and a way to ensure you don't get out of sync.)
This only works with two major assumptions, neither of which is true for the VisionPro:
1. The receiving side has to have at least as much rendering power as the original side, since it will be the one actually having to render things on screen. This is always going to be the opposite case with any kind of glasses, where you'll always want to put as little compute as possible for weight and warmth reasons.
2. Each application actually has to send draw instructions instead of displaying photos or directly taking on control of the graphics hardware themselves. No or very few modern applications work like this for any significant part of their UI.
IIRC many windows apps at that time were using MFC or otherwise composing a UI out of rects, lines, buttons, etc. Then came Winamp and the fad to draw crazy bitmaps as part of the UI. If everyone does that, shipping draw commands is less useful and shipping pixels makes a lot more sense.
This can only work until it doesn't, and it won't work in many situations because eg 1. apps aren't going to bother being compatible with it 2. compositing has surprising performance and memory costs, and in this case the destination is more constrained than the source.
Windows does this very well since at least a few years back. When connected via Remote Desktop any native application will get the behavior you describe, so the UI gets updated with almost no latency.
Applications which bypass the native APIs to render their window contents, in particular video players or games, get a compressed streamed video which has very decent performance. The video quality seems to be dynamic as well, so if there's a scene with very few changes you can see the quality progressively improve.
All of this is done per window, so a small VLC window playing a video in a corner gets the video treatment, while everything else still works like native UI.
Yeah, I don't think "mirroring" is quite the right term. It's effectively a 4K monitor for the laptop, with the laptop screen going black. Most (all?) Mac laptops don't have a 4K screen, so you have more screen real estate than "mirroring" would make you think.
But this is sufficient for many use cases (or at least, mine). I pre-ordered one with the idea that my main work will be on the 4K monitor, with most of my superfluous apps floating around as native visionOS apps. That's mail, a web browser, and zoom, which all have apps now, and Slack, which I could just use Safari for but may have a native app in the future.
The screen real-estate is the same as for a 1440p screen. From The Verge’s review:
“There is a lot of very complicated display scaling going on behind the scenes here, but the easiest way to think about it is that you’re basically getting a 27-inch Retina display, like you’d find on an iMac or Studio Display. Your Mac thinks it’s connected to a 5K display with a resolution of 5120 x 2880, and it runs macOS at a 2:1 logical resolution of 2560 x 1440, just like a 5K display. (You can pick other resolutions, but the device warns you that they’ll be lower quality.) That virtual display is then streamed as a 4K 3560 x 2880 video to the Vision Pro, where you can just make it as big as you want. The upshot of all of this is that 4K content runs at a native 4K resolution — it has all the pixels to do it, just like an iMac — but you have a grand total of 2560 x 1440 to place windows in, regardless of how big you make the Mac display in space, and you’re not seeing a pixel-perfect 5K image.”
It's more like 1080p monitor. The virtual monitor only covers a small part of the VisionPro's display. You can compensate a bit for a lack of resolution by making the virtual screen bigger or by leaning in, but none of that gives you a 4k display.
To really take proper advantage of the VR environment you really need the ability to pull out apps into their own windows, as than you can move lesser used apps into your peripheral vision and leave only the important stuff right in front of you. You also miss out on the verticality that VR offers when you are stuck with a virtual 16:9 screen.
I agree that this should be considered long term, however... you are able to snap VisionOS / iPadOS apps anywhere around your Macbook view AND you are able to control those very apps with your Macbook trackpad.
So even though you have a sequestered Mac output alongside Vision apps, you can use the same controls for all them simultaneously. This should help in the interim.
Yeah when I found this out, it resolved my concerns. Most of my apps will have a native Vision release (email, web browser, slack, etc.) and my actual monitor screen will only need more professional software (e.g. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign).
Discontent over this implementation detail shows users are fully sold on the basic idea. Like, if the main complaint about the first Fords was the colour range.
I think it's a more important feature than just a cosmetic color. Imagine if you bought a truck to haul cargo, but were then told it can only transport one type of cargo at a time. That would suck.
Further, I wish they added support to make multiple virtual monitors from macOS Workspaces, like what happens today when you attach another monitor. Switching workspaces can be bound to keys in the Keyboard Settings. Moving windows to other workspaces is easy to do with third-party apps like Amethyst.
It feels like the Vision Pro would definitely be a great replacement for people who (want to) buy multiple expensive monitors, but it doesn't fully reach that potential today, and mostly because of software? Although rendering 3 or 4 virtual workspaces through ad-hoc Wifi at 4K 60fps+ low-latency would certainly be a huge challenge.
I do this sometimes on my meta quest. Go into desktop VR and pull up a couple desktop views so I can see things happen in real time on different “screens”.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this came in a visionOS update. On a shorter timescale it could also come in the form of third party apps, because there’s no technical limitations preventing a server app from cutting out windows on a desktop OS and sending them over a wire to a visionOS client.
On a shorter timescale it could also come in the form of third party apps
If Apple approves it, of course. This is one of my major concerns; there's a lot of potentially useful functionality that could be implemented, but you have to jump through the app store hoops and hope that Apple doesn't decide that it conflicts with their idea of what you should be allowed to do.
There are third party apps that do this already on the Quest. I believe they can replicate Mac screens, they definitely can replicate Windows PC screens into the VR space. If Apple doesn't provide a 1st party solution I suspect someone else will soon.
The inability to break out Mac windows curbed a lot of my enthusiasm for the AVP. I hope Apple will eventually add it, but I'm not going to spend $3500 on that hope.
It will be less of an issue for me if we start seeing native builds of popular IDEs like xcode, intelli-j/goland, etc for vision pro (and other apps for other people say photoshop). I think of the 'projected screen' feature more like a compatibility layer like Rosetta 2. You use it until you get a native build then it stops being a thing you bother with.
The largest portable MacBook Pro 16.2 inch has a 3456-by-2234 native resolution at 254 pixels per inch which by default is halved . So I don’t know what she means exactly about 4k but there are enough pixels to do a portable 4k display.
Streaming an arbitrary collection of windows instead of a single finished, composited framebuffer increases the bandwidth requirements by at least an order of magnitude. That's never going to work well over WiFi.
As long as the total number of pixels is less, I don't see what that has to be true, at least bandwidth wise? Compute wise, the vision might have to do slightly more to separate the buffer and composite them into the AR view in different places, but the bandwidth should be direction proportional to the number/size of each window. If I can fit all the windows on a 4K screen, then I don't see why the software can't split that and lay it out separate in my view instead of in a single rectangle.
Just compress the stream. Total pixels increase the vram on the device but popping out a static window shouldn't take any more than a trivial amount of streaming bandwidth.
Use the touted eye tracking feature and compress that particular applications stream inversely to how much the user is focusing on it within the Vision Pro.
I guess there is something to the macpro being able to handle the output for one screen at a time. If it has to render 4k outputs for 10 different screens simultaneously, performance is going to suffer.
I really like Joanna Stern, and how she approaches reviews like this. I’ve watched her review, The Verge’s, and MKBHD’s unboxing video.
However, the best review I’ve found that actually transmits what is possible and what it is like to use is Brian Tong’s 55 minute review video: https://youtu.be/GkPw6ScHyb4
I’m not familiar with him, but unlike other reviews I’ve seen, he spends less time evaluating or summarizing, and more time trying to actually use the device. I didn’t even realize that you can seamlessly use your Mac to control your visionOS apps, for example.
Good review. Most interesting part was at 43:00 discussing the ergonomics and weight, which is the real question for everyone hoping to make this a daily driver.
He said he could wear it 45 mins before needing to take it off, that it was overstimulating so you need to slow down how quickly you use apps and move things on screen, and that gestures also were fatiguing. You could tell he was trying to be fair but positive.
Headsets just haven’t cracked this nut yet, and tho tech may advance somewhat, they may be limitations inherent to the form factor. Even if it gets really light weight, the issues of overstimulation, headaches, and the amount of neck movement implied may keep these products in a niche. (I say this as someone super excited about AVP)
For everyone used to using their computers all day long wanting to do it in a headset, don’t throw your macbooks away just yet.
I've regularly done 2+ hours of light activity (e.g. mini golf, social hangouts) with my Quest 3 without issues, though I will note this is with a third-party head strap specifically designed to be way more ergonomic and comfortable than anything first-party from Meta or Apple [1].
A lot of the physical downsides here are basically self-inflicted by companies trying really hard to hide the "nerd factor" necessary for comfort, to the detriment of the actual user experience.
I think the "overstimulation" thing is a bit of a sleeper issue.
At first people think "wow it's so awesome I can be sitting on the moon while I browse the web". But after a bit of time you just get tired, and I think it's precisely because your whole brain is working in overdrive to understand the unnatural environment you are in. None of this manifests explicitly but at the end of it, when people are faced with the choice of putting the headset on or not, they just "feel" like it's a lot of effort.
I say all this as someone who does regularly spend 1-2 hours working in Immersed with multiple giant screens up. And I love it as a break, a way to focus or just relieve the boredom of working in the same space day in day out. But even I feel this effect of it being tiring and not keen to do it for 8 hours a day. And the minute you say that, you lost the use case of this being your "only" computer / replacing your laptop, so it's actually kind of crucial to its central justification as a replacement for a computer or a 'new kind' of computer.
Everyone I know even those who are into VR and even those who WORK in VR have zero interest in working with a headset of any kind on.
And those who work in VR report their coworkers and just about everyone they talk to customer wise feels the same way.
I know there are people who really want to, or think they do, but most would rather just use screens until maybe such a time the form factor becomes a pair of eye glasses.
This is headset, app and person dependent. I've done 8 hours in Elite: Dangerous (sat down, can't remember the headset) and well over 4 hours in Fallout 4 VR (stood up and moving around, Valve Index).
Having demoed VR at my old office I can tell you that the range of reactions varies from an immediate "nope" and having to take the headset off to being able to stay in it for a significant amount of time with no discomfort.
I started watching the video, and at 0:40 he asked Siri to "close all my apps". At that point my own iPhone's Siri enthusiastically explained to me how I can close all the apps on my phone.
It is interesting how many here are excited about this for productive computer work. It’s also what Apple advertises with.
But what is the account situation like?
For years I’ve been complaining that I can’t easily use my private iPad with my company Mac because they have separate Apple IDs. Things like sidecar for a quick virtual whiteboard are basically impossible.
AirPods have gotten better over the years where today I can freely switch between devices belonging to different Apple IDs with the same AirPods.
But is the Vision Pro like that as well?
It would seem weird to exclude the not-so-small group of people working from home but with company MacBooks
It's actually far worse. There's a single user and a "guest mode", but for AR/VR to work with, there's a calibration step, which means that the guest has to go through that step every single time they want to use the device. It might be fine for a real guest using it once, but it would be basically impossible to share the device with someone else. Having to setup the device every single time you use it sounds absolutely terrible.
Of course. They want to sell them locked to a user so that every employee or family member needs their own, and can't use the same one at work and at home.
I don't think the question was about multiple people sharing a VP device, but about the same person using a single VP device with multiple Apple devices on multiple Apple accounts - can you easily switch between viewing your personal Mac's screen and then switching to your work Mac?
Man I've felt this for YEARS and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills with all the youtubers and influencers proclaiming Apple's Connected Ecosystem as such as productivity advantage.
Either you can't sign in with your personal Apple account, or you shouldn't (because MDM). So the only way to access anything associated with iCloud is what is available on the iCloud web portal; which is a horrible experience. You can't do sidecar. You can't do airdrop, copy-paste, continuity camera, nothing.
I've only ever used Macs in a professional environment. I've, also, always had a Mac and iPhone as personal devices. But I've never made the jump toward saying "Ok I'm actually using iCloud Seriously now" for this single reason. The best Google Cloud experience is available in a web browser, which I can be signed-in to on everything. Google Drive is everywhere. The list goes on.
Its such a crystalline example of why Apple's walled garden actually hurts themselves.
I thought I was the only one bothered by that! I'd love to use my private iPad with my work Macbook. And at least in my case preventing that definitely won't increase iPad sales: My company won't provide me a work iPad and even if it did it wouldn't work as there are no iCloud accounts attached to our work Macbooks.
Locking you customers into your ecosystem? Fine, whatever. But even within the ecosystem restricting usage in such a way!?
It's been said for years but the iPad could be so much more than a mere media consumption device if it weren't for short-term-profit driven design decisions.
Basically the business and education group is about selling to businesses and schools, so they give them the tools they say they need. This means you wind up having configuration options which sound good to operations, but which break ecosystem support - and on BYOD break personal usage.
Literally the only cloud drive product I know of which doesn't work on my corporate laptop is iCloud Drive, because the EMM gave a checkbox to set a flag. As a result, a huge portion of built-in collaborative features and apps just don't work. I have paid seats in other products only to regain functionality lost by that checkbox.
> For years I’ve been complaining that I can’t easily use my private iPad with my company Mac because they have separate Apple IDs.
I have a similar complaint with my Apple Watch and my corporate issued laptop. When I am using my own computer (mac mini) I love how easy it is to use my watch to login, use it to approve actions, etc. However when it comes to my company laptop I have to type my password in repeatedly. It would be awesome if the watch could be linked to both IDs to make this much more seamless.
No security-conscious corporation is going to allow you to approve any actions with security implications using an Apple Watch secured by a four-digit passcode, rather than an alphanumeric password on a Mac.
> For years I’ve been complaining that I can’t easily use my private iPad with my company Mac because they have separate Apple IDs. Things like sidecar for a quick virtual whiteboard are basically impossible.
This is kinda what Managed Apple IDs are for - the work 'owns' the Apple ID it puts into its management profile and can set policy. Apps write into a separate storage container which the company could remote wipe, without affecting the rest of your personal data. If they want to disable things like sidecar, they can do it.. for the corporate apps/accounts/web domains.
I'd' generally assume the multi-user aspect is worse (because face shields and prescriptive inserts) so generalized multi-account is pretty low on the priority list.
> Things like sidecar for a quick virtual whiteboard are basically impossible.
Zoom has a good Airplay sharing feature that works well in this situation.
But I get what GP means -- I do have a corporate profile, and I made my own @corporation.com Apple ID, but what do I do to use sidecar? Either log out of my personal iCloud on the iPad (gross) or log in to my personal iCloud on my work computer (grosser)
I suspect multi account support is not ‘down the priority list’ but purposefully not implemented at least when it comes to iOS. Why make it easier for customers to share iPads at home when they can buy multiple iPads.
I use my iPad so sporadically that it could easily be the house iPad, but I’m signed in with my email and so on it can’t be.
The entire screen sharing setup they demo'd in the original Vision Pro demo reels always made me laugh. They've had years to get Sidecar right, and have failed miserably every time. How am I going to believe that they'll get wireless display transmission to work perfectly for this thing?
I haven't used the Vision Pro, so I can't say how well it works in practice... but with macOS 14 this year they redid their screen sharing app to, presumably, use whatever technology is underlying the Vision Pro display-sharing. It's really good. Vast improvement over the previous tech (presumably VNC?).
Assuming the Vision Pro screen sharing works using the same stuff, I have high hopes.
I maintain that the Vision Pro/its battery pack should have at least one displayport input. It wouldn't support keyboard+mouse sharing, true, but latency would be improved and you'd sidestep all the problems with accounts and locked-down work devices.
The "freely switch" here is referring to the W-chip multi-device support that will on the fly switch between any number of Apple devices based on what's actively being used at the time, without needing to do any manual connection stuff.
Other non-proprietary Bluetooth devices will generally do 2 devices at most, and getting that to work right with microphone input settings can be kind of a nightmare.
However, pairing an audio device is an exchange of settings and encryption keys, and Apple will sync that pairing that to your entire account. Hold your AirPods near your Phone and tap the button to create the initial pairing, and they start working with your Mac and Apple TV.
OP is talking about the reverse. Using one Vision attached to two different laptops with two different iCloud accounts, so they can use it with both their work and personal computer.
The facial interfaces are just held on with magnets, so it's not unrealistic to think that people might swap them out regularly depending on who's using it. The interface is sized for the user so hygiene aside you'd probably want to swap it for a different one anyway.
Unfortunately Apple is charging $200 per extra facial interface though.
Its wireless operation seems to depend on Hand Off in some capacity. Most companies probably wouldn’t want to grant a personal device access to that on a work laptop, and I bet there are some thorny questions about what to do with incoming Hand Off data from multiple accounts.
If your company Mac is locked down to the point where you couldn't just create a separate account on it that is tied to your iCloud account, then it is also unlikely that they would allow you to hook up another device to their network and your work computer in order to have this convenience.
(My partner is corpo; I'm startup, but have worked at corpos. No thanks.)
Better to keep it all owned by the company, in my opinion, and have them issue you an iPad for this express purpose.
There’s plenty of reasons why you would want to have a separate Apple ID for a company Mac that have nothing to do with overly restrictive permissions from IT.
The main one being a complete separation of calls, messages, calendar, notes and reminders. For my own sake more than for my employers sake.
And many employees with company phones already have that separation. iPhone and Mac is not that uncommon to provide for employees. But an iPad on top? I think that’s gonna be much harder to find
Sure you can create a separate account on your company Mac. But there's no assurance that whatever work resources needed would be available on that second separate account.
If your work is on the traditional model of perimeter protection and trusted intranet, a non-work device can't join the network as you have correctly pointed out. If your work is on the newer BeyondCorp style model, switching to a second account on your computer is going to invalidate the device trust needed to access work resources.
I think we are now at a stage where VR hardware has surpassed software. Between this and the Quest 3, we have powerful, polished and consumer friendly devices, but beyond a few niches (fitness, simulation, gaming to some extent), there is nothing to convince users to put the headsets on.
I am hoping we will see a lot of experimentation in the coming years, and I am excited for what the Apple ecosystem will bring to the table. That said, from what I have seen so far this does not seem to be a revolution compared to the current offerings, but an evolution on various fronts, without addressing the killer app question.
Underlying a lot of these discussions is the assumption that there is a future where this is an actually useful, mass-market device. I'm still not convinced this is true.
For example, "killer apps/content" never arrived for 3D TVs and they have largely disappeared from the market. Same with various "waggling" input technologies like the Wiimote and Kinect. There were some compelling uses, like Wii Sports, but these were pretty limited and many other uses of these in games was a case of Nintendo shoehorning the technology into the game.
I think the best pessimist argument is the one offered by Folding Ideas in his metaverse video[1]: Text is really, really useful, and a virtual 3D space is not a good environment for either creating or consuming textual content.
I see headsets like this as a way to have multiple, large, monitors that go away as soon as you aren't using them. After having a big dual-monitor setup for years, about a year and a half ago I got rid of them and work with just my laptop's display. I do this so that my desk doesn't have to have monitors on it, and is more conducive to artistic work and mechanical tinkering.
I don't miss multiple monitors so much, but I do often wish for a larger screen. Not enough to put one in my space, though. That's where my interest in the Vision Pro lies - simply a way to project large, high-fidelity, 2d screens.
The "killer app" here is to have an infinity-sized 'screen' for anything the average user was already going to do with an iPad or Apple TV. The hardware's just not good enough yet, in terms of lightness and comfort, for the average user to put up with as more than a novelty.
I mean it's the same problem for a lot of stuff, build it and they will come. Apple is super naive to think that they can just jump into this space and yet end up with a polished product (ie Apple's selling point).
I see on scifi all the time where someone flicks/flings a video playing on a device to move it to a larger display surface and it kills me that we actually have the technology to do stuff like this right now...but because every company works in their own interests/don't work together to create standards we don't get to have fun use of tech like that.
It wouldn't be the first time that hardware gets ahead of software.
In 1988-94, the CPUs available in desktop computers were substantially more advanced than the widely used operating systems. Windows 3 and Mac System 6/7 didn't support pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection, or many other features that define a modern OS.
Maybe we'll look back at today's Quest and Vision Pro as similar transitional devices with one foot stuck in the old paradigm, running old-style software.
> In 1988-94, the CPUs available in desktop computers were substantially more advanced than the widely used operating systems. Windows 3 and Mac System 6/7 didn't support pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection, or many other features that define a modern OS.
That was partly because RAM was over $100/MB (Nominal; ~$230 inflation adjusted) in 1990. Additionally, in the IBM compatible world, many people didn't have a 386 at that point.
Also, minor nitpick on the dates; 1993 saw OS/2 2.1 and NT 3.1, both of which had preemptive multitasking and memory protection.
The Apple headset is maybe more akin to the expensive workstations of the time which did make fuller use of their CPU facilities but were neither priced nor aimed at consumers. The headset is not nearly as expensive (especially inflation adjusted) and is ostensibly a consumer device but it's current incarnation seems unlikely to have the kind of mass adoption for the analogy to work out.
I think you've got it backwards. There are plenty of reasons you'd want to put on a VR headset if it weighed as much as a pair of glasses, had a 180 degree field of view and like 5x the resolution of current headsets.
The reason the software doesn't exist is because compelling hardware doesn't exist for it to run on, so nobody bothers to write it.
Apple is imagining this device will be used for productivity but it's still painful to actually wear for long periods. We're a long way from being limited by software instead of hardware.
> I think we are now at a stage where VR hardware has surpassed software.
It's a 600+ grams headset with a battery on a leash for $3500. I wouldn't say the hardware is mainstream ready or fulfilling it's side of the contract yet.
People like to say this but my friend just sent me a recording of “drop dead home invasion” with the Quest 3 and my jaw was on the floor. He says it’s amazing too.
I’ve also heard about players spending a lot of time in counter strike games like pavlov.
At this point it seems like there’s a TON of things to do in VR (and I’m gonna be honest, there were a ton of experiences too on the Quest 1 when I had it).
I’m just waiting for more live shows and concerts that I can attend from the Quest personally.
Oh I agree - I loved my experience with Drop Dead Home Invasion, and there are a lot of amazing experiences overall. But, I do think that most of these have more potential as a "demo", that you do a few times but would not motivate you to use a headset every day, beyond a relatively small group of people.
It is like VR is currently stuck being Kinect in terms of sales and stickiness, while Meta and Apple would both like it to be at least like the Wii, or ideally the iPad.
Personally I have found social experiences to have the best long-term appeal (i.e. Racket NX or Drop Dead with friends), but even there I am not these apps have sufficient mainstream appeal.
The major problem VR has isn't the games, but all the boring and basic stuff, like using 2D apps in VR or running multiple VR apps at the same time.
The discontinued WMR Portal, essentially the Window's desktop in VR, was so far the only software that tried to be a full workspace in VR. But even that was missing a lot of important features and Microsoft gave up on it years ago and never made it accessible to non-Microsoft headsets. It's currently scheduled for removal from Windows.
VisionPro seems very similar to WMRPortal so far, with a few key improvements like allowing apps do add 3D objects into a shared space.
I personally think MSFS 2020 and Automobilista 2 are killer VR apps. All (wannabe or pro) pilots could learn how to operate any given aircraft in MSFS and relive past glorious racing in A2 on current or historic tracks/cars. Senua and Alyx showed what is possible in gaming as well and why it's so much better than 2D. Elder Scrolls looks great in VR just the controllers make it a joke when fighting (too easy and weird). I still think 4k is too low and 8k will be needed to feel like a 1080p phone.
they are killer apps, but how many people are going to spend $3500, no, just $1500 or $1000 for just for these things? Well, that is almost the entire market of Quest 3 which Apple does not want to be in. Which is why I feel Quest 3 is a product that makes much more sense than Vision Pro.
Anything goggle-like is a non-starter for me. I'm not even interested in trying it. I don't even like glasses, and I need corrective lenses to be able to see clearly (I wear contacts almost exclusively).
> I think we are now at a stage where VR hardware has surpassed software.
Totally agree. I'm waiting for a usable Virtual Desktop app to come out. All the ones I have tried which work on my cheap WMR headset fall short of having floating app windows in view.
I guess there is one of those which works on Meta Quest, but not PC headsets. That's really what you need to be effective working in VR. Just like is mentioned the Apple headset supports.
I feel like the killer combination here would be a Virtual Desktop-like app for visionOS where the desktop VR passes through as an environment, but full local app layering is still available in the foreground.
I think we are now at a stage where VR hardware has surpassed software.
How about enabling AIs to create layouts of information on behalf of the user? Like, what if an AI could arrange all of your information for you in a scheme derived from Archy?
But at the same time, the hardware is not where it needs to be for ubiquity. We need ~60PPD, great FOV, and lighter hardware to really break the barrier. Vision Pro is at the limits, but still not quite there, and we all know the 90/10 rule.
I think if it was an iphone accessory then it would have convinced more users because it would be $1000 since it’s just the display and sensors where iphone would drive all the compute
There's a bunch of VR games/apps that are notable for fitness. Beat Saber is the most well known one that's explicitly a game, Supernatural is maybe the most famous one that's framed as more of a fitness app/service.
But other notable ones include Synth Riders, FitXR, OhShape, Pistol Whip, Thrill of the Fight, and (maybe) Gorilla Tag. And this list is far from exhaustive.
VR is pretty good for fitness just because it can make exercising more interesting, comparable to sports without the need to coordinate with other people (and it's easy to do inside your house, if you have at least a 2m x 2m open space). Major downsides would be having that space available and sweat inside the headset.
I’m surprised Apple dropped the ball on fitness here given they already have a fitness platform. Imagine rowing in VR and feeling like you’re actually on the water. It would make exercising so much more motivating and interesting.
It turned out the killer Apple Watch feature was fitness, and I don’t see why it couldn’t have been here.
To add to the suggestions by the sibling comments, Eleven Table Tennis and Racket NX are both great racket-based games with multiplayer and a high skill ceilings. Depending on your personality I think applications like this are much more motivating than going to the gym as a workout.
I'm not sure I've ever liked the term "killer app", because I don't think it's particularly useful in describing real user thinking and behaviour. There was a very long journey from VisiCalc and Wordstar to the modern-day ubiquity of office computing. Different user groups have complex, diverse and overlapping sets of needs and wants that can rarely be distilled into a single application. I'm more inclined to think in terms of Bezos's one-way doors - changes in user behaviour that are sufficiently compelling to be largely irreversible.
I agree that progress has been slow in the consumer space and meaningful long-term adoption of VR has been confined to a few niches; that isn't necessarily an indictment of the long-term prospects for VR, because desktop computers spent much longer in that stage than most people remember.
In enterprise, I think things are more advanced and some user groups have decisively gone through the one-way door for some applications. I think the best example is architecture. If you've done a couple of client presentations in VR, you just aren't going back to showing renders on a flat screen, because immersing the client in a physical space is that powerful. It's not just a sales tool, but a communications tool - clients can understand and respond to the environment intuitively and give much better feedback as a result.
Industrial and clinical training is less clearly one-way, but I think we're very close in a lot of areas. AR is still less developed than VR, but I do think we're on the cusp of something significant - a sufficiently comfortable standalone AR headset with sufficiently high-quality passthrough can deliver training experiences that can't practically be replicated through other means.
I think one of the most interesting areas of development is in psychiatry. It's still early days, but we're starting to see real, meaningful benefits in RCTs for VR-based therapy of disorders like phobia and PTSD. Some of the most compelling results have been in the very sickest patients - people with psychosis, who often find it impossible to engage with conventional psychotherapy.
I don't think it's remotely likely that VR will ever replace flat screens, but I do think that VR is slowly growing into a niche but durable HCI platform. Tablets are a reasonable analogy - a lot of people see them as a failure, but they still sell in serious volume and they're often a much better form-factor for specific applications than either a phone or a laptop, especially in industry. Tablets didn't change the world, but nor are they likely to go away.
Everyone is looking for the "killer app" so they have something to anchor the concept. Put simply, the Web fits the bill. Apple has invested in the space because they can't afford not to. Their App Store model starts to show its limitations when you stop staring at the screen and start looking through it.
WebGPU and WebXR are the two big enablers going forward. With WebGPU, developers have a common way to access hardware and that's a big deal across all your devices. A common way to access the hardware that gets you real-time 3D graphics, machine learning, crypto, etc. that works on your phone, tablet, laptop, headset, whatever is a big deal. And it's not just for anyone with Apple gear, but anyone with a compatible browser. Think generative AI/ML streaming Gaussian splats to your retinas via a browser. That's where we're headed.
It's way too early to tell if this product line will succeed in the long term. Will the first gen Vision Pro be a runaway success? Of course not! Will later generations look as obvious as the iPhone does now? I sure hope so!
For comparison, Apple sold 1.4 million iPhones in 2007. Supposedly Apple is expecting to sell around 500k Vision Pro units this year. Given the 3x price difference (in 2024 dollars), that effectively means the first gen Vision Pro is expected to bring the same revenue as the first gen iPhone.
We all have rosy retrospection about how great and obvious the first iPhone or first iPod was, but honestly nobody had any idea if Apple's crazy bet would pay off. We all agreed it was magical tech, but it was expensive, had tons of limitations, and nobody really needed it. Sound familiar?
All I know is betting against Apple has rarely paid off. They do have failures too though and this is clearly technologically more ambitious than any other launch, so who knows! And honestly that's what makes this launch most exciting.
It's been so long since I've had child-like wonder about some new technology that I'm just glad Apple took a chance on launching such a crazy device, even if I don't know what to do with it... yet.
The difference is that in that review there were plenty of remarks like:
> Fortunately, we can report that on the whole, the touchscreen and software interface are easier to use than expected. What's more, we didn't miss a stylus in the least. Despite a lack of tactile feedback on the keypad, we had no trouble tapping our fingers to activate functions and interact with the main menu.
What I’m seeing in the reviews of AVP say the opposite about many aspects:
> There is a built-in virtual keyboard so you can type in thin air. But it will drive you mad for anything longer than a short message. And selecting smaller buttons with a pinch should be a carnival game. I started getting real work done once I paired the Vision Pro with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
I agree it’s still too early to tell, but the best thing that I see being mentioned is movie watching which is something all the other headsets already do as well. The AR aspect seems to be a unique aspect, but I wonder if there will be safety issues that prevent things like cooking and doing other tasks assisted with AR from truly taking off.
> I'm just glad Apple took a chance on launching such a crazy device
Probably a dozen other companies launched similar devices already. Apple is hardly going out on a crazy limb here. This is their classic iterative refinement of what other people already did.
But I do agree with the first point - the flaws in this gen 1 has very little bearing on the long term success of it as a product category. But I would argue it works both ways, in that to the extent it is successful in the niche that buys it, you can't tell yet if it will break out to mass appeal. We just don't know.
None of these articles are reviewing the future product line: they are merely reviewing the one product you can buy today. Of that product sucks but its successors in a year or two will be great--or even if this product with some major software update becomes awesome--that is entirely irrelevant. The original reviews of the iPhone weren't wrong just because some different later thing that was part the same product line earned a better review.
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For me the biggest issue though is that it can't fulfil it's primary use cases:
Want it for productivity? it can't run MacOS applications and if you want to use your actual Mac it can't do multiple monitors.
Want it for entertainment? people want to enjoy photos, videos, movies with other people and it can't include them. Even if they have a Vision Pro, I haven't yet seen any sign of ability for multiple people to do these things together.
All up, it all seems far more immature and dev-kit stage than I was expecting.
As far as viewing with other people, this doesn’t seem like an insurmountable challenge. They have the theaters, they have Personas, they have spacial audio, and other Apple devices have features for watching content together with friends. Put them all together and it seems like if several friends had Vision Pro they could feel like they were sitting in a theater room together while watching a movie. I’m not saying this will be easy, but it seems like all the building blocks are there. The Personas are probably the big weak point, especially looking at someone next to you, but with the focus on the movie, I that’s probably the least important part.
It really isn't though, at least not for long, as of mid 2023 there are publicly showcased compact lightweight prototypes with 240° FoV.
This can also be achieved with 3rd party apps. On Quest, this is already a reality with Big Screen.
This has been know for at least 30 years in the eye tracking business and it even has a name - The Midas Touch problem.
I wanted to see how it is possible but sure enough, I found a paper from 1995 that cited even older research about this.
https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~jacob/papers/barfield.pdf
Let's say I want to click on the "reply" button below this text box. If I'm perfectly honest, I DO look at the button for a moment, then I move the mouse pointer over to it. But then right before clicking, my eyes switch back to the content I've created to observe that my click is having the desired effect on it.
I'm not actually looking at the button at the moment I click on it, but I DID look at it just a few milliseconds prior to the click. Why can't the UI just keep track of what I looked at a few milliseconds ago, to figure out that I actually wanted to click on the button, and not in the center of some text box?
One issue could be maybe I thought for a moment about replying but then changed my mind and decided to edit the content some more. But the UI has decided that I meant to click the "reply" button and so now it's been submitted prematurely. Yeah, I can see the problem now. The position of the mouse cursor is meaningful when clicking, and the Vision OS doesn't have a cursor. Cursors are important.
lol, literally the only use case I could convince myself to spend this money on (hey its cheaper than an XDR ).
Even then I was having trouble convincing myself since.. all indications were you wouldn't want to wear this more than a few hours at a time, so ultimately you still need the real physical monitors for the other 80% of your workday.
It's basically what the SimulaVR guys are aiming at, and I'm surprised Apple didn't go this way with their Mac integration. Especially because the native visionOS apps do seem to behave just that way.
I think all the wear comes if you’re sitting up wearing it, though. For passive consumption (or thinking between moments of work), you can just lean back or even lay down, which will take the pressure off your head/face.
This has always been the case and this technology has been around for a while. I'm surprised Apple would have chosen to use it for user input.
Is an AR productivity tool really so hard? Apple owns the whole stack here. Nintendo can do Mario Kart AR in your living room with an RC car, but I can't get unlimited AR desktops for software development etc?
What you don't get is Mac windows intermingled with AVP windows, it's just your Mac screen as one window that you can move about. It sounds good though, and there has been a fair amount of movement in screen sharing over the last few macOS releases which suggests more could be coming here (like multi-screen support).
You can't because it's computationally impossible. There is simply no computing device that can render unlimited high-res desktops at 60Hz per eye.
Not to mention the need to stream all that data to the headset - since you're not going to put a high-end graphics card needed to even attempt this in anything approaching a wearable form factor. Good luck getting multiple 4k or even just HD streams between your laptop and your AR headset over Wi-Fi.
There’s a video circulating of someone cooking while wearing it and gingerly pinching a virtual timer and placing it on a pot of boiling pasta.
It looks so stupid that I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.
Maybe younger people might think differently but for me, this stuff is dead on arrival because of simply how uncool and stupid it makes you look when you use it.
We all look stupid staring at our black rectangles, with notches at the top, with little headphone stems sticking out of our ears. It looks stupid at first and then you get over it
Sort of virtual assistant.
That could be useful to people to avoid burning or forgetting stuff.
I'm so old I remember the N-Gage 1st gen being ridiculed for the "sidetalking" feature.
Now we have millionaires on TV talking to their phones like it's piece of bread they are about to take a bite of and nobody bats an eye.
Whatever, it at least gives a startup an opportunity to build something unique - it's just sad to see your old friend start going senile.
Everything you've said is reminiscent of the reviews of the first iPhone.
The first iPhone, yeah, it had some detractors, but I don't think the kinds of criticisms the parent poster gave ever really applied to the iPhone. To succeed, the iPhone didn't have to be this utopian product; it just had to be more useful than its main competitor, which was dumbphones. People who complained that it was missing features the Blackberry had were working from an unstated major premise that the iPhone was initially targeted at enterprise users, and I think that everyone who wasn't too busy being a pundit to see how the world works could see that that quite transparently wasn't the case. There was even a time period where I had both an iPhone for personal use and a Blackberry for work.
And I think the criticism about entertainment is spot-on. By contrast, despite being extraordinarily limited compared to even the very next modal, the first iPhone was fantastic for entertainment, precisely because it was good for fostering shared experiences. It didn't take long after the device came out before you'd see groups of people clustered around an iPhone, looking at photos together on that big, vibrant, gorgeous screen. That was something that none of its competitors could do. And you better bet that people saw that happening and started wanting to have one of their own so they could have fun, too.
I do think we're still in the "wait and see" phase for this product, but, unlike some of the original iPhone criticisms or cmdrtaco's original dismissal of the iPod, the criticisms this article points out feel really personally relevant to me.
- incredible amounts of hype
- loving the design
- loving the touchscreen and input (directly contrasting folks worrying about the eye tracking now)
- a sense (at least from cnet and pcmag) that it's really just an overgrown iPod so they keep comparing it to an iPod (compared to the vision where folks get that it's a new category for apple and have good comps outside anyway )
There are definitely similarities in terms of complaining about missing features that apple's probably going to add soon anyway (keyboard showing up in portrait and stuff). Lots of complaints about not supporting flash but we know how that went. Also apparently the headphone jack position was annoying.
What I'm not seeing in the current vision reviews - and maybe it's impossible to see this in real time - is some feature that has the chance to change literally everything that people arent able to comprehend just yet. These reviews being relatively dismissive of this web browsing on your phone thing is absolutely hilarious in hindsight. The only similar thing in the vision is - the passthrough eye thing maybe? Nothing else seems particularly baffling.
I'm glad I read some of those reviews. The vibe I'm getting is - the iPhone was doing something fundamentally weird with this whole smartphone thing that reviewers just didnt get, so they kept reviewing it as an iPod with really bad voice calling and a browser and being confused by all the hype. The vision though? It's a vr/mixed reality headset, we know what those are like, and apple didn't throw any real curveballs.
I do think future generations of AVP will do well. Iterating and applying learnings and customer feedback will make this a good product.
Apple didn’t fix any of them.
They're just a consumer goods company. Sometimes they make good things people don't appreciate at first. Sometimes they make bad things that people don't appreciate ever.
Their track record is better than the mean, but comparing every criticism of a first-gen Apple product to the iPod/iPhone launches is unserious. Of course some people panned any given new thing on Earth.
And this isn't even in response to someone predicting that AVP would fail, but just that the 1st-gen AVP is an immature product. The 1st-gen iPhone was an immature product! It's delusional (and discrediting to Apple!) to think the iPod, iPhone, OS X, Intel Macs, M1 Macs, etc. were as mature at launch as the later iterations we associate those technologies with now.
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This however is coming after a decade of existing AR/VR consumer electronics and still misses the mark
Most of Apple offerings are good:
Watch
iPad
Mac
iPhone
services
Are they really expecting this to just be a hard problem initially that they get better at over time? When is the last time they launched a "so so" product?
The first Watch was awful. I love my Series 8.
Don't get me started on the first Mac...
Btw, don’t forget visionOS 2.0 is just 18 weeks away. (Source: WWDC is every June and every platform gets a version bump, as we saw with watchOS launching in April then getting a 2.0 immediately after at WWDC.)
The first two iPhones weren't as innovative as they make them,just more polished than other symbians with cameras and internet, it took off with apps really in third iteration.
I think visionpro has lots of opportunities in the next iterations, early users will provide feedback this gen.
All of them! The first version of the iPhone, iPad, iPod, watch, AirPods...
They all had similar reviews. "Seems like a tech preview, not really ready for general use, too expensive", etc.
The reviews haven't mentioned it, but SharePlay [1] is OS-level functionality and the press releases mention using it with movies, music, and games.
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10087/
This is not accurate, FaceTime has Share Play. Any app that leverages it can build a synced entertainment. Example out of the box, Apple TV, Freeform, Apple Music.
I wish the SDK for Share Play was not tied with FaceTime, since it limits you to only people you have their iCloud email or phone number to. Big Screen on Quest was a great app that leveraged the idea of multiple users in the same VR session, based on interest, Quest just lacked the quality.
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/shareplay-watch-liste...
That might not be their primary goal, but the device could appeal to that demographic either way if the other features are appealing enough.
[0] https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4085828-a-record-share...
Not on a plane they don’t. Not in a hotel room on a business trip.
IMHo, the Vision Pro is for being somewhere when you’re nowhere; not for being somewhere when you’re already somewhere.
"Ensemble (formerly MacCast, before the lawyers had something to say about it) bridges windows from your Mac directly into visionOS, letting you move, resize, and interact with them just like you would with any other native app. It's wireless, like Mac Virtual Display, but without the limitations of resolution or working in a flat plane."
And this is a quite hard limitation, since the Mac has to actually render those windows and then stream them to the goggles over radio. So, without quite a bit of magic, you have a limited amount of pixels the Mac can draw and send.
Or maybe it’ll be another homepod
But nope, nothing more interesting came, and OS updates ruined performance so badly that I happily returned it to my employer 2 years later and opted not to buy my own until 2021 (for exercise and notifications only).
I wrote a long comment [1] months ago when the Vision was first announced expressing my skepticism about the use of eye tracking based on my person experience with the tech. At the end I said, "maybe I'm wrong." Turns out I wasn't.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36220097
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I think about all the apps I'm running and switching between on my computer now, using shortcuts and toolbars and docks to arrange, hide, and switch between them. Everyone using multiple apps on visionOS just looks chaotic.
I once had a second portrait monitor next to my ultrawide. I had to get rid of it because it was just too tiring to be constantly turning my head so far to look at it. It didn't work out.
I cannot imagine how uncomfortable it would be if each app needed to be in a different physical space that required turning my head to use. Painful.
At a deeper level it depends a lot on the question of does Apple want this? If they do then all these will be solved over time. But if they actually see MacOS as a legacy integration then they simply aren't going to invest in encouraging people to use it. I'm waiting to see indications on which way they are going to play it.
Vision has both of those. People will conveniently ignore all the downsides of it, like they do with current Apple products.
I have tried eye tracking as primary input method some years ago in another setting, and I very much did not like the experience.
Why would you want presence in an action movie? Cool, in an exciting sort of way.
But presence in recording of your family? That's powerful stuff, for everyone!
That feels like the long-term hook. iCloud to handle obscene storage amounts as a service. iPhone to generate new recordings. Vision to play back recordings.
And the dastardly brilliant part is... the more 3D video you record... the more valuable a Vision is to you.
>> Capturing -- One of the more remarkable things to watch? Your own home 3-D movies. Apple introduced “spatial video” for the iPhone 15 Pro a few months ago, and I started recording my sons with it. Watching the videos in 3-D in the headset now is almost like reliving the moment. The Vision Pro also captures these videos and photos—you just hold down a button on the top left.
At the end of the day, this is Apple testing the waters and trying to get a positive cash flow to help offset significant R&D...what they're showing is pretty impressive in a number of ways, even as it's lacking in others.
Do you mean a Mac's external monitor visible through the vision pro AR view?
I don’t know why, but while I feel multiple monitors helps my productivity a lot in Windows and Linux I find myself not caring as much in MacOS as long as the screen is big enough. I think it has to do with my habits around how I use the windowing in each. I tend to teasselate and arrange them in MacOS while I tend to maximize or lock to screed edges in Windows.
may be apple expect every person to buy one. Didn't facebook recently try something similar?
> cameras are still cameras, and displays are still displays.
Anyone remotely familiar with the state of development in those areas would be aware that “even Apple” can’t cheat Reality (punintentionally).
Those left still raving about and/or hoping for a game changer will be greatly dissapointed - or only in it for the line go up.
The whole concept will be a niche product for many years to come and will stay an isolating experience.
No idea if it does this, but the obvious use case is for people who aren't physically present - but letting them somehow share a physical space. It could potentially be awesome for friends/partners who live far apart.
iPod was the size of a beefy wallet, but was good enough.
iPhone was glorified plastic and websites looked like crap, no app store. But hey, it worked well enough.
That said... this isn't accessibly priced and what's the hook? Like if this launched the same time as Pokemon Go or WoW were taking off alongside it it'd get the social momentum all the other options had.
Also it's better than the competition in key was, but differentiable ways...? AR/VR could very well take off but it's not this year.
First Gen is usually awful
This is not awful and maybe even closer to 2nd gen
Everything starts somewhere
Most things are ready for the masses by the 3rd or 4th gen.
This is a disingenuous argument. Your other points are much more valid than this one. You don’t have a VR headset to interact with other people in the same room. If you want to watch a movie with other people around you, there are many other (cheaper) ways to do that (and Apple can sell you a nice AppleTV to do it).
or, how often do we believe other people are clicking something with out looking at it?
im examining this for myself...hard to feel organic while im actively focusing on it, but i at least glance at my mouse pointer target while traversing the pointer towards the target across my screens
I also started thinking about it reading the reviews, and the main cases to me are:
- checking something before commiting an action: for instance reread the product name before pushing the purchase button. The pointer is already on the button, I keep it there while checking the order, so I just need to click.
- focus switch: pushing another window to the forefront doesn't need a super accurate click. I assume most people eye ball it like me and will click on a emptyish part of the window from the corner of their eye. Same for moving the focus away.
- scroll and type like situation: mostly when using a document on the side while taking notes. My eyes and focus will be primarily on one side (with quick glances on the other), while the mouse/trackpad movement will be on another.
I think we'll discover a lot more instances of this.
Eh... I prefer empty cinemas
No loud babies, no popcorn sounds, no people explaining the plot to people not paying attention, just me and the world of the film. Bliss.
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This is one of those things that Apple never claimed was supported, and yet there's something about that behavior that feels like such a natural intuitive implication to the technology that a lot of people feel alarmed or even cheated when they realize it's not possible (yet). It's been funny to watch the various discussion threads as people pop up talking about their shocked realization and disappointed feelings.
Update: I did realize when watching the WSJ video that the "mirrored" display actually appeared to have greater "resolution" (more pixels in height and width) than what she had on her laptop. So that's something.
With Stage Manager on macOS now, it feels like they have all the primitives in place to "transpose" macOS stage manager windows textures to Vision OS/ the iPad OS foundation.
Though this will be tricky to get right for all apps. Will be interesting to see if it's a macOS App store only feature/ API, opt-in, or some other option
They just haven’t done it.
EDIT: -5* doesn't make sense, this is the most polite way you can point out that getting macOS apps windowed on visionOS has ~0 to do with double-buffered windows on iPad OS. n.b. I didn't use half-baked, OP did.
OSX had the opportunity to follow that path before settling on the “render windows, capture the screen, compress the image, send it over the network to be decompressed” VNC-style remote access that’s bog-standard today, and if they had Vision Pro would be set up to be an absolute mind-blowing macOS experience.
It falls apart as UIs got richer, browsers in particular: they're entirely composited in-app and not via GDI, because GDI isn't an expressive enough interface. So you end up shipping a lot of bitmaps, and to optimize you need to compress them. You might as well compress the whole screen then.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/3972/nvidia-gtc-2010-wrapup/3
This has been done many times before (see e.g. X Windows) and has known downsides. Off the top of my head:
- You need the same fonts installed on both sides for native font rendering to work
- Applications that don't use native drawing functions will tend to be very chatty, making the total amount of data larger than VNC/rdesktop/&c. style "send compressed pictures"
- Detaching and re-attaching to an application is hard to get right, so it's either disallowed or buggy.
I guess one downfall is that that your pipe has to be lossless, and there's no way to recover from a broken pipe (unless you keep a shadow copy of the window state, and have a protocol for resynchronizing from that, and a way to ensure you don't get out of sync.)
1. The receiving side has to have at least as much rendering power as the original side, since it will be the one actually having to render things on screen. This is always going to be the opposite case with any kind of glasses, where you'll always want to put as little compute as possible for weight and warmth reasons.
2. Each application actually has to send draw instructions instead of displaying photos or directly taking on control of the graphics hardware themselves. No or very few modern applications work like this for any significant part of their UI.
Applications which bypass the native APIs to render their window contents, in particular video players or games, get a compressed streamed video which has very decent performance. The video quality seems to be dynamic as well, so if there's a scene with very few changes you can see the quality progressively improve.
All of this is done per window, so a small VLC window playing a video in a corner gets the video treatment, while everything else still works like native UI.
How did you know it sends windows hooks? Was it some sort of binary serialization?
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But this is sufficient for many use cases (or at least, mine). I pre-ordered one with the idea that my main work will be on the 4K monitor, with most of my superfluous apps floating around as native visionOS apps. That's mail, a web browser, and zoom, which all have apps now, and Slack, which I could just use Safari for but may have a native app in the future.
“There is a lot of very complicated display scaling going on behind the scenes here, but the easiest way to think about it is that you’re basically getting a 27-inch Retina display, like you’d find on an iMac or Studio Display. Your Mac thinks it’s connected to a 5K display with a resolution of 5120 x 2880, and it runs macOS at a 2:1 logical resolution of 2560 x 1440, just like a 5K display. (You can pick other resolutions, but the device warns you that they’ll be lower quality.) That virtual display is then streamed as a 4K 3560 x 2880 video to the Vision Pro, where you can just make it as big as you want. The upshot of all of this is that 4K content runs at a native 4K resolution — it has all the pixels to do it, just like an iMac — but you have a grand total of 2560 x 1440 to place windows in, regardless of how big you make the Mac display in space, and you’re not seeing a pixel-perfect 5K image.”
It's more like 1080p monitor. The virtual monitor only covers a small part of the VisionPro's display. You can compensate a bit for a lack of resolution by making the virtual screen bigger or by leaning in, but none of that gives you a 4k display.
To really take proper advantage of the VR environment you really need the ability to pull out apps into their own windows, as than you can move lesser used apps into your peripheral vision and leave only the important stuff right in front of you. You also miss out on the verticality that VR offers when you are stuck with a virtual 16:9 screen.
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So even though you have a sequestered Mac output alongside Vision apps, you can use the same controls for all them simultaneously. This should help in the interim.
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edit: Yes I know you can build apps before they're in the store
It feels like the Vision Pro would definitely be a great replacement for people who (want to) buy multiple expensive monitors, but it doesn't fully reach that potential today, and mostly because of software? Although rendering 3 or 4 virtual workspaces through ad-hoc Wifi at 4K 60fps+ low-latency would certainly be a huge challenge.
If Apple approves it, of course. This is one of my major concerns; there's a lot of potentially useful functionality that could be implemented, but you have to jump through the app store hoops and hope that Apple doesn't decide that it conflicts with their idea of what you should be allowed to do.
However, the best review I’ve found that actually transmits what is possible and what it is like to use is Brian Tong’s 55 minute review video: https://youtu.be/GkPw6ScHyb4
I’m not familiar with him, but unlike other reviews I’ve seen, he spends less time evaluating or summarizing, and more time trying to actually use the device. I didn’t even realize that you can seamlessly use your Mac to control your visionOS apps, for example.
He said he could wear it 45 mins before needing to take it off, that it was overstimulating so you need to slow down how quickly you use apps and move things on screen, and that gestures also were fatiguing. You could tell he was trying to be fair but positive.
Headsets just haven’t cracked this nut yet, and tho tech may advance somewhat, they may be limitations inherent to the form factor. Even if it gets really light weight, the issues of overstimulation, headaches, and the amount of neck movement implied may keep these products in a niche. (I say this as someone super excited about AVP)
For everyone used to using their computers all day long wanting to do it in a headset, don’t throw your macbooks away just yet.
[1]: https://www.bobovr.com/products/bobovr-m3-pro
A lot of the physical downsides here are basically self-inflicted by companies trying really hard to hide the "nerd factor" necessary for comfort, to the detriment of the actual user experience.
At first people think "wow it's so awesome I can be sitting on the moon while I browse the web". But after a bit of time you just get tired, and I think it's precisely because your whole brain is working in overdrive to understand the unnatural environment you are in. None of this manifests explicitly but at the end of it, when people are faced with the choice of putting the headset on or not, they just "feel" like it's a lot of effort.
I say all this as someone who does regularly spend 1-2 hours working in Immersed with multiple giant screens up. And I love it as a break, a way to focus or just relieve the boredom of working in the same space day in day out. But even I feel this effect of it being tiring and not keen to do it for 8 hours a day. And the minute you say that, you lost the use case of this being your "only" computer / replacing your laptop, so it's actually kind of crucial to its central justification as a replacement for a computer or a 'new kind' of computer.
And those who work in VR report their coworkers and just about everyone they talk to customer wise feels the same way.
I know there are people who really want to, or think they do, but most would rather just use screens until maybe such a time the form factor becomes a pair of eye glasses.
Having demoed VR at my old office I can tell you that the range of reactions varies from an immediate "nope" and having to take the headset off to being able to stay in it for a significant amount of time with no discomfort.
But what is the account situation like?
For years I’ve been complaining that I can’t easily use my private iPad with my company Mac because they have separate Apple IDs. Things like sidecar for a quick virtual whiteboard are basically impossible.
AirPods have gotten better over the years where today I can freely switch between devices belonging to different Apple IDs with the same AirPods.
But is the Vision Pro like that as well? It would seem weird to exclude the not-so-small group of people working from home but with company MacBooks
It's actually far worse. There's a single user and a "guest mode", but for AR/VR to work with, there's a calibration step, which means that the guest has to go through that step every single time they want to use the device. It might be fine for a real guest using it once, but it would be basically impossible to share the device with someone else. Having to setup the device every single time you use it sounds absolutely terrible.
Either you can't sign in with your personal Apple account, or you shouldn't (because MDM). So the only way to access anything associated with iCloud is what is available on the iCloud web portal; which is a horrible experience. You can't do sidecar. You can't do airdrop, copy-paste, continuity camera, nothing.
I've only ever used Macs in a professional environment. I've, also, always had a Mac and iPhone as personal devices. But I've never made the jump toward saying "Ok I'm actually using iCloud Seriously now" for this single reason. The best Google Cloud experience is available in a web browser, which I can be signed-in to on everything. Google Drive is everywhere. The list goes on.
Its such a crystalline example of why Apple's walled garden actually hurts themselves.
Locking you customers into your ecosystem? Fine, whatever. But even within the ecosystem restricting usage in such a way!?
It's been said for years but the iPad could be so much more than a mere media consumption device if it weren't for short-term-profit driven design decisions.
Maybe they do better with the Vision Pro.
Literally the only cloud drive product I know of which doesn't work on my corporate laptop is iCloud Drive, because the EMM gave a checkbox to set a flag. As a result, a huge portion of built-in collaborative features and apps just don't work. I have paid seats in other products only to regain functionality lost by that checkbox.
I have a similar complaint with my Apple Watch and my corporate issued laptop. When I am using my own computer (mac mini) I love how easy it is to use my watch to login, use it to approve actions, etc. However when it comes to my company laptop I have to type my password in repeatedly. It would be awesome if the watch could be linked to both IDs to make this much more seamless.
This is kinda what Managed Apple IDs are for - the work 'owns' the Apple ID it puts into its management profile and can set policy. Apps write into a separate storage container which the company could remote wipe, without affecting the rest of your personal data. If they want to disable things like sidecar, they can do it.. for the corporate apps/accounts/web domains.
I'd' generally assume the multi-user aspect is worse (because face shields and prescriptive inserts) so generalized multi-account is pretty low on the priority list.
Zoom has a good Airplay sharing feature that works well in this situation.
But I get what GP means -- I do have a corporate profile, and I made my own @corporation.com Apple ID, but what do I do to use sidecar? Either log out of my personal iCloud on the iPad (gross) or log in to my personal iCloud on my work computer (grosser)
I use my iPad so sporadically that it could easily be the house iPad, but I’m signed in with my email and so on it can’t be.
Assuming the Vision Pro screen sharing works using the same stuff, I have high hopes.
Ended up creating a new account that was part of my family.
What the fuck. The fact that an apple ID is even involved is absurd. Should be able to just Bluetooth to any device.
The "freely switch" here is referring to the W-chip multi-device support that will on the fly switch between any number of Apple devices based on what's actively being used at the time, without needing to do any manual connection stuff.
Other non-proprietary Bluetooth devices will generally do 2 devices at most, and getting that to work right with microphone input settings can be kind of a nightmare.
However, pairing an audio device is an exchange of settings and encryption keys, and Apple will sync that pairing that to your entire account. Hold your AirPods near your Phone and tap the button to create the initial pairing, and they start working with your Mac and Apple TV.
These devices are going to have your sweat, makeup, odours etc on them.
So you're really not going to want to share a device with anyone else.
Unfortunately Apple is charging $200 per extra facial interface though.
The moment you use different Apple IDs you lose a lot of nice features of Apple‘s products
(My partner is corpo; I'm startup, but have worked at corpos. No thanks.)
Better to keep it all owned by the company, in my opinion, and have them issue you an iPad for this express purpose.
The main one being a complete separation of calls, messages, calendar, notes and reminders. For my own sake more than for my employers sake.
And many employees with company phones already have that separation. iPhone and Mac is not that uncommon to provide for employees. But an iPad on top? I think that’s gonna be much harder to find
And edit: a Vision Pro on top…
If your work is on the traditional model of perimeter protection and trusted intranet, a non-work device can't join the network as you have correctly pointed out. If your work is on the newer BeyondCorp style model, switching to a second account on your computer is going to invalidate the device trust needed to access work resources.
I am hoping we will see a lot of experimentation in the coming years, and I am excited for what the Apple ecosystem will bring to the table. That said, from what I have seen so far this does not seem to be a revolution compared to the current offerings, but an evolution on various fronts, without addressing the killer app question.
For example, "killer apps/content" never arrived for 3D TVs and they have largely disappeared from the market. Same with various "waggling" input technologies like the Wiimote and Kinect. There were some compelling uses, like Wii Sports, but these were pretty limited and many other uses of these in games was a case of Nintendo shoehorning the technology into the game.
I think the best pessimist argument is the one offered by Folding Ideas in his metaverse video[1]: Text is really, really useful, and a virtual 3D space is not a good environment for either creating or consuming textual content.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiZhdpLXZ8Q
I don't miss multiple monitors so much, but I do often wish for a larger screen. Not enough to put one in my space, though. That's where my interest in the Vision Pro lies - simply a way to project large, high-fidelity, 2d screens.
I'm still full of myself for postponing getting a 3D TV enough times that the technology died.
> Same with various "waggling" input technologies like the Wiimote and Kinect.
... but I have a PS Move gathering dust somewhere. Which I even preordered.
Hasn't VR taken over waggle? I don't think you can say its disappeared when the VR install base is in the 10s of millions.
I see on scifi all the time where someone flicks/flings a video playing on a device to move it to a larger display surface and it kills me that we actually have the technology to do stuff like this right now...but because every company works in their own interests/don't work together to create standards we don't get to have fun use of tech like that.
In 1988-94, the CPUs available in desktop computers were substantially more advanced than the widely used operating systems. Windows 3 and Mac System 6/7 didn't support pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection, or many other features that define a modern OS.
Maybe we'll look back at today's Quest and Vision Pro as similar transitional devices with one foot stuck in the old paradigm, running old-style software.
That was partly because RAM was over $100/MB (Nominal; ~$230 inflation adjusted) in 1990. Additionally, in the IBM compatible world, many people didn't have a 386 at that point.
Also, minor nitpick on the dates; 1993 saw OS/2 2.1 and NT 3.1, both of which had preemptive multitasking and memory protection.
The reason the software doesn't exist is because compelling hardware doesn't exist for it to run on, so nobody bothers to write it.
Apple is imagining this device will be used for productivity but it's still painful to actually wear for long periods. We're a long way from being limited by software instead of hardware.
It's a 600+ grams headset with a battery on a leash for $3500. I wouldn't say the hardware is mainstream ready or fulfilling it's side of the contract yet.
I’ve also heard about players spending a lot of time in counter strike games like pavlov.
At this point it seems like there’s a TON of things to do in VR (and I’m gonna be honest, there were a ton of experiences too on the Quest 1 when I had it).
I’m just waiting for more live shows and concerts that I can attend from the Quest personally.
It is like VR is currently stuck being Kinect in terms of sales and stickiness, while Meta and Apple would both like it to be at least like the Wii, or ideally the iPad.
Personally I have found social experiences to have the best long-term appeal (i.e. Racket NX or Drop Dead with friends), but even there I am not these apps have sufficient mainstream appeal.
The discontinued WMR Portal, essentially the Window's desktop in VR, was so far the only software that tried to be a full workspace in VR. But even that was missing a lot of important features and Microsoft gave up on it years ago and never made it accessible to non-Microsoft headsets. It's currently scheduled for removal from Windows.
VisionPro seems very similar to WMRPortal so far, with a few key improvements like allowing apps do add 3D objects into a shared space.
So the hardware is not good enough yet. It will be good enough when I basically don‘t care, just like I don‘t care with glasses.
Totally agree. I'm waiting for a usable Virtual Desktop app to come out. All the ones I have tried which work on my cheap WMR headset fall short of having floating app windows in view.
I guess there is one of those which works on Meta Quest, but not PC headsets. That's really what you need to be effective working in VR. Just like is mentioned the Apple headset supports.
How about enabling AIs to create layouts of information on behalf of the user? Like, what if an AI could arrange all of your information for you in a scheme derived from Archy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software)
But other notable ones include Synth Riders, FitXR, OhShape, Pistol Whip, Thrill of the Fight, and (maybe) Gorilla Tag. And this list is far from exhaustive.
VR is pretty good for fitness just because it can make exercising more interesting, comparable to sports without the need to coordinate with other people (and it's easy to do inside your house, if you have at least a 2m x 2m open space). Major downsides would be having that space available and sweat inside the headset.
It turned out the killer Apple Watch feature was fitness, and I don’t see why it couldn’t have been here.
I agree that progress has been slow in the consumer space and meaningful long-term adoption of VR has been confined to a few niches; that isn't necessarily an indictment of the long-term prospects for VR, because desktop computers spent much longer in that stage than most people remember.
In enterprise, I think things are more advanced and some user groups have decisively gone through the one-way door for some applications. I think the best example is architecture. If you've done a couple of client presentations in VR, you just aren't going back to showing renders on a flat screen, because immersing the client in a physical space is that powerful. It's not just a sales tool, but a communications tool - clients can understand and respond to the environment intuitively and give much better feedback as a result.
Industrial and clinical training is less clearly one-way, but I think we're very close in a lot of areas. AR is still less developed than VR, but I do think we're on the cusp of something significant - a sufficiently comfortable standalone AR headset with sufficiently high-quality passthrough can deliver training experiences that can't practically be replicated through other means.
I think one of the most interesting areas of development is in psychiatry. It's still early days, but we're starting to see real, meaningful benefits in RCTs for VR-based therapy of disorders like phobia and PTSD. Some of the most compelling results have been in the very sickest patients - people with psychosis, who often find it impossible to engage with conventional psychotherapy.
https://www.psy.ox.ac.uk/research/oxford-cognitive-approache...
I don't think it's remotely likely that VR will ever replace flat screens, but I do think that VR is slowly growing into a niche but durable HCI platform. Tablets are a reasonable analogy - a lot of people see them as a failure, but they still sell in serious volume and they're often a much better form-factor for specific applications than either a phone or a laptop, especially in industry. Tablets didn't change the world, but nor are they likely to go away.
WebGPU and WebXR are the two big enablers going forward. With WebGPU, developers have a common way to access hardware and that's a big deal across all your devices. A common way to access the hardware that gets you real-time 3D graphics, machine learning, crypto, etc. that works on your phone, tablet, laptop, headset, whatever is a big deal. And it's not just for anyone with Apple gear, but anyone with a compatible browser. Think generative AI/ML streaming Gaussian splats to your retinas via a browser. That's where we're headed.
Need an OR to explore a phobia of surgery? Sketchfab has you covered: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/charite-university-hospital-...
Oh sorry, that's from CNET's review of the first iPhone in 2007: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/original-iphone-review/
It's way too early to tell if this product line will succeed in the long term. Will the first gen Vision Pro be a runaway success? Of course not! Will later generations look as obvious as the iPhone does now? I sure hope so!
For comparison, Apple sold 1.4 million iPhones in 2007. Supposedly Apple is expecting to sell around 500k Vision Pro units this year. Given the 3x price difference (in 2024 dollars), that effectively means the first gen Vision Pro is expected to bring the same revenue as the first gen iPhone.
We all have rosy retrospection about how great and obvious the first iPhone or first iPod was, but honestly nobody had any idea if Apple's crazy bet would pay off. We all agreed it was magical tech, but it was expensive, had tons of limitations, and nobody really needed it. Sound familiar?
All I know is betting against Apple has rarely paid off. They do have failures too though and this is clearly technologically more ambitious than any other launch, so who knows! And honestly that's what makes this launch most exciting.
It's been so long since I've had child-like wonder about some new technology that I'm just glad Apple took a chance on launching such a crazy device, even if I don't know what to do with it... yet.
> Fortunately, we can report that on the whole, the touchscreen and software interface are easier to use than expected. What's more, we didn't miss a stylus in the least. Despite a lack of tactile feedback on the keypad, we had no trouble tapping our fingers to activate functions and interact with the main menu.
What I’m seeing in the reviews of AVP say the opposite about many aspects:
> There is a built-in virtual keyboard so you can type in thin air. But it will drive you mad for anything longer than a short message. And selecting smaller buttons with a pinch should be a carnival game. I started getting real work done once I paired the Vision Pro with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
I agree it’s still too early to tell, but the best thing that I see being mentioned is movie watching which is something all the other headsets already do as well. The AR aspect seems to be a unique aspect, but I wonder if there will be safety issues that prevent things like cooking and doing other tasks assisted with AR from truly taking off.
Probably a dozen other companies launched similar devices already. Apple is hardly going out on a crazy limb here. This is their classic iterative refinement of what other people already did.
But I do agree with the first point - the flaws in this gen 1 has very little bearing on the long term success of it as a product category. But I would argue it works both ways, in that to the extent it is successful in the niche that buys it, you can't tell yet if it will break out to mass appeal. We just don't know.