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Mark Zuckerberg on Apple’s Vision Pro headset

• retskrad 3y ago
  I mean, what else is he going to say to his own employees?
  • catchnear4321 3y ago
    admit the competition may have done something interesting? point out there are things to learn from this? suggest that it would take the company’s best efforts, but that it could do better? you don’t have to shit on the other team to say your team can be the best. this was an attempt to suggest apple is somehow less personable than zuck.
    • alanwreath 3y ago
      There is a veiled “we’ve got work to do” admission: “ And seeing what they put out there and how they’re going to compete just made me even more excited and in a lot of ways optimistic that what we’re doing matters and is going to succeed. But it’s going to be a fun journey. “ 1: they admit that having Apple dip into a category validates it 2: the “fun” is a euphemism for - we need to get our s@!t together quick, expect some all nighters
      • catchnear4321 3y ago
        apple just validated his seemingly overzealous stab into the space. he wasn’t completely wrong. zuck had, arguably still has, a chance for a real hero arc here. his recent pr piece about local martial arts tournament was endearing. veiled admissions and euphemisms are just silly, and hint that this might just be more of the same. nothing at all.
    • GreedClarifies 3y ago
      Not after burning 40B USD. He had no choice but to present a strong facade. The Apple device looks impressive and the use cases presented seem plausible. It is expensive no doubt, but if they can convince the jet set crowd to wear it then it will catch on.
      • catchnear4321 3y ago
        40B worth of lessons, spun right. its 2023, vulnerability and transparency can be signs of strength now. for those brave enough.
        • riwsky 3y ago
          Meh. You can keep the last few years of Meta VR “advances”; for the price, I’d much rather just buy 11 million Vision Pros.
  • Clubber 3y ago
    "Five hundred dollars? Fully subsidized? With a plan? I said that is the most expensive phone in the world," Ballmer reportedly said of the first iPhone. "And it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard. Which makes it not a very good email machine."
    • ThrowawayR2 3y ago
      That's just cherry picking. Lots of people said the Apple Newton would likely be a flop and it was indeed a flop.
      • Clubber 3y ago
        Are you arguing that Apple's headset will be a flop, or just being contradictory?
      • eunoia 3y ago
        That's... also cherry picking?
        • Dylan16807 3y ago
          Yes. That's the point. It shows that the previous comment is cherry picking by providing a contrasting example, and it shows how cherry picking can say anything.
      • dagmx 3y ago
        To move the goalposts slightly, Apple is a very different company pre and post Jobs return. They had tons of flops before he came back, but the company is almost completely changed post. of course, one could argue that he’s gone and that is lost as well, but they seem to continue delivering imho
        • JimDabell 3y ago
          By all accounts, Apple have absolutely nailed it when it comes to how the product works. The key to its wide-scale success from this point forward is not how well the product works, but in making it affordable to the masses. Apple have already cleared the “needs amazing product thinking” hurdle and now it’s all about getting the supply chain to where it needs to be. They don’t need a Jobs, they need a Cook.
• spacedcowboy 3y ago
  Seems remarkably similar to “those software guys aren’t just going to come in and get this done”… Apple will only go further with this over time, positing current limits staying as-is seems … shortsighted.
• alanwreath 3y ago
  So about: “ every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself “ I’m not sure I grasp the critique given commercials like: https://youtu.be/CfTC-dPwdLM https://youtu.be/CfTC-dPwdLM And multiple parts of the Vision keynote highlighted being present with those remotely as well as those locally. “ so much energy that now you need a battery “ I think everyone remembers the part where Apple admitted they are behind and getting the device they intend for consumers requires first getting it into developers hands.
  • alanwreath 3y ago
    But yeah, all that doesn’t make the price still sting/stink and “ costs seven times more “ Is a fair criticism
    • mortify 3y ago
      This is a high end Macbook Pro with a matching price tag and additional features. For a device that is aimed at developers and early adopters, it makes sense. In a year I expect to see the Apple Vision Air for less than half the price while the OS evolves.
      • wmf 3y ago
        Not exactly. M2 != M2 Max.
      • impulser_ 3y ago
        I highly doubt it, maybe in a few years when cost of the components needed to build a Vision headset decrease. There is a lot of expensive tech in the Vision Pro. You have two processors, 4K eye pieces, expensive sensors, expensive cameras, expensive LIDAR. How are you suppose to build a similar product for half the price? You would have to gut a lot of features and you would end up with a completely different product. This is why you can't really compare Quest and Vision because they are meant for completely different markets. Meta could build something similar but they don't want to sell a 3500$ headset. Meta rather build a cheaper product where more people can use it. Hence why they don't package their headset will expensive components. The Quest 3 will outsell Vision Pro by 10x because of this.
• symic 3y ago
  Just having a higher resolution alone has made Apple Vision worth talking about. By all accounts I’ve read it’s very impressive. The interface is much better on the Vision than with the Quest. I had a Quest but I stopped using it because my eyes no longer can stand to see non retina screens. Pixelization was fine 15 years ago but anymore. Wearing glasses in the Quest was a pain. My glasses fogged up too often. Implementation of features and capabilities is what matters. The capabilities are useless if it’s too hard to use them or the device is defective in some way that prevents users from wanting to use them.
  • fsociety 3y ago
    I disagree that higher resolution alone makes it worth talking about. Meta can churn out high quality screens as well as Apple, for a price. The more compelling angle is how they have nailed the interface with eye and hand tracking and if this works as well in real-world environments as it did in their demo setup. Apple has a tech advantage lately with their software and hardware stack. But historically their products have done well because of product features not because of tech advantages. There is a non-zero chance you get an almost $4K device as hamstrung as an iPad. So the question still remains, what are they going to do with it? It has much potential. But in some ironic twist of fate it is Meta taking the product first approach here. And Apple’s closed ecosystem (not to mention high price) puts them at a huge disadvantage to target the social/gaming angle of “spatial computing”. It’s not over yet, and in general this is exciting because competition will start to ramp up.
    • symic 3y ago
      Meta can churn out high quality screens as well as Apple, for a price. But they didn’t. The more compelling angle is how they have nailed the interface with eye and hand tracking and if this works as well in real-world environments as it did in their demo setup. This is what I was referring to when mentioned implementation. To paraphrase you I could retort: “Meta could have spent the time perfecting the interface but chose not to.”. I don’t see the relevance of such thinking though.
    • tinus_hn 3y ago
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• Apocryphon 3y ago
  Los Angeles Times op-ed: "Forget the metaverse. For $3,500, Apple offers a new way to be alone" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36245865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36245865
• anonzzzies 3y ago
  Keep bickering ya’ll ; it’s all better for us people who want to get work done. Apple made it more serious and even shows they actually support some of the Vision of Zuck. Let all big corps come in and compete for whatever their vision is. I just want holodeck hardware and software with weeklong battery life. This is getting is closer. One of the things that the Apple announcement will do; because it supports all iOS games and apps, meta (and other android eco system vendors) cannot not offer that. Things are going well. More competition please!
  • abc_lisper 3y ago
    Yeah, In Apple's vision, FB/Social is still just an app. For FB, social is the world. Like a matrix transposed. Still Apple can do all FB wants to do.
  • Rebelgecko 3y ago
    Are the iOS games just in pancake mode, or are they doing something clever to make them 3D?
    • anonzzzies 3y ago
      Seems pancake but you can place them anywhere in ‘space’. As I use VR/AR only for productivity (more/bigger monitors, less irl space), I would really like to have all android apps from the play store hanging in AR/VR space as pancake ‘screens’ I can organise. Now that Apple announced support for all iOS apps and games, I cannot see the rest being able to just sit and not follow for android.
    • doctoboggan 3y ago
      I don't know much about the apple metal stack, but theoretically all you have to do is duplicate and offset the camera and render twice.
      • anonzzzies 3y ago
        At least Apple proves it’s possible To expose all their apps just as is; they have been saying in Quest forums for years this is ‘impossible’ and the app has to be tailored for it, even just as a flat screen hanging in VR. Impossible, or couldn’t be asked? The latter surely?
• Dudester230602 3y ago
  > The introduction of Apple’s headset marks a major competitive threat." An idiot like me thinks the opposite: it validates the market and thus justifies further spending to Facebook investors.
  • kaliqt 3y ago
    It's both. Good if you use it, very bad if you ignore it.
  • sigmoid10 3y ago
    I wouldn't say it validates the market. At least not the market Facebook is going for. The ultra high-end market might be ripe for disruption after so many big companies failed at producing a super expensive MR device, but rumors say Apple plans to ship as little as 200k units in the first year. The entire Quest line has already sold north of 20M units, with most of that coming from the entry level models Quest 1 and 2.
  • teachrdan 3y ago
    This is the kind of thing a CEO says to fire up the troops. It is intended to encourage Meta employees to work harder on VR because now they're "threatened."
  • ravst3s 3y ago
    Reality Labs is going to burn at least $16 bn in '23 and '24. Meta can't really spend much more money on this business. I think investors will mandate clarity on how the spending is bucketed and see a mix shift to HW rather than Metaverse SW. Financially, RL is the worst business on earth. No other business has lost this much money in such a short period of time.
    • baby 3y ago
      > Financially, RL is the worst business on earth. No other business has lost this much money in such a short period of time. This is like saying, the US is the worst country on earth because of it's debt. The reality is, if you have money and you don't invest it, it loses value.
• ctvo 3y ago
  This sounded weak to me. Apple is making an integrated headset: their own lenses, processor, ..., down to the operating system. The Quest uses an Android based operating system and a lot of off the shelf components. We've seen this story before and it hasn't ended well for the folks in Mark's position. A personal device like these headsets needs to be delightful. It has to be responsive. It has to have the little touches. It's much more difficult to do that when you're constrained by off the shelf components. Apple had the best touchpads for a decade because of those integrated properties, for example.
  • wahahah 3y ago
    I really don't understand why nobody else has managed making decent touchpads. Is it not extremely high priority??
    • xnyan 3y ago
      I worked at an electronics retailer in high school for a couple years, my job was to sell laptops. I sold a lot of laptops. Nerds like us who post comments on hacker news can have a hard time understanding the mind of the vast majority of regular people who simply could not care less about trackpad quality. It's just not a thing most people even think about.
      • ricardobeat 3y ago
        Most people don't care about 'drive shaft quality' or 'steering wheel quality' in their cars either, but you can be sure it will be taken good care of by engineering, and subconsciously noticed.
        • GeneralAntilles 3y ago
          There's truth in your point. People do feel the difference even when they don't notice it, but it doesn't seem like that's always (or even often?) reflected in the bottom line. Nissan sells an awful lot of cars with their crappy CVT transmissions and crossovers continue to be hugely popular in the US.
• redundantly 3y ago
  > They went with a higher resolution display, and between that and all the technology they put in there to power it, it costs seven times more and now requires so much energy that now you need a battery and a wire attached to it to use it. Comparing the pricing of your consumer level product to an enterprise level product is extremely disingenuous. He's clearly scared.
  • dham 3y ago
    Is an enterprise product sitting around and watching "movies" by yourself?
    • redundantly 3y ago
      I'm not sure how to reply to your comment. Are you not aware of all the things apple showed this device will be able to do on release? Are you aware and just being sarcastic? Are you aware and unwilling to admit that it would have more uses than just watching movies? Are you not aware that a business VR space already exists with similarly priced products? What's your angle?
    • prawn 3y ago
      You don't have to think for long to see where they will take this, and how strong it will be in corporate environments. Especially a corporate world currently jostling between in-office and work-from-home.
• nine_zeros 3y ago
  Hot take: Short term PSC style corporate culture doesn't work for pivots or fundamental innovation
• Yusefmosiah 3y ago
  In this clash of visions, Apple wins by default. Not because Apple has a track record of setting the computer interface paradigm for the whole industry, but because Apple actually has its own vision — “spacial computing”. Zuck, on the other hand, aims to realize a sci-fi dystopia that he didn’t envision. Neal Stephenson did. Zuck didn’t found Oculus either. Now, Zuck may be the world’s greatest opportunist; copying, acquiring, optimizing, and scaling technologies that have already demonstrated product-market-fit. I sincerely admire his executive excellence. With this in mind, Apple Vision Pro has validated Meta’s pivot to hardware. If Zuck swallows his pride and pivots the Quest to copying Apple, Meta has the opportunity to own the Android of spacial computing, enabling low-cost devices, collecting data, and selling microtargeted ads. This will allow Meta to continue as a globally dominant entity, and Zuck will remain one of the world’s wealthiest men. But will Zuck’s quest to be respected as a visionary cloud his judgment and jeopardize his empire?
  • charcircuit 3y ago
    Apple didn't coin the term spatial computing. It's been used in the industry for a long time. They are both copying other's visions.
    • veidr 3y ago
      They didn't invent the mouse either, they just popularized it. Personally I like this term much better, so I hope we all start using it. VR, AR, XR, mixed reality... these are too specific and fussy. "Spatial computing" encompasses them all in a fuzzy way that to me has the right granularity for most conversations about this stuff.
  • soup10 3y ago
    there's also a third much more likely possibility: VR is still a novelty/gimmick experience and neither apple or zuck or any other company will make it mainstream, no matter how much money they burn on it.
  • tapoxi 3y ago
    Apple's vision is the Microsoft HoloLens. I was walking around with apps floating in front of me (and staying in rooms where I placed them) years ago. It's a neat gimmick but not worth the asking price because there's not $3500 of value you're extracting out of it. Maybe $500 of value because it's neat? Not sure. It's great at presenting virtual screens (I don't need one) and non-game 3D content which will be a handful of 3D movies and novelty apps where you can explode a hologram of something.
• asjfka 3y ago
  Apple Vision will fail. It doesn't matter if it's a good product or not. Fact is, wearing it makes you look like a dork. This is why it will fail. Segway made you look like a dork too and it failed. Then the hoverboard got out and you looked cool while using it and it is successful. There is a future for Apple Vision's tech, but this is not the product that will sell. People will buy a product that makes them look cool. As simple as that.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
    If you spend enough money marketing something, it becomes cool.
  • mzsmyk 3y ago
    Segway Ninebot sells fairly well.
  • Gigachad 3y ago
    It's an Apple product, and one that everyone knows is super expensive. It'll end up like the Airpods max, weird looking, but still a status symbol.
    • seydor 3y ago
      Yes. I can see people in coffee shops wearing the apple ski goggles , but not Quest. In particular because it's very expensive and signals wealth. Like how many people buy a Tesla, even though VR goggles are less useful overall
  • astrange 3y ago
    That's not an issue for commercial/industrial use cases.
  • juve1996 3y ago
    They said the same things about the original airpod and it used to not be cool to be into video games and comic books. Times change. If it fails it won't be because of this reason - people won't be walking around outside with these on.
• wdb 3y ago
  Not being a Facebook helps a lot in my book
  • Gigachad 3y ago
    Yeah the Quest always gave this corporate dystopia zuckerberg overlord world with NFT sneakers vibe. The Apple one feels like a high quality computing device I can imagine using in a few years.
    • esafak 3y ago
      Relax, nobody uses Facebook products at work.
      • wellthisisgreat 3y ago
        Except if you are a marketer / work in advertising?
    • dotnet00 3y ago
      It's kind of surprising to see this perspective being so common. They're both the same kind of dystopia, Apple just has more black mirror style polish, while Meta has the more old school "obvious" dystopia style going.
• jameslk 3y ago
  If Apple's Vision Pro succeeds in dominating this new market, there will be competitors like there always has. Let's say the Vision Pro is #1 in terms of market share--they might not be, but Apple certainly has some obvious advantages. I find the question of who will be #2 in the market more interesting. Meta has positioned themselves as either #1 or #2 so far, but that position could easily vanish just like the Blackberry. It requires great execution of both the hardware and operating system with their current strategy, and Meta doesn't exactly have a history of producing either. I'm surprised they haven't gone the Android or Windows way of just producing the software and licensing the OS to OEMs. It greatly increases their attack surface area on either the hardware or the OS from another competitor other than Apple.
  • chaostheory 3y ago
    > Meta doesn't exactly have a history of producing either Meta manufactured the Quest line after their oculus acquisition. While it runs Android, it’s heavily modified for VR AR. Overall, it’s a solid headset especially when you look at the price point and ease of use (compared to PCVR). I tend to favor Apple, but I’m not going to overlook what other products have achieved
• DueDilligence 3y ago
  [dead]
• cloudking 3y ago
  Interesting take, I thought he would be pretty excited a major player is entering the space he's been working on since they acquired Oculus. Apple would have done research to validate this product and market before entering it. Edit: he did acknowledge this a bit on Lex Fridman podcast https://youtu.be/C_fpCVtGR6I https://youtu.be/C_fpCVtGR6I
  • gnicholas 3y ago
    A friend of mine works at Meta and was telling me about how much of the AVP's functionality exists on the recent Meta devices, for a fraction of the cost. My reply: great! If that's true, that'll be a boon for Meta (as customers learn this) and for customers (who will save tons of money by getting Meta devices).
    • hyuuu 3y ago
      this is true
    • hedora 3y ago
      I think there is a large market of people that will never trust meta, but ignoring that, they have AR goggles now? If not, their comments about overlapping features sound like the “but nokia candy bar phones already have a WEP browser!” objections from back in the iPhone 1 days. (I’m personally not all that impressed by the apple vision announcement, but I also wasn’t impressed by the iPhone announcement, and for similar reasons. Hopefully someone will do significantly better than Apple this time.)
      • cloudking 3y ago
        The Quest 3 has passthrough mode for "mixed reality" similar to Apple Vision Pro, albeit Apple's hardware has way higher resolution.
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
    • 3y ago
• riwsky 3y ago
  Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
• mrobins 3y ago
  Pricing the headset at 7x the Quest seems like an Apple power move. Ordinarily if you’re 2nd or 3rd to a category you’d expect there to be pressure to price in the same ballpark. You want customers to compare but say the new product is worth spending a reasonable amount more than the old product because it has some bells and whistles. At $3500 Apple invites no comparison. They’re basically pretending Meta doesn’t exist and that they’ve invented the category, as though it’s the iPhone or iPad.
  • smoldesu 3y ago
    On the flipside, it gives Meta a blueprint for disrupting the market. They're well-poised up to release a "Quest Pro Max" of sorts - keep the Quest form factor, but go all-in on eye tracking and screen tech. Price it at $3,000 and include a nice aluminum stand for kicks and giggles. The Hololens was a "power move" headset that had to repeatedly re-adjust its target market because the price was too high. Apple could end up in the same spot if they can't iteratively bring down the price.
    • juve1996 3y ago
      I highly doubt Meta can match Apple's tech now and in the future. The hard part is the hardware. Apple is way ahead here.
      • smoldesu 3y ago
        The hard part is the low end - and Meta has 20 million devices sold there. If the hardware is an obstacle to reaching market fit, I'm pretty confident Meta could get there. It's mostly a matter of scaling up what they already have.
        • juve1996 3y ago
          Yea 20 million cheap VR headsets that haven't taken off into the expected market at all. Any hardware company could do that tomorrow. It's easy. Just source the parts. Apple is practically completely vertically integrated. They design their own chips. They have decades of experience in consumer hardware. To make AR/VR into what Zuck wants, his hardware is NOWHERE near what it needs to be. And they don't have the chops to get it there. If it's possible, I believe Apple can do it.
• andsoitis 3y ago
  > “By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself,” he said of Apple’s WWDC keynote earlier this week. Bullshit. There were many lifestyle video showing people moving around. That was actually worse than sitting on the sofa and being generally stylish.
  • revskill 3y ago
    But the choice of "people sitting on a sofa do their work" is not good. Not everyone has a sofa.
  • jackbrookes 3y ago
    The point is that Mark's vision is much more social... The most Apple showed was FaceTime but with added 3D on their avatar. There's so much missed opportunity here for true spatial social interaction that Apple avoided
    • andsoitis 3y ago
      Social is but a subset of computing applications. Vision Pro can do social, but it doesn't have to be the single thing to optimize for. We should remember that Meta probably has to: a) fight against low employee morale b) cool device from a company that has proved over and and over again that they're one of the best in creating consumer products
• vlovich123 3y ago
  That’s seems disingenuous considering the Quest Pro is literally competing for the same market segment and there were numerous tech investments made to build out the workplace vision. I think Apple came out with a much more compelling product in that space (although it may be fair that the quest pro had less investment and focus because they believe low cost headsets are the real priority). The pricing won’t matter because if Apple sells a bunch it won’t matter how much the Quest costs because the developers will be prioritizing the Vision headset and its modalities which is the key thing that will matter. It’s like what happened with Android - they were about to release when Apple showcased multitouch at which point they scrapped their existing stuff and retooled to make Android multi touch because they knew that would become the dominant modality to make it easy for developers to write apps for both / make it easy for customers to compare and contrast. More importantly, Apple seems to be seeding with an existing massive App Store for non-augmented apps that Quest doesn’t have in any meaningful way iirc and they’ll need to spend money trying to attract existing Android developers to publish to their store or sign a deal with Google to provide access to the Play store (which will never happen). Expect to see a massive strategy shift from Facebook if Q4 numbers indicate the vision pro is a hit and likely competitor “me too” products from Google, Microsoft, and Samsung if it at ask looks like Apple has reinvigorated this market.
  • pavlov 3y ago
    > “if Q4 numbers indicate the vision pro is a hit” The Vision Pro isn’t shipping until 2024. IMO this Verge article is a bit incongruent for mocking Meta’s announcement of Quest 3 a couple of months ahead, without mentioning that Apple’s announcement was almost a year before the Vision Pro will reach most markets.
• ubermonkey 3y ago
  I cannot imagine why any critical thinker would care what Zuck thinks about a competing product.
  • hyuuu 3y ago
    genuinely curious, why is that?
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • ubermonkey 3y ago
      Everything out of his mouth is likely to be self-serving above all else.
      • hyuuu 3y ago
        but he has his own products, doesn't it make sense for him to promote his own products?
  • dotnet00 3y ago
    These supposed critical thinkers apparently care what Apple thinks about computing, so caring about Zucc's opinion isn't all that unsurprising.
• cvalka 3y ago
  In other words he basically concedes.
• whatever1 3y ago
  If Apple solved the blurry text problem of VR, then they have a huge advantage in the pro market. Every app developer will be working on Apple VR apps: dashboards, AR training material, whiteboarding etc
  • pavlov 3y ago
    Fixing blurry text is simply a matter of throwing hardware at the problem though. The $3k+ Varjo headsets had solved it already with OLED screens and resolution close to the Apple Vision Pro. (You need a beefy PC to drive those headsets, so they are not self-contained.) It’s not a long-term competitive advantage. The same thing happened with high-DPI displays. Apple had a momentary advantage with what they call “Retina” display on iPhone 4, but soon every Android vendor was also shipping high-DPI and a few years later it was in the low-end handsets. Today it would be weird to say: “I got an iPhone because the text looks so sharp!” Similarly nothing stops Meta from using a high-DPI screen in Quest as soon as the OLEDs and computing power becomes cheap enough (or if they are masochists and want to try a $3k version of Quest Pro, I guess).
    • whatever1 3y ago
      Apple solved first the multitouch accuracy problem. People forget how bad other touchscreen vendors were in 2008. It took other companies at least 4 years to come close to the accuracy of the iPhone displays and keyboard. By that time Apple had already cornered the developer market.
    • seydor 3y ago
      Is it just resolution or an optics issue? Having to readjust all the time to read is a problem
  • baby 3y ago
    I thought this problem was already solved in all current-gen VR headsets? Basically eye tracking.
  • anjc 3y ago
    This is long solved
• veidr 3y ago
  I use the Quest Pro right now, because my interest in spatial computing (I like Apple's new term so trying to use it, haha) is greater than my misgivings about Meta (even though those are significant). I will buy the Apple thing, too. There are a lot of interesting differences between them (obviously, the biggest one being the price, and deriving from that) but the one I find interesting is Apple's decision not to have controllers. This is just like the infamous "if you see a stylus, they blew it" approach with the iPhone. Double down on the simplest possible input mechanism and pretend it is enough. Today, of course, Apple ships an excellent stylus that they are happy to sell you for $129. (UPDATE: I think here I wasn't clear, based on several replies. I'm not saying this decision was wrong -- it was right, clearly. I just mean they may very well ignore the existence of controllers... right up until they release an awesome high tech controller for us to buy (as an option).) The controllers on the Quest Pro are fantastic, and although Meta also seems to be pushing as hard as they can to improve hand tracking and gesture recognition, too, there are and will always be immense benefits to having a hardware controller compared to just waving your hands and pinching your fingers. Precision, haptics, joysticks and buttons, additional positional audio, and more. I have no doubt that if Vision OS succeeds, it will also eventually get spatially tracked controllers as well. But it is going to start without them. That to me seems like the main competitive advantage Meta's Quest lineup has, other than the price. It's obviously superior in terms of delivering a deeper and more varied lineup of games; Apple seems to understand that and are hardly mentioning games (although, that makes sense due to the price as well). It will be interesting to see how Meta tries to leverage this advantage. OTOH maybe some enterprising developer will just figure out how to connect Meta's controllers (or other similar ones) to the Apple Vision Pro.
  • lajupechere 3y ago
    To be fair, the Apple stylus is considered an art and creative _accessory_, not the predominant way of interacting with the system.
    • veidr 3y ago
      Totally true, and I suspect that the same will hold true for Vision OS — controllers will always be optional (even when Apple has "the world's most advanced spatial controller" to sell us for $999/pair).
• machdiamonds 3y ago
  I'm guessing that the Vision Pro will actually help Quest sales in the short term, since many people will want the Vision Pro but will settle for the Quest 3, since it'll be 7 times cheaper.
  • veidr 3y ago
    Absolutely. Also Meta would be foolish not to copy the innovative/popular things introduced by Vision OS. The iPhone massively benefited almost every phone user in the world -- even those who never used an iPhone. Same dynamic will apply here (albeit with a vastly smaller total number of users, at least for the first decade...)
  • MikusR 3y ago
    Or Quest 2 that is 11 times cheaper. And has a higher refresh rate than Vision Pro.
    • throw9away6 3y ago
      Why does refresh matter? It’s all about pixel density
      • dotnet00 3y ago
        Refresh rate is more important than pixel density, the former has a big impact on comfort, lower refresh rates are more likely to cause motion sickness, while a lower pixel density mostly just means that the details are smoothed out.
        • nazgulnarsil 3y ago
          latency and refresh rate are different.
  • lvl102 3y ago
    No. Experience is very different and people can just go right into their local Apple store to see the difference. People are ignoring the fact that Apple has one of the widest and best retail networks in the world. It’s game over for Meta.
• tracyhenry 3y ago
  If Vision Pro wins, its likely because of the higher-res (so virtual monitors become usable) and the ecosystem (any iOS apps + projecting Apple devices).
  • Panini_Jones 3y ago
    The 'trust' factor may play into it too. For years, we've seen Meta and Apple bicker about privacy. I don't think this was just for fun; I think this was for the upcoming headset war we're going to witness. Do you trust Meta or Apple with eye tracking data?
    • elforce002 3y ago
      That's the thing. I don't trust facebook at all. After many years, I switched to Apple (Mac) and I don't fight as much as before. Heck, I'm now learning Swift/SwiftUI just because that by the time we get version 3, We could program something similar to what Tony Stark has at home (fingers crossed). Now, fb is still "sharing" with the community (React, Pytorch, Prophet, etc...), so at least on that front they're winning.
    • tracyhenry 3y ago
      Apple pushes an update so that FB needs to ask you for permission for tracking. You think that's just being noble? It's because they want to become an ad company too[1], at the cost of destroying countless SMBs in the meantime. I'm not sure how long this trust is going to last. [1] https://proton.me/blog/apple-ad-company https://proton.me/blog/apple-ad-company
• JKCalhoun 3y ago
  > “By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself,” he said of Apple’s WWDC keynote earlier this week. Odd thing for him to say since he is describing the strange solitariness of all VR.
  • labrador 3y ago
    > strange solitariness of all VR The whole pitch of the Metaverse seemed to be "We'll all live in a virtual world and have great fun meeting and interacting with each other."
    • Panini_Jones 3y ago
      Their superbowl commercial was a depressed old dog that put on a headset and became happy, wasn't it? Or was that black mirror...
    • wellthisisgreat 3y ago
      … while sitting with those interaction-coffins on our heads? How can anyone promote a box of a VR helmet and speak about “social”
      • labrador 3y ago
        Maybe you haven't experienced the feeling of embodiment that Zuckerberg likes to go on about. You feel like your "in" the world with others, not in the solitary room of your physical world with your eyes staring at screens. I've felt embodied, but the resolution and processor speed with current tech keeps glitching me out of it. Reality doesn't have lags and glitches, so if you have them, it doesn't feel real.
        • wellthisisgreat 3y ago
          Oh I know the in-VR experience having built DIY headsets some 10 years ago for fun. I am talking about what’s happening in the real world, where Zuck’s “vision” of immersive black boxes w/o passthrough locking you into the virtual is as asocial as it gets.
• Cloudef 3y ago
  Nreal air seems better to me just because you don't have to strap a god damn monitor into your face
• tjpnz 3y ago
  >could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it’s not the one that I want. We'll have to wait and see with Vision Pro, but it's already pretty clear that Zuckerberg's vision is not one that anyone wants.
  • UnpossibleJim 3y ago
    He needed to look at hardware platforms of the past. If you can't get people to develop for a system and make good apps, then the hardware is useless.
  • kcplate 3y ago
    As weird as I find the cartoony Metaverse and would never ever use it, I think it has a greater likelihood of adoption over that uncanny valley looking FaceTime avatar thing. Campy over creepy.
  • zmmmmm 3y ago
    20M people bought Quests. More than x-box in the same period. I find this writing off of their sales achievements as really superficial. Whatever else you want to say, they shifted units and the people buying them wanted something he was selling.
    • tjpnz 3y ago
      They're using it for games, but not Horizon Worlds which is arguably the vision.
      • seydor 3y ago
        That should be taken as a hint that people don't want VR video conferencing which is the target use for Apple's headset. TBH i don't want an avatar face, real faces in a simple Zoom call are more expressive.
        • zer00eyz 3y ago
          I have a vision, external cameras on, on a cal with you where we are looking at hardware. "Hey Seydor, tab A isn't going into slot B here..." You being able to watch, is gonna be great. You can tell me I'm a moron or that the parts don't work or some combination. Apple probably has enough of an internal use case with product design, development and production being as long, desperate and demanding.
• langsoul-com 3y ago
  I hope quest pro 2 has the eye tracking, click hand gestures and better resolution for no blurry text.
  • machdiamonds 3y ago
    The Quest Pro already has eye tracking and even the Quest 2 has good hand tracking now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io7_NyTmXv0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io7_NyTmXv0 But yes, they really do need to improve the resolution, It seems that the resolution was kept similar to that of the Quest 2 due to using the same SOC, which couldn't power a display with a very high resolution.
• prawn 3y ago
  I think the reason Apple pitched a device for solo use is that at the price point they needed, you can't bank on your friends having one, or multiple headsets in the house, or everyone at the office. I bet they figured the display quality is the crux, and other decisions flowed from there: needed more power, necessitating the power brick; expensive; early adopters likely to be richer people using it for content consumption.
  • wellthisisgreat 3y ago
    How is there a non-solo use for the 3D blindfold? Are we expected to sit in the living room with goggles on our heads watching a movie? I mean casually like it’s TV. I had a 3D glasses projector and the friction for glasses was way less and still it sucked socially. The overall push to get people put boxes on their heads is so depressing
    • prawn 3y ago
      First thrust will be solo content consumption and mild work (emails and text docs). And yes, a fair number of early users will sit on the couch or be in bed watching a movie/show, experiencing an immersive environment or reading a book/site handsfree. It will be limited to wealthier people to start, but it will grow as the product iterates and becomes more affordable. Soon enough, it will be a hybrid of WFH and the office. Some employers will provide this and accept employees working from home if it's consistently used. At some employers, you will see a colleague working in your periphery (as though at a desk beside you) and be able to toggle a pane from your display as visible to them and discuss/share interacting with it and their persona. Employers will buy a $3500 headset rather than laptop, displays, desk, chairs, and letted office space. You can find that depressing, but I don't think it can be stopped for a fair portion of typical office workers.
• zmmmmm 3y ago
  For me the million dollar question is whether he chooses to try to compete directly with it (as in, Quest Pro 2 with increased specs) or if he tries to comfortably settle into the low end and leave the high end to Apple. I really do hope he chooses to compete. A quick turnaround on a Quest Pro 2 with only the updates they are already shipping in the Quest 3 would put them an vastly better position and still 1/3 the price. It should be possible and it would at least set up something resembling an open-ecosystem standards based choice to balance Apple's closed proprietary approach. If not - Apple essentially has no competition at all here.
  • dingle_thunk 3y ago
    They don't actually need a quick turnaround on the Quest Pro 2, as the Apple headset is launching next year. Apple has given them plenty of warning, they have runway to comprehensively respond. Such a premature announcement is reminiscent of the Osborne effect. I think it'll negatively impact sales, and it'll make the ultimate value proposition of their first product difficult. Apple are really cashing in that brand value here...
• elhudy 3y ago
  > The introduction of Apple’s headset marks a major competitive threat. Considering VR headset sales haven’t really hit their tipping point (if there is to be one), Apple’s entry into the market could actually benefit quest sales in a “rising tide lifts all boats” type of way.
  • seydor 3y ago
    I think it already does (expecting Quest sales to soar this quarter). But both companies forget that people don't use them much. There is no killer app yet. Apple showed horizon worlds in AR - but very few people use VR goggles for that purpose. There is a lot of speculation that apple knows what they are doing here - they don't
• bee_rider 3y ago
  The Vision Pro is only 7x as expensive as the Facebook headset if you value your privacy at zero.
• kumarvvr 3y ago
  " By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself." Wait, I thought an Oculus does the same thing too. Its a blindfold on your face, and it doesnt matter if they are alone or in a crowd. Mark has got to be terrified. The power of Apple is the tight and efficient integration of hardware and software. Regarding battery power, I woukd not rule out versions that stream the video and outsource the computing to a mac or a standalone box, like Apple TV. Regarding the experience, Apples seem to be far more coherent and natural rather than Oculususs. Imagine watching a movie, and mid way, trying to fumble around to get and orient the controllers. Absurd. FB should be in panic mode. The 10 billion over 10 years is now a high risk spend.
  • baby 3y ago
    Why should they be in panic? They already iterated on 3 headsets, they definitely have the advantage (weren't people complaining that they spent too much $$ in VR? Now they should be terrified?)
    • Ireallyapart 3y ago
      of course they are terrified. Not being terrified is delusional. It's apple.
    • A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
      FB does not appear to be attracting young people. Apple appears to be a magnet for them. FWIW, Apple does PR and presentations a lot better ( I honestly can't remember FB VR rollout, but I was interested in Apple's toy ). If FB is not worried, their CEO may not be doing his job.
      • johnnykree 3y ago
        I'm a middle school teacher in Europe. None of my students use Facebook. They even don't use Whatsapp that much anymore. FB has a big problem.
        • 3y ago
• claytongulick 3y ago
  I've been reading all the comments on here in the several discussions that have made it to the front page, wondering if my use case is really so unique... I'll buy it. No question. No hesitation. The main reason is that I need a private workspace. I work remotely and don't have a lot of physical space (I live in 80sq ft, at the moment. No, not a typo). I share it with my wife, who is a project manager and on calls all day. This makes work quite challenging, it's easy to pull me from the "zone". Sometimes it's just because of an intense call she's on, sometimes it's because I'm so available. She'll ask "are you in the middle of something? Can I ask you a quick question?" and just like that, I've lost 30-45 minutes of productivity. The idea of having a virtual private workspace, surrounded by monitors, playing focus music, with the illusion of a vast space around me... This sounds like a dream. I'd happily pay $3,500 for it. In fact, we'll be buying two.
• gonehome 3y ago
  The really good eye tracking seems like a big deal on the Apple device - that will feel like telepathy and I think will be significantly better than the controller nav that currently exists with meta devices. Apple's focus on productivity is good too because it relies less on network effects for cool use cases. Part of why the Meta approach is hard is the social stuff requires everyone you know to have headsets, this (imo) is why Carmack was pushing for lighter, cheaper devices over the Meta Quest Pro - he saw growth and distribution as the core bottleneck for Meta's approach. Since Apple's approach is around individual use and productivity, that frees them to build an expensive device that provides value to one user and then leverage that until lots of people have them, it's an easier way to bootstrap (and something they've done historically repeatedly). Of course it helps they already have a platform to extend too. The big breakthrough IMO is commitment to pass-through for AR, this ultimately solves the "draw black" problem Michael Abrash wrote about at Valve in 2012 [0] before he joined Oculus. Ben Thompson of Stratechery makes an analogy to mirrorless cameras vs. DSLRs and I think it fits - people thought screens would never be good enough compared to natural light, but it turns out at some point they are. Palmer Luckey mentioned in 2021 that he thought this also should be the approach to it. The other major issue Abrash talks about in that blog post is latency, and Apple has solved this (though only just) because of their incredible custom silicon which was not easily visible back in 2012. It's possible to imagine these devices getting smaller and lighter as they iterate, the AR and eye tracking means you may be able to do things like look at a light switch in your house and turn it out without anything else, UI for the real world becomes possible. Looking at little glass displays could become an anachronism of this time. Of course, it could also just be a common way to do desktop computing - hard to know. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120804140946/http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-ar-anytime-soon/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120804140946/http://blogs.valv... It's fun to look back on some old HN threads with predictions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=fossuser%20abrash&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
• myrandomcomment 3y ago
  Sounds like Blackberry talking about the first iPhone and we all know how that turned out. The $3500 for V1 will be $600 by V3. This is worth the read. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/hands-on-with-apple-vision-pro-this-is-not-a-vr-headset/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/hands-on-with-apple-... Here is the most important comment from the story. --- When you actually put on the headset, though, you'll often find that the promotional video was pure aspiration and reality still has some catching up to do. That was my experience with HoloLens, and it has been that way with consumer AR devices like Nreal, too. That was not my experience with Vision Pro. To be clear, it wasn’t perfect. But it’s the first time I’ve tried an AR demo and thought, “Yep, what they showed in the promo video was pretty much how it really works.” --- We all watched the demo and thought "wow, but this is the marketing video so lets see the reality."
• WatchDog 3y ago
  How much money has apple spent developing this thing? Meta has lost over $30 billion so far on developing VR. Apple's headset looks much more complex from an engineering perspective, really complicated sensors, and custom silicon for signal processing, wouldn't surprise me if they have spent a fair bit more than meta.
  • smt88 3y ago
    It's somewhat under the radar because it hasn't killed the company, but Meta's VR/metaverse failure is among the greatest business failures of all time. To spend $30B and have absolutely nothing is so astonishingly incompetent that you'd imagine an average 8th grader could get a better result.
    • fomine3 3y ago
      Everyone will be happy about that Meta doesn't use such money for excellent ad-clicking technology. Fuck boring capitalism.
• zer0zzz 3y ago
  I think Zuck is mostly right as far as the fundamentals of the core tech. Meta has a lot of strong competency in this space as far as building the core components of a hand tracked XR computing experience. What I do think Zuck misses are two things: 1) The Quest's overall software platform and ecosystem now need to get much much better about quality and performance/efficiency. Meta is already starting from a disadvantage when it comes to the hardware performance but it's clear a lot of the software can be a bit janky. Also the reliance on the Quest app for phone integration is bad enough, except that the quest app is atrociously buggy. A lot of this is exactly the sort of thing Carmack complained and pushed back about the most. 2) The Quest developer platform has a lot of work ahead of it as far as the kinds of 2D productivity apps and 2D media consumption apps that were primarily showcased. When apple can give devs Xcode and tell them a checkbox can turn their UIKit/SwiftUI App into a XR app thats not a small thing. Also all of Apples stack is either unity or swift based. Having a high level native system of deploying high quality Abi stable native frameworks is also no small thing. Meta has a lot of work ahead of it I feel if it wants to compete on the developer front to get app developers to write some truly great productivity software needed to sell Quests as general computer PC replacements instead of gaming products only.
• NovaDudely 3y ago
  This sounds similar to the talk of somewhat that just got Sherlocked. There are two ways you can go about this. Think of the iPhone release, you can be Nokia/Microsoft and stubbornly continue thinking you have first mover advantage. Or be like Google with Android, realize they have just seen the future and pivot the project in that direction. Zuck may be taking the Nokia route.
• hinkley 3y ago
  Has Jeri Ellsworth chimed in yet? I’d rather hear her opinion on laundry soaps than literally anything Zuckerberg has to say.
• sagebird 3y ago
  The price doesn’t matter if vision is the first headset that normal people with cash will use every day. Imagine how pathetic the smartphone market would be if the iPhone only ever caught on with gamers.
• MrJagil 3y ago
  For the third time, I’d like to reiterate my point on Metas recent trailer for their new Quest headset: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36201835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36201835 It turns out, it wasnt marketing that did wrong when Meta designed their trailer to be hip and energetic and happening. And it wasn’t Apple marketing that just “got it right” with their trailer when they focused on immersion. In reality, it has nothing to do with marketing. Meta just has a bad product vision. I cannot understand how they think “being actice and doing things” is their selling point? It is just so unintuitive. It’s not a smart watch. Good thing Meta thinks “it’s going to be a fun journey” because they are now at war with the most succesful product company in the history of the world.
  • prawn 3y ago
    Most people talking favourably about the Quest on HN talk about fitness games. It's easier to justify a hardware purchase if it will have a purpose, as you can compare the cost against a gym membership or a treadmill or a personal trainer. That makes sense to me. But as a desk-bound professional, Apple's pitch to me is as a work device with a bit of wind-down entertainment as a bonus. It's easier to justify their hardware purchase if you're comparing against a new Studio Display, for example. You can convince yourself that endless screen real estate will solve your digital problems. "Honey, it's not for the PlayStation, it's for actual work." I think both approaches are decent, but I've got a feeling that Apple are skating to where the puck will be, as they say.
  • 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
    The Vison trailer felt like it was directed by Cronenberg or David Lynch. Something very off about it, the over-polished, plastic execs, talking out of smiles wider than the grand canyon and the weird almost dreamlike people and scenarios.
    • seanhunter 3y ago
      Compared to the closest comparable which was the Zuckerberg Meta reveal video[1] which was so weird the country of Iceland produced a parody of it. [2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjNI9K1D_xo&pp=ygURaWNlbGFuZCBtZXRhdmVyc2U%3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjNI9K1D_xo&pp=ygURaWNlbGFuZ... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enMwwQy_noI&pp=ygURaWNlbGFuZCBtZXRhdmVyc2U%3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enMwwQy_noI&pp=ygURaWNlbGFuZ...
• yumraj 3y ago
  Soon we’ll hear that Meta is changing its name back to Facebook.
• nologic01 3y ago
  There is something quite remarkable and puzzling about the VR/AR and now SC (spatial computing) space. All major (ad)tech companies are convinced that this is a major market that will materialize and be profitable if the right combination of hardware and software is developed. Their VR "visions" differ but only at the margin. No matter how you execute it, we are talking about people (homo sapiens) putting a major something on their heads that dramatically takes over their visual field for the pursuit of... what exactly? That is the puzzle. There is a missing aha moment around this type of interface that would justify the major behavioral adjustment that is required for it to be adopted as a general purpose interface rather than a gimmick. The number of devices sold so far does not impress me. A small number of people, especially youngsters with disposable income can be sold on anything (including fake currencies). What is missing is an indication that this is actually an empowering piece of tech that is a a major new mode in our interface with computing. What would be such indicators? Anything really. E.g. Some leaked stories that the teams developing these devices wear them all the time because it makes them so much more productive / social / fun / transcedental / [insert something people might actually want to have]. So far at least, this is a tech that is being pushed onto people rather than being pulled. I don't think this was the case with any of the major steps in the development of digital computing but would be quite interested if people can think of historical precedent.
  • bushbaba 3y ago
    Not joking. Checkout VR porn. Then it hits you. Holy shit this is the future of media and entertainment. Something about perspective in VR gives a human touch of interactivity not possible with other media forms. I have no doubt this new medium will revolutionize mainstream TV and Movies. The infinite desk. Infinite whiteboard. Improved conferencing. Are just added bonuses.
    • paul_grisham 3y ago
      >Not joking. Checkout VR porn. Then it hits you. Holy shit this is the future of media and entertainment. Something about perspective in VR gives a human touch of interactivity not possible with other media forms. One of the most pathetic things I've ever heard. Gushing about immersive cuckoldry.
• kart23 3y ago
  Apple really isn't introducing any fundamentally new concepts here. It's all just 2D windows floating around in 3D space. And the new things like 3D photos seem to be universally panned by people who've tried the headset. VR is such a new powerful format, for apple to present a bunch of 2D windows running the same old apps being 'spatial computing' is kind of a joke. The hardware is really impressive, the functionality is extremely underwhelming.
  • lvl102 3y ago
    People said the same thing about the iPhone. Heck, they said Android will compete too. Meta doesn’t even have 1/100th of the engineering/manufacturing capabilities of Apple. It’s literally Zuck sourcing mostly off the shelf hardwares. They will never catch up to Apple until they invest in that type of infrastructure which will cost them hundreds of billions.
• Roark66 3y ago
  Personally I would compare these devices to be like the first monochrome display Palm Pilot "organisers" state of tech when what we want is modern smartphone. The thing is too damn big, heavy, it obscures your field of vision, it gets hot and it has bad battery life. When will VR/AR really take off? When the headset can clip onto my prescription glasses and not make them too heavy. When any of my devices (smartphone, pc) Can use this AR display to show stuff on. Even then there will be a long time before AR will supercede classic high dpi displays.
  • Gareth321 3y ago
    That’s when AR goes exponential. We’re a few years off but I don’t think we’re that far away.
• 1023bytes 3y ago
  Apple doesn't really address gaming and it will be pretty hard to port over existing games due to the lack of controllers. Which is pretty unfortunate, since VR gaming is a much more unique value proposition than reading your emails and watching TV in VR. Same goes for Meta - who wants to sit in VR work meetings?
• nanna 3y ago
  Am I the only one who hopes that vr will never take off just out of a sense of schadenfreude for Zuckerberg?
  • CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    That and also it's the flying car of personal computing.
• dschuetz 3y ago
  Zuckerberg with his "Metaverse", yeah, about that. Instead of creating useful applications in VR first he spent billions into creating a metaverse nobody wants. Quoting his response to Apple's Vision: ‘could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it’s not the one that I want.’ Meh, it's freaking awesome, but mine is better, you'll see, meh. What a child.
• jl6 3y ago
  Maybe it’s just me aging into a different demographic, but my sphere of acquaintances is increasingly reaching peak tech, becoming quite uninterested in (or actively hostile to) further technological mediation of our lives.
  • nlitened 3y ago
    Yeah, that’s just aging, unfortunately.
    • CatWChainsaw 3y ago
      But also hostility to entire personhood being digitized and hostage-taken by SaaS, however "free" or "voluntary" it might be.
    • flerovium 3y ago
      Yeah, that's just aging, fortunately.
• d--b 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • tuukkah 3y ago
    > Nobody gave a shit about smart phones before the iphone. Too much hyperbole. Perhaps 50% of people cared before iPhone and 100% after iPhone. In the case of VR, it's more like 5% before Apple and ... 10% after?
  • LeoPanthera 3y ago
    > Nobody gave a shit about smart phones before the iphone. 2 out of 3 isn't bad, but this is revisionist history, and simply wrong. Nokia dominated the pre-iPhone smartphone market with Symbian phones, which supported 3G for years before the first iPhone, which didn't even have 3G. And are we assuming that Blackberries aren't "smartphones"? Because I think they probably are.
    • d--b 3y ago
      Not saying it didn't exist, but that it wasn't mainstream. Ask your mother if she's ever heard of Symbian phones...
      • DoingIsLearning 3y ago
        That is a very US perspective. Nokia absolutely dominated the European market up to the 2010s.
        • wil421 3y ago
          Nokia brick phones dominated the US market in the early 2000s. I’ve never seen a Symbian outside of magazines and internet tech writers. Symbian lost to iOS and Android within 2 years of release. Not to mention developers were never going to create apps for the platform.
          • hexomancer 3y ago
• AltruisticGapHN 3y ago
  So long as Mr Zuck has money to throw away at his vision... I'm all for it. Because the Meta Quest is amazing for games and entertainment. So go mr Zuck. The more money he can keep burning on it the better for us :) I mean is there anything else of comparable quality in the price range? I still have the Quest 1 and it's amazing. I´m still wowed by the feeling of immersion even in the crappy Quest 1 homes (vs eg. SteamVR homes). edit: also Apple's headset is never gonna be a competitor any time soon. As much as I dislike Meta/Facebook, the Quest is surprisingly open. They even let you hook a cable and do PC VR with it! WTF!!! I'm able to play Skyrim VR even on the Quest 1 at good framerates (the PC is rendering of course). Heck they even let you use your own USBC cables for the link feature. Can´t wait to see Apple letting us use our own cables. /lelz > More importantly, our vision for the metaverse and presence is fundamentally social. It’s about people interacting in new ways and feeling closer in new ways This seems valid. Read reviews on games on the Quest store. People are talking about how they weren't into games and now theyŕe playing eg. Walkabout Golf with their relatives through the internet and having fun sessions on the weekends and things like that. Or you'll read about older people who find some of the VR experiences really beneficial just to exercise and get them moving, I think the Meta Quest is making a difference, it's just not something really obvious or shiny enough. It has a place. Once Meta can make a headset of sufficient quality, lighter, sharper, I could totally see myself actually watching TV or movies with the headset on. It's just not comfortable enough yet. So that's where it seems Apple has been trying to push the bar, making it more usable/comfy.. at a big price. Also, Apple's demo is kinda odd. You have the woman doing something like Zoom in her room. Nobody is wearing the goggles. How does that work? You ´d think that once YOU wear the goggles, the other people in the meeting would also use it so everyone's kinda on the same tools. Yet none of them wear a headset - that scenario doesn't make sense. So as goofy as it looks, Meta's scenario where everyone is inside the VR space, makes more sense. I still think this is all a stepping stone towards having AR rendered in real space without wearing any headset. But that's probably a loooong way off.
• eecc 3y ago
  Well, Mark is mistakenly positioning the Vision Pro in the same braket of his Quest. The Vision is going after Microsoft's HoloLens and it's a closed case already (if anything because Microsoft dropped the towel long ago). Nope, according to rumor Apple has another device in the pipeline and that should make Mark lose some sleep: you see, now that Apple announced it, the VP is in feature freeze and they can switch full-on on finalizing the cheaper consumer class device that will likely go for 1k. But he knows that... it's just pandering for the shareholders.
  • jobigoud 3y ago
    Would they really make the announcements in this order? It will make the cheaper device a lot weaker, everyone will be talking about what it doesn't have. Either the things it doesn't have are important, in which case people will feel they are getting a dumbed-down device and may look at the competition if it's cheaper for the same set of good-enough features, or these things won't be considered that important, in which case no one will buy the high end one…
• rwmj 3y ago
  Someone sent me this link today which is Meta's & Apple's competing visions for the office of the future: https://twitter.com/DachshundColin/status/1666459733899763712 https://twitter.com/DachshundColin/status/166645973389976371... Why are they so obsessed with office metaphors? It's like the very early shopping websites which were basically virtual shops or shopping malls. These companies have thousands of people working on this problem, and VR Microsoft Bob is the best they can come up with?
• kristianpaul 3y ago
  This clearly about vision, the fact that apple make this 4k and you being able to read text, thats it. It is “stamp display” but if it feels real, whatever software environment develops around its for time to tell. Our “Metaverse” already exists in the stories we tell/produce on social media/news paper/reela/etc how eventually this augments or extend to reality i don't think we know as i still love to print pictures of trips but also like to watch my drone/go pro videos big on the TV. Sure, a “Metaverse” made of comic like characters because your hardware (quest) dont match want the world sees is an arguing excuse for the lack of hardware innovation. Apple well its brave and also a strong brand to put this to sell for 3k and it should deliver. I just know that i wont be buying a TV in while…
• progx 3y ago
  Zuckerberg should fall to his knees and thank apple that they will create the way for Meta, so that they can sell their cheap Oculus with Ads.
• deleted 3y ago
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• fsniper 3y ago
  I suppose to understand the premise of a newer technical idea we could look into how it is perceived in the sci-fi works. I can not say I am any way en expert or geek for everything sci-fi so please keep in mind the below points are how I see this from my limited point of view and knowledge. Consider mobile phones, tablets, It was mainstream on sci-fi even before it was even remotely possible on reality. Everyone, unless considered a recluse had a handheld communication device. It was not perceived as a niche product that only a limited set of people uses. It's used all of the time, not something that is reserved for particular times or places. And considering everyone reading/watching/listening the works would want to have a piece of it, I can really say it was always meant to be mainstream if it was built. And it did. Let's have a look on VR and AR. Is it considered mainstream in sci-fi? Like everyone without any distinction uses them? Is it something considered a timeless/place-less device that everyone has and uses? I don't say it's not considered useless. I say it's most of the time considered a niche product or device, a limited set of people has access to. Either rich/privileged or with a particular job that requires the use case. It's not considered to be used all the time. It has it's times to be used and then left to itself. And If someone is in fact uses it for extended periods or never gets out of, they are the recluse. If I am not mistaken on how I view it, I don't think these AR/VR devices are meant to be mainstream. Perhaps a holodeck would be a wiser option to invest into?
• diamondfist25 3y ago
  I thought the extended battery is a smart design choice for vision pro. You just shouldn’t put everything on your forehead, it’s too heavy
• betimsl 3y ago
  He's bitter because he's 6-7 years behind. He lost the moment Apple decided to make their own SoC.
• 7e 3y ago
  This reminds me very much of Steve Ballmer’e dismissive reaction to the original iPhone.
• lvl102 3y ago
  At the end of the day, Zuck is going to burn even more money on VR due to Apple. He’s going to try to compete and sink an enormous amount of money chasing something he cannot catch. This is actually very bad for Meta.
• respondo2134 3y ago
  >> Meta has found early success in VR gaming and fitness... Really? Is this true at any scale, let alone FB scale? I think there's plenty of room in this space for both Meta and Apple to fail in their own ways.
• lazyllama 3y ago
  I think people are missing the point of these “mixed reality” headsets. They’re really prototypes for AR glasses. Basically in the future they want to replace your phone with glasses with some kind of waveguide that can composite 3d objects into the real world. We have the waveguide tech and 3000nit lcos micro led displays already but just don’t have the processing power in a package small enough to fit in a pair of glasses.
• erichmond 3y ago
  Everything about how Meta / Zuck is approaching this is showing how nervous and anxious he is about all of this. From the panic announcement of the Quest 3 before the Vision Pro unveiling to this statement, which, seems weirdly honest. Calling out "it was a person sitting on a couch by themselves" when that's the ONLY way you can use your Quest 2, given how bad passthrough works. Given their vision of the future is a bunch of people in different parts of the world all using headsets "to be together" vs a future where you are present in the real world at all times, except you have productivity enhancements available. Look, I'm in awe of both the Quest and Vision Pro for how technologically advanced all of this tech is, and I know Zuck needs to show "strength", but he knows he's in trouble and needs to rethink most of his product strategy going forward.
  • innocentoldguy 3y ago
    I agree. Meta's Quest devices are little more than an Android-based cell phone strapped to your face. Zuck has bet his company on his Metaverse idea and it appears Apple will utterly stomp him if their device performs half as well as they claimed in their WWDC keynote. The only thing Zuck has going for him is price. Some people will settle for Meta's lesser quality at a fraction of the price.
• pavlov 3y ago
  From a purely technology point of view, Meta is well placed. There isn't an enormous gap between what their hardware does vs. Apple. Display resolution, eye tracking and hand tracking are problems that can be solved today with a more expensive device. (The Quest Pro is a weird compromise because it's not that much of an upgrade from the base Quest. It has powerful eye tracking, yet the software doesn't use it. The whole device really feels like it's an internal hardware testing platform that got a public release because Meta wanted to show the world they're working on something beyond the consumer headset.) Historically this kind of timing against Apple has boded well. Windows 2.0 looked ugly and for end-users was little more than a glorified MS-DOS file manager, yet ended up winning the market in five years. Same thing happened in smartphones. Android 1.0 was a hasty design reset to catch up to the iPhone, yet it became the world leader in smartphones. If Meta wants to be the Windows and Android of this generation of computing, they need to think hard about the platform aspect. The Microsoft and Google platforms wouldn't have taken off if the companies hadn't actively worked to open them up to other vendors. Meta can't just be the "poor man's Apple" in their own proprietary garden, or they will end up like Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, BlackBerry 10 and others who tried that approach in the past.
  • rob74 3y ago
    I would argue that the whole "IBM PC clone" phenomenon came about more by chance than by design: IBM certainly didn't want it to happen, but since they cobbled their PC together from standard off-the-shelf parts, and outsourced the OS to a third party (Microsoft) who was more than happy to license it to others too, there wasn't much they could do to stop it either. The other platforms you mentioned were ultimately undercut by these cheap PC clones and by their own failings, not necessarily by the fact that they were proprietary. Actually, IMHO Apple only narrowly escaped joining the Atari ST and Amiga in the mid 1990s...
    • alexsereno 3y ago
      That non exclusive licensing deal with Microsoft was absolutely bananas on IBMs part
  • newscracker 3y ago
• elif 3y ago
  IMO the question really is: will meta's $500 experience cause sweating and nausea, or does it really take $3.5k of hardware to get over that hurdle (if, in fact it even does). Until putting on VR has the same non-reaction of putting on headphones, it will remain a novelty.
• somsak2 3y ago
  Interesting just how similar his reaction is to what Ballmer's was when asked about the iPhone. "We like our strategy," comments about how it's so expensive (in fact giving almost precisely the same comparison; $99 vs. $500 back then is quite close to the $500 vs. $3500 with VR!), and mentioning that they're selling "millions of phones per year" while Apple is selling zero. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U
• nektro 3y ago
  see the thing about the Quest is that I actually do really want one, but I will never buy one because it's being developed by Meta