4 ms·

Great post - got through all important points in a very concise letter. Vision Pro is a super awkward name, but I do like that it forefronts "pro"; VR games tha

by bbor 3y ago

Great post - got through all important points in a very concise letter. Vision Pro is a super awkward name, but I do like that it forefronts "pro"; VR games that really blow people away without needing a ton of space are a bit far off IMO*, but we are so close to replacing laptops with something that's 1000x more convenient and powerful. I hope they're able to stick to their ambitious production schedule and they hit the shelves around the same time (early 2024). I've never rooted for any product harder than I am for SimulaVR, and that's saying a lot considering my dark days Kickstart-ing video games... *: If you disagree and love your VR games, tell me: how often do you break it out in favor of a traditional monitor? My experience tells me not very often, unless you have a great setup or are into a seated timesink game like Elite Dangerous.

babypuncher 3y ago
I'm not convinced this will actually replace laptops. There are clear use cases where an AR headset like Vision Pro makes a lot more sense than a laptop, but the opposite is also true. I'm skeptical that I will want to go through the effort of strapping goggles to my face just to sit on the couch and scroll through social media and catch up on email. This isn't like the rise of smartphones, where iPhones and Droids were a mostly additive experience to the dumb- and feature-phones people were using before.
- bbor 3y ago
  I totally agree on part of that, thanks for clearing it up - I definitely don't think it will replace all laptops, or all other computing in general. We very often want to interact with computers casually or with a group. But for extended sessions of computer work (a healthily sized market, to say the least), I would be very surprised if I didn't love having 9 monitors instead of 3. And that's to say nothing of the 3D/spatial computing modalities that will develop as the platform evolves away from its 2D roots. If you're not convinced and haven't watched the awesome video/scrolling ads the marketing wizards at Apple worked up, I highly recommend it. Brings a tear to my eye ;) https://www.apple.com/apple-vision-pro/ https://www.apple.com/apple-vision-pro/
- hiatus 3y ago
  If you told people 30 years ago that in the future, people would be walking around city centers with their heads down and eyes glued to a lit screen they would have laughed. This is less a laptop replacement and more a mobile-compute replacement. Who needs a tablet or phone if you have one light enough and with enough power to see you through the day strapped to your face? It also allows for a more intimate, private experience, as you may balk at opening some items on your phone in a crowded subway where a casual shouldersurfer could catch a glimpse.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    People from 30 years ago would probably be incredulous if you revealed that we still don't drive flying cars in the future. If you instead told them that we found a way to miniaturize television and celebrate content as short as 6 seconds long, they would probably be really horrified and then concede that you're right about the future. Comparatively, it's not hard to see why smartphones became popular. It's a cellphone, iPod and internet communicator in one device. The Reality Pro, on the other hand... it can call people, circumstantially. You could listen to music on it, but it's kinda cumbersome and there are less intrusive options even today. You could also browse the internet on it, but it would require context-switching that isn't so intrusive with physical interfaces. If your biggest pitch is that future tech will make this small enough to be competitive, I refute that by saying we'd just use that technology to make better/cheaper smartphones. Literally the same thing happened with television (and 3D TVs), there's hardly a reason to think it won't happen here.
    - hiatus 3y ago
      In its current form, sure I agree. But to me thinking that we will just see a future of miniaturized TVs is like thinking we would just keep making faster horses instead of shifting the paradigm. As the smartphone was the nexus for multiple technologies, so too are AR headsets. They are getting smaller and lighter and will become less obtrusive and with more intuitive user interfaces and interaction modalities, just as has been done with computers taking their myriad forms. I'd much prefer a private, hands free mode of interacting with a computer in public, not to mention the AR potential. Misplaced your keys? Well, they were last seen by your headset on your desk ten minutes ago.
simiones 3y ago
> we are so close to replacing laptops with something that's 1000x more convenient and powerful. Strapping a heavy laptop tightly to your face is the farthest thing away from "convenient" I can think of, especially when compared to a laptop. Then, the huge waste of compute power needed to run two separate displays showing 99.9% the same information, and to do it at huge resolutions to avoid seeing pixels up close, and then even more wasted cycles on filming, interpreting, compositing, and rendering your surroundings won't leave much room for a "powerful" device either.
- bbor 3y ago
  I agree that it's a technical challenge. And that it wouldn't work with a heavy/uncomfortable form factor. But c'mon, even if you don't agree with "so close", you see how we could get there with just a few more iterative improvements? Criticizing XR for displaying redundant information feels a little like criticizing smart phones for needing expensive multi-touch screens. Or laptops for not hooking up to your desktop where all the power is. Or personal computers for not hooking up to the school's mainframe. In other, less snarky, terms: the cycles aren't wasted if they get you 9 monitors IMO :) EDIT because apparently I'm obsessed with this topic: at my latest company the only program we ran on our laptops was chrome, and all computing happened in the cloud. Obviously not an option for all jobs/people/locations, but I'm confident such a setup would work for many of the current owners of heavy expensive "Pro" laptops. LLMs and their need for datacenter-level compute during training may accellerate this among certain dev circles, too.
  - simiones 3y ago
    No, we are nowhere near close to having a full-powered laptop in a form factor that could be worn on the face. I don't see any reasonable chance it will happen in the next 10 years, for example. And I don't agree that that's a fair comparison. First of all, because my main point was not to criticize AR/VR, but to point out that the display system itself will inevitably consume a huge portion of a laptop's compute cycles - so a pair of glasses with the same compute power as a laptop will be far slower in running any kind of software than the laptop. You might be able to display 9 huge windows in the AR space, but you will probably not be able to run 9 different programs at the same time. Second of all, because smartphones and laptops are not actually wasting cycles compared to a desktop to achieve a version of the same workflow. They are more expensive for the same compute power, and they are more thermally-throttled, but they don't use extra compute power to achieve the same performance.
spacedcowboy 3y ago
I was hoping they'd go with iBalls Probably never happening. I will, however name my own "iBalls" when I get it :)

by bbor 3y ago

babypuncher 3y ago

I'm not convinced this will actually replace laptops. There are clear use cases where an AR headset like Vision Pro makes a lot more sense than a laptop, but the opposite is also true. I'm skeptical that I will want to go through the effort of strapping goggles to my face just to sit on the couch and scroll through social media and catch up on email. This isn't like the rise of smartphones, where iPhones and Droids were a mostly additive experience to the dumb- and feature-phones people were using before.

bbor 3y ago
I totally agree on part of that, thanks for clearing it up - I definitely don't think it will replace all laptops, or all other computing in general. We very often want to interact with computers casually or with a group. But for extended sessions of computer work (a healthily sized market, to say the least), I would be very surprised if I didn't love having 9 monitors instead of 3. And that's to say nothing of the 3D/spatial computing modalities that will develop as the platform evolves away from its 2D roots. If you're not convinced and haven't watched the awesome video/scrolling ads the marketing wizards at Apple worked up, I highly recommend it. Brings a tear to my eye ;) https://www.apple.com/apple-vision-pro/ https://www.apple.com/apple-vision-pro/
hiatus 3y ago
If you told people 30 years ago that in the future, people would be walking around city centers with their heads down and eyes glued to a lit screen they would have laughed. This is less a laptop replacement and more a mobile-compute replacement. Who needs a tablet or phone if you have one light enough and with enough power to see you through the day strapped to your face? It also allows for a more intimate, private experience, as you may balk at opening some items on your phone in a crowded subway where a casual shouldersurfer could catch a glimpse.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  People from 30 years ago would probably be incredulous if you revealed that we still don't drive flying cars in the future. If you instead told them that we found a way to miniaturize television and celebrate content as short as 6 seconds long, they would probably be really horrified and then concede that you're right about the future. Comparatively, it's not hard to see why smartphones became popular. It's a cellphone, iPod and internet communicator in one device. The Reality Pro, on the other hand... it can call people, circumstantially. You could listen to music on it, but it's kinda cumbersome and there are less intrusive options even today. You could also browse the internet on it, but it would require context-switching that isn't so intrusive with physical interfaces. If your biggest pitch is that future tech will make this small enough to be competitive, I refute that by saying we'd just use that technology to make better/cheaper smartphones. Literally the same thing happened with television (and 3D TVs), there's hardly a reason to think it won't happen here.
  - hiatus 3y ago
    In its current form, sure I agree. But to me thinking that we will just see a future of miniaturized TVs is like thinking we would just keep making faster horses instead of shifting the paradigm. As the smartphone was the nexus for multiple technologies, so too are AR headsets. They are getting smaller and lighter and will become less obtrusive and with more intuitive user interfaces and interaction modalities, just as has been done with computers taking their myriad forms. I'd much prefer a private, hands free mode of interacting with a computer in public, not to mention the AR potential. Misplaced your keys? Well, they were last seen by your headset on your desk ten minutes ago.

simiones 3y ago

> we are so close to replacing laptops with something that's 1000x more convenient and powerful. Strapping a heavy laptop tightly to your face is the farthest thing away from "convenient" I can think of, especially when compared to a laptop. Then, the huge waste of compute power needed to run two separate displays showing 99.9% the same information, and to do it at huge resolutions to avoid seeing pixels up close, and then even more wasted cycles on filming, interpreting, compositing, and rendering your surroundings won't leave much room for a "powerful" device either.

bbor 3y ago
I agree that it's a technical challenge. And that it wouldn't work with a heavy/uncomfortable form factor. But c'mon, even if you don't agree with "so close", you see how we could get there with just a few more iterative improvements? Criticizing XR for displaying redundant information feels a little like criticizing smart phones for needing expensive multi-touch screens. Or laptops for not hooking up to your desktop where all the power is. Or personal computers for not hooking up to the school's mainframe. In other, less snarky, terms: the cycles aren't wasted if they get you 9 monitors IMO :) EDIT because apparently I'm obsessed with this topic: at my latest company the only program we ran on our laptops was chrome, and all computing happened in the cloud. Obviously not an option for all jobs/people/locations, but I'm confident such a setup would work for many of the current owners of heavy expensive "Pro" laptops. LLMs and their need for datacenter-level compute during training may accellerate this among certain dev circles, too.
- simiones 3y ago
  No, we are nowhere near close to having a full-powered laptop in a form factor that could be worn on the face. I don't see any reasonable chance it will happen in the next 10 years, for example. And I don't agree that that's a fair comparison. First of all, because my main point was not to criticize AR/VR, but to point out that the display system itself will inevitably consume a huge portion of a laptop's compute cycles - so a pair of glasses with the same compute power as a laptop will be far slower in running any kind of software than the laptop. You might be able to display 9 huge windows in the AR space, but you will probably not be able to run 9 different programs at the same time. Second of all, because smartphones and laptops are not actually wasting cycles compared to a desktop to achieve a version of the same workflow. They are more expensive for the same compute power, and they are more thermally-throttled, but they don't use extra compute power to achieve the same performance.

spacedcowboy 3y ago

I was hoping they'd go with iBalls Probably never happening. I will, however name my own "iBalls" when I get it :)