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The Vision Pro is a flop

167 points by myaccountonhn 2y ago

wetpaws 2y ago
[dead]
mattmaroon 2y ago
It’s the Cybertruck of VR.
- citizen_friend 2y ago
  ? Cyber truck looks like it’s doing great
  - microtherion 2y ago
    Does it? Assuming that the accelerator pedal issue affects all Cybertrucks shipped so far, they appear to have sold about 4000 of them: https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/19/business/tesla-cybertruck-recall/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/19/business/tesla-cybertruck-rec... Meanwhile, there are dozens of reports about Cybertrucks breaking down within literally a handful of miles after the owners taking possession. Given the small number produced, this seems quite high.
    - citizen_friend 2y ago
      It says recalled 4000. Does that mean they sold that many? Not to mention sales which haven’t shipped. So what traits are you comparing? Sales? Quality? excitement?
      - MBCook 2y ago
        Yes, it does. They had to recall every single one of them. Yes, you’re also right there are more orders that aren’t shipped.
        citizen_friend 2y ago
        > manufactured from November 13, 2023, to April 4, 2024 Where are you getting that the population of cybertrucks is no greater than 4000?
        joncfoo 2y ago
        > The recall involves all 3,878 of the aesthetically-divisive angular trucks that have been sold so far. https://www.npr.org/2024/04/19/1245849907/tesla-cybertruck-recall-accelerator-soap https://www.npr.org/2024/04/19/1245849907/tesla-cybertruck-r... > That means the 3,878 trucks being recalled are likely many, if not all, of the trucks now on US roads. https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/19/business/tesla-cybertruck-recall/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/19/business/tesla-cybertruck-rec... ---- A couple of sources.
        citizen_friend 2y ago
        All of them simply cite the recall report with the manufacturing date range and extrapolate that is all the vehicles. I’ll wait for a financial figure, thanks.
        FireBeyond 2y ago
        You mean the financial figures that Tesla have been caught acting less than honestly with? "Financially delivered" vehicles that are no more than a VIN plate in a warehouse still waiting to go through an assembly line? Or like in Australia, "We outsold Camry!" - and then when the media pulled vehicle registration data, well, no, they hadn't. Not even close.
        citizen_friend 2y ago
        Ok, I didn’t say that either. But it’s even more misleading to say they only sold 4000. Good faith preorders are sales and nobody has evidence besides a date range
        2y ago
    - maximus-decimus 2y ago
      Didn't they plan to only make 10k of them the first year? Selling 100% of the cars you make seems good enough to me.
  - fullshark 2y ago
    Based on what?
    - citizen_friend 2y ago
      Fun product that people want to buy?
  - mattmaroon 2y ago
    Meh, Tesla could polish a frozen turd, thaw it out, price it at $80k and sell 4,000 of them. Just as Apple probably has sold some of the Vision Pros. We won’t know if it’s a success or not until they can produce 100k of them a year and we see if they sell that many. But that’s not really what I meant. (That’s on me, it was late at night and I did not clarify.) Both of them are a product that, IMO, look stupid (highly subjective, I know), make you look stupid, and greatly misunderstand the traditional audience. Or they’re creating an entirely new audience. Cybertruck is not a replacement for a regular pickup, at all. But perhaps it’s a replacement for an SUV. Vision Pro is not a replacement for an Oculus, but perhaps in a few generations it’ll be something entirely new and worthwhile.
    - citizen_friend 2y ago
      Thanks for clarifying. Surprised my comment was so controversial! > Cybertruck is not a replacement for a regular pickup I think that’s actually a key insight. Most f150s are bought by suburban dads, not rural farmers. Tesla has been missing a masculine element, and I think that market has been perfectly identified.
ergonaught 2y ago
The idea that 400K units of this is a "big flop" requires some sort of fundamentally broken thinking (that applies to AAPL as well, if they have a similar view), wildly out of touch with reality. The reality distortion field is dead. Perhaps the memo was missed.
- luyu_wu 2y ago
  A bit curious why you think this. How much do you think the R&D costs were?
  - ergonaught 2y ago
    Because 400K units of this kind of product, at this price point, with this lack of “killer app” solving a problem people didn’t know they had, is a phenomenal success. If they expected …that… to sell millions of units straight away, well, as I wrote.
- 627467 2y ago
  Appl is not interest in niche products. they are not in biz to sell 200 products at 400K units each. they are in the biz to sell 20 overpriced products at 30M units/year each.
  - swatcoder 2y ago
    Sort of. That's the shape of their portfolio and long-term strategy, for sure, but they clearly didn't target "30M units/year" for the launch of Vision Pro any more so than they've targeted that scale for for AppleTV or the Airport and Time Machine product lines. It was plainly a test of both manufacturing and market. To the GP's point, I think it's hard for anyone on the outsjde to judge whether they hit their marks for it or not right now. It certainly wasn't grossly short, as there's no indication that they overshot manufacturing by an order of magnitude or something, but it certainly could have been disappointing. We really can't guess right now. Good, traditional reporting might be able to surface some insight with real footwork and investigation. Armchair blogspam writing like the article is pointless and is really just clickbait.
chamezard 2y ago
I think why it's flopped because price and power. Whoever want to buy this heavy VR headset with over 3000$ when we have meta quest or something? Browsing when we move? That mission smartphone has do well and will do well. And you need plug charger or power bank maybe full time when you move and it's drain battery fast. P/s: Remember Apple sell four wheels for 600$? That's Apple.
afavour 2y ago
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- citizen_friend 2y ago
  When does apple ever publicly predict sales?
- reaperman 2y ago
  Also worth noting they sold about 270,000 of them during the first week of sales, which is about $1 billion of revenue in just the first week. I think if they didn't over-manufacture them against unrealistic expectations that they may have gotten a reasonable profit, or broke even on paper (at least, ignoring their IRR baseline). $1 billion is enough to pay 500 engineers $300,000/year for 6 years. But I'm sure the cost of components ate a ton of that, and I'm not sure how much of that would be fixed vs. marginal costs. For something like the custom silicon, I could imagine fixed costs were substantial compared to marginal costs. I'm also not sure how much of this can be amortized across future versions of the Vision Pro, or if a huge amount of the fixed costs will need to be repeated. Maybe for the amount of silicon fabrication tooling, and the complexity of manufacturing tooling for something so unique, the fixed costs required the sale of 2-3 million units to break even. If so, I could see various parts of the organization feeling pressured to deliver analysis which confirmed the necessary level of demand, especially if executives expressed bullishness on the project.
- jdminhbg 2y ago
  > As the article states, Apple publicly stated they expected to sell 3 million of the things in the first year. This is false. The link goes to a Mark Gurman article in Bloomberg that claims Apple at one point had an internal prediction of 3 million, and that it was revised down before it went on sale. That may or may not be accurate reporting, but it’s not close to claiming they publicly predicted 3M sales.
- logbiscuitswave 2y ago
  When the iPhone came out, it was perfectly positioned. Smartphones weren’t new of course, but they were clunky devices with tons of compromise. The iPhone was designed to fix a lot of the problems around existing smartphones by having great built in apps, a great browser, and great usability thanks to many novel and intuitive forms of interaction. When it came out it was a must-have device and it solved so many problems for so many people. For everything I’ve seen of the Vision Pro it has represented a solution in search of a problem.
behnamoh 2y ago
I think it shows Apple has a vision!
- talldayo 2y ago
  Many Visions, presumably. I wonder if they'll ever change it's MSRP, or if it's such a dud that they'd rather preserve the brand halo associated with premium pricing.
k0mplex 2y ago
We actually want big tech to take swings like Vision Pro. And we should also be fine if they fail.
- waynesonfire 2y ago
  I guess.. the issue is that it's blatantly obvious how crappy the thing is. It's not that they failed but the disconnect. But, some engineers got to work on some new green field tech which is pretty cool. All to often at work I'm presented with interesting problems that I have to solve with hacks / least amount of resources. I envy those that know how to convince a company to take swings.
  - ajross 2y ago
    The vision pro isn't "greenfield tech". Meta and HTC have been in this space for a decade. Apple built a super premium Quest, basically.
  - FireBeyond 2y ago
    And yet all the usual suspects, Om, Gruber etc., couldn't but fall over themselves gushing at it. I mean "You can feel a vibration in the universe!"
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  Thank you very much for saying this, I totally agree. This is despite the fact that I want absolutely no part of "the metaverse" or whatever folks want to call ubiquitous AR/VR, and I don't want it to become commonplace in society. This is mostly for personal reasons, as I feel like I've finally gotten a handle on my cellphone addiction and have recently started realizing how much happier I am spending extended amounts of time in nature and away from tech. I like the idea of tech as tools, and I've enjoyed playing games on VR headsets for a short while, but extended use of a computer strapped to my face is a WALL-E nightmare for me. All that said, I really didn't like the tone of this article. Yes, I agree that "big tech" has caused a lot of harm in society. But it's not that hard to separate that from many good things it has done, and this article felt so cynical like it just wanted to piss in everyone's soup. We should celebrate it when big companies take real risks, even if they swing and miss. What would the author of this article prefer, more stock buybacks?
spicyusername 2y ago
TVs, computer monitors, actual conversation, and books are just too "good enough" for VR to compete. After owning a Quest 3 for a while, it's just too isolating and cumbersome an experience. It can't compete with the freedom of my laptop when I want to be in the digital world and it can't compete with legitimate social interaction when I want to be with people. The biggest place it can compete is games, but outside of a few really solid, and really compelling experiences, most games in VR aren't enough to warrant strapping it to your face.
- voidfunc 2y ago
  VR is still missing the killer app/experience to take off. Video games aren't it for most people. I can't see VR ever being a thing beyond video games and maybe some forms of other media. People are social creatures. The idea is that people want to sit around staring into goggles rather than interacting with other human beings is the kind of weird stuff that gets baked up by socially underdeveloped Big Tech nerds. Unless the form factor can be significantly minimized this is not going to be the next iPhone. Looking forward to this comment ending up in some HN retrospective on the success of Vision Pro 20 years from now like some of those old iPhone takes from the mid 2000s lol.
  - MBCook 2y ago
    I think that’s why Apple is pushing AR and not promoting VR experiences that much. But we don’t have that amazing thing for AR yet either.
    - crooked-v 2y ago
      I remain firmly convinced that Apple is planning for 10 or 15 years down the line, when there is no special "thing", just face screens that are light and compact enough to start piecemeal replacing phones as a product category.
      - nradov 2y ago
        In principle it should be possible to do away with screens altogether and generate an image by shining low power lasers from eyeglass frames into the wearer's eyes. This will require some major technology breakthroughs, but I think that's what will really make AR cross the chasm into the mainstream market.
add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
I can't imagine they thought it would succeed. My theory is they wanted to get out of VR, concluding it wasn't going anywhere this generation. But they wanted to launch something, whether to recoup some costs or avoid embarrassment. So they raised the price to a point where there would be relatively few buyers to piss off when they abandon it.
- crooked-v 2y ago
  My theory is that they're planning for 10 years down the line when the hardware is light enough to be mainstream, and are perfectly happy releasing the v0.1 iterations as a way to get a foothold in the parts of the market where Meta isn't.
spike021 2y ago
For a company as rich as Apple it's hardly a flop. Even if it doesn't do well I'd imagine they can recycle a lot of the R&D that went into it for their other tech areas.
wumeow 2y ago
First the car, now this. Apple better come up with something soon to offset losing the phone market in China.
archeantus 2y ago
I tried it for the first time last night and I was not too impressed. It felt like a solution in search of a problem. For the past decade Apple’s product lineup has pretty much remained the same (faster, lighter, etc), while they invested heavily in spatial computing (flop) and autonomous vehicles (scrapped). All while totally neglecting the industry they pioneered (Siri) and should have been perfecting. Instead, OpenAI came along and ate their lunch and Apple was caught completely flat-footed. And now they’re way behind. It’s shocking to me how bad the above bets and non-investments have played out for Apple. Tim Cook needs to ride off into the sunset. It’s been a good ride. He ran the business well. They need an innovative CEO at the helm that can make better bets.
- replyifuagree 2y ago
  Yep, Tim Cook is a pretty amazing at operations. Creative leader of creatives though, he just isn't that.
- snowwrestler 2y ago
  I’m confused. Which of Apple’s lunch is OpenAI eating? OpenAI does not offer a voice assistant that competes with Siri. Google and Amazon do, and their usage is way down as well; voice assistants in general have lost consumer preference.
  - archeantus 2y ago
    You must not have tried the voice feature in the ChatGPT app yet. Try it out, it’s amazing. It pairs the power and functionality of a conversational voice assistant with all the power of ChatGPT and LLMs. Obviously the integration isn’t as convenient as Siri’s yet, but the utility is infinitely higher. My point is that it seems pretty clear that the future is in the space that OpenAI is right now. And that isn’t a bet that Apple was investing in very heavily.
    - nmfisher 2y ago
      Apple is also not in the business of losing money. It's much easier to make something new and shiny when you can run it at a loss and your investors are happy for you to light piles of money on fire year after year. That's also probably why most AI research published by Apple is about on-device inference. It's expensive to run inference servers at scale. Apple is a hardware company, so it makes sense they want to focus on what you can do on a local device (or more accurately, how they can sell you a new piece of hardware).
sho 2y ago
> The Vision Pro is a big flop Not to sound like an apple fanboy but is it, though? I don't think anyone expected v1 to set the world on fire. They put a normal-for-Apple amount of time into trying to polish it as best they could be I don't think anyone bought a Vision Pro not knowing it was kind of an experiment. I'm never going to wear some ridiculous pair of ski goggles as a computer. But I'm also aware that some day we're going to have some kind of functioning AR, and it probably started with the ridiculous pair of ski goggles. Faulting Apple for taking their best shot at a v1 of that eventual product is just weird to me. Yeah, most people shouldn't buy it, but isn't this exactly what they should do? Get something out there, see what works and what doesn't, and start iterating? I suppose we'll find out if Apple thought it was actually a "big flop" if they never make a version 2, but I suspect they're thinking a little more long term than this blog.
- MBCook 2y ago
  It’s an Apple product. All Apple products sell 200 billion units a year. Anything else is a failure. The Apple Watch was a failure. The iPad was a failure. AirPods were a failure. The HomePod lineup is a failure. The Apple TV is a failure. I’m just about positive you can find a whole bunch of think pieces about each of those from not too long after their launches. Because if it doesn’t sell iPhone level numbers it’s obviously a total mistake that they tried. But the Apple Watch just kept selling better and better. The iPad had a slump after the initial hype, but it’s still selling extremely well all these years later. AirPods have done so terribly there are three different current models. I don’t know if we know numbers about HomePods and the Apple TV but they keep making new versions. There are so many companies in the world that would kill to run one of Apple’s “failure“ product lines and sell that many units. It’s really hard to “succeed” when everything you make is compared to the world changing iPhone as a yardstick. This could be a stumble out of the gate and you could be right about your comment. Or they could give up after a while. But they obviously spent a lot of money on this product, I don’t think they’re going to declare to failure and close up shop after three months.
  - sho 2y ago
    Er, I think you're agreeing with me?
phmqk76 2y ago
There was a lot of breathless coverage about how Steve Jobs was irreplaceable, and Apple hummed along for years after his death and seemed to do not only fine, but achieved heights Jobs maybe never even dreamed of. But the columns were right - Apple is completely rudderless and has been for years. Apple literally prints money increasingly from “services,” which is made up in large part of rent-seeking. It’s why they’re willing to burn their reputation by fighting antitrust regulation until the bitter end. Steve Jobs was Walt Disney - Apple didn’t invent products to make money, they made money to invent more products. Now, the bean counters are in charge. I’m an Apple fanboy for 25 years now, and I find their latest products, and the company itself, now completely charmless. Apple Vision was always going to be a flop because nobody gives two shits about how many pixels you can strap to your face; they care about the experience. And Apple Vision gives you precious little content to experience. Jobs would have never shipped this product without the content to make it shine. But he died a lifetime ago in tech…
- crooked-v 2y ago
  > Jobs would have never shipped this product without the content to make it shine. This feels like a whole lot of revisionism that ignores the state of the first iPhone, which had an entire feature set that amounted to "new UX paradigm, plus basic media apps and web browser".
  - phmqk76 2y ago
    The iPhone did exactly what it set out to do. Steve Jobs sold it as three devices in one - a phone, iPod, and web browser. It delivered beautifully. I owned it shortly after launch and immediately fell in love. I don’t know anyone who can say the same for Apple Vision Pro.
- citizen_friend 2y ago
  > without the content to make it shine. It’s a computer. Read internet, listen to a podcast, download some apps, edit some photos, etc.
  - 2y ago
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zone411 2y ago
I've been disappointed with Vision Pro for various reasons, such as the lack of investment in content, the small field of view, price and the weight, but this rehash by the self-styled tech critic is insufferable. The first version just shows that Apple wanted to grab some money from rich Apple fans and developers before having something truly useful. They could still salvage it as a media viewer by creating a lot of stereoscopic VR180 content, but the progress has been too slow. I've been using a VR180 camera to create some content myself - I think it's a step forward in capturing memories.
- crooked-v 2y ago
  I feel like the money is a side benefit, and what they really wanted was to verify that their basic no-controllers VR/AR paradigm works in the (relatively speaking) mass market before putting the next 10 years of R&D into it.
  - zone411 2y ago
    It doesn't seem like this will prove much about using controllers either way though, given how few games and other content there are.
alsetmusic 2y ago
I bought one and I really love it. It’s the lack of immersive content (from Apple) and lack of third-party dev support (hollowed out by Apple) that makes me bored with it. Apple’s first-party experience is perfect as far as eye tracking and implementation go. It’s very basic with their apps on top of the OS, but that’s ok if the other two things (content, apps) are there. I think Apple genuinely believed everyone would flood the market for them while they built out the first-party apps. They truly don’t get how much they’ve burned and angered the people they needed to be there. Or maybe now they do, based on the response. I doubt it.
- kalleboo 2y ago
  The high cost is also a huge barrier to developing it for. One developer, who's app was even featured by Apple, stated that his sales of the app on the Vision Pro "have just about paid back the developer strap" (a $300 accessory to connect the VP to a computer). So investing in the hardware and development time is clearly not going to pay itself back with the small market.
- nequo 2y ago
  > They truly don’t get how much they’ve burned and angered the people they needed to be there. Do you mean with their App Store markups? Or are you thinking of something else?
- bredren 2y ago
  I bought one too, and I think its amazing. The Apple TV content presentation is incredible. Once you get used to the immersion it can provide, it makes the entire existing paradigm of hand held, desk or lap-rooted screens as output seem like a compromise that we will look back on like the dial on a rotary telephone. Vision Pro needs more software, and it needs Apple to lead a move from stationary to room scale experiences. I don't know that developers being burned from existing App Store policies is why the software is slow to come. Development of apps that effectively work in Apple's "spatial" concept is not easy. It isn't even clear what truly spatial software aught to be able to do, because there aren't enough examples. Even Apple's first party apps are ~2D windows. You have to look at some of the highlighted games to get an idea for what is actually possible.
cactusfrog 2y ago
Apple started out as a personal computer company—which was a radical concept because there was no good answer to “What are regular people going to do with one”. Mainframes and terminals were useful, but personal computers only had minor applications. The Vision Pro product is inline with this philosophy of building a good product with no clear purpose and letting users figure it out. It is going to take years for someone to come up with a good use. Think about how long it took AirPods and Apple play to catch on.
- crooked-v 2y ago
  People focus a lot about VR/AR needing to have a "killer app", but I think that line of thought is really off the mark. The point of an AR device, done well, is to be a phone/computer replacement that lets you do whatever you were doing with one but without always needing your hands or a specific location. The reason the idea isn't mass-market popular yet is entirely because the hardware just isn't good enough (too heavy, too big, too battery-hungry), and as soon as it is good enough, plenty of people will start using.
  - Nevermark 2y ago
    For me the Vision Pro has been my “Mac replacement” in terms of how I use and love it. (Even though it needs a Mac.) I completely customized the light shield and straps to be very conformable with a wider field of view. Third version was the charm. Apple could have done better. Games they have are very meh. Pass. Got a Quest for that. But 3D movies are finally what 3D should be. At least the well done ones. Blade Runner 2049, Dune Part 1, are fantastic. Felt like I hadn’t really seen them before. Strange to me they only have a few “environments”. Gorgeous, just so few. I use them to focus when working and meditate. I hope they keep up with it as a developer friendly Mac replacement. It does that well, and with just a few improvements could be significantly better. Devs using it will start building for it, even if just to scratch an itch.
MBCook 2y ago
I love Apple swung for the fences. I bought one, but ended up returning it within the window. The technology is amazing, with a few caveats, but they shot themselves in the foot with the launch. They had no 3rd party software at launch. Developers couldn’t get the device ahead of time, at most you could get two short hands on labs if you flew to one of a handful of cities in the world. Apple didn’t have anything amazing themselves to keep people coming back. Personas are interesting but not enough. Mac Virtual Display is neat but not going to sell 2 million units. But that’s OK. That’s what third parties are for. But basically no one was there. Between the issue above and knowing how few would sell it didn’t make sense. Apple should have been paying companies to seed the launch with cool/useful apps. Enhanced ports from other systems, wild ideas, anything. Apple’s secrecy probably meant they weren’t going to do this. Hopefully they show some great stuff at WWDC. Apple has the money to keep it going for quite a while while they fix the price and get some killer apps. But developer sentiment towards Apple in general isn’t good and some cool possibilities for apps would likely require more room data than I think Apple gives apps for privacy reasons. I do want to see where it goes. The Apple Watch took a while to find its real place, but it was cheaper and had a more obvious initial value proposition. —- Meanwhile, Meta is losing $1B a month on AR/VR. “Why would I want a Vision Pro? A Quest 3 is the same for $3000 less.” isn’t doing them enough favors it seems. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/meta-loses-another-38-billion-on-vrar https://www.gamesindustry.biz/meta-loses-another-38-billion-...
- crooked-v 2y ago
  I feel like Meta's basic problem is the exact reverse of Apple's: literally the only thing the Quest platform is good at is specific, isolated pieces of immersive content, with nothing to connect them or make them "Meta-y", to the point that there's no reason to even stick with the Quest OS over casting from Steam on a PC.
  - MBCook 2y ago
    I agree. I had a Quest 2. It was fine, could’ve used some hardware improvements that I’m sure the 3 fixed. But it’s just an overcomplicated game launcher. The environment between VR apps isn’t important or memorable in any way. And once you’re in the game it could be any piece of VR hardware. It’s just a commodity. I think the main reason it’s popular is it just doesn’t seem to have much direct competition (stand alone VR headsets). Apple chose a few differentiators like ultra-high resolution, entirely hands free (no controller) operation, and a ton of processing power relative to a Quest. That means they’re capable of doing things no one else could, if they can find compelling things to do.
bruce511 2y ago
He briefly mentions self driving cars along with a bunch of other unwanted and failed tech (metaverse, crypto etc) The difference with self-driving cars is that everyone [1] wants them, and once "done well" they'll take off quickly. The advantages are just too obvious; mobility for those too young or too old, or medical unable to drive. The lack of needing parking right near your origin or destination. The expensive asset that is tied to single human location, so meaning it spends 98% of time idle. The road deaths caused by bad driving, drunk driving, stupid driving etc. Indeed self driving cars have so much upside they are inevitable. Sure the tech is hard, and we're not there yet, but the payoff is too big not to keep working on it. [1] yeah I get that there's some percentage of people who like driving and will continue to do that. Perdonally I enjoy driving, and I drive stick. We also have people who like riding horses. But that group will make a big noise for a while, but ultimately dwindle into a niche hobby.
- sumeno 2y ago
  > mobility for those too young or too old, or medical unable to drive. >The lack of needing parking right near your origin or destination. >The expensive asset that is tied to single human location, so meaning it spends 98% of time idle. >The road deaths caused by bad driving, drunk driving, stupid driving etc. We can do all these things now for most of the people in the US with expanded public transportation
  - gizmo686 2y ago
    Even the best public transport has downsides relative to personal vehicles. A perfect self driving car is a drop-in replacement for a current car that is simply a better product.
  - bruce511 2y ago
    I disagree that public transportation is a solution. It works in high-density situations where lots of people get on and off at each stop. In low density situations the stop time overhead leads to the journey being very slow.
- lll-o-lll 2y ago
gizmo686 2y ago
I disagree with the article's comment on inevitability. Sure, if society wants to put a lot of effort into stopping something, we can. For instance, nuclear rock blasting might never happen, despite us having the technology to do so since the 50s. Getting to that point, however, required a massive geopolitical movement powered by everyone being terrified of nuclear weapons. The problem with VR is simply that the technology is still not there yet. The Vision Pro is cutting edge technology; but it is still cumbersome. The display might be technically impressive, but it still offers less pixels per degree than a typically monitor at typical distances. All that the Vision Pro demonstrates is that optics, computers, and display technologies are not yet advanced enough to make VR a mass market viable technology. I see no reason to believe that there is any barrier that means they will never become sufficiently advanced. And once the technology does reach that point, I see no indication that it will not be a success. Even given the limitations of the technology, VR products that are technologically inferior to the Vision Pro seem to have found a sustainable niche.
- harryp_peng 2y ago
  Excuse me, the first Macintosh was 7,300 in today's dollars, and did far less.
  - gizmo686 2y ago
    So? Everything did less back than. The Vision Pro needs to compete in a world filled with smartphones, tablets, laptops, monitors, computers with multiple monitors, docking stations, televisions, etc. Most of what the Vision Pro offers is also offered by those existing technologies. And they can do a lot of it much better because they do not need to work within the same constraints as VR devices do.
bastard_op 2y ago
I saw Vision Pro demos with extending a MacOS desktop into the field of view, and I was highly intrigued, even at that price, as I've been hoping for something like this since Google Glass (which yes, I have). Everything seemed perfect until a reviewer stated that it only worked with a single monitor display, and I was like "what!?" This seemed entirely a waste of the concept! My normal desktop is 3x 50" TV's I work in front of, which is more or less what my first thought of doing in Vision Pro with their ability to pull in the Mac desktop, but I would want it as multiple displays as well, same as I use my displays today. Only a single desktop seemed unnecessarily limiting, and apparently I'm not alone as someone has even come up with a product (Splitscreen app) to expand on this at least to 2, but it's still hackish and far from ideal. Maybe this is a Mac limitation, as looking at what sort of Mac I would need to support a Vision Pro indicated I would need M3 Pro to do 2x displays, or a M3 Max for 3x displays. This seemed absurd as I am typing this on a 7-8 year old dell xps driving 3 displays at 4k on an intel gpu, and a brand new M3 needs a top spec Pro or Max to do so? If I could replicate my 3x desktop experience in Vision Pro, I had honestly considered maybe even trying a MacOS system again (I use Linux for the past 20 years full time), but without at least that, it's all a half-baked tech demo today. Ideally I could even pull in application windows from the desktop apart into Vision Pro space as well, but multiple desktops otherwise would be the barrier to entry. Here's to hope Collabora/Valve hasn't given up on XR Desktop for Linux VR Desktop integration entirely yet.
- wtallis 2y ago
  Regardless of limitations on the Mac side, there's simply no way to stream data into the Vision Pro fast enough. WiFi can only come close with very heavy compression and a low bar for reliability. One 1080p60 uncompressed video stream is 3.2Gb/s, already well beyond what WiFi can be relied upon to deliver. The existing single 4k desktop streaming is pushing the limits of low-latency, high-quality compression.
  - nradov 2y ago
    Right so the Vision Pro should have had a wired connection.
CharlesW 2y ago
So when you follow the link under "Apple initially had a sales target of 3 million Vision Pro units in its first year", you'll see that this number came from Bloomberg's Marc Gurman, and is based on nothing. The author bolsters his argument by quoting Ming-Chi Kuo's similarly unsubstantiated "800,000 units" claim. Since the 72.5% accurate¹ Kuo can't possibly have guessed wrong, his face-saving explanation is that Apple intended to hit that number but has since had to slash production. Only, this doesn't agree with Kuo v2023.09, who noted, "Based on some component suppliers’ maximum production capacity estimates, Vision Pro shipments in 2024 will be at most 400,000–600,000 units"². (The Financial Times, The Information, and The Elec all reported on the 400-500K unit limit imposed by the availability of the ultra-high-resolution OLED microdisplays manufactured by Sony.) Also, Apple was telegraphing fewer than 400,000 units in 2024 way back in July of last year.³ Look, I understand that analysts gonna analyst. But anybody with even a tiny bit of tech history knowledge should understand by now that Apple plays the long game. This is just poorly-researched, long-form, "gotta generate engagement" shitposting. ¹ https://appletrack.com/ming-chi-kuo/ https://appletrack.com/ming-chi-kuo/ ² https://medium.com/@mingchikuo/apple-vision-pro-shipment-growth-may-be-below-market-expectations-apple-vision-pro%E5%87%BA%E8%B2%A8%E6%88%90%E9%95%B7%E5%8F%AF%E8%83%BD%E4%BD%8E%E6%96%BC%E5%B8%82%E5%A0%B4%E9%A0%90%E6%9C%9F-7a5eeb613ab0 https://medium.com/@mingchikuo/apple-vision-pro-shipment-gro... ³ https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/07/03/apple-will-reportedly-make-fewer-than-400000-vision-pro-headsets-next-year-due-to-production-snags/?sh=2bf46fa71f58 https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/07/03/apple-w...
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  LOL. Your argument amounts to "the analysts who named a high number had no idea what they were talking about, and had no evidence" while "the analysts who named a lower number, with no evidence" were much better?
  - FabHK 2y ago
    The commenter names three publications that gave a lower number with good evidence, namely supply constraints.
- 2y ago
LZ_Khan 2y ago
It's certainly not a success, but Apple just beat Meta in almost every way except price while not burning O(10B) in the process. That gives me a lot of confidence that they will dominate this space if it ever takes off.
- AceJohnny2 2y ago
  > while not burning O(10B) in the process. How much do you know that Apple has invested in the R&D of the Vision Pro?
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  I don't think it's a huge surprise that a company that has been designing hardware and selling it to consumers for 30+ years beat another company for which this was both the first hardware they ever designed and the first time they ever tried to sell something to consumers.
- Stevvo 2y ago
  It has been reported Apple spent an estimated $15 Billion on research and development for Vision Pro, that's a lot more than 10B. Meanwhile, Quest has sold over 20 million units. Apple might have beat Meta in "almost every way except price", but for now Meta has Apple beat in every way that matters.
- asadotzler 2y ago
  Apple spent about as much on AVP as Facebook did on Quest, starting about the same time (10 years ago) and all Apple's done to date is release a Quest Plus with slightly better specs and premium materials for 7X what Facebook charges and that's why Apple only has tens of thousands of monthly AVP users and Meta has about 10 million monthly Quest users.
anon115 2y ago
my quest 2 gathering dust the i rather have the 250 dollars itself than the VR
httpz 2y ago
What VR is lacking is content. Apple needs to make a user friendly 360 camera in an approachable price range. I take a 360 camera whenever I travel and rewatching 360 videos in a VR headset can put me back in time. Being able to relive the moment I saw the total eclipse or walking through my childhood home is not something a phone camera can do. Currently the image quality of consumer grade 360 cameras are webcam level and having to edit and export 360 content then side loading it to a VR headset is not a very user friendly experience.
_akhe 2y ago
The whole glasses thing might be more like Apple Watch. Feel like it has to be used with the hands to be tool-like enough. Our hands and fingers are so evolved to using things, it's a big part of how we do anything. Sure there will be smart glasses, but it might be more of a peripheral thing.
darepublic 2y ago
We are slowly inching our way toward the type of AR / AI get up featured in that infamous Black Mirror Episode. Once you can wear your Vision Pro contact lenses, with streaming to AI assistant that can whisper in your ear, respond to a rhythmic movement of the fingers, or a focused thought, it will be ready to shape us for the better or.. worse.
- doitLP 2y ago
  There is no such thing as the slippery slope! /s
mehulashah 2y ago
I often look to my children to help portend the future. They had a demo of it last week on Spring Break. Needless to say, they were wowed. It’s the first version of the product, folks. Yes, it’s expensive and hard to justify its cost. But, it is work like that pushes us beyond the edge of what we know and what we have. It inspires our creativity. And, yes it may take time but people want something like this because it has the power to suspend disbelief and transport you to new worlds. Thank you Apple for taking a shot.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >Needless to say, they were wowed. But did they buy it? That's the question. When the first iPhone launched people actually bough it instead of just being wowed by it and then walking away. A lot of commercially failed products were successful on wowing people. Making people buy it so you can be profitable is the real deal. You don't make money wowing tire kickers.
  - mehulashah 2y ago
    No. As I admit in the comment, it’s too expensive. It’s similar to the Mac II, the first color Mac, which was also, for the time, inaccessible to most households. But, it often takes a few tries before a technology vision sticks.
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      I don't think the price is the biggest problem. I used to own two generations of Oculus Quest devices and while they wowed me and got me to buy several games that wowed me even more, I eventually sold them because they were gathering dust. Do you see the problem? If not, I'll go deeper. I rarely used them despite the wow factor since I rarely had the motivation of strapping them to my face and wearing them for too long despite me not having issues sitting playing PC games for hours or being for hours on my phone. Do you see the issues now? It was not a comfort issues, it was a motivation issue. It's just much less friction to stare a screens around you than strapping goggles to your face and wearinng them for long. Wow factor is not enough, and neither is being cheaper. You need to convince people why they should strap goggles to their face and wear them prolonged. The gap between woowing people and getting the to use some long therm is huge. While is why apple's VP and the other VR Googles are failing mainstream.
_xnmw 2y ago
I’m sorry, but as a digital nomad living out of hotels and AirBnBs, the Vision Pro is indispensable. I would not be productive without it. Mac Virtual Display is way better than lugging around a monitor in my luggage, which is what I used to do before. The portable home theater experience is better than any home theatre I’ve ever used. For me, the price tag for a portable office and TV is well worth it. I don’t use it for anything else.
- asadotzler 2y ago
  As a member of the space station crew, with no room for an actual big screen, I benefit from strapping a tiny screen to my face. That surely means Apple's got a hit on its hands here. I'm a market, I'm the proof they have happy customers. Of course they will be successful, if I'm a representative example....
- manderley 2y ago
  So why not get something cheaper and more compact, like the Lenovo glasses?
bluehat974 2y ago
The current best mass market VR is Meta Quest 3. However, Apple first VR headset is an opportunity for developer to start & learn how to use visionOS, experimenting spacial computing. One french developer like the interaction with the Apple VR compared to the quest 3, it's not perfect but it's working, it's natural to use, but she warn that first good apps will arrive in two years https://youtu.be/UKsSPF5pT88?si=8VqwkGvprqlE1uy2 https://youtu.be/UKsSPF5pT88?si=8VqwkGvprqlE1uy2 The VR market is emerging and new ideas is coming (microled, holographic lens, vergence accomodation conflict solutions...) Douglas Lanman makes a long video on how to pass the visual turing test on AR/VR with tons of ideas https://youtu.be/EJ_-n7Syz0s?si=yc90uRFyOlPIeT3D https://youtu.be/EJ_-n7Syz0s?si=yc90uRFyOlPIeT3D
- MaanuAir 2y ago
  The first video mentionned (in French) generalises about AR/VR AND provides interesting insights when reframing the AVP in this context. Thanks for sharing!
- asadotzler 2y ago
  The VR market was "emerging" in the 80s when VR setups made it to our mall video game arcades. Then it was "emerging" again in the 90s when VR kits toured universities across the country. Then VR was "emerging" in the aughts with military and medical systems getting a bunch of attention. Then VR was again "emerging" in the teens with Oculus and Hololens. Now it's once again "emerging" because Apple's joined in. Great. With all this emergence, you'd expect we'd have something that didn't suck shit through a Slurpy straw, but alas we do not.
matt_daemon 2y ago
Not sure this ended up being a Marques Brownlee diss track.
akmarinov 2y ago
Yeah, this was a devkit and hype machine, outside of some devs, people with money and Youtube reviewers- there’s no mass market for a $3500 device
intellix 2y ago
I've had the HTC Vive, bought a million games, done virtual desktop and then last year bought the Quest 3. The fact you can pick it up and get going without tethering to a computer or setting up base stations and see through it is amazing for €500. Had a friend show me the Vision Pro and couldn't believe the cost and how similar it was to the Quest 3. I asked him if you can install Steam etc and he's like nah... ok so you paid €4500 to look at a dinosaur tech demo and do a virtual desktop. It just doesn't make sense why anyone would buy one over the Quest other than to show people in public they can afford a 5k device and have people looking at them
- audunw 2y ago
  The lack of features/services you describe are all software: which explains exactly why they’re so expensive. The displays they’re using is in limited supply. And they primarily want to get the headsets into the hand of developers to make apps for them. If some enthusiasts buy them and give them some feedback for OS development that’s also great. The high price makes it more likely that the AVP doesn’t get bought by people that Apple doesn’t have any interest in getting it yet. You also gotta keep in mind that the AVP has an incredibly powerful processor. That drives a lot of the cost and downsides compared to the quest (a lot of heat from those chips.. metal helps conduct it away). I think the point is to get developers to start thinking primarily about developing professional apps. Apple can’t afford to be stuck with just a casual consumer market. Quest will be too strong there. I’m sure they will launch a “non pro” Apple Vision for this market eventually (I suspect when they can get the same processing power as AVP with less power consumption so they can drop the fan and integrate a battery). But they need the halo-effect of a “pro” product line to drive sales.
intended 2y ago
If you saw minority report, you saw the cool fiddling of dials using AR headset. If you saw that and thought that was cool- yes it is! If you saw that and thought “crap that’s way too many calories to burn” - hello from other lazy people. Unless AR makes it EASIER for me to work and spend yet less energy, then why use it?
2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago
the catalyst of success for new technology is always porn. personally i can't really see how 3d will enhance the fun of it. there are some obvious applications - i mean, literally just filming stereoscopically. but that just doesn't really seem to add anything exciting beyond the perceived novelty. then again i never really watched porn in 3d actually.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  Did you enjoy porn on a commodore 64? Because you didn't and we still have computers.
MagicMoonlight 2y ago
This is what blackberry kept saying. Buh buh the keyboard! It’s what the consumers want! And yet somehow everyone now owns an iPhone and children wouldn’t even be able to tell you what a blackberry is.
- penjelly 2y ago
  iphone sold 6.1m units in 2007 when it launched, there was initial skepticism but they never downgraded their manufacturing because demand was too low. In contrast Vision pro is expected to sell 450k units this year. https://medium.com/@mingchikuo/apple-cuts-2024-2025-vision-pro-shipment-forecasts-unfavorable-to-mr-headset-pancake-and-micro-38796834f930 https://medium.com/@mingchikuo/apple-cuts-2024-2025-vision-p... AVP is cool, but it suffers from a lot of the same problems as traditional VR. Im happy we have it as a devkit available to us
aranelsurion 2y ago
This article reads more like a manifesto against tech, and somewhat specifically against certain kinds of tech (face-strapped computers vs. hand-held ones) rather than a careful analysis of what happened with Vision Pro and why. It pretty much has nothing to do with Vision Pro other than it serving as a piñata for the author. I feel clickbaited.
sidcool 2y ago
This is a short sighted article. Give it time. Apple thinks in terms of years or decades.
- finnjohnsen2 2y ago
  True as long as they make a lot of money for years and decades
- asadotzler 2y ago
  Look at the size and weight of the Oculus Quest that Facebook started working on in 2015/2016. It was 571 grams. The Quest 3, about 4 years newer and shipped last year at 515 grams and the more capable Meta Quest Pro is 722 grams. The Apple Vision Pro is 650 grams of headset and another 350 grams of battery for a total weight of 1 kilogram or 2.2 pounds. These monstrosities are not shrinking yet because their capabilities aren't good enough yet. They'll keep getting bigger, or treading water at best, for another decade chasing needed capabilities before they start benefiting from a tech shrink. Then, a decade after that, we might have some form factors people aren't embarrassed to be seen wearing. Until then, these 1.5 pound face smashing strap on dorkboxes are not going to be a substantial market.
maxcan 2y ago
"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." - https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
tuatoru 2y ago
Unpopular opinion from the sidelines: Silicon Valley is in a tech bywater now. It's just circling aimlessly. Think of XKCD's chart extrapolating the number of cameras per phone. Things have got zero sum. The real innovation is in energy generation and storage, and medtech like semaglutide and embryo selection.

167 points by myaccountonhn 2y ago

wetpaws 2y ago

[dead]

mattmaroon 2y ago

It’s the Cybertruck of VR.

citizen_friend 2y ago
? Cyber truck looks like it’s doing great
- microtherion 2y ago
  Does it? Assuming that the accelerator pedal issue affects all Cybertrucks shipped so far, they appear to have sold about 4000 of them: https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/19/business/tesla-cybertruck-recall/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/19/business/tesla-cybertruck-rec... Meanwhile, there are dozens of reports about Cybertrucks breaking down within literally a handful of miles after the owners taking possession. Given the small number produced, this seems quite high.
  - citizen_friend 2y ago
    It says recalled 4000. Does that mean they sold that many? Not to mention sales which haven’t shipped. So what traits are you comparing? Sales? Quality? excitement?
    - MBCook 2y ago
      Yes, it does. They had to recall every single one of them. Yes, you’re also right there are more orders that aren’t shipped.
      - citizen_friend 2y ago
        > manufactured from November 13, 2023, to April 4, 2024 Where are you getting that the population of cybertrucks is no greater than 4000?
        joncfoo 2y ago
        > The recall involves all 3,878 of the aesthetically-divisive angular trucks that have been sold so far. https://www.npr.org/2024/04/19/1245849907/tesla-cybertruck-recall-accelerator-soap https://www.npr.org/2024/04/19/1245849907/tesla-cybertruck-r... > That means the 3,878 trucks being recalled are likely many, if not all, of the trucks now on US roads. https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/19/business/tesla-cybertruck-recall/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/19/business/tesla-cybertruck-rec... ---- A couple of sources.
        citizen_friend 2y ago
        All of them simply cite the recall report with the manufacturing date range and extrapolate that is all the vehicles. I’ll wait for a financial figure, thanks.
        FireBeyond 2y ago
        You mean the financial figures that Tesla have been caught acting less than honestly with? "Financially delivered" vehicles that are no more than a VIN plate in a warehouse still waiting to go through an assembly line? Or like in Australia, "We outsold Camry!" - and then when the media pulled vehicle registration data, well, no, they hadn't. Not even close.
        citizen_friend 2y ago
        Ok, I didn’t say that either. But it’s even more misleading to say they only sold 4000. Good faith preorders are sales and nobody has evidence besides a date range
        2y ago
  - maximus-decimus 2y ago
    Didn't they plan to only make 10k of them the first year? Selling 100% of the cars you make seems good enough to me.
- fullshark 2y ago
  Based on what?
  - citizen_friend 2y ago
    Fun product that people want to buy?
- mattmaroon 2y ago
  Meh, Tesla could polish a frozen turd, thaw it out, price it at $80k and sell 4,000 of them. Just as Apple probably has sold some of the Vision Pros. We won’t know if it’s a success or not until they can produce 100k of them a year and we see if they sell that many. But that’s not really what I meant. (That’s on me, it was late at night and I did not clarify.) Both of them are a product that, IMO, look stupid (highly subjective, I know), make you look stupid, and greatly misunderstand the traditional audience. Or they’re creating an entirely new audience. Cybertruck is not a replacement for a regular pickup, at all. But perhaps it’s a replacement for an SUV. Vision Pro is not a replacement for an Oculus, but perhaps in a few generations it’ll be something entirely new and worthwhile.
  - citizen_friend 2y ago
    Thanks for clarifying. Surprised my comment was so controversial! > Cybertruck is not a replacement for a regular pickup I think that’s actually a key insight. Most f150s are bought by suburban dads, not rural farmers. Tesla has been missing a masculine element, and I think that market has been perfectly identified.

ergonaught 2y ago

The idea that 400K units of this is a "big flop" requires some sort of fundamentally broken thinking (that applies to AAPL as well, if they have a similar view), wildly out of touch with reality. The reality distortion field is dead. Perhaps the memo was missed.

luyu_wu 2y ago
A bit curious why you think this. How much do you think the R&D costs were?
- ergonaught 2y ago
  Because 400K units of this kind of product, at this price point, with this lack of “killer app” solving a problem people didn’t know they had, is a phenomenal success. If they expected …that… to sell millions of units straight away, well, as I wrote.
627467 2y ago
Appl is not interest in niche products. they are not in biz to sell 200 products at 400K units each. they are in the biz to sell 20 overpriced products at 30M units/year each.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  Sort of. That's the shape of their portfolio and long-term strategy, for sure, but they clearly didn't target "30M units/year" for the launch of Vision Pro any more so than they've targeted that scale for for AppleTV or the Airport and Time Machine product lines. It was plainly a test of both manufacturing and market. To the GP's point, I think it's hard for anyone on the outsjde to judge whether they hit their marks for it or not right now. It certainly wasn't grossly short, as there's no indication that they overshot manufacturing by an order of magnitude or something, but it certainly could have been disappointing. We really can't guess right now. Good, traditional reporting might be able to surface some insight with real footwork and investigation. Armchair blogspam writing like the article is pointless and is really just clickbait.

chamezard 2y ago

I think why it's flopped because price and power. Whoever want to buy this heavy VR headset with over 3000$ when we have meta quest or something? Browsing when we move? That mission smartphone has do well and will do well. And you need plug charger or power bank maybe full time when you move and it's drain battery fast. P/s: Remember Apple sell four wheels for 600$? That's Apple.

afavour 2y ago

[]

citizen_friend 2y ago
When does apple ever publicly predict sales?
reaperman 2y ago
Also worth noting they sold about 270,000 of them during the first week of sales, which is about $1 billion of revenue in just the first week. I think if they didn't over-manufacture them against unrealistic expectations that they may have gotten a reasonable profit, or broke even on paper (at least, ignoring their IRR baseline). $1 billion is enough to pay 500 engineers $300,000/year for 6 years. But I'm sure the cost of components ate a ton of that, and I'm not sure how much of that would be fixed vs. marginal costs. For something like the custom silicon, I could imagine fixed costs were substantial compared to marginal costs. I'm also not sure how much of this can be amortized across future versions of the Vision Pro, or if a huge amount of the fixed costs will need to be repeated. Maybe for the amount of silicon fabrication tooling, and the complexity of manufacturing tooling for something so unique, the fixed costs required the sale of 2-3 million units to break even. If so, I could see various parts of the organization feeling pressured to deliver analysis which confirmed the necessary level of demand, especially if executives expressed bullishness on the project.
jdminhbg 2y ago
> As the article states, Apple publicly stated they expected to sell 3 million of the things in the first year. This is false. The link goes to a Mark Gurman article in Bloomberg that claims Apple at one point had an internal prediction of 3 million, and that it was revised down before it went on sale. That may or may not be accurate reporting, but it’s not close to claiming they publicly predicted 3M sales.
logbiscuitswave 2y ago
When the iPhone came out, it was perfectly positioned. Smartphones weren’t new of course, but they were clunky devices with tons of compromise. The iPhone was designed to fix a lot of the problems around existing smartphones by having great built in apps, a great browser, and great usability thanks to many novel and intuitive forms of interaction. When it came out it was a must-have device and it solved so many problems for so many people. For everything I’ve seen of the Vision Pro it has represented a solution in search of a problem.

behnamoh 2y ago

I think it shows Apple has a vision!

talldayo 2y ago
Many Visions, presumably. I wonder if they'll ever change it's MSRP, or if it's such a dud that they'd rather preserve the brand halo associated with premium pricing.

k0mplex 2y ago

We actually want big tech to take swings like Vision Pro. And we should also be fine if they fail.

waynesonfire 2y ago
I guess.. the issue is that it's blatantly obvious how crappy the thing is. It's not that they failed but the disconnect. But, some engineers got to work on some new green field tech which is pretty cool. All to often at work I'm presented with interesting problems that I have to solve with hacks / least amount of resources. I envy those that know how to convince a company to take swings.
- ajross 2y ago
  The vision pro isn't "greenfield tech". Meta and HTC have been in this space for a decade. Apple built a super premium Quest, basically.
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  And yet all the usual suspects, Om, Gruber etc., couldn't but fall over themselves gushing at it. I mean "You can feel a vibration in the universe!"
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
Thank you very much for saying this, I totally agree. This is despite the fact that I want absolutely no part of "the metaverse" or whatever folks want to call ubiquitous AR/VR, and I don't want it to become commonplace in society. This is mostly for personal reasons, as I feel like I've finally gotten a handle on my cellphone addiction and have recently started realizing how much happier I am spending extended amounts of time in nature and away from tech. I like the idea of tech as tools, and I've enjoyed playing games on VR headsets for a short while, but extended use of a computer strapped to my face is a WALL-E nightmare for me. All that said, I really didn't like the tone of this article. Yes, I agree that "big tech" has caused a lot of harm in society. But it's not that hard to separate that from many good things it has done, and this article felt so cynical like it just wanted to piss in everyone's soup. We should celebrate it when big companies take real risks, even if they swing and miss. What would the author of this article prefer, more stock buybacks?

spicyusername 2y ago

TVs, computer monitors, actual conversation, and books are just too "good enough" for VR to compete. After owning a Quest 3 for a while, it's just too isolating and cumbersome an experience. It can't compete with the freedom of my laptop when I want to be in the digital world and it can't compete with legitimate social interaction when I want to be with people. The biggest place it can compete is games, but outside of a few really solid, and really compelling experiences, most games in VR aren't enough to warrant strapping it to your face.

voidfunc 2y ago
VR is still missing the killer app/experience to take off. Video games aren't it for most people. I can't see VR ever being a thing beyond video games and maybe some forms of other media. People are social creatures. The idea is that people want to sit around staring into goggles rather than interacting with other human beings is the kind of weird stuff that gets baked up by socially underdeveloped Big Tech nerds. Unless the form factor can be significantly minimized this is not going to be the next iPhone. Looking forward to this comment ending up in some HN retrospective on the success of Vision Pro 20 years from now like some of those old iPhone takes from the mid 2000s lol.
- MBCook 2y ago
  I think that’s why Apple is pushing AR and not promoting VR experiences that much. But we don’t have that amazing thing for AR yet either.
  - crooked-v 2y ago
    I remain firmly convinced that Apple is planning for 10 or 15 years down the line, when there is no special "thing", just face screens that are light and compact enough to start piecemeal replacing phones as a product category.
    - nradov 2y ago
      In principle it should be possible to do away with screens altogether and generate an image by shining low power lasers from eyeglass frames into the wearer's eyes. This will require some major technology breakthroughs, but I think that's what will really make AR cross the chasm into the mainstream market.

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago

I can't imagine they thought it would succeed. My theory is they wanted to get out of VR, concluding it wasn't going anywhere this generation. But they wanted to launch something, whether to recoup some costs or avoid embarrassment. So they raised the price to a point where there would be relatively few buyers to piss off when they abandon it.

crooked-v 2y ago
My theory is that they're planning for 10 years down the line when the hardware is light enough to be mainstream, and are perfectly happy releasing the v0.1 iterations as a way to get a foothold in the parts of the market where Meta isn't.

spike021 2y ago

For a company as rich as Apple it's hardly a flop. Even if it doesn't do well I'd imagine they can recycle a lot of the R&D that went into it for their other tech areas.

wumeow 2y ago

First the car, now this. Apple better come up with something soon to offset losing the phone market in China.

archeantus 2y ago

I tried it for the first time last night and I was not too impressed. It felt like a solution in search of a problem. For the past decade Apple’s product lineup has pretty much remained the same (faster, lighter, etc), while they invested heavily in spatial computing (flop) and autonomous vehicles (scrapped). All while totally neglecting the industry they pioneered (Siri) and should have been perfecting. Instead, OpenAI came along and ate their lunch and Apple was caught completely flat-footed. And now they’re way behind. It’s shocking to me how bad the above bets and non-investments have played out for Apple. Tim Cook needs to ride off into the sunset. It’s been a good ride. He ran the business well. They need an innovative CEO at the helm that can make better bets.

replyifuagree 2y ago
Yep, Tim Cook is a pretty amazing at operations. Creative leader of creatives though, he just isn't that.
snowwrestler 2y ago
I’m confused. Which of Apple’s lunch is OpenAI eating? OpenAI does not offer a voice assistant that competes with Siri. Google and Amazon do, and their usage is way down as well; voice assistants in general have lost consumer preference.
- archeantus 2y ago
  You must not have tried the voice feature in the ChatGPT app yet. Try it out, it’s amazing. It pairs the power and functionality of a conversational voice assistant with all the power of ChatGPT and LLMs. Obviously the integration isn’t as convenient as Siri’s yet, but the utility is infinitely higher. My point is that it seems pretty clear that the future is in the space that OpenAI is right now. And that isn’t a bet that Apple was investing in very heavily.
  - nmfisher 2y ago
    Apple is also not in the business of losing money. It's much easier to make something new and shiny when you can run it at a loss and your investors are happy for you to light piles of money on fire year after year. That's also probably why most AI research published by Apple is about on-device inference. It's expensive to run inference servers at scale. Apple is a hardware company, so it makes sense they want to focus on what you can do on a local device (or more accurately, how they can sell you a new piece of hardware).

sho 2y ago

> The Vision Pro is a big flop Not to sound like an apple fanboy but is it, though? I don't think anyone expected v1 to set the world on fire. They put a normal-for-Apple amount of time into trying to polish it as best they could be I don't think anyone bought a Vision Pro not knowing it was kind of an experiment. I'm never going to wear some ridiculous pair of ski goggles as a computer. But I'm also aware that some day we're going to have some kind of functioning AR, and it probably started with the ridiculous pair of ski goggles. Faulting Apple for taking their best shot at a v1 of that eventual product is just weird to me. Yeah, most people shouldn't buy it, but isn't this exactly what they should do? Get something out there, see what works and what doesn't, and start iterating? I suppose we'll find out if Apple thought it was actually a "big flop" if they never make a version 2, but I suspect they're thinking a little more long term than this blog.

MBCook 2y ago
It’s an Apple product. All Apple products sell 200 billion units a year. Anything else is a failure. The Apple Watch was a failure. The iPad was a failure. AirPods were a failure. The HomePod lineup is a failure. The Apple TV is a failure. I’m just about positive you can find a whole bunch of think pieces about each of those from not too long after their launches. Because if it doesn’t sell iPhone level numbers it’s obviously a total mistake that they tried. But the Apple Watch just kept selling better and better. The iPad had a slump after the initial hype, but it’s still selling extremely well all these years later. AirPods have done so terribly there are three different current models. I don’t know if we know numbers about HomePods and the Apple TV but they keep making new versions. There are so many companies in the world that would kill to run one of Apple’s “failure“ product lines and sell that many units. It’s really hard to “succeed” when everything you make is compared to the world changing iPhone as a yardstick. This could be a stumble out of the gate and you could be right about your comment. Or they could give up after a while. But they obviously spent a lot of money on this product, I don’t think they’re going to declare to failure and close up shop after three months.
- sho 2y ago
  Er, I think you're agreeing with me?

phmqk76 2y ago

There was a lot of breathless coverage about how Steve Jobs was irreplaceable, and Apple hummed along for years after his death and seemed to do not only fine, but achieved heights Jobs maybe never even dreamed of. But the columns were right - Apple is completely rudderless and has been for years. Apple literally prints money increasingly from “services,” which is made up in large part of rent-seeking. It’s why they’re willing to burn their reputation by fighting antitrust regulation until the bitter end. Steve Jobs was Walt Disney - Apple didn’t invent products to make money, they made money to invent more products. Now, the bean counters are in charge. I’m an Apple fanboy for 25 years now, and I find their latest products, and the company itself, now completely charmless. Apple Vision was always going to be a flop because nobody gives two shits about how many pixels you can strap to your face; they care about the experience. And Apple Vision gives you precious little content to experience. Jobs would have never shipped this product without the content to make it shine. But he died a lifetime ago in tech…

crooked-v 2y ago
> Jobs would have never shipped this product without the content to make it shine. This feels like a whole lot of revisionism that ignores the state of the first iPhone, which had an entire feature set that amounted to "new UX paradigm, plus basic media apps and web browser".
- phmqk76 2y ago
  The iPhone did exactly what it set out to do. Steve Jobs sold it as three devices in one - a phone, iPod, and web browser. It delivered beautifully. I owned it shortly after launch and immediately fell in love. I don’t know anyone who can say the same for Apple Vision Pro.
citizen_friend 2y ago
> without the content to make it shine. It’s a computer. Read internet, listen to a podcast, download some apps, edit some photos, etc.
- 2y ago

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zone411 2y ago

I've been disappointed with Vision Pro for various reasons, such as the lack of investment in content, the small field of view, price and the weight, but this rehash by the self-styled tech critic is insufferable. The first version just shows that Apple wanted to grab some money from rich Apple fans and developers before having something truly useful. They could still salvage it as a media viewer by creating a lot of stereoscopic VR180 content, but the progress has been too slow. I've been using a VR180 camera to create some content myself - I think it's a step forward in capturing memories.

crooked-v 2y ago
I feel like the money is a side benefit, and what they really wanted was to verify that their basic no-controllers VR/AR paradigm works in the (relatively speaking) mass market before putting the next 10 years of R&D into it.
- zone411 2y ago
  It doesn't seem like this will prove much about using controllers either way though, given how few games and other content there are.

alsetmusic 2y ago

I bought one and I really love it. It’s the lack of immersive content (from Apple) and lack of third-party dev support (hollowed out by Apple) that makes me bored with it. Apple’s first-party experience is perfect as far as eye tracking and implementation go. It’s very basic with their apps on top of the OS, but that’s ok if the other two things (content, apps) are there. I think Apple genuinely believed everyone would flood the market for them while they built out the first-party apps. They truly don’t get how much they’ve burned and angered the people they needed to be there. Or maybe now they do, based on the response. I doubt it.

kalleboo 2y ago
The high cost is also a huge barrier to developing it for. One developer, who's app was even featured by Apple, stated that his sales of the app on the Vision Pro "have just about paid back the developer strap" (a $300 accessory to connect the VP to a computer). So investing in the hardware and development time is clearly not going to pay itself back with the small market.
nequo 2y ago
> They truly don’t get how much they’ve burned and angered the people they needed to be there. Do you mean with their App Store markups? Or are you thinking of something else?
bredren 2y ago
I bought one too, and I think its amazing. The Apple TV content presentation is incredible. Once you get used to the immersion it can provide, it makes the entire existing paradigm of hand held, desk or lap-rooted screens as output seem like a compromise that we will look back on like the dial on a rotary telephone. Vision Pro needs more software, and it needs Apple to lead a move from stationary to room scale experiences. I don't know that developers being burned from existing App Store policies is why the software is slow to come. Development of apps that effectively work in Apple's "spatial" concept is not easy. It isn't even clear what truly spatial software aught to be able to do, because there aren't enough examples. Even Apple's first party apps are ~2D windows. You have to look at some of the highlighted games to get an idea for what is actually possible.

cactusfrog 2y ago

Apple started out as a personal computer company—which was a radical concept because there was no good answer to “What are regular people going to do with one”. Mainframes and terminals were useful, but personal computers only had minor applications. The Vision Pro product is inline with this philosophy of building a good product with no clear purpose and letting users figure it out. It is going to take years for someone to come up with a good use. Think about how long it took AirPods and Apple play to catch on.

crooked-v 2y ago
People focus a lot about VR/AR needing to have a "killer app", but I think that line of thought is really off the mark. The point of an AR device, done well, is to be a phone/computer replacement that lets you do whatever you were doing with one but without always needing your hands or a specific location. The reason the idea isn't mass-market popular yet is entirely because the hardware just isn't good enough (too heavy, too big, too battery-hungry), and as soon as it is good enough, plenty of people will start using.
- Nevermark 2y ago
  For me the Vision Pro has been my “Mac replacement” in terms of how I use and love it. (Even though it needs a Mac.) I completely customized the light shield and straps to be very conformable with a wider field of view. Third version was the charm. Apple could have done better. Games they have are very meh. Pass. Got a Quest for that. But 3D movies are finally what 3D should be. At least the well done ones. Blade Runner 2049, Dune Part 1, are fantastic. Felt like I hadn’t really seen them before. Strange to me they only have a few “environments”. Gorgeous, just so few. I use them to focus when working and meditate. I hope they keep up with it as a developer friendly Mac replacement. It does that well, and with just a few improvements could be significantly better. Devs using it will start building for it, even if just to scratch an itch.

MBCook 2y ago

I love Apple swung for the fences. I bought one, but ended up returning it within the window. The technology is amazing, with a few caveats, but they shot themselves in the foot with the launch. They had no 3rd party software at launch. Developers couldn’t get the device ahead of time, at most you could get two short hands on labs if you flew to one of a handful of cities in the world. Apple didn’t have anything amazing themselves to keep people coming back. Personas are interesting but not enough. Mac Virtual Display is neat but not going to sell 2 million units. But that’s OK. That’s what third parties are for. But basically no one was there. Between the issue above and knowing how few would sell it didn’t make sense. Apple should have been paying companies to seed the launch with cool/useful apps. Enhanced ports from other systems, wild ideas, anything. Apple’s secrecy probably meant they weren’t going to do this. Hopefully they show some great stuff at WWDC. Apple has the money to keep it going for quite a while while they fix the price and get some killer apps. But developer sentiment towards Apple in general isn’t good and some cool possibilities for apps would likely require more room data than I think Apple gives apps for privacy reasons. I do want to see where it goes. The Apple Watch took a while to find its real place, but it was cheaper and had a more obvious initial value proposition. —- Meanwhile, Meta is losing $1B a month on AR/VR. “Why would I want a Vision Pro? A Quest 3 is the same for $3000 less.” isn’t doing them enough favors it seems. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/meta-loses-another-38-billion-on-vrar https://www.gamesindustry.biz/meta-loses-another-38-billion-...

crooked-v 2y ago
I feel like Meta's basic problem is the exact reverse of Apple's: literally the only thing the Quest platform is good at is specific, isolated pieces of immersive content, with nothing to connect them or make them "Meta-y", to the point that there's no reason to even stick with the Quest OS over casting from Steam on a PC.
- MBCook 2y ago
  I agree. I had a Quest 2. It was fine, could’ve used some hardware improvements that I’m sure the 3 fixed. But it’s just an overcomplicated game launcher. The environment between VR apps isn’t important or memorable in any way. And once you’re in the game it could be any piece of VR hardware. It’s just a commodity. I think the main reason it’s popular is it just doesn’t seem to have much direct competition (stand alone VR headsets). Apple chose a few differentiators like ultra-high resolution, entirely hands free (no controller) operation, and a ton of processing power relative to a Quest. That means they’re capable of doing things no one else could, if they can find compelling things to do.

bruce511 2y ago

He briefly mentions self driving cars along with a bunch of other unwanted and failed tech (metaverse, crypto etc) The difference with self-driving cars is that everyone [1] wants them, and once "done well" they'll take off quickly. The advantages are just too obvious; mobility for those too young or too old, or medical unable to drive. The lack of needing parking right near your origin or destination. The expensive asset that is tied to single human location, so meaning it spends 98% of time idle. The road deaths caused by bad driving, drunk driving, stupid driving etc. Indeed self driving cars have so much upside they are inevitable. Sure the tech is hard, and we're not there yet, but the payoff is too big not to keep working on it. [1] yeah I get that there's some percentage of people who like driving and will continue to do that. Perdonally I enjoy driving, and I drive stick. We also have people who like riding horses. But that group will make a big noise for a while, but ultimately dwindle into a niche hobby.

sumeno 2y ago
> mobility for those too young or too old, or medical unable to drive. >The lack of needing parking right near your origin or destination. >The expensive asset that is tied to single human location, so meaning it spends 98% of time idle. >The road deaths caused by bad driving, drunk driving, stupid driving etc. We can do all these things now for most of the people in the US with expanded public transportation
- gizmo686 2y ago
  Even the best public transport has downsides relative to personal vehicles. A perfect self driving car is a drop-in replacement for a current car that is simply a better product.
- bruce511 2y ago
  I disagree that public transportation is a solution. It works in high-density situations where lots of people get on and off at each stop. In low density situations the stop time overhead leads to the journey being very slow.
lll-o-lll 2y ago

gizmo686 2y ago

I disagree with the article's comment on inevitability. Sure, if society wants to put a lot of effort into stopping something, we can. For instance, nuclear rock blasting might never happen, despite us having the technology to do so since the 50s. Getting to that point, however, required a massive geopolitical movement powered by everyone being terrified of nuclear weapons. The problem with VR is simply that the technology is still not there yet. The Vision Pro is cutting edge technology; but it is still cumbersome. The display might be technically impressive, but it still offers less pixels per degree than a typically monitor at typical distances. All that the Vision Pro demonstrates is that optics, computers, and display technologies are not yet advanced enough to make VR a mass market viable technology. I see no reason to believe that there is any barrier that means they will never become sufficiently advanced. And once the technology does reach that point, I see no indication that it will not be a success. Even given the limitations of the technology, VR products that are technologically inferior to the Vision Pro seem to have found a sustainable niche.

harryp_peng 2y ago
Excuse me, the first Macintosh was 7,300 in today's dollars, and did far less.
- gizmo686 2y ago
  So? Everything did less back than. The Vision Pro needs to compete in a world filled with smartphones, tablets, laptops, monitors, computers with multiple monitors, docking stations, televisions, etc. Most of what the Vision Pro offers is also offered by those existing technologies. And they can do a lot of it much better because they do not need to work within the same constraints as VR devices do.

bastard_op 2y ago

I saw Vision Pro demos with extending a MacOS desktop into the field of view, and I was highly intrigued, even at that price, as I've been hoping for something like this since Google Glass (which yes, I have). Everything seemed perfect until a reviewer stated that it only worked with a single monitor display, and I was like "what!?" This seemed entirely a waste of the concept! My normal desktop is 3x 50" TV's I work in front of, which is more or less what my first thought of doing in Vision Pro with their ability to pull in the Mac desktop, but I would want it as multiple displays as well, same as I use my displays today. Only a single desktop seemed unnecessarily limiting, and apparently I'm not alone as someone has even come up with a product (Splitscreen app) to expand on this at least to 2, but it's still hackish and far from ideal. Maybe this is a Mac limitation, as looking at what sort of Mac I would need to support a Vision Pro indicated I would need M3 Pro to do 2x displays, or a M3 Max for 3x displays. This seemed absurd as I am typing this on a 7-8 year old dell xps driving 3 displays at 4k on an intel gpu, and a brand new M3 needs a top spec Pro or Max to do so? If I could replicate my 3x desktop experience in Vision Pro, I had honestly considered maybe even trying a MacOS system again (I use Linux for the past 20 years full time), but without at least that, it's all a half-baked tech demo today. Ideally I could even pull in application windows from the desktop apart into Vision Pro space as well, but multiple desktops otherwise would be the barrier to entry. Here's to hope Collabora/Valve hasn't given up on XR Desktop for Linux VR Desktop integration entirely yet.

wtallis 2y ago
Regardless of limitations on the Mac side, there's simply no way to stream data into the Vision Pro fast enough. WiFi can only come close with very heavy compression and a low bar for reliability. One 1080p60 uncompressed video stream is 3.2Gb/s, already well beyond what WiFi can be relied upon to deliver. The existing single 4k desktop streaming is pushing the limits of low-latency, high-quality compression.
- nradov 2y ago
  Right so the Vision Pro should have had a wired connection.

CharlesW 2y ago

So when you follow the link under "Apple initially had a sales target of 3 million Vision Pro units in its first year", you'll see that this number came from Bloomberg's Marc Gurman, and is based on nothing. The author bolsters his argument by quoting Ming-Chi Kuo's similarly unsubstantiated "800,000 units" claim. Since the 72.5% accurate¹ Kuo can't possibly have guessed wrong, his face-saving explanation is that Apple intended to hit that number but has since had to slash production. Only, this doesn't agree with Kuo v2023.09, who noted, "Based on some component suppliers’ maximum production capacity estimates, Vision Pro shipments in 2024 will be at most 400,000–600,000 units"². (The Financial Times, The Information, and The Elec all reported on the 400-500K unit limit imposed by the availability of the ultra-high-resolution OLED microdisplays manufactured by Sony.) Also, Apple was telegraphing fewer than 400,000 units in 2024 way back in July of last year.³ Look, I understand that analysts gonna analyst. But anybody with even a tiny bit of tech history knowledge should understand by now that Apple plays the long game. This is just poorly-researched, long-form, "gotta generate engagement" shitposting. ¹ https://appletrack.com/ming-chi-kuo/ https://appletrack.com/ming-chi-kuo/ ² https://medium.com/@mingchikuo/apple-vision-pro-shipment-growth-may-be-below-market-expectations-apple-vision-pro%E5%87%BA%E8%B2%A8%E6%88%90%E9%95%B7%E5%8F%AF%E8%83%BD%E4%BD%8E%E6%96%BC%E5%B8%82%E5%A0%B4%E9%A0%90%E6%9C%9F-7a5eeb613ab0 https://medium.com/@mingchikuo/apple-vision-pro-shipment-gro... ³ https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/07/03/apple-will-reportedly-make-fewer-than-400000-vision-pro-headsets-next-year-due-to-production-snags/?sh=2bf46fa71f58 https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/07/03/apple-w...

FireBeyond 2y ago
LOL. Your argument amounts to "the analysts who named a high number had no idea what they were talking about, and had no evidence" while "the analysts who named a lower number, with no evidence" were much better?
- FabHK 2y ago
  The commenter names three publications that gave a lower number with good evidence, namely supply constraints.
2y ago

LZ_Khan 2y ago

It's certainly not a success, but Apple just beat Meta in almost every way except price while not burning O(10B) in the process. That gives me a lot of confidence that they will dominate this space if it ever takes off.

AceJohnny2 2y ago
> while not burning O(10B) in the process. How much do you know that Apple has invested in the R&D of the Vision Pro?
tsimionescu 2y ago
I don't think it's a huge surprise that a company that has been designing hardware and selling it to consumers for 30+ years beat another company for which this was both the first hardware they ever designed and the first time they ever tried to sell something to consumers.
Stevvo 2y ago
It has been reported Apple spent an estimated $15 Billion on research and development for Vision Pro, that's a lot more than 10B. Meanwhile, Quest has sold over 20 million units. Apple might have beat Meta in "almost every way except price", but for now Meta has Apple beat in every way that matters.
asadotzler 2y ago
Apple spent about as much on AVP as Facebook did on Quest, starting about the same time (10 years ago) and all Apple's done to date is release a Quest Plus with slightly better specs and premium materials for 7X what Facebook charges and that's why Apple only has tens of thousands of monthly AVP users and Meta has about 10 million monthly Quest users.

anon115 2y ago

my quest 2 gathering dust the i rather have the 250 dollars itself than the VR

httpz 2y ago

What VR is lacking is content. Apple needs to make a user friendly 360 camera in an approachable price range. I take a 360 camera whenever I travel and rewatching 360 videos in a VR headset can put me back in time. Being able to relive the moment I saw the total eclipse or walking through my childhood home is not something a phone camera can do. Currently the image quality of consumer grade 360 cameras are webcam level and having to edit and export 360 content then side loading it to a VR headset is not a very user friendly experience.

_akhe 2y ago

The whole glasses thing might be more like Apple Watch. Feel like it has to be used with the hands to be tool-like enough. Our hands and fingers are so evolved to using things, it's a big part of how we do anything. Sure there will be smart glasses, but it might be more of a peripheral thing.

darepublic 2y ago

We are slowly inching our way toward the type of AR / AI get up featured in that infamous Black Mirror Episode. Once you can wear your Vision Pro contact lenses, with streaming to AI assistant that can whisper in your ear, respond to a rhythmic movement of the fingers, or a focused thought, it will be ready to shape us for the better or.. worse.

doitLP 2y ago
There is no such thing as the slippery slope! /s

mehulashah 2y ago

I often look to my children to help portend the future. They had a demo of it last week on Spring Break. Needless to say, they were wowed. It’s the first version of the product, folks. Yes, it’s expensive and hard to justify its cost. But, it is work like that pushes us beyond the edge of what we know and what we have. It inspires our creativity. And, yes it may take time but people want something like this because it has the power to suspend disbelief and transport you to new worlds. Thank you Apple for taking a shot.

Rinzler89 2y ago
>Needless to say, they were wowed. But did they buy it? That's the question. When the first iPhone launched people actually bough it instead of just being wowed by it and then walking away. A lot of commercially failed products were successful on wowing people. Making people buy it so you can be profitable is the real deal. You don't make money wowing tire kickers.
- mehulashah 2y ago
  No. As I admit in the comment, it’s too expensive. It’s similar to the Mac II, the first color Mac, which was also, for the time, inaccessible to most households. But, it often takes a few tries before a technology vision sticks.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    I don't think the price is the biggest problem. I used to own two generations of Oculus Quest devices and while they wowed me and got me to buy several games that wowed me even more, I eventually sold them because they were gathering dust. Do you see the problem? If not, I'll go deeper. I rarely used them despite the wow factor since I rarely had the motivation of strapping them to my face and wearing them for too long despite me not having issues sitting playing PC games for hours or being for hours on my phone. Do you see the issues now? It was not a comfort issues, it was a motivation issue. It's just much less friction to stare a screens around you than strapping goggles to your face and wearinng them for long. Wow factor is not enough, and neither is being cheaper. You need to convince people why they should strap goggles to their face and wear them prolonged. The gap between woowing people and getting the to use some long therm is huge. While is why apple's VP and the other VR Googles are failing mainstream.

_xnmw 2y ago

I’m sorry, but as a digital nomad living out of hotels and AirBnBs, the Vision Pro is indispensable. I would not be productive without it. Mac Virtual Display is way better than lugging around a monitor in my luggage, which is what I used to do before. The portable home theater experience is better than any home theatre I’ve ever used. For me, the price tag for a portable office and TV is well worth it. I don’t use it for anything else.

asadotzler 2y ago
As a member of the space station crew, with no room for an actual big screen, I benefit from strapping a tiny screen to my face. That surely means Apple's got a hit on its hands here. I'm a market, I'm the proof they have happy customers. Of course they will be successful, if I'm a representative example....
manderley 2y ago
So why not get something cheaper and more compact, like the Lenovo glasses?

bluehat974 2y ago

The current best mass market VR is Meta Quest 3. However, Apple first VR headset is an opportunity for developer to start & learn how to use visionOS, experimenting spacial computing. One french developer like the interaction with the Apple VR compared to the quest 3, it's not perfect but it's working, it's natural to use, but she warn that first good apps will arrive in two years https://youtu.be/UKsSPF5pT88?si=8VqwkGvprqlE1uy2 https://youtu.be/UKsSPF5pT88?si=8VqwkGvprqlE1uy2 The VR market is emerging and new ideas is coming (microled, holographic lens, vergence accomodation conflict solutions...) Douglas Lanman makes a long video on how to pass the visual turing test on AR/VR with tons of ideas https://youtu.be/EJ_-n7Syz0s?si=yc90uRFyOlPIeT3D https://youtu.be/EJ_-n7Syz0s?si=yc90uRFyOlPIeT3D

MaanuAir 2y ago
The first video mentionned (in French) generalises about AR/VR AND provides interesting insights when reframing the AVP in this context. Thanks for sharing!
asadotzler 2y ago
The VR market was "emerging" in the 80s when VR setups made it to our mall video game arcades. Then it was "emerging" again in the 90s when VR kits toured universities across the country. Then VR was "emerging" in the aughts with military and medical systems getting a bunch of attention. Then VR was again "emerging" in the teens with Oculus and Hololens. Now it's once again "emerging" because Apple's joined in. Great. With all this emergence, you'd expect we'd have something that didn't suck shit through a Slurpy straw, but alas we do not.

matt_daemon 2y ago

Not sure this ended up being a Marques Brownlee diss track.

akmarinov 2y ago

Yeah, this was a devkit and hype machine, outside of some devs, people with money and Youtube reviewers- there’s no mass market for a $3500 device

intellix 2y ago

I've had the HTC Vive, bought a million games, done virtual desktop and then last year bought the Quest 3. The fact you can pick it up and get going without tethering to a computer or setting up base stations and see through it is amazing for €500. Had a friend show me the Vision Pro and couldn't believe the cost and how similar it was to the Quest 3. I asked him if you can install Steam etc and he's like nah... ok so you paid €4500 to look at a dinosaur tech demo and do a virtual desktop. It just doesn't make sense why anyone would buy one over the Quest other than to show people in public they can afford a 5k device and have people looking at them

audunw 2y ago
The lack of features/services you describe are all software: which explains exactly why they’re so expensive. The displays they’re using is in limited supply. And they primarily want to get the headsets into the hand of developers to make apps for them. If some enthusiasts buy them and give them some feedback for OS development that’s also great. The high price makes it more likely that the AVP doesn’t get bought by people that Apple doesn’t have any interest in getting it yet. You also gotta keep in mind that the AVP has an incredibly powerful processor. That drives a lot of the cost and downsides compared to the quest (a lot of heat from those chips.. metal helps conduct it away). I think the point is to get developers to start thinking primarily about developing professional apps. Apple can’t afford to be stuck with just a casual consumer market. Quest will be too strong there. I’m sure they will launch a “non pro” Apple Vision for this market eventually (I suspect when they can get the same processing power as AVP with less power consumption so they can drop the fan and integrate a battery). But they need the halo-effect of a “pro” product line to drive sales.

intended 2y ago

If you saw minority report, you saw the cool fiddling of dials using AR headset. If you saw that and thought that was cool- yes it is! If you saw that and thought “crap that’s way too many calories to burn” - hello from other lazy people. Unless AR makes it EASIER for me to work and spend yet less energy, then why use it?

2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago

the catalyst of success for new technology is always porn. personally i can't really see how 3d will enhance the fun of it. there are some obvious applications - i mean, literally just filming stereoscopically. but that just doesn't really seem to add anything exciting beyond the perceived novelty. then again i never really watched porn in 3d actually.

bamboozled 2y ago
Did you enjoy porn on a commodore 64? Because you didn't and we still have computers.

MagicMoonlight 2y ago

This is what blackberry kept saying. Buh buh the keyboard! It’s what the consumers want! And yet somehow everyone now owns an iPhone and children wouldn’t even be able to tell you what a blackberry is.

penjelly 2y ago
iphone sold 6.1m units in 2007 when it launched, there was initial skepticism but they never downgraded their manufacturing because demand was too low. In contrast Vision pro is expected to sell 450k units this year. https://medium.com/@mingchikuo/apple-cuts-2024-2025-vision-pro-shipment-forecasts-unfavorable-to-mr-headset-pancake-and-micro-38796834f930 https://medium.com/@mingchikuo/apple-cuts-2024-2025-vision-p... AVP is cool, but it suffers from a lot of the same problems as traditional VR. Im happy we have it as a devkit available to us

aranelsurion 2y ago

This article reads more like a manifesto against tech, and somewhat specifically against certain kinds of tech (face-strapped computers vs. hand-held ones) rather than a careful analysis of what happened with Vision Pro and why. It pretty much has nothing to do with Vision Pro other than it serving as a piñata for the author. I feel clickbaited.

sidcool 2y ago

This is a short sighted article. Give it time. Apple thinks in terms of years or decades.

finnjohnsen2 2y ago
True as long as they make a lot of money for years and decades
asadotzler 2y ago
Look at the size and weight of the Oculus Quest that Facebook started working on in 2015/2016. It was 571 grams. The Quest 3, about 4 years newer and shipped last year at 515 grams and the more capable Meta Quest Pro is 722 grams. The Apple Vision Pro is 650 grams of headset and another 350 grams of battery for a total weight of 1 kilogram or 2.2 pounds. These monstrosities are not shrinking yet because their capabilities aren't good enough yet. They'll keep getting bigger, or treading water at best, for another decade chasing needed capabilities before they start benefiting from a tech shrink. Then, a decade after that, we might have some form factors people aren't embarrassed to be seen wearing. Until then, these 1.5 pound face smashing strap on dorkboxes are not going to be a substantial market.

maxcan 2y ago

"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." - https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...

tuatoru 2y ago

Unpopular opinion from the sidelines: Silicon Valley is in a tech bywater now. It's just circling aimlessly. Think of XKCD's chart extrapolating the number of cameras per phone. Things have got zero sum. The real innovation is in energy generation and storage, and medtech like semaglutide and embryo selection.