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There is something quite remarkable and puzzling about the VR/AR and now SC (spatial computing) space.

All major (ad)tech companies are convinced that this is a major market that will materialize and be profitable if the right combination of hardware and software is developed.

Their VR "visions" differ but only at the margin. No matter how you execute it, we are talking about people (homo sapiens) putting a major something on their heads that dramatically takes over their visual field for the pursuit of... what exactly? That is the puzzle.

There is a missing aha moment around this type of interface that would justify the major behavioral adjustment that is required for it to be adopted as a general purpose interface rather than a gimmick.

The number of devices sold so far does not impress me. A small number of people, especially youngsters with disposable income can be sold on anything (including fake currencies).

What is missing is an indication that this is actually an empowering piece of tech that is a a major new mode in our interface with computing.

What would be such indicators? Anything really. E.g. Some leaked stories that the teams developing these devices wear them all the time because it makes them so much more productive / social / fun / transcedental / [insert something people might actually want to have].

So far at least, this is a tech that is being pushed onto people rather than being pulled. I don't think this was the case with any of the major steps in the development of digital computing but would be quite interested if people can think of historical precedent.

> So far at least, this is a tech that is being pushed onto people rather than being pulled.

I think it's very hard to tell the difference between these things ex ante. Everything that succeeds looks like it was pulled. But many things were pushed before they were pulled. Buying things on the internet, for instance. This was laughed at for quite a while, while a few people and companies were committed to the idea that it was the future. They were right of course, so right that it feels like it was effortless and demanded by the public, but it wasn't. Not at first.

That isn't to say that that will happen with VR either. Just to say that there is a long history of things being pushed hard and finally breaking through and becoming a near universal norm, and there is a long history of things being pushed hard and dying and being completely forgotten.

The promise of VR is to unlock a world free of the constraints of physics. Where physical distance prevents certain styles of communication and interaction - where physical real estate is finite and therefore rivalrous, etc. There are many things that VR, in principle, could solve. Whether or not the tech can deliver those things in a way that partially (or totally?) replaces actual physical reality remains to be seen. It is clear though that if you want to weave tech into the fabric of people's lives in the deepest possible way, something like VR is probably your best bet.

> The promise of VR is to unlock a world free of the constraints of physics. Where physical distance prevents certain styles of communication and interaction - where physical real estate is finite and therefore rivalrous, etc. There are many things that VR, in principle, could solve...

See. You just did the exact same thing that Op is talking about. You didn't describe a single actual use case. You just talked about unlocking things or solving problems. You didn't describe any actual problems or any actual things. op's point is that enabling technologies are useless without problems that require the enablement to be solved. And no one is actually demonstrating that any of those exist.

Alright well then I'll bite.

I'm in operational technology and deal with a lot of on-site tech, such as SCADA, factories, even stuff on trains or planes.

We have 3D lidar mapped files of factories that are scaled in such a way that users can throw on VR and "walk" through the facility and figure things out. It's not completely mature but it's pretty good, and there have been talks about putting a camera on a scooter and letting engineers remotely drive though the place in real-time -- not just the static files.

What do you do with it? erognomics engineering, looking at flows of goods, processes, etc.

Ding ding!

You didn't mention it, but same thing is true for remote surgery applicatons.

Telepresence for subject matter experts is a fundamentally new application that is unlocked by AR/VR tech. To nitpick, its more of an industry application rather than a consumer one(apple/meta releasing consumer-targeted products because the market is bigger) - but you're right that it's a good use case. Particularly in time-sensitive cases where industry would have to wait days to fly someone out when they need help immediately. To be fair though... a cell phone video call can already get you maybe half of the way there I'd say(where VR still might only get you to 80% given you cant smell/touch).

Telepresence devices have been a thing for years. No VR or AR needed.

Still waiting for a Visicalc for AR.

I am sure I read similar comments around 2008 - "We have phones with internet connectivity, phones with touchscreens and phones with apps. No iPhone needed".

And yet, here we are. iPhone truly revolutionized phone market and was the first real smartphone.

Enjoy a couple very similar HN discussions about the iPhone from 2007:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19185

Why I Don't Think The iPhone Will Sell Very Well (mattmaroon.com) 8 points by mattmaroon on May 4, 2007 | 11 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16394

Why iPhone Will Win (kedrosky.com) 15 points by far33d on April 24, 2007 | 7 comments

iPhones didn't solve any "problems", but they unquestionably ushered in a new era in smartphone user interfaces. The public wasn't clamoring for a touchscreen phone, Apple just made one up and told everyone it was the best thing ever. And it was. The touchscreen is, for nearly 99% of uses, just better. In the same vein, you'd have to be pretty bereft of imagination to not see how AR/VR promises an incredibly useful and exciting approach to interfaces.

Instead of staring down at a tiny device or simply wracking your brain in desperation any time you need information about something in the world around you (driving/walking direction, business hours, the history of a sculpture in an art gallery, the name of an acquaintance approaching you down the sidewalk, etc.), imagine that the information is just... there. In the environment with you. That is incredibly useful, and is an incredible way to interact with information. Imagine cooking along to a recipe laid out on the countertop in front of you, with generative AI guiding you through different techniques (or even helping you change a tire on a busy roadside).

Instead of needing bunches of different tiny screens for bunches of different use cases (I wake up and sit at my medium work screen, sometimes scroll my tiny screen, go home and sit on the couch and watch my large screen, maybe over the weekend I'll catch a movie on the extra large screen), you just need a single device that produces exactly the screen and environment you want. That's the promise of VR. I could be on a cramped flight watching a movie on an Imax screen or writing code with 3 separate monitors in front of me.

We could go on and on and on just imagining excited scenarios where AR/VR would provide an incredible way to interact with tech. It all just hinges on how well it can be done. Apple has now laid out the requirements needed for a truly satisfying UX with these devices, so the next step will be to see if the industry can make devices small enough, powerful enough, with enough battery life, etc. to make these viable for the average consumer. If that happens, I predict that in 10 years flat-screen based (TVs, smartphones, desktop PCs, laptops) devices will all but disappear.

I see the vision you’ve laid out. The idea of “the information is just… there” sounds useful to me, too. Maybe it’s even the next step in computing.

The hurdle to overcome in my opinion is the form factor. Everyone walking around wearing ski goggles is a deal breaker to me. Glasses, maybe; or even better, contacts. Right now that size technology is more sci-fi than reality, and I suspect it will be a very long time before we reach that (if we ever do).

It’s also important to keep in mind that information availability isn’t the end goal. The purpose of having more information is to improve other aspects of our lives so we can reach our goals more effectively. We want big data so we can optimize for outcomes of our choosing. We want to understand the natural world so we can use it for our benefit.

Connectedness to information does not benefit us if it comes at the cost of having face-to-face interactions with each other, IMO. A lot of people think in-person conversation has gotten worse since the advent of smartphones because they steal peoples’ attentions. Imagine the extent of that dynamic when everyone is always-connected and it is impossible to discern who is paying attention.

Watch movies, play tabletop games, exercise, play existing video games, visualize interior design, attend a virtual concert, etc etc

All of those are use cases, and obvious ones.

Your argument is “none of these seem compelling to me” (you’re not pulling) which is fine, but don’t ignore the comment’s point that they could soon be compelling to you (which is why they’re being pushed).

This is especially true for network effect based use cases like Oculus is shooting for - even Facebook was useless until “everybody” was on it

Those are all things you can already do! And big, nice screens are already very cheap.

The Vision Pro's problem is that it lets you do something you can already do "some percent better."

But "some percent better" isn't what any of the companies pushing this need, because that doesn't translate into the volumes they need to sell.

"Fundamentally different" does, but no one has described any use case like that.

Examples of "fundamentally different" would be "taking the ability to make and receive phone calls with you, wherever you go" or "taking the ability to browse the web with you, wherever you go."

You can't get an IMAX screen for cheap, nor can you easily extend rooms to fit bigger TVs. Often the view from a couch isn't particularly optimal because so many living rooms have been built to accommodate dinky 20" sets of 30 years ago. It's also not easy to take a big screen TV from your living room and mount it to your bedroom ceiling, or watch something out on the balcony.

Laptops screens are small not because people want small screens, but that the form factor requires it. What if you could take the 30" display or multimonitor setup you have set up at your home office anywhere in your home? Anywhere in the world? Why bother with an iPad to watch movies on a flight when you can have a full cinema experience?

Because the HMD is heavy, the battery sucks and you look like an idiot when using it. All true, but the one stupid bet to make on computing technology is that it won't get smaller, faster and more efficient over time.

> You can't get an IMAX screen for cheap

> What if you could take the 30" display or multimonitor setup

The issue is VR doesn’t provide this either. Yes, it can provide screens the same size or larger, but IMAX currently provides 8K or higher resolution, my three monitors are each 4K, and even the screens in the Vision Pro can’t match that level of detail or fidelity regardless of how big the virtual screens are.

It’s the same reason people didn’t buy gigantic TVs back when the resolution was 480p or lower, bigger alone is not better, especially when combined with the problems you documented.

I say this as someone who uses VR regularly and has bought two headsets so far. I do agree that in the future the tech will probably reach a point it’s able to provide image quality that’s good enough and solve all of its negative factors. It’s also possible the Vision Pro reaches the necessary bar, no one has really tried it yet. But for the normies VR just hasn’t reached a compelling level yet.

Vision Pro might not be able to match 8K but based on the specifications it should be able to hit a level of pixel fidelity close to 4K with an IMAX sized screen. The vast majority of movies exist with only 2K digital masters available, with quite a lot of "4K" content being upscaled. This is the case even with new releases. My local cinema, a rather big chain, still has 2K projectors in the vast majority of their theaters. For film and TV content I don't see the resolution of the Vision Pro to be problem. For desktop use where screens are usually smaller I guess we'll see how close it gets, but even if it doesn't hit full 4K fidelity, ~1440p at ~32" inches is still plenty usable, particularly if desktop real estate is unlimited.

There were plenty of large format standard definition sets, they were just either way too big (CRTs) or rear projection (worse picture quality, which is saying something for 480i). DVD is SD and was a dominant format for a significant amount of time after the rapid rise of HD flatscreens. TVs got big because the technology allowed for it without requiring TVs to be installed via forklift or crane, not because people didn't want a big picture.

I've used a bunch of headsets too and it baffles me when people with plenty of time wearing these bricks can't extrapolate those experiences out, it doesn't require a whole lot of imagination. The Quest 2/Pro aren't cutting edge and their UI is jank, but even with the shitty passthrough it's pretty clear (to me at least) how virtual screens can be useful based on my experience with them.

> ...anywhere in your home... Anywhere in the world... on a flight...

See my comment down below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36257804

I strongly disagree that only 100% novel uses are meaningful, and I disagree even more that “phone calls anywhere” or “web anywhere” are meaningful — nobody care about phone calls or the web. They care about what those enable: talking to people or doing research or shopping or whatever.

But, sure, fundamentally different: being able to surround yourself with any environment you want. Being able to navigate that environment with physical movement. Seeing a movie that exists in a sphere around you.

You may not want those things, just like my mom could not understand why anyone would want a smartphone, but that does not mean other people get no value.

That's the catch though: existing, screen-based solutions let your surround yourself with any environment you want. ("Some percent worse")

What's fundamentally different about AR/VR is that it lets you do that... while being anywhere.

But! The cost of doing it (putting on the goggles) is a direct and serious degradation of your physical experience of wherever you physically are.

So we have a device that's key value proposition is -- it lets you have your nice home media experience, out in the world, at the cost of losing the sensation of the world.

... but then why do I want to do that out in the world, instead of at home, on the couch, like Apple's demos are?

... and if I'm doing it on the couch, it has to compete directly with high fidelity existing solutions.

The mobile component is effectively worthless, until the hardware is capable of augmenting physical reality instead of muffling it. (Read: magic AR eyeglasses)

There does exists one very particular type of user for whom the above is valuable: the business traveler.

But that's not enough volume (especially now) to meaningfully contribute to Apple's revenue.

If I were Apple, I would have taken a page out of Blackberry/Bloomberg's success book and made a flagship launch app a very polished "Vision Pro iMessage, with 3d presence" and worked the social network angle. Call any important person during business hours, with presence, instantly, would be fundamentally different. (Especially with an AI agent if they're unavailable)

Do photons have a soul? On the surface level I kind of get the argument that headsets with camera passthrough are "artificial". The light that you see isn't the light that you're supposed to see, it's been captured by a photosensor, processed into data, projected and output on a display. Scary music cue, what a total dystopia. But if it gets to the point where you can't actually tell, does it matter?

Maybe it does to you, maybe a lot of people, but calling it degradation is still a subjective call.

> But, sure, fundamentally different: being able to surround yourself with any environment you want. Being able to navigate that environment with physical movement. Seeing a movie that exists in a sphere around you.

I agree there are some people that want it (I am one of those people, Beatsaber changed my life). The issue is the number of those people isn’t that large yet. I know this because pretty much all of my friends and family that tried my Index have said “wow that’s really cool!” and later none of them go buy a headset. It’s just not compelling enough to buy for most normal people yet.

It's the same fundamental reason that Forza and Grand Turismo is more popular than VR iRacing: For the vast majority of people, the goal is FUN, not authenticity or """immersion"""/fidelity and accuracy of simulation. A game that is "simulatorish" and easy to use with a controller, and has lots of average cars that normal people can connect with.

VR has proven itself pretty much only in VR racing and VR flying, where it provides an impossible to compete with improvement in experience, but at a huge cost and COMMITMENT. It takes effort to put on a headset, set aside some space, and commit to being "away from reality" for a bit

All things can be described as “some percent better”

For what it’s worth, the fitness use case is 0 to 1 because a million people are saying “I didn’t exercise; now I do; Oculus is why”

No fitness > fitness is 0 to 1

In what way was the iPhone “fundamentally different,” by your definition? Its functionality all existed in a blackberry / mp3 player. It was just “some percent better” at everything - especially interaction - that unlocked all the apps we have today, no?

There's a difference between "infinite percent better" (because it was non-existent before) and "some percent better."

The fitness use case is a red herring and a software problem. Instilling motivation in people to do things they know are good but don't want to isn't traditionally a money-maker. You're building a better shame-er: how's Peloton doing these days? https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PTON/financials?p=PTON (and that is "fundamentally different"!)

The iPhone as initially released isn't the iPhone brand success we see today, looking back: that's the iPhone + iTunes + App Store.

Which explains why similarly featured hardware didn't experience iPhone success.

That combination was fundamentally different, because it allowed you to easily do the 3 things most people wanted to on their phones (browse the web, listen to music, get a specific app).

At the time, 2008, there was no competition for that.

It would be until ~2010 that Android even launched rough (very rough) parity: HTC Nexus One/Samsung Galaxy S + Google Music + Android Marketplace

Two. Years.

I’m gonna be honest, I just sincerely have no idea what you mean by “fundamentally different.”

Like, Peloton is an exercise bike. A cool one! A great brand and experience! But it’s an exercise bike.

And it’s somehow more “fundamentally different” than this device that is trying to materialize sci fi?

I guess I just don’t get it

I'd say Peloton is as fundamentally different... as you can get within the fitness category. Absolutely agreed: its an exercise bike with adjustable resistance and integrated, network-connected stats. In objective terms, not fundamentally different.

But if even it's having trouble financially, fitness isn't a great category to win with technology. Branding and advertising, absolutely! (Nike?) But not tech.

Beat saber is not fundamentally different from DDR. I love both.

But that "some percent better" has a tipping point. MP3 players and Camera's in a mobile phone only matter to most when the capacity, quality, and battery life were good enough. Once they were, they were everywhere, and that was revolutionary. (The iPhone as such was just a better version)

The Apple Vision Pro is an impressive improvement. But I'm skeptical its at that tipping point. Making the tech work in a pair of regularly sized glasses, that don't need plugged in or a heavy battery, yet has similar functionality, would push it much closer to reality. No regular person is strapping one of these on to interact with the world as is. IMHO its current stage is: a very impressive toy. Which is totally fine -- with what's at stake and Apple's market position and cash, it makes total sense to try and be the leader here, until it materializes into the next thing or fizzles out. Either position is likely acceptable to Apple.

if they can make me feel like I'm having a face to face conversation with someone who lives hours away then that would be fundamentally different

> those are all things you can already do!

Yes, think about being able to do it remotely AND still have presence ie imagine being able to still hangout with your college buddies or extended family for game night who live hundreds or thousands of miles away

> play tabletop games

I've played hundreds of hours of Tabletop Simulator (a game on Steam, if that's not clear) outside VR and it works great.

Tabletop Simulator also supports VR, I tried it a few times but it really didn't add anything. And honestly using a mouse and keyboard to click on board game pieces, select cards, and so on is far more precise and low effort than grabbing things with my hands.

I game regularly in VR and I believe in it, but not for board games or tabletop games.

> Watch movies, play tabletop games, exercise, play existing video games, visualize interior design, attend a virtual concert, etc etc

Literally all of those are possible with your cell phone at slightly lower fidelity. We're not talking about zero to one applications here. Cell phone fundamentally unlocked new applications via mobile connected GPS, computer, camera, screen, accelerometer, internet. Fidelity is not worth as much as people think to as many people as they think. 3D TVs were a flop. People still play and watch low res cell shaded games and movies.

To expand on this, it seems like the majority of people I know actually prefer consuming media on small screens, especially if I include people under 20 in that assessment.

On top of that so far VR only offers a bigger screen and can’t actually produce high fidelity images. My 4K TV has more pixels and produces a clearer picture with more detail and resolution. Only offering bigger doesn’t feel like a good selling point or revolutionary change.

I think unique games like Beatsaber (which I fucking love and play regularly) are an example of a completely new use case unlocked as a possibility because of VR but those are only compelling to a small percentage of people. VRs big problem is it hasn’t found a similar completely new experience that’s not just a new way to do existing things moderately better (often only in a some areas while being worse in others) and is actually compelling to a large audience. Until it does the potential audience is going to remain small.

> Beatsaber

That's what I'm talking about - this is a clear use case. Another example I can think of would be remote surgery.

You're exactly right though - the big problem is that it hasn't found the killer app yet. Something will probably materialize eventually, but it's not clear yet.

But Beat Saber is not fundamentally different from DDR.

Yea I mean the point is that all of those already existed in other (worse) forms or were added later

Fwiw, I’m a VR bear overall, but the idea that it’s somehow “not new” feels wild to me, like saying ChatGPT isn’t new because we’ve had chatbots for ages. Like, yea man but the preexisting stuff sucked lmao

The difference is ChatGPT is objectively better in every possible measure compared to what was available in the past with zero downsides to using it instead of old stuff. It’s also a lot better.

VR so far only offers experiences that are moderately better in some ways (bigger screen, more immersive experience) while being objectively worse in others (heavy sweaty headset, lower resolution, nausea/headaches, high cost or be locked into a FB run ecosystem).

It won’t explode the way LLMs and other AI has lately until it solves the negative factors it has. I say this as someone who uses VR regularly and figured most of this out from feedback from my normie friends and family.

You’re using 2 different measuring sticks.

Oculus Pro is objectively better in all possible ways than other VR headsets (but has trade offs vs substitutes, like regular screens).

ChatGPT is objectively better in all possible ways than other chatbots (but has trade offs vs substitutes, like google search).

That comparison is wrong too though, the importance isn’t the “things” it’s the experiences and use cases those things provide.

VR headsets provide “large scale 2D experiences” and “immersive 3D experiences”. The resolutions on all VR headsets means for the first it’s objectively worse in a lot of ways, namely fidelity and detail. I agree the second one is a new experience and use case (I really like VR and have two different headsets I use regularly), but the only actual new thing is the “3D” part. People find plenty of other stuff immersive. Heck books provide that for a lot of people. That 3D part just isn’t enough, you can ask all of my friends and family that have tried my Index, said “wow that’s really cool” and then never buy a headset themselves.

ChatGPT provides a bunch of new use cases with regard to chat, text editing/manipulation/analysis, and knowledge recall/generation while also being significantly better and faster than Google with regard to finding answers or information. Meanwhile AI image generation has completely changed art and image creation to a ridiculous degree. I have friends and family asking me how concerned they should be about AI taking their jobs in fields as varied as writing, art/design, law, and medicine.

I do think in the future VR could reach the point where it’s that revolutionary, I just don’t feel like the two compare well now. VR is currently more like those old chatbots mentioned.

Exactly. Revolutions usually happen because the friction to adoption is near-zero. If so, your benefits can even be modest!

The cost of using ChatGPT vs older chatbots was... nothing.

Once there are downsides, people weigh them and you lose chunks of your potential adoption base.

If a set of vr hardware can make it so I can work as ergonomically from my patio as from my desk I will throw money at it.

Doesn’t strapping on a VR helmet kind of counteract the fun of being outside? Might as well just load up a nice outdoor scene as your background environment

No, a desktop background doesn't come within 100 miles of being physically on your patio when it's nice out (or when it's terrible out; either way, it's not the same experience).

One wouldn’t even need to go outside to want it. This could be the ultimate standing desk — one that you can bring with you to the kitchen or to the basket of laundry.

Why would you want to bring your desk into the kitchen or to the basket of laundry?

Not being flippant -- I really think that's the big question.

Current AR/VR (Vision Pro included) lets us do desk things at not-desk places, but why would I want to do that?

Only you can say why you would, so I can't help you there.

But, for me, for example: to GSD around the house while one needs to be in a Zoom, so that menial chores aren't waiting for me when I'm off work. Even Airpods let me do that somewhat now, but at the expense of missing slides or what's being shared on someone's desktop.

I enjoy the breeze and sun. Plus the smell of my garden

[dead]

Ok, working out is really boring for me. I also don’t have the time to participate in team sports. What AR VR brings me is a fun way to do cardio exercise. Instead of just using a boring cycle or treadmill, I get to box someone in a ring, fight monsters, or dodge bullets and arrows

To date, I’ve lost 10-15 lbs

Edit: here’s another use case

I hate when schemas and architecture diagrams go way beyond the screen. Even 30 - 50” isn’t enough. Why can’t it fill a room or even go beyond a room instead? I’ve used a diagraming tool called noda.io that demonstrates whats possible where I can have a 3D viseo like diagram fill a stadium

The use case I want is showing me someone's name and s few notes I wrote previously about them. I'd be so much more comfortable at parties. Creepier, too.

I'm sorry, but buying things on the internet wasn't laughed at, if anything people were worried about it cause of their credit card numbers. It was that basis of the dot com boom of the late 90s.

Everyone saw the potential and lashed money into it. It didn't deliver at the time, but that dynamic is totally different to vr headsets.

Think smart phones, they weren't pushed, people wanted them in a serious way

I mean, smartphones existed for a long time before anyone cared, and it was only due to Blackberry (for business) and then Apple (for consumers) that that happened: until then the entire space was seen as nerdy and pointless (and was thereby something my friends and I were excited by... despite not having any real use for any of it yet).

And like... are you sure about being able to buy stuff online? I remember when being able to buy pizza online was new and there was a TV show in Japan about some crazy guy trying to survive off of stuff he ordered on the Internet, and the entire concept was just not a thing normal people were into... remember: the dot-com "boom" was actually a bubble and a lot of the stuff that came out during it failed.

It happened in Europe, Africa and Asia, we aren't at fault if PDAs, Symbian and feature phones were largely ignored on American continent.

not on your list is the Palm Treo.

It was laughed at by consumers. There was a time not long ago when buying anything from internet was considered taboo because, you said it, fear of losing your credit card information to scammers.

> There was a time not long ago when buying anything from internet was considered taboo because, you said it, fear of losing your credit card information to scammers.

That's a distinctly American problem. As is the (over)use of credit cards in general.

Here in Europe, the main worry was simply paying in advance and not getting the item. Early on, the popular choice was just paying to the postman on delivery - it moved some of the risk on to the seller, but it was balanced out by the seller making this option ~50% more expensive. It took some time for people to get used to dispute processes in marketplaces, and then for the laws to be updated with additional safeguards (e.g. 14 days no-questions-asked return policy for online purchases, which I think is an EU directive), and at some point, transferring money in advance of delivery became a normal practice. That was even before payment gateways, or even smartphones, became ubiquitous.

American here, I remember buying some items online via check because of the fear of credit card theft, haha. It wasn't super common but I did it a few times. You'd "purchase" the item online, get a code in response, and you'd write the code in the memo area of the check and mail it out. I was definitely scared I'd never receive my package but thankfully it always worked out. I never paid too much for that reason, I think the most I paid was $90 for a hard to find game cartridge.

I'm European and the main problem I remember was the fear of losing credit card information. Old people are still scared.

Not just this, but you couldn't see the product. In a store you can look at the product, see how it feels, try it on, test it out, etc. Early online shopping was a big gamble with different stores having different rules. It was often a frustrating experience.

Distance selling regulations helped with it a lot. I can buy a product online and if I'm not happy with it, for any reason, I can send it back for a refund. This just isn't the case with shopping in a store.

I learned this the hard way twice buying in store from Argos in the UK, only to get home and find I had bought a used product which someone else had returned already. Argos refused to refund or replace the items because they are used.

I looked this up at the time and it seemed to be a common occurrence, I can only assume people returned items they bought online and Argos just put them back on the shelves.

Had I bought it online and had it delivered to my house I could have returned it. I buy online wherever possible now.

Interestingly "click-and-collect" services are not covered by distance selling regulations which is how I got burned twice by Argos.

> Not just this, but you couldn't see the product. In a store you can look at the product, see how it feels, try it on, test it out, etc.

This is why I still buy clothes, shoes and sport gears at stores. Returning products takes time and you still don't have what you wanted to buy.

If I buy a new item of the very same model I bought before, that's OK to buy online. Unfortunately companies keep changing models every year.

If you want to sell something like clothes where purchase without trial results in very high returns, you need to build this into your model. The way Old Navy does returns means you can buy multiples and send 80%+ of them back very easily. Their business model is completely based on anything less than 100% returns is a win, so they optimize very differently than say, "how can we reduce returns to single digits?"

What brands are you buying from that change models every year??

Pretty much every clothing brand out there, and usually more often than once a year.

Also at this point they don't give a damn about quality controls. E.g. there was a time when you could order shoes online rather reliably. Today? What you get in the mail is barely correlated with the size you specified on the order.

From the last 10 days: we order two pairs for our kids, size X and Y - which we selected by actually following measurement instructions of the shoe company. When the order comes, it it turns out size X is too big for the younger kid, size Y is too small for the older. We return those, and order again, this time sizes (X-1) and (Y+1). What we got is... the (X-1) shoes were identical to X shoes (therefore still too large); the (Y+1) shoes were like Y+3 - way overshooting the target.

This was same models, same company, with no logistical confusion according to labels. Just one of multiple similar events we had (and many more I heard about from others) where the size of shoes received was pretty much random. So this is one category of goods that we're going back to buying in person.

And yes, that means dragging a 1.5 y.o. and a 4 y.o. into a shoe store in a large mall - the very one I mentioned above. Yes, our kids will likely get overwhelmed by lights and wares and ads, and start making all kinds of scenes. I don't care. If the store doesn't want a scene, they should not be routinely fucking up their order sizes.

Again, what brands?

I have never experienced this buying shoes from both big and small brands. Adidas, Nike, Allbirds, Converse, John Elliott, Beckett Simonon, etc. Maybe kids shoes are a different ballgame?

Also never experienced this with clothes. I buy everything online and it always fits as I would expect from the measurements listed on the website.

I have experienced this with Levi jeans. I buy a nice pair of jeans, they fit well, look nice, affordable etc. I need more jeans, so I go to the store a month later and try on a bunch of different jeans. One pair says they are the same size but fit entirely different, so I chalk it up as being a different "fit" of jeans. Nope, when I get home, they were an IDENTICAL pair, but fit like a different size.

I once talked to someone from the jeans industry and he attributed this phenomenon to brands switching between different manufacturers for their fabrics. So thismanufacturer A might produce the fabric at a weight of XX g/m² and, next year, manufacturer B might produce it at YY g/m². XX and YY will be close but often not exactly the same and this will affect the fit.

For me (not the guy you responded to) the big thing is shoes. When I find a pair I like I’ll often buy two or three extra pairs (often online) in other colorways but when those wear out they usually aren’t made anymore or I want to try something new. Boots and shoes (especially rock climbing shoes) seem to never be consistently sized, even inside the same brand, and I need to try them on to get them to fit right. Can’t really think of anything else off the top of my head!

I don't understand the sizing problems with shoes at all. I elaborated in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36256573.

I do find shoes sometimes have inconsistent sizing between brands, but they usually say something like "runs 1/2 size small". Worst comes to worst I can compare size charts with a pair that I already own.

It's never a crapshoot where I can't rely on their sizing at all.

I worked in retail electronics and this is exactly what happens, there is no procedure than put it back in the box and sell it again.

The simplest contrast is ChatGPT vs VR right now. OpenAI is up to over a billion of users and hundreds of millions of subscribers in <6 months, from a huge cross-section of markets. VR has a few million users at most after ~10 years, and almost all of them are gamers.

There is no demand for VR outside gaming. Efforts to try and create that demand are failing.

> ~10 years

Actually its more like 30 years.

People get too focused on devices and the recent storyline around Google/Oculus/Meta/Apple etc. Any and all devices are and will always be WIP, they get refined once there is strong demand in the direction of that demand. The concept and experierence of immersive / interactive computing is much older and we should not ignore the lessons it may try to teach us.

What we have here is a new round of device refinement in anticipation of strong demand for an alternative computer interface that did not materialize in several decades - even though it could have.

It may be that VR is an exception. Some people are arguing that there is some sort of threshold that needs to be reached. Its possible.

But this is not the usual pattern. People are extremely adept and keen at glossing over grave limitations and filling in the blanks if a technology helps them achieve something relevant to them.

I don't know that comparing ChatGPT (a particular instance of a branch of AI) to the entire category of VR (not a particular instance of a branch of VR) makes too much sense.

AI has been around since the 50s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig...

VR has been around since roughly a decade later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality#History

The apt part of the comparison is, since the 50s the use cases for AI has been obvious and clamored for, and is sufficiently revolutionary its difficult to even imagine all of the use cases, but very easy to imagine some. Its much closer to electricity -- it will likely change just about everything about how we go through life. And most people are keenly aware of that.

... AR / VR may have the same promise. But the implementation is sufficiently far away, that most people look at it and think "Wow, really cool toy. I don't have a use for it right now", and walk away. They'll be back if / when that tipping point arrives, but unlike ChatGPT, its not here, not yet.

Excuse me, but how much time people have been developing the technology that powers ChatGPT. How much time and money has Google spent to create Transformers? How much time has been spent developing neural networks or CUDA devices.

How much money has ChatGPT invested? Billions.

GPT1 is from 2018, but neural networks have more than 70 years now. VR have more than 30 years since the early prototypes.

I bought a commercial VR product in 1995: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VFX1_Headgear

You’re comparing a service accessible through any device with a physical product, not very apt I’d say

The first iPhone was released June 2007. The iPhone X was released by 2017. By then smart phones were ubiquitous. And it only took 4? Maybe 5 years? We’re still looking for a good use case for VR … and it’s not Second Life: Facebook Edition, or games (yet).

> The first iPhone was released June 2007

And the first mobile phone was sold to the public in 1949. It took time to catch on. People needed it to be convenient and accessible. VR/AR is neither convenient nor accessible today.

You can use your iPhone camera for an AR experience, but your hands are occupied holding the phone so you can't do much at all when using it.

Even if AR through a phone is a bit clunky you’d think people would use it if it was so great. I’ve never heard any real consumer talk about AR outside of the short obsession with Pokemon Go.

The whole meta verse thing seems like it was 100% hype building by people with money invested in it and none of the platforms had any users.

hmmm, not quite. To get an email address you need a computer. We went from 1% of the population having email addresses in 1994 to a decent 25%+ of the population in 1998 (or around then). All of them had to buy a computer to access that email.

If VR was so compelling, people would buy the headset to get the experience. It's not so they don't.

Any new sources on the billion users of OpenAI? I know they hit 100 million users pretty quickly, but has any new data come out on subscribers and MAU of free users?

It’s completely made up and untrue. Think about it, a billion users is 1/7 of all people on earth. If you assume that number has to be at least 3x in the US (extremely conservative, given we’re incredibly rich and at least 100x more exposed to it in media than most of the world), you’d have to expect that basically 40% of people you know are actively using it.

Impossible. My extended circle which leans tech overall is maybe 4%. And many just tried it and aren’t really actively using it.

They’re counting numbers very funny.

I also have my doubts. Meta, with three near ubiquitous products (FB, Instagram, Whatsapp) had trouble reaching 1B MAU so I have questions on this figure.

1B is a reasonable number as it is imaginable that 1 in 7 people on earth tried to use GPT (through ChatGPT or Bing) at some time over the past 6 months. It is undoubtly the fastest growing commercial product in history.

Not a chance, these numbers are so heavily quadruple counted and biased, and even if they try it once it’s not an active user. Again if you think it’s that common you live in a bubble.

Half the population is above 45, and it’s not above 2% for that cohort they barely hear about it on the news and have no idea how to even sign up for it.

I witnessed a middle-aged mum walking a pram talking to her son or husband about GPT. Haven't had that kind of moment since 1995 and the rapid uptake of email.

Having seen this before, I don't think the numbers are incredible. Everyone I know has signed up for an OpenAI account, and probably 25% are paying for one. Granted I'm in the HN bubble, but this is so 1995.

Maybe Meta is using it and thus implicitly its billions of active daily users?

> There is no demand for VR outside gaming

If I could replace my monitor with a portable device that would grant me huge virtual desktop space I would pay 3500$

Right now I'm waiting to see the feedback and for the early adopter issues to get ironed out.

But I'd say this demand is far greater than gaming. Being able to work from any rental where I can plop a keyboard and laptop without having to deal with bad desk height and non adjustable chair/lack of monitors is huge - it would literally mean I could work from anywhere.

Right now I can't - and I've tried many times. Experience is terrible and after a few days of bad desk/chair combo, even lugging a small 24inch monitor in the car, I get insane cramps/headaches from neck strain or back pain from bad posture.

If VR can solve this I know a lot of people would buy into that.

>If I could replace my monitor with a portable device that would grant me huge virtual desktop space I would pay 3500$

People keep parroting this line, but have you ever actually tried this? There's way more to discomfort in VR than just pixel density.

Last time I tried was early oculus days and it wasn't even close.

But it's been like 7 years at this point ? If Apple has decided to launch it I would assume they worked out the kinks.

I'm not buying it until I see enough evidence it's usable (doubt I'll get to try it for 8 hours without buying one).

I loved the idea of Oculus Vim

But the practicality of not being able to see the people around me gave me the screaming heeby-jeebies. I just wasn't comfortable not knowing who was near me.

I will happily have 3 monitors in realspace just so I can turn my head to see who's near me.

For most of the past two decades Chatbots were pushed by enterprises and hated by consumers.

ChatGPT was the first chatbot to cross the magic threshold, after which point consumers enthusiastically adopted it.

And peak VR gaming circa 2023 seems to be Gorilla Tag and Beat Saber. Not saying those are bad games, but…

Sure, to the extent peak non-VR gaming is candy crush.

Most gaming will be casual, in VR just like non-VR.

But there are much better and deeper games in both cases.

Alright lets put it this way: For fiveish years now, there have been basically copies of CS:GO and CoD in VR, games that get up to millions of daily users, and the VR versions of those games get like, hundreds of players, if that.

VR just isn't that wanted by average people. "Immersion" just isn't a magic panacea that older execs seem to think it is, and being in a "virtual world" while you play most games don't make them better games! Oddly enough, most people don't play videogames to emulate real activities, but rather to play games, with their own made up rules and concepts. FIFA on the Xbox is nothing like actual soccer, but the players prefer it like that, and a FIFA that requires you to kick the ball with your real foot and costs hundreds of dollars is NOT better as a game, or more fun to most people, than "flat" FIFA.

We literally already went over this with the Wii; shoehorning in "realism" into games that don't benefit from it just makes shitty games.

I don’t disagree with anything you said, but I believe you’re reasoning in circles between “immersion hasn’t been better enough to merit interest” and “immersion can never be good enough to merit interest”

> There is no demand for VR outside gaming.

How big was the demand for the first mobile phone?

The pitch was very common sense - you can make calls without being tethered to your home/office physical phone line. They were just too big, expensive and low coverage in the beginning for most people.

That sounds familliar...

>I'm sorry, but buying things on the internet wasn't laughed at,

Yes, it was laughed at and during the early internet days, people were skeptical that online shopping would become mainstream. An example includes the famous prediction from Clifford Stoll from 1995[1] :

>Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure. [...] Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping--just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet--which there isn't--the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

Clifford was correct in that brick & mortar stores wouldn't become obsolete. But he was very wrong about the mass consumer adoption of internet shopping. Many agreed with his mispredictions at the time.

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...

"but buying things on the internet wasn't laughed at"

It was definitely laughed at by people like travel agents - remember them? I can remember discussing it with people in the travel industry around '94 and '95 and they literally laughed at the idea of people arranging travel online.

Maybe they were laughing out of fear for their job.

It the late 90s a technology professional calmly explained to me that nobody would ever do their supermarket shopping online because they would not able to select fruit and vegetables by hand to look for the 'good' ones

And he was right. Still going to the market myself for the veggies.

What are you talking about? I see a large number of grocery store employees gather up wares for curbside or delivery every time I go to the supermarket. All of my area supermarkets have dedicated sections for these ways of shopping!

Because when the grocery store employee picks the fruit for you online order they don’t care about getting the ripe ones with no blemishes.

Additionally they seem to always pick the perishables with the closest expiry date. IE milk from the front of the shelf that is expiring tomorrow rather than the stuff at the back that has 7 days before expiry.

And then on top of that the popularity of meal kits as well supplanting some amount of grocery shopping.

And any discussion about those meal kits is full of people complaining about low quality produce, and many of them quitting their subscription because of it.

I wonder how instacart became a 12 billion dollar company even though you go to the market for 'the veggies'.

I guess many people make do with mountain dew and pringles.

You can dismiss it if you want, but the truth is that what you said is not correct. People get groceries delivered all the time and that includes fruits and vegetables.

What they didn't anticipate was how many people don't buy fruits or vegetables.

Plus how many of us are willing to buy 2x as many as needed, assuming some will be bad, and just chalk that up to the cost of not going to the store.

Or how many of us understand that an "ugly" tomato is just fine to eat, especially when I'm making a sauce.

The obsession with perfect produce is so dumb, and has genuinely harmed our shopping.

Oh I’m fine with imperfect produce. But Instacart frequently brings me really terrible specimens, like strawberries with mold literally yesterday (the second batch was fine, and I would have eaten both if they were both good).

The grocery store should be pulling terribly produce, but my local one apparently does not.

Context: Not sure what its like in the US but in the UK supermarket deliveries including all kinds of loose fruit and veg are very common

Another example: Video-on-demand was pushed for decades and essentially laughed at outside of a narrow niche where it found purchase… until one day it ate the world.

The issues with video-on-demand were network connectivity, image quality, etc. It wasn't hard to imagine a future where all issues were fixes, and see all the benefits over the brick and mortar video rental. You take an existing common use case, add significant benefits without drawbacks and it becomes a no-brainer.

For VR/AR however? Are we going to get to Black Mirror level of a weightless device that projects a huge AR screen without block your field of vision for the rest, and without making you look like a goof?

Even if that's the case, the benefit over using a phone screen wouldn't not be as big as getting a huge library of movies to be rented in seconds directly from your living room (compared to driving to Blockbuster during opening hours for a much smaller selection).

> compared to driving to Blockbuster during opening hours for a much smaller selection

And the best movies all being rented out! That's a concept that doesn't even exist anymore. A bit tangential, but good technology has that effect, of making scarcity disappear.

The Internet was first available to the public in 1993. 10 years later, in 2003, it was so ingrained in everyone's life that we could no longer imagine living without it.

VR is available to the public since the 90's, it's as old as the Internet. Even if you consider that "actually useable VR" started with Occulus it was already 10 years ago.

I'm not saying the turning point for VR will never come, but it's certainly taking its time.

Using the internet never required becoming a quasiborg.

I like the idea in some cases but it's still absurdly komisch to the vast majority of human beings

I would say AR is the real use case here and I think the apple headset is the first truly usable example of it.

I remember the argument against tablets, I was one of them, I thought because of the weird hand/arm position, this can never be a serious format. It was pushed through several iterations, and now it is accepted.

They didn't really live up to the hype, though. It was said that they would replace laptops. While they have their space in the market, sales are in a declining trend, and considerably behind laptops.

(I was like you and still am, by the way... I don't find tablets comfortable. I only bought one once, and I think the number of times I actually used it can be counted with both hands).

The iPad did replace a category of laptops. At the time the iPad came out netbooks were popular and it was believed by many that Apple was in trouble because they didn’t have a netbook. Apple came out with the iPad and killed the netbook market.

Netbooks died because they were terrible products, and for "I just need to check my email" phones were infinitely better.

They surely replaced laptops for artists, digital note taking, journalists, travelling and mobile terminals.

For some people, some of the time.

Many journalists will have their MacBooks prized out of the cold dead hands.

I travel with my laptop and my iPad Pro never leaves the couch.

And how close to most working artists’ realities are those slick Apple keynotes showing sexy young people drawing with their Apple Pencil? I don’t know. Artist is a broad term.

Depends if we are talking about US journalists, and countries with similar income, or the rest of the world with more down to earth possibilities.

Yes, artists is a broad term, just like developer isn't a UNIX guy doing containers.

Can’t reply to OPs comment under this.

But no, iPads did not replace laptops for the majority of people. Phones maybe, but not so much tablets.

Again if unless you are very young or old, and/or your profession significantly benefits from a portable touch devices (artistry, home remodeling, etc.) it’s a niche.

Kids love tablets and parents on trips love that kids love tablets!

They’re convenient consumption devices. I’d never work on one but I can watch something on it. Personally I have a phone full that niche but I get that having a giant phone is nice to some people. But keeping kids calm during a plane ride is a great use case

>It was said that they would replace laptops.

By who?

The iPad introduction explicitly presented the iPad as a complementary device situated between the smartphone and the laptop.

That’s true. But it was also Apple who kept calling it a “post PC” device. Which at face value always sounded like it aimed to replace a PC.

I never had the same feeling about tablets. If anything, I am still somewhat surprised that they have (in relative terms) flopped. I was really expecting much more widespread use given it is quite a sweet-spot form factor (small and lightweight to carry around to far more places than a laptop yet offering a good fraction of the laptop functionality)

Phones got larger. 6" or 7" phones are normal now, they are always with us, no need to also buy a 8" or 10" tablet.

As a data point, I do own a tablet. It's mostly a mobile TV screen: a TV Headend client for broadcast TV, NewPipe for YouTube and VLC to a shared disk on a server at Home. Not having to sit in front of a fixed TV set it great. My TV is mostly forgotten in a corner of the living room.

I rarely bring the tablet with me outside home. When I do it's with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Example: I'm on vacation but I need some sort of work connectivity in case nasty things happen. Ssh works better on a 8.4" screen than on a phone. That doesn't happen every year luckily. My laptop is larger, weights more and I'll cry if it breaks or gets stolen. Damage to the tablet will only piss me off a bit.

In my view it's the opposite: the worst of both worlds.

If I need to do work involving lots of typing, precise clicking or sitting for a long amount of time, I'd rather use a laptop (or desktop). And for less demanding stuff, the smartphone (which I'm already carrying everywhere by default) is enough.

The tablet sits in an awkward middle and I don't really find much use for it.

I think the tablet market share agrees with you. We've also got touch sensitive notebook screens that removed the edge from a pure tablet experience.

Which is something important to keep in mind when discussing VR adoption. A few people getting overly excited (or overly dismissive) is not necessarily a good predictor.

Tablet is for playing touch based games and watching Youtube

I was listening to a famous shoe designer give a talk today. While telling a story, he mentioned in passing that he no longer uses paper but does all his design work with a stylus on an iPad. This guy has to be in his 60s or 70s. I was kind of surprised.

> I am still somewhat surprised that they have (in relative terms) flopped.

I am not - Apple's "Post-PC" vision was clearly not viable to me, despite initially out-selling the entire desktop industry initially. The "What is a computer" ads were cringe.

They never stopped their PC lines so I don’t think they believed it either.

I thought that about tablets too! I still don't really use them myself, but they just seemed like a dumb interface to me. I do understand their appeal now, though.

For all intensive purposes tablets became normalized but are far from widely accepted or bought,

Part of the reason it’s only kids and old people often seen using them.

Haven’t been on an airplane recently?

They're still fairly rare.

> But many things were pushed before they were pulled. Buying things on the internet, for instance. This was laughed at for quite a while, while a few people and companies were committed to the idea that it was the future

When, for a couple of months in 1992? There are always a few people who dislike new ideas but that one was popular from the beginning because it was so easy to understand: just like ordering from a catalog but you get your stuff a week earlier and in most cases can see more info about it before buying.

I worked at a web development company in the mid to late 90s and businesses were all over this concept. It saved them money having to pay people to answer the phone or open envelopes, let them do things they couldn’t afford with printed catalogs, and avoided a whole ton of problems around payment.

> When, for a couple of months in 1992? There are always a few people who dislike new ideas but that one was popular from the beginning because it was so easy to understand: just like ordering from a catalog but you get your stuff a week earlier and in most cases can see more info about it before buying.

I think you were in a pretty distinct milieu if you thought this was a popular idea in 1992, or any time before, say, 1998.

> I worked at a web development company in the mid to late 90s and businesses were all over this concept. It saved them money having to pay people to answer the phone or open envelopes, let them do things they couldn’t afford with printed catalogs, and avoided a whole ton of problems around payment.

Yes, I imagine that the companies you interfaced with as an employee of an webdev company in the late 90s were all over this. That is not the same thing as it being generally popular.

> I think you were in a pretty distinct milieu if you thought this was a popular idea in 1992, or any time before, say, 1998.

It wasn’t mainstream before people could afford computers and connectivity but nobody serious was laughing at the idea for the reasons I mentioned: it was an obvious extension of what businesses had been doing for over a century and there was tons of prior art (services like CompuServ had online shopping in the 80s). By the mid-90s it was obvious that it was going to happen for easily shipped items as soon as people got online - when Amazon launched in 1995 it had customers around the country almost immediately and the book operation was profitable within a couple of years.

> Yes, I imagine that the companies you interfaced with as an employee of an webdev company in the late 90s were all over this. That is not the same thing as it being generally popular.

Our customers weren’t tech companies but brick and mortar retail, banks, manufacturers, etc. They knew that this was an easy way to sell direct to customers - which cut out some hefty margins charged by major stores & catalogs - and try new products. The opportunity was obvious even to people who weren’t in the industry — absolutely nobody was laughing at that, although there were dotcoms of the “lose money on every sale, make it up in volume” persuasion who everyone knew were doomed.

>Buying things on the internet, for instance. This was laughed at for quite a while, while a few people and companies were committed to the idea that it was the future.

Pretty much every developer (and reader) I know jumped on the OG amazon to buy books. All through the late '90s I (and pretty much everyone I knew) would buy books that were not immediately available in bookstores (remember those?) or libraries on the internet. Never mind that it sometimes took over a week for your books to be delivered, the point was that we could get something we wanted.

I have played around with a VR headset, and been part of demos that have fallen flat, because there really is nothing that we want in that experience.

This is not to say that it won't be successfull. Advertising and hard sells can be very effective after all.

Is ChatGPT being pushed or pulled?

I was talking to my daughter about sort of a tangential issue the other day. I want to say it's related because some of these "better" technologies get pushed onto public schools. Some idiot in her class had managed to completely disable (destroy?) a Smart Board by throwing some tiny object and striking it.

I have to admit that I don't actually know exactly what a Smart Board is or exactly what its capabilities are, but I get the impression that the replacement cost of such a device is multiple orders of magnitude greater than that of a simpler device, the Overhead Projector, so common in classrooms thirty years ago. And I have to ask the question, is the educational value multiple orders of magnitude greater? Also consider that you don't need a degree in electrical engineering (and other domain/manufacturer specific knowledge) to understand how the mirrors and light bulbs make the older device function, and to repair it.

I fear this attitude comes off as crotchety old man get-off-my-lawn a little bit, but I think if we take a step back and make objective comparisons we might find that we've been had by the marketing department quite a few times in recent years. And I just hate to see public schools (which I think are so desperately important, and don't have the disposable cash) taken advantage of by the marketing departments with budgets larger than the engineering department of their firm. I would be dismayed to see my kids' schools investing into VR/AR any time soon, but I could see it happening.

My teacher would send everything he wrote on the smart board as a PDF after class. This was effortless for him either the smart board. Now sure, for projecting a presentation, there’s no major difference. But I think it’s trying to combine blackboards and projectors, and in this case, it did (at least for me) make some things easier. Is it 30x better at educating than the overhead? No. But I don’t think it has to be to be worthwhile.

When I was in high school, they installed the first generation of smart boards. The resolution and quality of pen input was quite mediocre. But it solved an actual severe problem for teachers and students. Back then we used sponges to clean boards but this can lead over long period of time to skin diseases. Furthermore, the sound of chalk on a board was torture. An alternative would have been those smooth boards but they get really hard to clean over time and pens seem to be always empty. Lastly, you actually get to the material from previous lessons and can even upload them. I think those smart board need to be iterated on more. If displays are to difficult to repair, maybe e-ink paper might be an option in the future.

SmartBoards were actually awesome! The issue is that most teachers disliked them because they didn't know how to utilize them, didn't want to learn something new (a lot of teachers are like 50 years old) and basically had the old man shouting at clouds "damn these newfangled computery thingies", or genuinely had no good use for them: My mom was a French teacher at the time, and being able to get pen input to her laptop from a whiteboard wasn't exactly a useful tool for her.

I find this similar to those note taking apps. Everyone assumes having notes stored digitally will be more useful by allowing search, sharing between devices/friends, or any of the other propaganda used. However, they all miss the crucial bit of taking notes is that the act of writing the note is the key in helping retain the information. Can't get much cheaper than a pencil and paper, but yet we keep trying and failing.

95% of technology in the classroom initiatives are pure grift. Ever notice how it's usually the struggling districts that are most willing to go all-in on them?

or the GenZers with an app

>So far at least, this is a tech that is being pushed onto people rather than being pulled.

Like anything else in life?

How much it took for the Guthenberg press to be "successful". It took at least 50 years since Guthenberg died bankrupted until there were millions of books being printed and people realised what the printing was by the consequences.

Guthenberg pushed so hard his entire life.

Aviation was not pushed by fanatics that killed themselves for at least 50 years(they were gliders in India thousands of years ago that killed themselves trying to fly) before it became a normal thing.

Read about Otto Lilienthal or the casualty rate of early aviators and then tell me that it was not pushed.

The nuclear bomb was not pushed with project Manhattan, one of the biggest expenditures on earth ever?

Rockets were not pushed? Going to the moon was not pushed? The diode and the transistor were not pushed by the germans and later the Americans?

Lasers were not pushed before we knew what could be done with them? Computers were not pushed?

>I don't think this was the case with any of the major steps in the development of digital computing but would be quite interested if people can think of historical precedent.

The entire Silicon Valley thing was created by the Pentagon at first. It did not went from zero to billions of devices instantly. The military were paying the development of early (ultra expensive)microprocessors in the dozens to power submarines and spaceships, like the hand weaved RAM of the Apollo devices.

The early entire DARPA internet was at first 56Kbits, the entire network!!

Certainly things like Xerox PARC machines were pushed when every single machine did cost a fortune. It was not pulled because Xerox had no idea of what to do with the technology, just like lasers before.

> Like anything else in life?

There is a lot of truth in that. Modern consumerist needs have an important push element to them. Creating "wants" is by now very sophisticated social engineering practice with over a century of successful track record.

But the examples you mention mostly bundle other phenomena that I would not include in the typical "consumer push" category. Doggedly pursuing research on various uncertain technologies (typically government founded) is common, but it is not pushing anything onto consumers. Potentially this may happen in the final phases, if/when successful, relevant and mass market commercializable.

Mass market companies typically only enter the game when there is an expected short or (at most) medium term return that will compensate for the investment risk.

You think 56kbit/s is slow, but in early Internet times, people communicated with 9600bit/s modems. We sometimes had to be satisfied with upper half of the body only.

Ha but the modem would not make you feel sick!

> they were gliders in India thousands of years ago that killed themselves trying to fly

Source?

I think it's still a couple of years out, but what about a little thought experiment: Let's say you had a pair of normal looking glasses that do everything that Vision Pro is doing now [1] and cost, say, 1500 USD. This would IMO be a no-brainer, as you can then augment any space and activity you want with having views into the digital world - for work, for hobbies, you name it. That would IMO be a mass market device on the level of today's smartphones.

Now, the question is, how much worse can it be and still sell well? How good is good enough? How soon will we see the plastic iPhone 3G equivalent at half the price, 70% the weight and 150% the battery life? After listening to the first hand experiences I do think Apple is onto something here, and this could be the beginning of the next step, finally going beyond what Douglas Engelbart has already envisioned in terms of digital augmentation of our lifes (on which we're IMO only now getting to a full realisation, almost 60 years later).

[1] listen to yesterday's Cortex podcast, they go over all the details after first hand experience, and it's quite interesting to say the least.

What makes you think it's possible, especially in just a couple of years, to have a laptop powerful enough to drive two 4k+ screens + cameras at the same time reduced to the weight and form factor of a pair of glasses?

Phones, laptops, and tablets have all been fighting on weight vs compute power for years, and improvements are incremental year to year. I don't see any reason to imagine it's possible to reduce the size that much in the foreseeable future. Even with compromises like a separate battery, which is already extremely clunky.

Not to mention, the illusion depends highly on having your regular vision blocked out completely and on having the screens at a very fixed position relative to your eyes. So, for the foreseeable future, the screens will have to stay well fixed to your face, even if in a more glasses-like form factor, and completely cover your eyes. Ski goggles are actually a better description of the best that can be done, not glasses.

I'm not saying it's possible in a few years. My argument was: Such a device would definitely be mass market. So how much worse can it be and still be mass market. And I could see a consumer version of Vision Pro in a couple of years reaching that state, where they just make it a bit cheaper, lighter and smaller.

Everyone saying "just wait until this has been miniturized and made cheaper" as if Moores law wasn't already dead and buried and we've been burning billions chasing 1-2% per generation for several generations.

There's one more doubling of computing power per square centimeter of die, MAXIMUM.

Otherwise GPU prices wouldn't still be climbing.

as it turns out there is a lot of optimizations to be had besides feature size shrink. for a long while, both software and hardware were sustaining of the "free lunch" of Moore's law (as coined by Herb Sutter). With that fading away, there has been a lot of progress on the architecture side in the last couple of years, with AMD & Apple entering a previously stale desktop CPU market and mixing it up quite a bit, forcing Intel to also be competitive again. I think it will be quite a while until the train of improvement runs dry even when feature size will be stuck. Think about how inefficient today's software still is when compared to what e.g. the original Mac could do with its limited hardware.

Augmented Reality (AR, or I guess "spatial computing" now) has always been what I thought would push the whole thing over the edge, and not VR. The "killer app" for VR is immersive experiences - while there's a niche for them, and I think we'll see more and better iterations, I don't think it has the growth potential that AR does.

The killer app for AR is the pair of glasses that pops up information as an overlay on the rest of the world. Directions? You get an arrow and line telling you where to go. Meet someone for lunch? Facial recognition tells you information about them - either recent social media posts if you're already connected or something like a public profile if you don't. Testing out a new recipe? It shows you step by step directions and floating video of the task you need to do right them. Watching a movie? Built in subtitles and tells you who the actors (or voice actors) are. Looking to buy a car? The AR headset gives you pricing information and stats for any car that you look at.

I could keep going. Think combination of Ready Player One, any gadget spy movie, and a video game isekai. Menus that allow you to make notes for when you go to the store, calendar reminders popping up visually

The potential for abuse of privacy is high, but the convenience factor and instant gratification probably mean that people will still adopt it in droves. Add in some kind of AI assistant that does a halfway decent job at anticipating the user's needs and it's a done deal.

The main things holding back that kind of thing are battery tech and miniaturization. 2 hours isn't gonna cut it, and it needs to shrink to a more innocuous level before we get there, but that's the direction I see it going. That's probably also why these companies are working so hard at iterating, to get that first-mover advantage.

If we do get there I pity anyone with photosensitivity issues or epilepsy. They're gonna have a rough time.

Had to scroll down surprisingly far to find this comment.

The iPhone moment for this space IMO is... the iPhone (sans phone)

Imagine something of google glass form factor tethered to a personal computing device (the size of an iPhone) for external battery and CPU.

Basically Iron Man glasses. IMO glasses that can do everything a phone can, with baked in Google Lens is already a killer feature.

Imagine having everything in focus auto-translated while abroad.

Once you get certain social features like both visualizing the same thing I think that will be the ChatGPT moment for the space.

The phone already has all that minus the heads up display. I wonder if anyone’s working on a glasses display that uses your phones considerable compute, networking, etc resources.

one of their main goals was making the latency imperceptible, and from the initial hands-on reviews they've achieved it, by integrating it right down on hardware level using an RTOS for the graphics & display part. and since Apple is all about SoC's nowadays, it doesn't really make sense for them to use half of an iPhone's chip if they can as well use the CPU already next to their GPU on the same chip.

I'm a bit surprised that the Vision Pro doesn't utilize the iPhone in some respect to offload processing, storage, battery, etc.

They probably thought about it, but found it was too slow. Everything about Vision Pro hardware to me screams: this is the absolute cutting edge and that's what's needed to make it usable. In fact, it's barely there so we had to do something we don't like to do - preannounce for next year - because it will only be then that we can mass produce it.

If you think about it, the product is essentially a MacBook that sits on your face, micronized with massive optimizations.

>If we do get there I pity anyone with photosensitivity issues or epilepsy. They're gonna have a rough time.

I would expect the headset to have the same accessibility features for epileptics that phones have.

Interesting, I didn't know phones had general accessibility features for epileptics. Could you elaborate?

As I understand it, it monitors the screen and if there is flashing lights it makes that section of the screen much dimmer.

The first time I tried an Oculus Quest was mindblowing, it was a very unique and impressive experience. I wont go on about it but I encourage you to do the Oculus Quest demo app if you get the chance.

BUT then the excitement faded and I don't find myself wanting to return to VR much. Having something strapped to your face is awkward and tiring.

Tech companies can see the potential because it _is_ breathtaking but are also aware of the drawbacks and hurdles. Zuck decided it was a big enough thing to bet the farm on.

Its a potentially very powerful thing with some big issues that no-one knows how to fix. Hence the buzz and endless talking and companies jostling for position to be the leader without knowing quite where they want to lead us to.

ADU metrics are hurt by Facebook’s execution of OS software updates and UX issues that make it a tedious dance. Many releases where create a situation where it is put into a drawer.

One important issue with Oculus is that doesn't have AAA apps to consume, so at the end you only bought a device. I assume Apple knows well the apps strategy and there would be apps that leverage de device as it happened when they launched multitouch displays (remember: they were the firsts).

Mark downvoting my comments ;-) non-happy owner of the Oculus Quest 2 and Meta Quest Pro. Have them for the business.

Abstractly, we have different devices that stimulate our sensory inputs by mimicking, in an imperfect way, what they receive naturally in the environment.

We can make devices that are fixed in space, where you need to orient your sensory inputs around the device. Or, we can make devices that instead are themselves oriented around your sensory inputs. The latter tends to be better for ergonomics and convenience (at least), since the device is accommodating your senses instead of your senses accommodating the device.

In other words, AR/VR/etc devices are headphones for the eyes. I can see why it seems like an obvious next step to some (if they can get it right).

The headphone analogy is a good one and maybe sheds some light on the different nature of these "visual" headphones.

Headphones are in a sense "additive": they take a channel (auditory) that for a prolonged period of time might be underused while we go on about our lives and utilize it in an unobtrusive way. You can listen to podcasts while doing other stuff. We can optionally upgrade the experience: If you want, you can close your eyes and lose yourself in music.

Goggles are necessarily subtractive. Whatever you do while immersed must justify the fact that you are obstructing your primary contact with the world. It may well be that there are worthwhile pursuits but its a bit odd that they don't advertise themselves.

I think that you can extend what you said in your first example to the second. In a future where they are just small devices barely noticeable and providing by default just AR, it would be just like headphones. Then, if you want, you can switch to VR and lose yourself there.

With theoretically perfect AR (e.g. AR contact lenses with perfect pass through), it would be better than anything you use a screen for today, because it would be a strict superset of today’s experience.

Imagine using your phone but you don’t have to hold it up to your face, or tilt your head to look at it. You don’t need to sit at a desk, because your work screen is wherever you are.

If you really want the old experience, you could make the contacts emulate a fixed display in space, or on top of a soap bar.

The goggles today are much worse than the theoretically perfect version, but it isn’t clear where the experiential threshold is for “better”.

Headphones are a great analogy. For me, headphones are a burden to wear long-term.

And that's coming from someone who spends a good amount of time doing studio work. I much prefer the comfort of a good set of speakers as they're far less intrusive, but for some things you just have to have a pair of headphones on hand.

This is why I have doubts that the current form of VR headsets is going to be the new standard for working.

Porn. What you're missing is porn.

Or generally, anything that's much better experienced directly than through a screen. Think about virtually hiking Mt Everest, diving the Mariana Trench, walking on Mars, etc. The technology certainly isn't there yet, but I can imagine a future where for a majority of the population, especially those with lower income, VR provides the only affordable* escape from reality.

* In a few years obviously, $3500 is far from affordable.

> Porn. What you're missing is porn.

I suppose this means that Apple is aiming for the high end of that market while Meta for the coin-operated booths? :-)

> Porn. What you're missing is porn.

This is correct. With the ability to mimic touch, the VR NSFW avenues are set to explode.

Explode?!? Do you think people who don’t already pay for porn/sexual IOT devices/digital sexual pleasure content will start to enter this emerging market? Do you think the same customer base will drastically increase spending?

- I’m genuinely curious and surprised by the confidence.

I'm sure there are millions of people who visit pornhub that would never have visited a pornographic cinema (or whatever they were called).

Agreed. But there are much fewer people who pay for pornhub. Fewer who would buy a $3500 device just for a more immersive pornhub experience. I highly doubt these people are in apple’s target market.

But there a enough people paying for other devices that enhance. Full on silicon body molds of your favorite performer, remote devices to allow for others to stimulate you, get them all connected into an app so that both participants can interact and you have the sexual encounter these people can only dream of

I think it is easy to severely underestimate the number of persons who engage with porn and NSFW content everyday, along with the volume of content.

One quick glance at the Reddit hysteria will show that people are particularly bummed about the NSFW changes. Like, really bummed. Same with Pornhub limiting its service in Utah, and people of Utah immediately learning what VPNs are. Additionally, there are human trafficking rings around the world that thrive for a reason (e.g., Epstein). With VR you have sensorimotor gadgets you can sync to your virtual world, and it is completely immersive. As you become desensitized to one fetish, you can purchase a new fetish experience. Porn is a lucrative path.

For me, I like humans, the "in real life" kind to be exact. So it's not a hot selling point, for me. I do like to study how humans "human." And porn is front and center for many people, for all sorts of different reasons.

Reminds me of this GQ video with Lil Dicky where he listed the Oculus Quest as one of the 10 things he couldn't live without

https://youtu.be/eqAcVASDZ3g?t=470

Honestly, at what point will you need regulators to step in? It’s pretty clear that we have a little porn addiction epidemic. And there’s increasing evidence of the harmful effects of porn.

And that’s happening with the current state of porn - often viewed on small phone screens in less than even HD quality.

I can’t imagine what would happen to young people once porn is viewable in a lifelike virtual reality. I can imagine an entire generation of young men dropping out of society altogether (something that’s already happening)

I love that we’ve gone from “is anyone going to buy this?” to “would someone think of the children, this is going to destroy society.”

The reality is that the phone is, and will be, the far more dangerous a vector for porn because of how ubiquitous and convenient it is. The wow factor of this device won't move the needle much here, particularly at this price.

Yes, some will use it for this. Porn use is never satisfied so the addicts that are always looking for bigger hits will find some here. But they are already in it's grasp. Very few to nobody will start it on this device, and that is where the primary battle is located.

Kids, on phones, far away from the supervision of their parents.

Do you think the devices will be that bulky and that expensive by 2035 too?

[dead]

A couple of years ago, I sat down with my friend for a game of chess. After a few minutes of chatting and playing, I realised that I had completely forgotten he wasn’t really there.

I took my headset off and it was like he had just left the room. I think that being able to provide the feeling that someone you love is there with you (when they are far away) is why people use a lot of tech.

It was a feeling that 2d FaceTime just cannot give you (and it felt like a bigger advancement than going from a phone call to video calls).

If Vision Pro’s face reconstruction thing works well I can see that being the killer app.

I had a similar feeling without VR: working from home + having friends far away meant I spent a lot of time on video chat du jour.

One day I set up the TV with a spare computer and webcam, and used that instead of phone, laptop, or even desktop.

The difference was huge, and exponentially so when the other party was doing the same.

With selfie webcams we got person-centric mugshots, with room webcams we connected places.

It was like having opened a portal to another place, we could move around each one's place very naturally, which only reinforced the connection between people. Just a little bit of care with placement and angle went a long way to drive the illusion. I remember that a couple of times we honest to god unconsciously tried to hand over objects through the screen.

Brains are so easy to trick. As it seems to be currently my cobbled up setup looks better than floating mugshots.

Also not addressed and never shown is how the VR user shows up to these FaceTime users. I mean the wearer doesn't have themselves captured by the device? And it can't take into account other people naturally walking into the room.

This reminds me of what the people over at https://tonari.no/ are building. I would love to try out their tech!

Yes! I did basically that with a Logi C920 something + a 42" TV.

And yes the perspective is wrong, things don't line up, objects and textures don't match, but after a few minutes it doesn't matter, basically as long as you get the horizontal plane right the brain just adjusts and still believes you're looking through a window.

Gaming is legitimately awesome with these devices. It’s a high effort, high reward experience. Using the Quest on a few of the highly polished and addictive games surpassed even my childhood experience of getting a computer for the first time.

As a general purpose computer, I see a hint of what it could be, and I am convinced it’s the future. It has to be. It’s too powerful not to be.

Imagine there’s nothing to put on. The computer doctor sprinkles some magic computer dust over you 7 minutes after you are born and you get Apple Vision++++ levels of ability, all of the time. Everything in the world becomes a potential UI. Every action becomes an input. Every surface a display. Look at our total screen time and realize there’s no going back, so we might as well ditch the screens and stop all the squinting.

But I am also convinced this is 30 to 100 years away. There‘s no line of sight on how to build this magic dust and no one is going to wear ski goggles all day.

>Imagine there’s nothing to put on. The computer doctor sprinkles some magic computer dust over you 7 minutes after you are born and you get Apple Vision++++ levels of ability, all of the time. Everything in the world becomes a potential UI. Every action becomes an input. Every surface a display.

I am begging you to consider how this is an awful future

I’m from a world where my myopia was debilitating (minus 10.5 in one eye, -9.5 in the other). Then, someone came an sprinkled magic dust into my eyes through a Laser and bam! 20/20 eyesight in one afternoon.

You could say I was going the other way - from wearing a contraption (specs/contacts) to not wearing one unlike AR/VR where I have to wear something to experience it - but the effect is the same.

I was naturally one way and then, out of nowhere came LASIK to make life better for me.

It’s the same way everywhere. We couldn’t fly and now we have flying tubes. We couldn’t understand movies in foreign languages and now close captions exist.

Personally, I’d like to give that VR/AR magic dust a chance to see if my now 20-20 eyesight can kick up a notch.

I've also had my bad eyes (-6.00, -5.50 bad but not at your level!) corrected by laser surgery.

Very different things! Also you're talking wistfully about science fiction, there's no indication that AR technology is going to reach the magic dust level this century.

How so? I’m serious.

Nearly every person on the planet has a phone in their pocket. People use these screens for hours a day. Companies and governments track everything you do. Whatever world you are afraid of is already here.

It can get worse. The entire point of half of the management of Meta and Google is directly to make it worse.

I share similar thoughts.

If we go back in time to the mobile phone era, just before the iphone was released, the mobile market was actually flourishing and very solid: companies like nokia, motorola and blackberry managed to make mobile phones something as common as a TV, almost everyone had one.

At the time Apple introduced the iphone with its touchscreen and virtual keyboard, forever game changers to the whole mobile industry. The rest is history.

VR has been in the market for some time now and despite the fact that competitors haven't reached the level of technology that Apple has unveiled, those cheaper alternatives are by no means something that are either underdeveloped or half-way unusable products. I've tried a pair of Occulus few years ago and found them pretty impressive (putting aside all their flaws).

I must assume that since then these got better and prices actually dropped a bit, and if they haven't they are still way way cheaper than what Apple will be selling next year and I'm sure you can have a ton of fun with budget ones as well.

But yet... Why VR goggles can't be found in homes the same way that TVs, mobile phones and other popular electronic products despite that they are already affordable? Why hasn't this technology became mainstream? Is it maybe due to the fact that the VR experience can't be shared the same way that when we turn on a TV, play with friends with a gaming console on the couch or sit down on a desk with a PC and we share its use? Is it because it lacks that mythical killer VR app that could be a gamer changer? Is it because the industry hasn't released as much software for VR as for other more common devices like consoles, PCs, mobile phones?

It feels as if there's still something inherently missing in VR that won't make you go and buy a pair of goggles no matter how technologically advanced they become. And people spend a lot of money on expensive phones, gadgets and the alike...

Maybe I'm wrong and shortsighted and the answer is actually trivial.

> If we go back in time to the mobile phone era, just before the iphone was released, the mobile market was actually flourishing and very solid

If we go further back in time, mobile phones were bricks used only by business people and tech enthusiasts. They didn't have mass market appeal because the technology wasn't there yet. Once devices got to be more powerful, compact and capable, everyone wanted one and the market exploded.

I suspect the same is happening with XR. Nobody wants to strap on a giant and clunky headset. But do you really not see the mass appeal in a pair of smart sunglasses that augments computing in a way we haven't experienced before?

The technology has the potential to disrupt computing as we know it, but it's _really_ hard to get right, which is why the experimental stage has lasted for so long. XR is _much_ more complicated than any computer interface we've had so far, and requires advancements in several cutting edge tech to align: display, battery, computer vision, voice recognition, miniaturization, etc., and, of course, the price to come down.

There's a reason all these companies are pushing so hard for this. We're still a few years away from reaching the iPhone-like boom, but Apple getting into the field is a sign that this is not a fad. This first generation is obviously not a mass market product, but the tech and price will improve until it becomes one.

> If we go further back in time, mobile phones were bricks used only by business people [...]

But they were widely used by business people, and I’m assuming that was an important aspect of permeating into the other demographics.

To me, what happened with cellphones is similar to what happened with personal computers. It first entered households of people that needed them for work, and as the tech evolved, so did their recreational capabilities making them more appealing to the mass market.

AR/VR devices are attempting this the other way around: their current use cases seem to be mostly recreational, and we are hoping they will eventually come up with some productivity use cases. Someone in this thread talked about how they are surprised that tablets have sort of flopped, and I feel it’s because of similar reasons. Sure there are now more and more ways to be productive on a tablet, but it’s still more of a consume-centric experience and I believe that’s the reason they haven’t replaced laptops. Time will tell.

> But they were widely used by business people, and I’m assuming that was an important aspect of permeating into the other demographics.

Similarly to how VR headsets are used by gamers and tech enthusiasts today. Just like VR for gaming, not everyone was willing to pay exhorbitant prices to lug around a briefcase of a phone, and use it only for poor quality phone calls.

> AR/VR devices are attempting this the other way around: their current use cases seem to be mostly recreational, and we are hoping they will eventually come up with some productivity use cases.

Sure, but the actual current use case doesn't matter. Once the capabilities, price and user experience improve, it will become more appealing to a mass audience.

Think of the iPhone: there were certainly devices that had the same functionality of "an iPod, a phone, and an internet mobile communicator" before it. But Apple saw the right opportunity when the tech got good and cheap enough to vastly improve the user experience and expand the capabilities beyond just a mobile phone. It's what they're good at.

> Someone in this thread talked about how they are surprised that tablets have sort of flopped

But tablets didn't flop. They got merged into 2-in-1s, foldables, "phablets", etc. They've certainly replaced laptops for many users. The only reason productivity is limited on devices like the iPad is because Apple wants to, for whatever reason (possibly to avoid cannibalizing sales of their other products?). But the iPad is still selling well, AFAIK, and many professionals use it. Google and Android never prioritized the tablet form factor, so it understandably lags behind. So productivity is restricted mostly because of software, and the touch interface makes it more suitable for consuming content. If you need to be productive and the software is not a problem, you add a mouse and keyboard, and there's your 2-in-1.

> Sure, but the actual current use case doesn't matter. Once the capabilities, price and user experience improve, it will become more appealing to a mass audience.

I'm not the poster you're replying to, but I think you've missed their point here.

Market penetration of mobile phones was (initially) driven by the advantages they provided as a work tool. This growing market that was willing to pay helped drive the cost vs. utility down to the point where non-business use cases became viable.

Goggles with screens in them have had a very different history. There are exceedingly few people/careers who have gotten a good ROI from buying and using a headset, so most sales are driven by entertainment (and a small number of enthusiasts).

Apple (and Meta) can definitely continue to subsidize the development of this technology to bring the price down, but expanding from a niche market for entertainment devices to a market of professional tools is the opposite of what's worked for new technologies in the past.

I get that, but my point is that it doesn't matter what the initial use case that drives adoption is. Whether the ROI is financial/business, or enjoyment from entertainment, there are early adopters willing to pay high prices and tolerate the poor UX for the tech to improve.

This is clearly Apple's angle with this product. They understand that this is not a mass market product, but are betting on their brand appeal for it to sell well enough to finance later generations.

You might be right that it won’t matter in the long run. But I’d argue that targeting gamers and tech enthusiasts is going to make it harder to reach mass market adoption.

For instance, with computers, laptops and cell phones being first and foremost business tools it was common in the early days for those to be provided by the employers. That really played a big role in normalizing their presence around the home before they became mainstream products.

I have a hard time seeing a similar thing happening with these goggles, but I’m far from being an expert in these things.

Yes, that was what I was trying to articulate. Thank you for phrasing it more clearly.

> If we go further back in time, mobile phones were bricks used only by business people and tech enthusiasts. They didn't have mass market appeal because the technology wasn't there yet.

Mobile phones are something of a special case, if you ask me, because the technology for voice calls and several days of standby time arrived quite a bit before affordable service did.

In 1988 a stockbroker could make calls from his speedboat for $250/month, and by 1998 a teenager could call his parents after soccer practice for $10/month.

You could describe that as "the technology getting there" because of more efficient radio signalling schemes enabling lower prices. But you could also say the user offering was unchanged[1], and the most important difference was the price.

[1] Except for SMS and the snake game

I don't think the experience needs to be shared.

Steve Jobs was making a comparison to headphones https://youtu.be/bQECSInWVPY

That is the way I think of it. A pair of headphones for your eyes.

Well, if you look back at the history of Apple, most of their popular products were considered unnecessary, especially including the iPhone. Of the Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, AirPods and Apple Watch, I don't think any of them were immediate hits except (ironically) for the iPad.

The thing about Apple is that they iterate in meaningful ways over a long period of time. I'm unlikely to buy this first version of Apple Vision Pro. But in a few years, I expect some later version of it is likely to be as indispensable to me as my noise cancelling headphones.

> If we go back in time to the mobile phone era, just before the iphone was released, the mobile market was actually flourishing and very solid: companies like nokia, motorola and blackberry managed to make mobile phones something as common as a TV, almost everyone had one.

Apple doesn't always go into a flourishing industry though. Tablets were not doing well when Apple launched the iPad. The smart watch industry (and traditional watch industry) were shrinking.

Computing platforms have a tendency to become conversion devices, and have a pricing advantage over individual devices. Phones became car GPS replacements and mid-tier photo/video cameras. iPads became an ebook alternative for many. Apple Watch took on fitness tracking and more 'quantified self' roles.

It wasn't clear at launch what was likely or unlikely to succeed. Fashion-tier Apple Watches pretty much failed. iPads have a difficult time competing with eBook reader screens and portability. Fitness trackers maintain a battery life advantage over the Apple Watch.

> But yet... Why VR goggles can't be found in homes the same way that TVs, mobile phones and other popular electronic products despite that they are already affordable? Why hasn't this technology became mainstream? Is it maybe due to the fact that the VR experience can't be shared the same way that when we turn on a TV, play with friends with a gaming console on the couch or sit down on a desk with a PC and we share its use? Is it because it lacks that mythical killer VR app that could be a gamer changer? Is it because the industry hasn't released as much software for VR as for other more common devices like consoles, PCs, mobile phones?

Possibly all of them? I draw parallels between an Oculus and the Nintendo 3DS. Compared to other game consoles, it isn't an easily 'sharable' experience. Software had to be custom-developed for it to take advantage of its capabilities (two screens, one with touch and one with 3D display).

Some of the adoption was made easier by being software-compatible with the DS platform, meaning it launched with backward compatibility with an established library of games. If you liked the DS, you were mostly guaranteed not to be giving anything critical up with the 3DS.

That said, it was still gimmicky, and was still too expensive for some of their target demographics while also being a bit limited in terms of technology. The price was cut by a third, a model with a larger and higher quality array of screens was unveiled, while cheaper 2D models also shipped which were priced closer to what parents were looking to spend.

It sold about 77 million units over nine years across all models.

Compare that to the Nintendo Switch, which sold over 125 million units (across all models) in its first six years. It is more versatile (being both a personal handheld and tv-attached unit), more easily shared and perceived as less gimmicky. It launched at about $10 more when adjusting for inflation, without game backward compatibility but with a store where you could purchase ported titles.

A big part of the success of the Wii and the Switch are that they are suitable for more casual gameplay, including party play. This is something that VR is not great at, as you need to fit hardware for every player switch and it is rare (and expensive) to have local multiplayer.

I would say the Wii overcame the gimmicky nature of the controller interactions via Wii Sports; yet another outstanding showcase game for the system, on par with Tetris for the Gameboy. The multiplayer physical interaction and open nature of play set a tone for the system in general.

> It feels as if there's still something inherently missing in VR that won't make you go and buy a pair of goggles no matter how technologically advanced they become. And people spend a lot of money on expensive phones, gadgets and the alike...

Games are a hard lead-in - console-like devices such as the Quest are going to have significant limitations for cost, while hardware integrating with higher-end gaming rigs are naturally a low volume market. You can't really have a game like Guitar Hero for it because of how private and difficult-to-adjust it is.

Industrial applications are far easier, but lower volume on high margin hardware. I imagine you are talking about more of a consumer/prosumer adoption.

Workforce is confusing. I kinda enjoy the idea of Apple both mandating the engineers working on VR functionality come into the office. As an employee, it feels like workforce always skimps on per-seat investments, and will only consider hardware like this if an all-in-one headset "spatial computer" is cheaper than their bulk-order laptop.

But that said, the most difficult part is to keep people from trying to reinvent EVERYTHING as if it all has to be a 3D experience. There are certainly 3D tasks which are difficult to do with 2D tools (such as CAD), but there's also 2D tasks like word processing that make little sense to reinvent as 3D tasks.

Apple seems to be targeting it as an alternative to an iPad or MacBook Air, with backward compatibility to run iPad apps as 2D surfaces, and the ability to operate a Mac "screen". They seem to have invested quite a bit in screen quality to make presenting existing apps at existing text sizes feasible.

That approach is also understandable because that is the computing market Apple goes after. I have a hard time thinking this "Pro" headset would launch without a medium-term plan to get something in more of a $1500 price range. Apple Pro products generally exist because Apple thinks they should, and to let the higher BoM let them explore new technologies that aren't yet feasible on their baseline consumer hardware. But in all cases, Apple seems to try to go after gaps in the market where they don't see other companies investing in a particular experience.

I would agree that the putting goggles over your face is absurd and it will never be a hit, not in a million years. However! Having that proof of concept to be able to manipulate your environment with just a gesture of your fingers and simply by looking at something - this I believe can be extended to external cameras, screens, and all sorts of IoT devices.

The eye tracking uses multiple cameras centimetres from your face. Eye and gesture tracking don't require expensive VR hardware projects to code up.

Not to mention how dry your eyes would be from wearing that thing for hours, like seriously, why is no one talking about that?

I have used several VR devices. Never had a problem with dry eyes.

>why is no one talking about that?

Because it is not an issue for most people?

Because dry eyes is not an issue that plagues the majority of people.

And whilst you do blink less whilst wearing VR glasses it's on par with looking at a computer screen.

It's not like it prevents you from blinking

Why would your eyes be drier? If anything they'd be more moist because there's less air movement around them right?

Also moisture is trapped in the enclosure between eye and screen.

I can give you an anecdotal "indicator":

Been a gamer my entire life.

Ever since getting into VR 4 years ago, I basically haven't played a single "flat" (non-VR) game.

> pursuit of... what exactly

Experiences that you literally cannot get in real life without going to jail or dying. It's the same value proposition that gaming in general provides, but far more immersion and realism.

Or read a book and use your imagination.

An interesting comment because it’s so contrary to my lived experience as a backer of Oculus DK1, among many other VR attempts going back to the VFX1 in 1995.

> for the pursuit of. . . What exactly?

Experience. Fun. Productivity. Emotion. All of the same things we look at screens for. I’m surprised that’s not clear.

People (homo sapiens) have sought these things in many mediums for as long as we’ve been sapiens. There is nothing categorically different about seeking these things in the kind of immersion that (so far) only headsets can give.

In the future we’ll have glasses and then BCI. I’m excited for both.

But if you’re seeing XR as pushed by waves hands with no consume pull or enthusiast hacking, I think you’re not looking with truly open eyes.

You are an enthusiast, that's pretty clear. OP gives sober perspective of regular Joe, who didn't have VR as a wet dream since early childhood. That's perspective of vast majority in this world.

If you connect only with people in same echo chambers, you will invariably have very skewed perspective on real world, and you will not grok similar opinions.

Personal viewpoint - I was VR enthusiast since 90s. Then I sobered up when I grew up, and that seamless trouble-free experience that would make me want to spend time in VR instead of big screen never came. Still waiting for it.

Also people change, and thus markets change. I have much less free time, thus I value it massively. I am not going to spend it (on top of ridiculous amount of cash) on some geeky almost-there-in-next-5-years tech. But who knows, maybe Apple will finally make breakthrough on society and tech level. Maybe in 5 years. Or next 5. Till then, my cashflow will be pointed to matter actually important in life, and mighty useful right now, like new climbing shoes.

Also, where is actual content worthy of such investments?

> OP gives sober perspective of regular Joe, who didn't have VR as a wet dream since early childhood

Yes, the average Joe doesn't care about this stuff. That's why Ready Player One grossed 600 million dollars at the box office[0]. And why we've had movies like Tron since the 80's. And hypothetical tech in movies like Iron Man display AR/VR capabilities we dream about. Clearly the average Joe doesn't concern themselves with AR/VR or care about it becoming a reality. /s

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Player_One_(film)#:~:t....

>we are talking about people (homo sapiens) putting a major something on their heads that dramatically takes over their visual field for the pursuit of... what exactly? That is the puzzle.

A far better screen real estate to hardware size ratio than you can get if you dont put something on your head.

Most office workers have been using two or more 22 inch or far larger monitors for a decade now. People buy the largest televisions in their budget and are impressed when their buddy gets a new bigger one. Movie theatres 1) exist when television ownership is common and 2) advertise it when they have particularly big screens.

Laptops make up like half of all computer sales. Plenty of people have been trying to make working on tablets work to shave down a bit more size. Phones are frequently used for media consumption.

If I wasn't a person who existed in the world and used devices, it'd still be perfectly obvious to me that people want to see a lot of stuff at once but they also don't want to lug around the things necessary to do that. I am a person who exists in the world though and therefore have this very problem. I carry a phone everywhere I go and sometimes find myself giving up on tasks, or it not even occurring to me to try them, because I know they'll be a lot easier when I have my laptop. I carry it to less places and find myself doing the same thing, leaving off tasks until I'm at my desk, which I carry nowhere.

I keep seeing people mention an aha moment or killer app needed to make these devices make sense and I honestly dont get it. It doesn't need to satisfy some new want to be incredibly successful. It just needs to be a laptop with far more screen real estate than any actual laptop.

Agree. Indeed it's still looking for the breakthrough. The question is whether it's just around the corner like a surprising threshold to usefulness (E.g. like GPT models) or if it's still decades out.

I think there aren't enough people who will want to wear it for games or social media. Not because it's a bad experience, but because it's an expensive and cumbersome experience and it's just not THAT much better than just staring at a small screen. The user base can't motivate spending billions on creating the experiences that would grow the user base significantly.

What I think could be the breakthrough thing is the combination of AI and VR. Interactive agents and possibly also something to cheaply create that holodeck experience for rendering (NeRFs with foveal rendering, whatever - I'm an amateur skimmer of papers and extrapolating research is difficult even for experts). But imagine the difference in development costs between a VR experience where some interior space is modeled by hand in minute detail in Unreal engine, and NPCs are scripted, versus one where a space is merely captured in RFs and the NPCs are GPT bots with some plot instructions. Both of those technologies (NeRFs and GPT NPCs) would have sounded like science fiction even to the creators of the Quest2, yet here we are. I would have said "no one would ever buy/wear this" 5 years ago, but with the idea of a mind blowing photorealistic interactive murder mystery developed on a shoestring budget (Not to mention: porn - never underestimate it) I'm not so sure any more.

One of the most persistently irritating parts of being deep in this space is people loudly proclaiming what it is that VR is truly missing.

The answer is not only different for different people, but very different for some of them. It's a way for trans people to express their real gender in a way that seriously alleviates their dysphoria, or for people to explore sexuality in a place they are fully equipped to defend themselves in, and discover that their biases or prejudices were weaker than they thought, or outright reaction formations to their real-life environment.

Still others use it as an artistic outlet, a mechanism for connecting to people across the world, a sandbox with which to experiment with and learn certain pieces of technology.

It's been juiced up by Facebook money, sure. It's not purely motivated by that by a long shot. There's a demand and perhaps an oversupply in some respects, but the experiences achievable are legitimately delightful if you know how to look for them. Fantastic escape rooms, beautiful gardens, relaxing rooms, sleepy hideouts, fantasy worlds. This is all happening and has been happening for years.

There are of course serious caveats, such as some people being simply physically unable to tolerate it.

It's a rough piece of technology early in its lifetime and it's got a lot of road to cover, but it's already nailed a level of immersion into an artificial world that nothing else has come even remotely close to - and it's everything else that sucks to some moderate degree and needs to catch up and surpass the norm.

Transsexuals and furries... So these are the best use cases for VR after all these years? Really?

You see a bench in your garden, and you cannot sit on it. That's just very disappointing. I don't even want to translate that into the sexual domain ...

The idea of VR/AR is super exciting, and beat saber is super fun. The reason why beat saber is super fun is because it manages to transcend the visual only aspect of VR. I don't see how this can be done in general. Unless you can go full Holodeck, I don't see the general appeal for most things. Immersive cinema is certainly a nice application, 3D-avatar facetime is not.

Regarding your second paragraph.. These headsets right now can only be powered by the resources a big corp can bring to bear. And big tech has a tendency to relentlessly surveil everyone... collecting and hoarding data is the politer term for that.

Given that tendency, the arbitrariness of automated processes that decide whether or not you're banned from an account or platform, and the culture wars, I would be suspicious of consequences down the road from trusting big tech with such intimacy.

The discussion is about massive tech companies investing giant piles of cash into the technology, making the bet it will be the next mainstream platform.

If yourself and some others are having awesome experiences already, no one is doubting or downplaying that.

Why can't more immersive entertainment be an exciting goal and vision? That alone is amazing. To have an entire movie theater in any room in your house or in an airplane.

Or gaming.

It can, but that only appeals to gaming or movie/TV aficionados, and otherwise is only for very occasional use as a novelty. It’s not something that would become an integral part of most people‘s life like a smartphone.

> It can, but that only appeals to gaming or movie/TV aficionados

I think you just described something like 95%+ of the US population. TV and movies and games are exceedingly popular.

Most of them usually watch the Currently Popular Thing on their phone with their $50 headphones. That's not what an aficionado does.

That’s not what “aficionados” means.

Personally I love the immersive feeling, at least for some experiences. IMAX movies are a level up from normal cinema, which is a level up from TV.

I would think though that if that is the main target use you don't need to strap a computer on your head.

Crucially, I don't want the hassle of a headset to play something like Civ. """immersion""" doesn't add anything to that experience, and is actually a massive distraction

I said before somewhere else that I want to be invested in video games and their stories, characters, worlds.

I don't particularly want to be immersed in Slender or Diablo or MTG.

part if it is to extend my house - I have tiny rooms, in VR I am in a giant open world.

Same on the plane or train. I can wonder a beach or sail the ocean.

Will try to take a crack at this. Two underlying principles I think will drive the Vision pro are:

1. The need to live vicariously / voyeuristically: it’s possible for me to at least a two-sense experience of sky diving, bungee jumping, F1 / motor cross racing, and many others, including some darker more voyeuristic experiences like sex with someone out of my league, or unfortunately even extremes like murder / suicide. While the extremes are bad, there’s a lot of market for meeting desires in the middle.

2. Current efforts that have physics limitations: I’d like to make my multi-monitor setup on to a couch or car or plane, or even just have more monitors at my desk than my desk allows. I’d like a bigger TV in my small room. These things I want are big, expensive, and limited by physics and money, and the Vision makes them available to me.

So these two things are the killer apps for me - experiences which I would otherwise not have access to, and the removal of physics burdens in my daily work setup.

We are quite far from producing that kind of video at scale. The current 360 degree videos are horrible quality fishbowl looking experiences.

But the Vision stereo cameras might be able to pull it off. Not necessarily in 360 (though Apple was showcasing some environments there as well), but at least from a single POV, taking viewers along for the ride.

Your answer as to the "end goal" was downvoted to death: "to inject advertising/manipulation and surveillance into every remaining aspect of your life."

The thing is, although it was downvoted, nobody responded to it. Given that every trend in computing technology is to make it more seamless, more integrated, less downtime; and data was the new oil on which AI is fueled; and that only a handful of Big Tech companies control the way most laypeople do computing; and, that these trends show signs not of stopping but of accelerating, explain how that answer is wrong.

Silicon Valley does not value anything that can't be quantified, because value, by computer logic, must always be represented by a number. And since software will eat the world, therefore it must be a law of the universe (as in, might makes right) that the summation of you is a sum - a number - to be used in a greater calculation, for someone else's profit.

Did that glimpse in the mirror show you a side of yourselves you desperately wish to believe didn't exist?

I fully agree, and to go one step "further" in that reasonning, there seems to be two ways on that street: one is the massive headset, which is a pain and whose only viable purpose for which people will accept wearing it seem to be gaming, and the other is the invisible headset in the continuation of google glass, which is less of a headset and more of a small addition to your everyday life.

I'm very weirded out to see all of them go with the massive option. A google glass oriented solution with 2023 level of tech and that can be adapted to any/most pair of glasses but offering much more limited functions (pictures/photo, maps/gps, notification, light AR, ...) would have much more appeal to every day life.

Not saying it's easy, not saying it would work, but it feels like it would be an easier challenge to convince people to wear that all the time.

If we're to believe this, Apple is working on it but thinks it will be four years at minimum before it's good enough to be usable https://www.tomsguide.com/news/apple-glasses

Everything looks like a gimmick until it isn't. Even when the iphone was released nobody would ever be able to comprehend the reach it has today. I think we are waiting for hardware to "catch up" and its getting closer + people's aversion to wearing something like this (aka google glass .. prob too ahead) + the right ecosystem and company to take this to market (maybe apple is the one?).

For me personally I wanted to jump on board the spacial computing for reasons like being able to work in any location but have my awesome setup. Current systems have terrible resolution or are bulky, but I can see the promise. Current entertainment avenues are not tapped (imagine courtside sports seats anywhere, novel ways to engage users, porn, etc.)

This feels like a technology that will be ‘ready’ in ten (twenty?) years, but to dismiss it now a) feels unimaginative and b) precludes that from ever happening.

Do I want to wear big goggles? No. Do I, one day, want a device that can magically project anything I want on to my field of vision, and for it to be as realistic as my actual vision?

Hell yeah I do! And we can’t get there unless we go through the ski goggles phase. So, here we are.

I feel the same way about people complaining that the headphone jack was removed. ‘The phone is thin enough!’, they say. No it isn’t! My god where’s your imagination. The phone is good enough when it’s wafer thin and I can have it protein-printed on my arm or whatever.

The first time (I am aware of) people experimenting with immersive computing experience was in the nineties CAVE @ ncsa [1]. It has not really taken off and I don't think its down to device specifics.

It is possible that there is a non-linear threshold type thing (Like LLM's requiring billions of parameters before doing a decent imitation of human language) that has prevented (thus far) making this technology really interesting.

[1] http://www.visbox.com/products/cave/

I alreday feel exhausted when I walk my town because there's so many information to process: front of shops, advertising, road signs, people, cars, bikes, nice buildings,... If I had to add yet antoher layer of information on top of that, it would be exhausting.

Now, if I was someone who works in construction, I'd be happy to have glasses that add the position of eletrical wire in the wall where I'm going to drill a hole :-)

Real AR glasses could also edit out the existing distracting information, like an ad blocker. I guess technically that would not be AR, but DR (diminished reality).

The iGlasses could just as easily block information making a walk through downtown Manhatten look like a stroll through the woods. Use at your own risk :)

If the headsets are good enough you could actually use them to remove information from your view as you walk instead of adding more to it.

These glasses for industrial purposes have already existed for a number of years

> I alreday feel exhausted when I walk my town because there's so many information to process: front of shops, advertising, road signs, people, cars, bikes, nice buildings

Ok, but you're certainly atypical in this respect.

Feels a bit like 3d movies. The producers can practically taste a fresh new market, just have to get the consumers stampeding.

I don't think there's been the Avatar equivalent yet, and though it might take a bit longer, I think there will still be a tipping point where enough people realise it's garbage and Zuckerberg is thrown into a long dark well forever. Followed by the peoples' tim cook right to the stomach.

Slightly more seriously, this stuff reminds me of that book Snow Crash (which I love). But it's never going to be like that, and even if it was, the virtual world aspect of that is a bit of a horrible dystopia. It's like a drug.

Feels a lot like 3D movies . Don't think immersion provides the value or demands the purchasing price that people think it does. I mean, people still play dwarf fortress for god's sake. Look at how popular 8-bit things are. Animated movies, games, sawtooth waveform music.

At a certain point, the real value of realism is in being able to fake it. Which is a little bit of a scary thing I guess when the wrong actors use it for for lying and misleading.

CoD isn't one of the most popular games because it accurately recreates the experience of being in a massive world war

I'm currently seeing it like the introduction of the ipad. At first I was snarky about "what is this even for? It's way too expensive. Why would anyone use one? It's just a big phone" And they were mainly bought by people with disposable income.

Where as nowadays tablets have become a staple and it's very common to own one, and often not own a computer. I ate my words.

So at the moment there's a few players in the VR/AR landscape, maybe something big will come of it, maybe it won't. But I think it's too early to tell

I was so skeptical about the iPad, I really didn't understand the audience when it was introduced. I could do everything on my iPhone already anyway, it's just bigger and not a phone.

Little did I know that the iPad would slowly take away my time spent on my iPhone. So now I have a $1000 iPhone that I don't use that much (except when not at home), and I have an additional $750 iPad I spend 4+ hours / day on.

Not sure what happened, but I couldn't go back to just my iPhone anymore.

Some of the games are good. It’s a little surprising how immersive the primitive current devices are. My kids do the psvr pretty heavily for a weekend and then leave it for weeks without touching it. I think it’s the interface that is wonky but that will get better.

Immersive is the key here. There are entertainment things where I think that could be killer, maybe seeing a concert from impossible to get vantage points, maybe viewing the nfl game from on the field, maybe some movies and some games. Do I want to be immersed in work? I’ll write code and you know what I do at times? I go outside for a walk, my quality goes up and the problems get solved. Same thing doing data analysis, I’ll find some interesting bits and then I need to think, maybe I could have more ‘screen real estate” in VR but I don’t know if I want it, need it, or could actually use it.

There is something about production to consider too. There are things in the nfl games that you don’t see, maybe some people want to, I’m pretty sure a lot don’t want to. “Taking some football outa guys” is a thing. Someone on another thread mentioned climbing Everest; you never do that for the views, people actually die doing it and then others just sort of pass by their dead bodies because the quest they are on is so so very different than seeing the world from the top of Everest. Maybe that’s the point, but it’s not for everyone.

> Their VR "visions" differ but only at the margin. No matter how you execute it, we are talking about people (homo sapiens) putting a major something on their heads that dramatically takes over their visual field for the pursuit of... what exactly? That is the puzzle.

I definitely think VR/AR is the next big think, but not via headsets, but via holograms or whatever it takes to get rid of physical screens and mouses (peripherals in general). You tell me I can have a huge 4K "hologram screen" projecting whatever is on my phone by just clicking a button? I'm sold. I mean, why would I read HN on my tiny phone if I can read it in a 13inch hologram display being projected from my wrist while I'm on the bus? Or a 30inch display when I'm on my couch? Same for whatever you do on the internet.

What Apple has showned us in the demo is the future... but not with headsets (if I go to the supermarket to buy milk, I'm not taking my headset, if I go to the bathroom I'm not taking my headset, if I'm taking the public transportation I'm not taking my headset).

You may think "high definition holograms" are just too sci-fi, but I don't think so. In any case, headsets are just too clumsy. Perhaps Apple's v2 for their headsets becomes just some glasses ala Google glass? In that case I don't know, maybe that gets traction if implemented correctly.

Well, keep in mind that every yokel with a PS4/5 or Xbox plays Fifa and CoD etc now. Tonnes of people have a switch/had a DS etc.

I remember gaming even like early-mid 2000s was a "geeky/nerdy" thing to do. Now everyone(ish) plays games. Browsing the web was a geeky thing to do & tbh I kind of miss how the Internet was without the masses of the general population; the Internet has changed.

But the same thing will happen to VR, Valve/HTC and Facebook created a burgeoning market that Apple is now trying to capitalise on and "bring to the masses hurr durr".

But VR/AR will be very big eventually, imo. Once prices get down to a mid-flagship phone level, once hardware is lightweight and small like a pair of glasses, easy & convenient to set up and more non-gaming applications that make sense for AR/VR are available it will take off. Maybe not with older gens but that's been true for all of history.

To me it is obvious:

Most of the FAMAG is concerned about advertising (Apple the least, but still), while life nowadays is all about signal to noise. The bandwidth is there, 24/7 connectivity is there, wrt smartphones. Its the noise which can be reduced further, which would increase productivity. What is noise? Stuff you don't want to see, suggestions, lower priority vs higher priority (ie. what is really important to you vs clickbait), and, yes: advertising.

If I could just block all advertising with a AR/VR glasses I'd easily shell out 1k EUR every 2 years for the hardware (not 3k, but YMMV as I don't earn a Netflix dev wage). In fact, perhaps a good UI on it could replace a smartphone. Except, the smartphone UI is going to be in (comparison) mature, its very unlikely a new hardware interface is going to be great right away. Smartwatch needed time (and cannot replace smartphone full-time at all), smartphone needed time (vs desktop/laptop, see mid '00s before capacitive touch), foldables are going to fill the niche which tablets/phablets provide, and now we got a hardware UI like this released by Apple (yes, I'm aware of predecessors including Meta/Facebook Quest, Magic Leap, and Google Glass). Also, it has the disadvantage of being visually omnipresent to others. A Google Glass is much less obvious. And yeah, walking around in Amsterdam with OSM AR (no, not Google) for all the buildings but without all the advertising would (after transition period) be a massive, massive plus to me. Add Wikipedia on top of it, with TTS and voice input pivoted towards my own voice as a bonus. Heck, I wouldn't even mind if I could just blacklist certain buildings like Nutella bars and red light distract. Yes, I can see it as a future, but not by FAMAG (Musk isn't sane enough; it'd be someone sane with deep pockets who's not into advertising).

That's why I always believe Google's Glasses and their vision were way ahead of their time - they were not strapping a big device to your head like all these other ones. Unfortunately, for legal and whatever reasons it didn't take off. But as a person who already wears prescription glasses I'd have definitely wanted to wear that instead.

I think a virtual space has plenty of obvious benefits for productivity and immersion.

The main problem seems to be the execution. Nobody wants to have a huge thing attached to their head for hours. Maybe this will change if headset become as lightweight as regular glasses but we're still very far away from that.

Lots of it is about the execution.

I went through 2 PCVR headsets and I'd never think: oh this is going to be mainstream (in the present state!).

Those headsets are not comfortable (sweaty); the hardware needed for anything realistic is top tiers; it takes PhD/time to configure (and goes out of sync!); the software ecosystem was(is?) not super stable; the interaction (controllers, tracking) is sometimes awkward (controllers are big, interfere with keyboard and real world). Often it small things like comfortable physical head position vs. position in VR world are not "lined up"

We'd laugh that it takes as much time to get into the VR plane simulator as to drive to the airport to fly real plane!

Compare a VR kit to a monitor pair, or a game controller (imo VR is kind of a cross of the 2) - both are mostly plug an play.

I'm changing my simracing rig from VR to triple-monitors for this reason. (And also the narrow FOV). When it works it's amazing. At least I can pretend the sweaty visor is because I'm wearing a racing helmet. But every 2 weeks or so something messes up and I have to spend an hour or two resetting things and reinstalling things.

Also only a few simracing games have really good VR support.

... the pursuit of... what exactly? That is the puzzle.

I remember similar thoughts about the first wave of tablets. And the first generation or so weren't great. But, the technology matured and now people can use an iPad instead of a full PC for most home uses.

My first try with a VR headset was in 1994, with DOOM.

Since then my opinion has hardly changed that these are gimmicks, and mostly unusable by people with eye sight issues, where already dealing with natural light is an issue, let alone tiny screens a couple of cms away.

Circa that time was also (in more professional context) the NCSA CAVE immersive visualization project.

For good measure, this was also the time of the Mosaic browser.

I think three decades is enough to suspect that if there was some unique added value from the VR concept (that goes beyond some very small niches), it would have been adopted more broadly, even with imperfect technologies.

Future developments (~5-10 yr) in other parts of the digital universe may bring use cases that are currently not visible to people with limited imagination. But usually short-termist corporates launching major products here-and-now does feel a bit odd to me.

Who knows, time will certainly tell.

Pixel density is a bit higher in the Apple Vision Pro. Might be less of an issue.

Doesn't make a difference for light sensitivity issues.

Have you actually tried it though?

I would be willing to buy this argument if anyone who actually used the device were reporting these issues.

I doubt they would fix issues like photophobia, or high light sensitivity.

Why is wearing this headset worse for light sensitivity than not wearing the headset?

I see it more like the Vision Pro is the bulky Apple II equivalent (in a very positive, optimistic way) of what spatial computing is going to be - and perhaps Dynamicland was another take at the same « target ».

It’s bulky because/in the sense, how much top technology and work has been designed into it to validate and refine even further the vision with more users and developers.

It’s also bulky in an other sense, because how massive it is to wear still; and how social etiquette around it barely exist (but is also taken into account/proposed/embedded in this first public iteration).

It definitely make sense because it opens a really opiniated conceptual door to a different way of interacting with computers.

>There is a missing aha moment around this type of interface that would justify the major behavioral adjustment that is required for it to be adopted as a general purpose interface rather than a gimmick.

Quick question, have you used the HTC Vive?

I have used tons of VR, and they are all cool for about 2 minutes, except the Vive. The Vive was the game changer. Walking around a room, interacting, etc..

The other versions either look bad, have bad controls, etc... Quality VR isnt accessible for $100 despite companies offering you a box for your cellphone. You do need to spend over $1000 to participate in good VR. It prices out lots of people, and the low cost version pushes people away.

According to some people who have tested it, it is amazing to use it to watch a movie, watch a big screen and the 3D effect, the Vision Pro is just a television from the future.

Interesting that on that basis, $3500 is probably about on a par with a really nice OLED big-screen TV and surround sound system.

One person only though, not a shareable experience.

Like others, I'm waiting for this to come to a spectacles / sunglasses formfactor. An external box would be fine, I just wouldn't be able to bear wearing what looks like metal ski-goggles for any significant period of time.

The end goal is Ready Player One world dominance.

The sticking point is the tech is several years off the miniaturisation and power needed to enable the comfortable switching of worlds.

The actual sticking point is that nobody actually wants "ready player one", even people who think they do.

VRChat and RecRoom exist today and are available to anyone, anywhere with an internet connection. They do not have millions of players because "meet strangers in a virtual environment that can be ANYTHING" is a novelty, not something you want to do every day.

I say this as someone who literally spent hours every weekend during the pandemic raving (yes really) and socializing in VR chat. Your average person doesn't want to be spammed with half naked Anime Waifu avatars and dinosaurs with boobs

The key for me will be if it can meet it's core proposition of making a virtual world as good as the real one.

At a basic level of I'd be willing to binge netflix on it rather than a TV. That would be the start.

What if I preferred it to going to the cinema? Already a win.

What if it can make it feel like you're having lunch in a restaurant? Perfect.

It doesn't really do any of these things. More like having wallpaper of a photograph of a restaurant

There are already applications on the Quest to use your physical keyboard, and either see it (AR) or see a representation of your keyboard as well as your hands.

Yeah but they are pants.

I'd have to go 10 rounds with Tyson Fury to experience reality like the quest feels.

I think the aha moment is essentially having spatial computing but without wearing a computer on your face. So “Minority Report.”

> the right combination of hardware and software > this is actually an empowering piece of tech

People wear sunglasses to avoid eye contact, Roddy Pipers character wore one in the movie "They Live" to see the real message - I would love one that blocks irl ads. Perhaps when they're small and hackable enough.

There's a saying, if you don't believe in VR, you haven't played Half Life: Alyx.

Joking aside, I do think gaming is important to bootstrap VR. Once it's cheap enough and many people have it, it will be much easier to build other things. Personally I think interactive 3D story-telling could be a big one.

I think Alyx has a lot of potential to be great, as do a lot of other games. However, so far I haven't used a headset that's comfortable with high enough fidelity to make me want to play through the game. I agree that 3d story-telling especially with interactivity and even group participation could be huge. An escape room meets It Takes Two meets The Last Of Us seems like it could be awesome.

the index worked perfectly fine. it was an amazing experience. jeff gave me nightmares

> All major (ad)tech companies are convinced that this is a major market that will materialize and be profitable if the right combination of hardware and software is developed.

Does Google have a VR play? They explored this with Glass 10 years ago, but that's dead and they don't seem interested in developing a successor.

Never got glasses but I still have some cardboards :-).

The data point for the discussion is that at some point they did think that this might be an interesting direction.

The “what” is some immersive experience. IMHO Zuck understood it better than Apple and tried to build that experience with the Metaverse. Although it tanked it was in principal the right choice. You have to give something more than just a spatial computer otherwise you solve no problem and offer no incentive.

If you take this reasoning further you will realize you don't actually need any technology in your life.

> we are talking about people (homo sapiens) putting a major something on their heads that dramatically takes over their visual field for the pursuit of... what exactly?

In the simulation field, the advances are already major. There is a huge gap in the gaming experience when playing simulation games for instance.

The difference is fidelity and accuracy of experience are ONLY important to simulation turbo nerds.

Call of Duty would not be a bigger franchise if it gave you trenchfoot for example.

> So far at least, this is a tech that is being pushed onto people rather than being pulled. I don't think this was the case with any of the major steps in the development of digital computing but would be quite interested if people can think of historical precedent.

Not computing but 3D TV and 3D movies ?

Is there any movie today that anyone releases exclusively in 3D? I can imagine maybe Avatar 2, but for the vast majority of AAAA blockbusters, they are available in either version, and the 3D is really just a gimmick.

And 3D TVs are not remotely common.

So 3D TV/cinema seems to be a counter-example - a technology that was pushed hard, but has generally failed to become anywhere close to mainstream, nor to continue moving in that direction.

3D movies/TV are the perfect example: It's been PUSHED SUPER HARD for decades by execs who swear up and down the improvement in immersion will be life changing and utterly reinvent the entire industry but oh oh oh the tech just isn't here yet but you just wait it will totally take over everything.

In reality, 3D would not have made the new ghostbusters a better movie. Nobody watches a movie for "immersion", they watch it for a story.

Sorry, the question - that I quoted - didn't asked specifically for a successful tech or a current unproven tech.

One thing would be you could go to the movies in your lounge, watching a massive screen. That could be cool.

You can do that on something like the Quest 2 for $399, yet that didn't take over the world.

That "feature" just isn't that enticing.

It might've been ahead of its time. There is a funny thing that Apple are good at where early adopters decide they're going for something, they "invest", an ecosystem develops, the price goes down (or more models appear, some cheaper) and people start prioritising buying that thing. Tesla also, with their sequences of car releases.

I'm not saying this will follow that pattern, just that low adoption of a lower price product that can technically do something isn't necessarily evidence of failure of the idea.

>we are talking about people (homo sapiens) putting a major something on their heads that dramatically takes over their visual field for the pursuit of... what exactly? That is the puzzle.

IRL adblock, please. I'd pay up to 5k if it worked decently well.

I see use cases for business. Using HoloLens / Vision Pro / AR instead of sending your engineers to Tokyo.

But for consumers? I mostly agree. It has a few nice gimmick features, but seems rather isolating and disrupting natural human interaction.

The point you’re missing, and with no fault of your own, is that this isn’t the end goal by any means. You’re right that this type of device will always be a niche market, indeed Apple are targeting just 1M units sold.

If you dig deep enough, you’ll find that the ubiquitous, always-on, socially acceptable form factor is indeed AR in the shape of glasses. As in Google Glasses but with infinitely more utility. The ability to do anything you can now on your phone and more, powered by a localized and shared augmented experience.

> What would be such indicators?

If you agree on the above as the end goal, one clear indicator of success is “how many times did you not take out your phone?”

Of course any expert in the field will tell you we’re 10+ years away from achieving such technology, due in no small part to the physics of optics and displays. But you can imagine the Apple VisionPro shrinking toward this end state.

some vr games seem like a lot of fun - beat saber in particular is good enough that if I could have bought an oculus without needing to tie it into an internet-of-shit account I would have just because I have seen a convincing proof of concept that I could get a few hundred dollars of entertainment over the lifetime of the device.

as for AR, google glass has demonstrated convincing value as a heads up display for factory floors and other places where people need to interact with complex machinery. I am excited about the potential in that.

Oh, it's very simple, when the next "emergency" comes by and everybody is locked in their tiny apartments, AR/VR/*verse will be ready.

mong us vr is already quite great actually, and I think you are spot on. Pandemics will become far more common unless we develop really effective vaccine/medication pipelines.

Not joking. Checkout VR porn. Then it hits you. Holy shit this is the future of media and entertainment. Something about perspective in VR gives a human touch of interactivity not possible with other media forms.

I have no doubt this new medium will revolutionize mainstream TV and Movies.

The infinite desk. Infinite whiteboard. Improved conferencing. Are just added bonuses.

>Not joking. Checkout VR porn. Then it hits you. Holy shit this is the future of media and entertainment. Something about perspective in VR gives a human touch of interactivity not possible with other media forms.

One of the most pathetic things I've ever heard. Gushing about immersive cuckoldry.

Media technology has seen past innovation on by the porn industry. A major VR selling point is entertainment. I say this less as gushing about omg porn. But more that immersion VR video at a human to human perspective changes video entirely. It feels more human. Feels like you aren’t looking at a celeb but a real human being. This will change the way we do TV, Social Media, and a Movies.

https://www.thrillist.com/vice/how-porn-influenced-technolog...

People keep parroting this "porn pushes tech" line, but what important algorithm or tech advancements have come out of mindgeek the past twenty years?

The oft repeated "VHS won because Beta didn't have porn" is flat out wrong, you could rent porn on Beta back in the day.

Kink-shaming on HN. Wow.

Man, I miss when the web was dominated by counter-cultural weirdos.

VR porn is a nice gimmick for a while, but most people aren't going to get $3500 invested in Porn.

If VR porn was that important to people, Google Cardboard would be a household name. Plenty of people have tried VR porn, and most go back to the same stuff they usually do for regular sessions.

Isn't VR porn just a stereoscopic look around? Google cardboard gets you 90% of that experience.

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I am seeing a rather clear (if incomplete) parallelism with 3D television (which, oddly, I never see mentioned, even by detractors). What was it, 10 years ago? All TV producers pushed it hard (it was impossible to buy a high end TV without it). AAA movie producers pushed it hard (a lot of blockbuster movies were _designed_ to be 3D first).

Just like with VR, the technology wasn't new: I had watched a 3D movie some 30 years ago at a theme park, liked it, threw up and passed out afterwards, for the first and only time in my life - doing it after a rollercoaster was not a great idea. Just like with VR, it required you to put something on your eyes that people found awkward - and ultimately, this was possibly what made them unpopular, if you want to relax, you don't want to focus on your hardware.

A bit like VR, the early glasses were cheap and disposable (just pieces of red/blue plastic); the "pro" versions with active filtering were significantly more expensive and technological. But for all that, they didn't solve the main issue, i.e. they weren't less intrusive, if nothing else more so (heavier, requiring batteries, etc.). In this case, I'm not sure if the Apple vision is a step forward or backward - if I understand correctly it makes the experience "better" than other visors, but it is also bulkier.

A lot of optimism on this technology comes from saying "it is not yet mature, give it time, the first iPhone was very limited, etc.". But the main issues I see seem just too hard to surpass in a few technological iterations: - The experience is limited to the eyes. No matter how magic Apple is, I'm not ready to believe that in 5 years wearing something as simple as a goggle will give me tactile feelings or anything else. Though I'll admit, 3D vision might be enough. - Battery power won't evolve tenfolds. The first iPhone didn't have a shorter battery life than the current ones, and that's because research for better batteries and more efficient CPUs is already cutting-edge - a 2x improvement would be huge already. Everybody just assumes it will get better, but not everything does, or at least not always fast enough. - The main issue everybody notices is lack of apps and, in general, something to do with it. Here, people cite the iPhone as an example of thing that developed a lot of apps, which made all the difference between the first and later versions. This might happen thanks to the Apple Vision Pro, but I'm not ready to believe it without proof. Just a few years ago, Apple pushed hard, very hard, the touch bar on basically all of its users. Certainly more than half the developers (not just mac developers; all developers) had it integrated in their working machine, whether they wanted it or not. Yet, I only saw apps starting integrating functionalities there years later, and it was often half-baked things, and even when they were not I found myself never using them - the old hotkeys, or the F-keys, were easier to memorize, and faster. And Apple did roll back on that, now I have again physical buttons which I very happily use to change screen light or volume.

All in all, maybe this technology will fly, maybe it won't, but if we look at the past we shouldn't forget the large fraction of technologies that didn't make it, or which at most thrived as a niche sector unlikely to ever explode. Not everything that Apple makes needs to be the new iPhone - and why should that be a problem, really?

lets be honest, facial recognition and some sort of longer distance hearing/tts. Also terminator hud, etc.

It's really not that difficult, you put the thing on your head and instantly have a three monitor setup whenever and wherever you want. And of course with the right software, you can go past that and use your whole surrounding as your "desktop", watch movies on a virtual IMAX screen, go full virtual realty or whatever else you can imagine.

The problem so far has simply been that none of the existing headsets work for this. Resolution needs to make it past 30 PPD to be usable for text. All the exiting consumer ones are between 10 and 20 PPD.

You also need the right software. SteamVR has basically nothing by default, you get a blurry view of your desktop if you go the menu and that's it. You can enhance it a little with Steam overlay addons, but it's all a crude "make desktop show up in VR", not a "userinterface build for VR". Oculus is a bit better, but still not great. Microsoft tried with WMR Portal to bring the full Windows desktop into VR and it is about the closest thing to what Apple is doing now, but it was still riddled with problems, lots of bugs and limitations that made it impossible to take full advantage of VR (max window size was restricted to 1920x1080, no way to anchor virtual windows to the real world, no real passthrough mode).

What Apple has shown so far look much better than anything else out there. The resolution is good enough that you can actually read text, the passthrough cameras are good enough that you can actually see and interact with the world around you in proper 3D and color and the software seems to be completely focused on making 2D content in a virtual space work well, something none of the other companies spend much effort on.

There is an alternative reality somewhere where VR went the other direction, focus on making it cheap and accessible and focus and producing proper full VR games, basically the original vision behind Oculus. That could have worked, Oculus delivered a couple of great games in the early days of VR and before Facebook joined them, they were even able to produce $300 headsets. But all that got derailed by Facebook, who raised the price to $600, gave up on PC based VR and forced everything on mobile. They also largely gave up on games and focused instead on "Metaverse", which means that the Quest2 games out know, still look a lot worse than what we had 6 seven years ago on CV1 or even DK1. The insane amount of money Meta has spend so far simply doesn't show in the actual product and especially not in the software.

Anyway, since this alternative reality didn't happen, we are now basically stuck waiting for VR headsets to get enough resolution that 2D content becomes enjoyable in them, as that's the only way VR will get content. Native VR content is still just too rare and the quality is often not great. Apple's VisionPro is the first device that crosses that threshold and has the software to go along with it.

TIL some people believe desktop computing is more natural than spatial computing

Believing (and preaching) is easy. Some tangible evidence is harder.

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Wasn’t this the same with computers? I remember that people didn’t want to use them about 25 years ago

People mostly still don’t want to use them, other than for texting and taking pictures.

" By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself."

Wait, I thought an Oculus does the same thing too. Its a blindfold on your face, and it doesnt matter if they are alone or in a crowd.

Mark has got to be terrified. The power of Apple is the tight and efficient integration of hardware and software.

Regarding battery power, I woukd not rule out versions that stream the video and outsource the computing to a mac or a standalone box, like Apple TV.

Regarding the experience, Apples seem to be far more coherent and natural rather than Oculususs. Imagine watching a movie, and mid way, trying to fumble around to get and orient the controllers. Absurd.

FB should be in panic mode. The 10 billion over 10 years is now a high risk spend.

Pretty sure Mark was actually counting on it. It doesn't make it a good idea, but Apple tends to set the bar for status symbols. Smartphones existed before the iPhone. PC laptops existed before MacBooks. Portable digital music players existed before iPods.

While not always successful, they actually add legitimacy to many of the markets they get into. Time will tell if it happens here; I'm not holding my breath.

>Smartphones existed before the iPhone. PC laptops existed before MacBooks.

You make a good point and I'd like to add to it. What is interesting is that all modern phone design grew out of the designs of the original iPhone and all modern laptops grew out of the design of the original Powerbook. If you scroll down on the second link below you'll see that the Powerbook is the first one that looks like a modern laptop.

https://www.cultofmac.com/145083/what-phones-looked-like-bef...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_laptops

I don’t think smartphone adoption was held back by the lack of a sufficient status symbol. Apple didn’t bring a revolutionary status symbol to market to make smartphone adoption explode. It brought a really good product that was valued because of how useful it was. Apple’s headset will take off if it proves to be actually useful, otherwise it won’t.

It will certainly have to be a strong product to succeed in the market, irrespective of whether it's a status symbol, I agree.

And if this is a product to be used on your couch at home alone, who cares how it looks?

But some people imagine this being used by world travellers to translate signs in foreign languages, by laptop users in coffee shops to have a huge screen, by parents to take hands-free video of their kid's first steps, by mass transit passengers to watch movies, and so on.

If the product's success relies on being worn in public - people will have to want to be seen wearing it.

While true, Apple has long made products people view as stylish and mainstream. VR advertised by Zuck isn't taken seriously (by most), but Apple will be. At the end of the day, there will be more consumer eyeballs on the devices now that Apple has entered the fray, and likely consumers that weren't even looking at VR devices before. That's probably a net win for everyone in the space.

Of course these devices existed but every time Apple raised the bar. MP3 players existed before Ipod but with limited storage. The first Ipod was really usable with its HDD. Smartphone were a thing but touch interface is what made the Iphone something unique. Let see if Apple is really bringing something new here, the jury is still out.

Famously, the original iPod had "less space than a Nomad".

The Nomad was the size of a CD player… The ipod was fitting in a pocket.

The Nomad also had an absurdly slow UI.

Having had one, that Nomad was absolutely terrible, space or no. It was cheap though.

Facebook isn't a hardware company, all their similar ventures are essentially duds. They will like the market legitimacy but they are more likely in the position of Palm when the iPhone was announced (ie, have been in the market with tepid success for years, then eclipsed by Apple).

Apple's core strength is the hardware/software vertical integration, but another strength is that they know how to partner with others, even competitors (Intel/MS/Google/Netflix/IBM/you name it) if it makes their product more cohesive in a way they couldn't do alone.

The first thing I did after watching the demo was sending congrats to a friend working in a competing company. Apple entering the market and selling is a great validation point.

Facebook is not in panic, they're relieved that they're not the only fools betting on VR anymore.

None of this will be relevant soon to consumers, except maybe games, and then it will be console makers who will push it and cash in. For Facebook and Apple it's just shareholder porn.

But it doesn't look like Apple is betting on a Metaverse where you have your little virtual houses and objects, but rather putting monitors right in front of your eyes with an entire ecosystem where work and entertainment is the main focus, with the ability to include communicating with others.

Apple just skipped the 3D world-thing which is what Meta is focusing on and being pathetic at it.

To me this reads as if Mark is scared of what his employees are thinking of him, where what they have been working on is this toy, while Apple now presents a real device with some sensible use cases.

Also Apple's is see-through AR to blocking VR, while Meta's is blocking VR. His statement about the couch doesn't make sense at all.

He seems to be ashamed that they are not the leader in this space by a long shot, since this is what his company is supposed to be about.

The oculus products have the same "AR but it's actually VR" thing going on. It just sucks on the quest 2 and seems half baked on the pro. They claim that a better version of passthrough will be the biggest upgrade on the quest 3, but of course remains to be seen if they can pull it off for $500 a pop.

I see, and it appears that Apple's is also only see-through by overlaying the VR onto a camera stream.

I thought it was like the Hololens, which btw is also in the 3.5k-range.

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Apple’s implementation appears years ahead of anyone else. Just the way iPhone was when introduced.

Back in the day Nokia, Siemens, Blackberry, Palm and Ericsson had smartphones that you could do everything that iPhone could do or even more.

These were devices that only those who have to use it or those who are techno nerds used it.

When Apple introduced their implementation of smartphone, those who were using the devices from the established companies dismissed the iPhone as gimmick or inferior. Fast forward, the regular people queued for iPhones and the other smartphone makers are all gone.

Is it really the same though? I can see how this is proposing a different approach on how to present VR but apart from tech folks nobody seems to care. Where on iPhone case from day 1 one could tell it was actually really really useful. And you also have to consider the price tag as well, I can think about many things that I would spend money on first even if I had those 3500 dollars.

Maybe I'll change my mind when I see people working or joining meetings in one of these but at least for now it looks like this is a product searching for a mass market.

>apart from tech folks nobody seems to care

On the contrary, this is the first time that non techies are actually interested in it and debating its implications on the society.

And about the price tag, a quick search tells me that %18 of the American individuals and %34 of the households are making over 100K and there are over 5 million millionaires and 770 billionaires in the USA.

Even if pricey, it is within the reach of so many people's income levels which means if it is good enough and people will buy it.

The price anchoring effects are strong but Apple is capable of creating its own anchors. Consider the iPhone, the iPhone 14 pro costs less than %25 of the monthly pay check of an average American and you say it's expensive. In the other extreme - Turkey, the iPhone 14 Pro costs about 5x the average salary(iPhone 14 pro is 2350$ today and the average salary is less than 500usd) and people still buy it. It was never THIS bad, but even in the good times an iPhone would cost more than the average salary and everyone bought one and the Apple's market share is over %20.

Moral of the story, if you make something that people want badly they will find a way to get it.

Apply these kind of comments to Facebook VR or Google Glass.

Everybody is just grasping the "but it's Apple!" straw.

It's a completely valid sentiment given their track record.

Maybe, but then what's the point of discussing this.

> but apart from tech folks nobody seems to care. Where on iPhone case from day 1 one could tell it was actually really really useful

This was exactly the same when the iPhone was introduced. Only tech folks could tell it was actually really really useful. Other people were just like "So browsing the internet o a phone is better now. But why would I need to browse the internet one a phone?"

All my friends, even the non-tech nerds, wanted to try the first gen iPhone when I got it. The appeal was clear from the get go.

except, you know, there's a massive market for non-iphone smartphones now. Facebook would not weep if it was android to the iphone

I don't think that Zuckerberg would be excited for making money from VR some time in far future, he is already very rich.

It's less about making marginally more money, and it's more about retaining Meta's grip on attention as it shifts from one medium (mobile/web) to the next (AR/VR/SC).

He's probably not going to make more money by having a bulkhead in the new personal computing paradigm (unless the ads are 10x as valuable, IDK). He's more importantly aiming to defend the current "proportion of attention spent on personal computing".

If other cos shift consumer attention to mediums where Meta has no presence or is excluded from, there goes his market cap.

Typical tech nerd way of thinking things.

"Implementation appears year ahead" does not mean anything. What matters is whether the product can gain enough attraction to be a successful business, which we don't know yet.

FB should absolutely be in panic mode. They bet everything on VR because they wanted to own an entire ecosystem and not be reliant on Google/Apple.

No matter how good Oculus is, Apple will be the VR experience everyone will want to have. Apple will sell it vastly better and make it far more desirable than anything Meta can manage.

If I have to strap on an invasive device to my face, what company am I going to trust more - the one that has been hammering in its “privacy” credentials for years, or the one that incites riots and whose founder is memed to be a humanoid?

Yeah... Meta is now at risk of going the way of other "first movers" when Apple chose to enter their market. Companies like Rio and other makers of MP3 players before Apple came around with the iPod. Or companies like Blackberry, Nokia etc. that built smartphones long before the iPhone. Or companies like Pebble who introduced the first smartwatches. The list goes on and on...

Maybe the Vision will be what everybody want, but there is always space for “almost what you want but cheaper”. Mid range android phones are very popular worldwide. Mid range laptops too. I’m skeptical of VR promises, but if the industry grows Apple is likely to be the high end expensive option, but there will be great opportunities for other companies in the space. And oculus can offer very compelling products for a seventh of the price.

Not that I want to see Facebook succeed in their goals. I personally find a cheaper option like the quest more interesting than the vision, at least on paper, but won’t ever use a product that forces me to have a Facebook account.

Have you ever used a VR headset?

I doubt there is ever going to be a budget headset with mass market appeal because they'd be incredibly nausea inducing.

The Oculus quest is a perfect example. It's basically manufactured e-waste which is only getting bought because of the fantasy it ultimately doesn't live to.

I believe I used 3-4 times an occulus headset. Not a quest, and that was years ago, I don’t remember the model. I haven’t really been interested by VR products, the only reason I find the quest kind of interesting is for beat saber, seems like a fun game to play. I cannot see myself using a headset more than 1h, and outside of gaming.

There is no reason to be worried about Apple monopolizing the market. They've never been interested in anything but the luxury segment, and meta is going the other direction. If anything this should help meta by growing mind share of VR/AR products. A $3,500 product is immediately off the table for probably 99% of people.

First Apple Watch Edition series 0 was > $1k, but successive releases essentially destroyed other platforms except for high end sports watches (Garmin, etc). Fitbit essentially died after a few years battling with Apple.

The analogy for this product is less the iPhone than the Apple Watch (if they only release Edition on first run).

The Apple watch started at $350, not $1k [0]. Also no one with an Android phone has an Apple Watch, which means Apple at best has ~27% of the market [1].

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2015/3/9/8162455/apple-watch-price-... [1] https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/android-vs-apple-market-shar...

While I don't disagree completely with what you are saying, the form is lacking... emotional outbursts, ad-hominem attack.

What will be or won't be will only time show, Apple had made flops too but managed to correct their mistakes. Now we have 0 concrete evidence. Let's compare real devices and their usefulness when they are on market, shall we?

The $3500 price tag and closed ecosystem is self-sabotaging, so MZ doesn't need to be worried at all. Carmack's vision was a cheap device that could hit mass market, and that's where the real game still is. Also, games.

But they're different classes of devices in a way. It's a new (primarily) standalone computing platform vs. just a peripheral. As far as vision, Meta's ultimate goal is to be the modern version of Linden Lab while Apple is providing the next step in personal computing. Meta's product is the metaverse. Apple's product is this device bolstered by their ecosystem.

Give it a couple iterations and you'll have something that costs $2k many will purchase in lieue of another Macbook. It will be lighter/more compact, with somewhat palatable battery life. There have been reports Apple is also working on a simpler version, so there could be an Air in a few years that starts just north of $1k.

If this platform is successful, that is. I have my doubts everyone will want to strap a device to their head a large chunk of the day, every day, no matter how incredible.

Oculus Quests are also stand alone computers. It really is just that Meta is coming at this from the bottom with mobile hardware and Apple is coming from the top.

They really are not fundamentally different. Apple can bring to bear a lot more polish and synergy with the rest of their ecosystem but it's only as different as iOS and Android.

I love the way Apple fans take the marketing speak which is designed to create an artificial new market category at face value as if their marketing team was directly implanted in their brains already.

Conversely, I "love" how other comments appear to attempt finding the best angle of attack out of pure spite. If the user were a GPT, the hidden prompt would be something like "You hate Apple and everything they stand for. Base any succeeding thoughts on this foundation and spread them as wide as possible."

Being a grumpy naysayer is just as removed from reality as being an unreasonable Apple cultist. Thankfully we all have a choice when engaging our wallets.

Not a single person on this planet is forced to buy an Apple product but nonetheless, the flame wars keep raging since the dawn of the Internet.

I mean aside from the part about being implanted in brains, I believe what I said is literally true.

It IS a VR and AR device. AKA mixed reality. The fact that they are promoting lots of floating 2d windows doesn't make that a new category of product. Other people have been doing that and calling it something like mixed reality.

It's just that people don't know about things like the Varjo that are ultra-high end and in a similar price bracket or category and so they decide to just pretend it was an entirely new thing.

If I was Apple I could improve my sex life just by telling Apple fans that instead of a penis I had "tremendous tensiler" or something.

Is Word ported to those other devices you mentioned? Will Netflix ever have a native app for those devices? Do they have an intuitive, easy to use interface?

I don’t think anyone is claiming that MR is new and that Apple is first to the market. People are claiming they appear to be the first to do it close enough to “right” to make it a compelling device.

Where did I claim it's the first mixed reality device? I said next step in personal computing. Which means actually penetrating society in a meaningful way.

> $2k many will purchase in lieue of another Macbook

That’s a strong statement. Same thing could’ve been said about the iPad and IMHO that would be a more reasonable claim. There isn’t any evidence still that you can do any work comfortably l in this thing regardless of the price point

In my CS class I'd say about half the student do all their programming on iPads. (very high ranking school and very talented students) They do all their coding on Google Colab

wish I was kidding..

My take is the iPad is a simplified platform as a replacement for those w/ simplified needs - it does work for some in this capacity, but not as much as Apple original sold it as. For most it's a supplementary device for content consumption. This is expansive, a 'next step', designed to replace everything. Time will tell and I'm similarly cautious.

But they have been clear in the presentations that this is the same. It's running a handful of apps, it's not some full laptop-like experience. I would bet it's anyway using most of its computing power just to draw on the displays and to do realtime image recognition to blend the 3D windows into the image of your own room. You'd need far more computing power to actually get a full laptop experience in addition to all this.

Sure, it will have that locked in experience to start and lack the computing power to compete with a traditional machine. It doesn't mean it has to remain that way. They've tried to push the iPadOS further in that direction for years.

There is no intention that Apple might ever make iPadOS fully(ish) open like macOS is. I don’t see any reason to believe that their VR devices will not stay locked down forever too.

For sure. This is the key insight imo:

> Meta's product is the metaverse. Apple's product is this device bolstered by their ecosystem.

One way or another, that's the bet here.

1) Apple didn't mention the metaverse at all (as far as I can remember)

2) The user experience looked great, without those moments that would make someone who was neutral think "Err, ... that's a bit .... creepy"

The technology is incredibly compelling - which is the main thing, that people are exciting about it - but there are definitely things about it that area creeping people out... I've noticed these pop up in discussions

- The isolation aspects of consuming TV/movies (Mark has a point here IMO)

- The whole taking 3d images/videos of your children with a headset on

- The uncanny valley Facetime avatars

- The external screen that gives a window to your eyes in AR mode

Agree with all of those. I think the interaction between people with headsets on and no headset on is one of the things we'll really need to see play out to see how it works in a real social context once the device itself isn't a novelty. At the moment it seems incredibly distopian at best. Apple is the first attempt to actually try to address that it seems (eg by fading people who are in your periphery into the picture in the headset so you at least see them and fading an image of your face onto the outside of the headset so they at least sort of see you). But it's still weird af, no question.

I was specifically speaking about the interface, which when meta introduced theirs had all these weird things "Why has nobody got legs? Why does it look like absolute arse? etc". It didn't have those. It looked slick, like you would expect from Apple.

Quest is also standalone computing platform

You underestimate Apple fans throwing ungodly amounts of money at new products. The early-adopters always generate FOMO among the not-quite-so-early adopters and it snowballs from there.

$3500 is pretty cheap for the HW it provides. An iPhone 14 Pro Max starts at $1100 and has nowhere near the HW that this device has, let alone the economics of scale.

The question is not whether the parts add up to $3,500 worth of tech, but whether the tech provides $3,500 worth of value to the buyer.

lots of technologies in those vision Pro are similar components as in those iphones and ipads. If you take 2 iphone 14 pro (total cost 2x$1000=$2000) you get:

- 2x OLED screens

- 2x lidar camera

- 2x truedepth camera module

- 2x4=8 RGB cameras with very high spec

- 2x A15 chip

- 2x accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, barometer, proxmity, ambient sensors

- 2x gps, wifi, bluetooth, nfc, uwb, 3g/4g/5g

- 2x flash led

- 2x batteries

- 2x stereo speakers

- 2x3=6 microphones

They already have crazy profit margin on iphones. I think if they would price it at $2500 this would make more sense.

If they would allow to run full MacOS on this thing and I could use it just as Mac Mini replacement and attach physical external display via hdmi out then I could easier stomach $3500 price.

> 2x OLED screens

Not quite the same ballpark, is it? iPhone 14 Pro resolution is 2556×1179 at 460ppi. Vision Pro is believed to have 3800x3000 at 3400ppi. That's almost an order of magnitude improvement in density over the iPhone screens (and 3x the density of the Quest Pro or the PSVR2.)

Sure those are very hight DPI screens I agree.

So then take the price of ipad pro 11. Even cheaper than iphone 14 pro and has most of those components I mentioned above (excluding 3g/4g/5g). 2x ipad pro 11 == 2x $800 = $1600. Does it really cost apple ~$1000 or even $500 per such 3400ppi screen to justify such price?

And regarding screen resolution very old Sony Experia 1 (from 2019) had 4k resolution (1644 x 3840 pixels at 650dpi):

https://www.gsmarena.com/sony_xperia_1-9543.php

> Does it really cost apple ~$1000 or even $500 per such 3400ppi screen to justify such price?

I can easily imagine that for a relatively new technology with a ppi much higher than anything commercially available (as far as I can find through searching) that they are getting on for $1k each at the moment, yeah.

I kind of think having the compute power combined with the external battery would have been pretty slick. An AR head unit combined with a portable Mac mini would be pretty compelling at $3500. Give it the ability to be a MacOS desktop when plugged into a regular monitor and I would buy one for sure!

The same was said of the iPad and Apple Watch… this may be their big miss, but based on the reviews I’ll keep betting on Apple.

It seems that they nailed the hardware. Sure, the battery life can be improved, the price can be reduced through mass production. It is now mostly a question of people will accept/like carrying a head set.

I am mildly optimistic, even the initial Vision Pro won't be much more expensive than a well-spec'ed MacBook Air plus 5k display. So at least I think Vision is attractive to pro Mac users as a very portable workstation with a lot off screen estate.

The only things missing for Pro users (especially Devs) are tools - ipad is useless for Software Dev as main machine. They can't force other companies to port Intellij or VSCode to iOS/iPadOS but you would expect they provided Xcode to iPad by now.

Even if IDE is there then how about Python and Nodejs modules in such restricted environment.

I Hope Meta will switch to Linus and Valve will stick with Linux where you can run any legacy software currently available including many Pro tools.

You connect it to a MacBook and use IDE with a physical keyboard, while keeping browser windows with Jira and Slack open on the sides.

Sure but this looses appeal for me. I still need macbook nearby and both devices need to be charged. If I'm in plane i dont want to remove my laptop from hand luggage or draining both batteries.

This is just slightly better than someone connecting ipad to external monitor and logging with remote desktop to cloud computer and pretending ipad is good for software development.

No it's not. It wasn't for any of the products Apple make.

A lot of good points in there.

I think Apple are much better at UX and platform building than Meta, this weeks WWDC visionOS videos(1) show impressive depth in their research and thinking for all types of users of spatial-based computing.

Regardless of the differences in how these 3D platforms are approached, apple's commitment to their platforms along with iterative improvement is the secret sauce to giving 3rd parties the confidence they need to invest time and money developing apps.

On the other hand I keep hearing that enthusiasm for the Metaverse is waning amongst Meta staff, that's usually my sign to not get involved, or have all of my efforts/revenue suddenly vanquished should Zuckerberg change his mind.

On the topic of battery power: While I think that the battery power of "up to 2 hours" is not a long time in comparison to how long I use my computing devices, I also think this gen 1 device isn't really a mobile device where that matters, also we've seen apple take laptops from a few hours of charge to 20+ hours.

(1) https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc2023/

Why should they be in panic? They already iterated on 3 headsets, they definitely have the advantage (weren't people complaining that they spent too much $$ in VR? Now they should be terrified?)

Thats what I am saying. They had 3 iterations, yet, are technologically behind Apple.

I mean, just pure technology wise, the screens, number of sensors, processing power itself is mind boggling.

I am sure that all their hadware decisions regarding oculus were constrained by the compute hardware. Apple has the moat of world class custom silicon that means, the constraints on its designers are far less.

And we are seeing just the first gen device.

One is priced at $300 and the other is more than 10x that. I don't understand why people keep comparing the two as if they were designed with the same objectives.

Quest pro is $1,500 (albeit 8 months old )

Yes, Apple is priced quite premium but that is also their strength Apple can price at this level and still command enough sales , Meta or any other company cannot .

Even at the same price point (HoloLens 2 costs the same) as Apple it is hard to imagine another headset competing.

Also none of the concept headsets MZ has shown so far come close to this

Just a bit, but the $1500 price point didn't stick around for long. So really it's a $999 headset now vs $3500 "next year".

For Apple, I don’t think it’s about sales. It’s about introducing something new to the mass market. So they want to sell this to developers (price doesn’t really matter). And early adopters/fanboys (for them it matters a bit more).

Apple is using these two groups for development of new software and for marketing. The fanboys will carry this thing around for a year or two and familiarize the general public.

Yeah it’s like saying that a Honda Civic has had many generations but it’s not as fast as the latest Ferrari.

In your analogy I'd still buy a Civic lol. Also, it's more like, Tesla has the advantage in EV land, but you'd rather buy the first EV car from BMW?

It's more like saying that Ferrari is going to compete head to head with Toyota next year. Apple are experts in making all sorts of hardware at scale, directly and through partners. Now it's on display that they've always been ahead of Facebook which acquired a much smaller hardware maker and has had its own hardware products which flopped.

isn't the objective to capture and define the market?

metaverse vs spatial computing?

and whoever can make money for their respective business: sell ads or sell apps/integrate with rest of apple ecosystem?

It's 7 times the price, I sure hope the hardware is better. I don't expect $200 phones to be on par with $1500 iphones either.

They're going for different markets. Meta is trying to be the VR kids get for Christmas and people buy for fun, Apple is aiming at...something else.

They’re constrained by price: they haven’t trained the market to accept a $3500 piece of hardware from Facebook.

Apple has.

The “people with $3500 to spare” market knows that it’ll be polished and likely worth the price tag due to the “sparks joy” factor that Apple regularly delivers.

Apple "has"? Hey the device is not even released and there is nothing like a preorder number that can tell a story. Please just be more mindful of the facts here. Your own speculation is simply meaningless.

The comment:

> "They’re constrained by price: they haven’t trained the market to accept a $3500 piece of hardware from Facebook. Apple has."

Can be justified by a lot of the Mac range costing >$3500, especially when you consider non-basic configurations.

Apple has (past and present tense) trained its audience to accept the most expensive hardware of any major consumer electronics company.

They did this by delivering consistently on their “coupled with our ecosystem, this is the best one of these you can possibly get” promise.

Exactly. Apple has a track record and fanbase that means they can sell a $3500 device. Meta know that even if they could build this device, there is zero chance anyone would buy it. They have to start with the low price point to make up for the lack of branch cachet.

I disagree on the tech part. I suspect much of the raw onboard power is going straight to keeping those high density displays fluid with pixels. Ambient awareness is a nice trick, but really? A bunch of flat apps floating in front of you? I had that shit with my GearVR adapter for my phone. I also think they may have a disadvantage on some the actually useful features of the Pro, like facial tracking for avatars, due to patents.

I'm also going to call it on the dedicated floating eyes screen: it will be a joke once it hits market, and everyone will turn it off to eek out a few more minutes on the battery pack.

Don’t confuse targeting a lower price point with being behind. We have no evidence that Meta wouldn’t have arrived at the Vision Pro if they also targeted a base price of $3,500 + tax.

Probably not technically behind. Were aiming lower for price, is more likely.

An Apple company never become a monopoly in a big market. There must be at least one competitor, and Meta is the first candidate.

I don't get this comparison BTW. Apple needs an external battery, doesn't have controllers, doesn't seem fit for gaming. There's nothing interesting with their device. IMO the Quest 3 is objectively the superior device here.

While I think Apple throwing their hat in the ring with a super-high end device is great for the market and should light a fire under Meta (and everyone else's butt), I think that the idea that Apple has a super-advanced technology lead isn't totally true for those that have been paying close attention to the XR space.

I mean yes, Apple is the best hardware company in the world, and they've assembled/polished best in class hardware and most importantly, have been willing to commit to the volumes for production for bleeding edge parts (eg, companies like eMagin have been demoing 4K micro OLED display for years [1] but no one's ever committed for an $X billion order - already we're seeing the "Apple" effect though as suppliers now have customers to chase [2]).

Meta's FRL has been working on pinch-and-release click for years with a haptic EMG controller that while bulkier, I think would actually be a more satisfying experience: https://tech.facebook.com/reality-labs/2021/3/inside-faceboo... Meta has also been working on next-gen displays (focused on varifocal displays/fixing vergence acommodation conflict) for years. I still think that Doug Lanman's 2020 EIS Plenary presentation is one of the best technical talks of recent memory, and highly recommend watching it to anyone interested in displays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQwMAl9bGNY - Tested had a good demo video of what they have in the labs last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6AOwDttBsc and you can read about their DeepFocus work from back in 2018: https://tech.facebook.com/reality-labs/2018/12/introducing-d... or see their Half Dome prototypes going back the same time period: https://tech.facebook.com/reality-labs/2018/12/introducing-d...

You can go down anywhere down the stack, from spatial audio and custom HRTFs [3], haptics [4], avatars [5], FRL (or whatever it's called now) has done it all [6] but most of the cool stuff has only trickled into the market while Meta has focused on selling $300 consumer headsets and despite obstensibly being a "software" company has never figured out how to build a platform beyond a barely passable VR game launcher. Reading the visionOS docs [7] has been a breath of fresh air and is much more impressive to me than the hardware (which is great, but the biggest accomplishment on that end IMO was committing to launching such a high price-point to reach a baseline experience they were happy with; also their passthrough appears SoTA).

Still, I'm most excited that this will give the "courage" to others to launch high-end consumer experiences. Let's see true retina-resolution (60PPD+) varifocal HDR displays and actually seamless passthrough.

(Funny note, looking through old notes, back in 2015, I expected 4K/eye displays to be in an HMD by 2020, which was far too optimistic. [8])

[1] https://www.uploadvr.com/emagin-4k-oled-microdisplay-steambo...

[2] https://www.oled-info.com/tags/oled-microdisplays

[3] https://about.fb.com/news/2020/09/facebook-reality-labs-rese...

[4] https://www.xrtoday.com/mixed-reality/what-is-meta-doing-wit...

[5] https://theinnerdetail.com/meta-will-soon-let-you-to-make-ph...

[6] https://research.facebook.com/research-area/augmented-realit...

[7] https://developer.apple.com/visionos/learn/

[8] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/k08jnu4t4qwerd0ln10w8/Virtual...

of course they are terrified. Not being terrified is delusional. It's apple.

FB does not appear to be attracting young people. Apple appears to be a magnet for them. FWIW, Apple does PR and presentations a lot better ( I honestly can't remember FB VR rollout, but I was interested in Apple's toy ).

If FB is not worried, their CEO may not be doing his job.

I'm a middle school teacher in Europe. None of my students use Facebook. They even don't use Whatsapp that much anymore. FB has a big problem.

What do they use instead of Whatsapp?

Snapchat, Discord and Instagram. Mostly Snapchat. It's really strange for me. I'm 41 years old. Seeing the birth of the Internet and all, I always assumed that kids will grow up with stuff and be great with everything. But most of them don't even know how to create an email account. (or they don't want to invest time into it) They don't watch movies. Or Netflix. Most of them just use Snapchat and Instagram and Tictoc.

snapchat isn't a replacement for IM apps. They serve different purposes and most people still want the ability to send lasting messages.

I know that but tell this to my students. For me it also doesn’t make sense that they prefer watching tictoc for hours instead of tv series on Netflix… but they do.

Snapchat. All teens are communicating on Snapchat. And sometimes Instagram which is also owned by FB.

yup. Instagram is more used by the sports guys to show of their stunts... I have a kid who jumps into public water fountains with his bike. And girls with beauty stuff which may be a cliche but as a language teacher we often talk about their weekends and their hobbies...

Probably discord

but they are using instagram no?

The girls, the skaters and bikers. The others just use snapchat most of the time. One of my students was complaining about battery life on his new iPhone. I told him that snapchat just uses a lot of battery because all of the shenanigans. He didnt believe me till I showed him the battery function of the phone where you can see what app uses how much percentage. :)

More likely Snapchat.

No, I actually think he has it spot on. While they're both headsets, I think the Vision is more a replacement for the Mac + Displays + maybe iPad line.

Just like I have a PlayStation in the family+friends living room and a multi-monitor Mac setup in my study, I'm going to have an Oculus in the living room and a Vision Pro in the study. These are complementary things.

> " By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself." > Wait, I thought an Oculus does the same thing too.

I never use my Quest sitting down. I use it as a roomscale device for, e.g., boxing, or playing table tennis or golf with family in other countries.

The Apple device looks great, but if it was the same price as a Quest 3 and I could only buy one, I'd choose the Quest 3, no questions.

Oculus already has hand tracking and it's plenty good enough to manage pausing a video.

> Wait, I thought an Oculus does the same thing too.

As excited as I am about Apple Vision, Mark is right about this. Most of Apple’s demos don’t show the user being active, and the Vision’s price is anything but demographic even though it’s fair, given that it’s a miniaturized MacBook with magic powers

On other hand, the Quest and its apps make you move. Most of the apps on Quest are low key cardio workouts, though it’s not initially apparent to most users when they’re fighting ninjas or dodging bullets.

Do I think Apple Vision is incapable of what the Quest is capable of in terms of helping their users be active? Definitely not. Anything the Quest can do I’m sure Vision can do and then some. I’m also sure that future Apple Vision spots will highlight this. However, Apple is not showing anything at the moment.

> Mark has got to be terrified. The power of Apple is the tight and efficient integration of hardware and software.

I’m sure he is to a degree, but meta needed Apple to enter the market. It would be much worse for meta if Apple didn’t validate the often criticized and ridiculed AR VR industry.

While meta has been able to make a revolutionary product at a great price point, it’s been hampered by

1. meta’s poor past reputation,

2. meta’s terrible marketing & messaging. The Super Bowl ad was nonsensical to normal people,

3. the intimidating form factor of most VR headsets including the Quest aka face buckets of isolation. Many normal adults refuse to put it on their faces without a lot of coaxing, and

4. not being able to market the Quest to children. They are the largest demographic who just intuitively understand VR AR. They also have the highest retention. (There is one old study that shows that it may be harmful to children, but many people have criticized its methodology.)

Now that Apple has fixed the messaging for the industry, Apple can dominate the high end while Meta can take everything else. People who are buying Vision likely would not buy a Quest and vice versa

Meta won’t have a real fight until Samsung & Google re-enter the space.

No need to panic the oculus is doing well and is very easy to chat and connect with friends and new people. And with the quest 3 there is complete pass through so finding a controller should be easy even though I can tell you it already is.

I’m not a Zuck fanboy but I have enjoyed the quest 2 thoroughly and plan to get the 3 when it releases.

I do think the Apple vision pro looks amazing but the second I heard the price it was laughable. Obviously I am not the target audience. I’m not sure who is to be honest.

Why isn’t anyone pointing out that there were many demos of people walking around, and some of them, in an office with other people?

It’s almost like, after spending $10B on the space, he doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about /s

> " By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself." > Wait, I thought an Oculus does the same thing too. Its a blindfold on your face, and it doesnt matter if they are alone or in a crowd.

I found this hilarious too. The HTC Vive was the "walking around your virtual space" headset, and Meta deliberately marketed the Oculus as couch-based, because they didn't think people actually wanted more than that.

> Regarding battery power, I woukd not rule out versions that stream the video and outsource the computing to a mac or a standalone box, like Apple TV.

I imagine wireless latency would be too high here. I think they mentioned a 12 ms number to avoid motion sickness.

This sounded weak to me.

Apple is making an integrated headset: their own lenses, processor, ..., down to the operating system.

The Quest uses an Android based operating system and a lot of off the shelf components.

We've seen this story before and it hasn't ended well for the folks in Mark's position.

A personal device like these headsets needs to be delightful. It has to be responsive. It has to have the little touches. It's much more difficult to do that when you're constrained by off the shelf components.

Apple had the best touchpads for a decade because of those integrated properties, for example.

> We've seen this story before and it hasn't ended well for the folks in Mark's position.

Meta doesn't need to dominate the market. Being the Android to Apple's iOS or the Windows to Apple's macOS is way more than fine for Meta's business. iPhone's did $250b in revenue in 2022. Meta as a whole did $117b.

They aren't looking to replace Apple, they are just trying to find a way to get their revenue growing again. It's a huge win in their eye's if Quest3 contributes reasonably well to bringing their 2023 revenue to about $130b.

If there was a genuine third company competing with Meta then that would be a problem for them. Valve and Pico are roughly 0% the size of Meta and Apple. They just won't have the resources to actually compete. Google has been rumored to be working on a headset. If that's the case and they didn't fire that entire org then that would be Meta's only real competition for second place.

> They aren't looking to replace Apple, they are just trying to find a way to get their revenue growing again

This is such an odd sentiment.

Meta was first in this segment, they've spent billions and billions, harmed their reputation as a company on Wall Street, etc. etc.. Apple comes in after them, with, from what we can tell, a superior product. This rationalization that this was all part of Meta's master plan all along is a little ridiculous. They're going to lose and get the crumbs, just like Android device makers get 30% of the profit (70% of it goes to Apple) but hold 80% of market shares. This wasn't Meta's aspirations and is a blunder.

Most products aspire to be the Apple of their category. Ending up as successful as Android is definitely not a blunder...

You're looking at this too abstractly. Meta's revenue grew by 0.6% last year. And that's up from shrinking by 1.3% the year before. Their social media platforms have reached the peak and don't really have any more users to gain. They aren't looking for 300% revenue growth. They'd be blissfully happy to get back to 5% by establishing themselves as a serious hardware/software company.

> They aren't looking to replace Apple, they are just trying to find a way to get their revenue growing again.

Thats like "they arent trying to be the best, they are just trying to be a little better.

Ofc they are trying to beat apple, and everyone else. Or you are saing that if they were magically given the opportunity to become most valued company, theyd simply pass with "no thanks, thats more than we want" attitude?

Every major corporation is trying their absolute hardest to grow.

They're developing completely different products. Apple's product is a productivity enhancing tool, the main use case is a mobile desk so that you can use your computer anywhere in the world and the monitor setup is always exactly the way you want. Meta is going for the console market. The type of product kids get for christmas.

> Apple's product is a productivity enhancing tool, the main use case is a mobile desk so that you can use your computer anywhere in the world and the monitor setup is always exactly the way you want.

Apple's initial use cases are around work, entertainment, and meetings. It's ridiculous to think they won't expand this and compete in every use case once they get market shares and a developer eco-system. They are not different products. That's like saying a MacBook Pro and a HP laptop are different products. No, one is a high-end, more expensive, more coveted product, and the other isn't.

It's more like saying macbook pro and chromebook are different products, and they are.

> We've seen this story before and it hasn't ended well for the folks in Mark's position.

Is Microsoft today in a fundamentally problematic position ?

Apple has the spotlight and a higher evaluation, but I'm not sure Google or Microsoft "haven't ended well".

> A personal device like these headsets needs to be delightful.

The number of people willing to pay for "delightful" is pretty small though. Even as today, the iPhone isn't winning on delight, it's primarily on the ecosystem, green bubbles, game payments etc., as we've heard in the numerous trials and hearings from Apple execs.

WinCE? Windows phone? TabletPC? Their non-vertical integrated devices sucked.

Microsoft lost an entire platform, and yes, that was a problem (they’ve since recovered with other bets).

You could say iPod, xServe, AirPort or Pippin in the same vein. Companies lose/get out of entire markets and move to others, that's a natural (and probably healthy) thing.

Otherwise, I forgot about TabletPC, hut given they have the Surface line now, is it a failure ?

Thanks for the reminder: Zune. You think iPod belongs in the same breath as the others?

Random protocols aren’t products.

Surface is a strategic failure because it didn’t define the tablet market a decade ago, and iPad / Chromebook is what every grade school kid uses. Now it gets to cannibalize sales from their PC partners, who I’m sure are thrilled to be competing with their OS supplier.

iPod ended killed, so yes I'd ship it in the same category as we others. For what it's worth, to this day I'm still more salty about the AirPort line getting killed than the iPod.

> Random protocols

I didn't understand this bit.

> Surface

It's not taking the world by storm, but is a solid product line that is well received, has its loyal community, and continues to ship new products for 9 generations now. And the windows tablet market itself expanded around it, when it just didn't exist 10 years ago. I'd compare it to Google's Pixel line, it's not going to take half of the market, but it's alive, keeps fullfilling its role, get recognition and user satisfaction, so I wouldn't call it a failure.

On iPad/Chromebook, they're a different device category. The same way Chromebooks and Macbooks aren't the same category.

Blackberry

Blackberry was making their own hardware and OS to almost the same extent as Apple does today...are you arguing that Apple will be the next BlackBerry ?

I am sure people have said the same argument about Blackberry being the next <insert even older tech company here>

IBM!DEC!

I'm not the same poster (and hate the one-word answers with nothing to back them up), but I think BlackBerry's position could be called similar to Meta's. They were already established with lower-cost, lower-spec'd devices. However, BlackBerry couldn't conceive of how more would be transformative. They insisted that the iPhone would flop because it didn't have a keyboard and such.

When you said that the iPhone wasn't succeeding today based on delight, I'd argue that it's the only reason the iPhone succeeded. BlackBerry had an amazing brand and the ecosystem that you say it the reason the iPhone is successful today - including its own proprietary messenger service. The iPhone came along with delight and overthrew the established players.

If the Vision Pro offers users an experience that they like, it could make the Quest series look like BlackBerries: low-rent devices that were bought as toys for enthusiasts before real devices came along.

The thing about the iPhone is that people could instantly see what they'd enjoy it for. BlackBerries were a status symbol, had some business use cases, and were a nice toy for those who tried to buy distractions. When Apple introduced the iPhone, they showed real web browsing, useful maps (even before GPS), a better iPod than they'd ever seen, YouTube, and more.

With the Vision Pro, Apple is showing me something I could see myself using. I could wear it writing code and have more display space than 3 displays (and still use my keyboard). I could watch movies, I could browse the web, and I could play games. Apple is showing me how it could become an integral part of my usage rather than just a gadget that I'm likely to ignore.

I'm not an expert on the VR/AR space, but it sounds like the Quest devices don't really have the resolution for reading text comfortably which cuts out a lot of usage - just as the BlackBerry devices didn't have good web browsing and other stuff. That could leave the Quest series in the BlackBerry zone where they're trying to fill a similar niche, but they're limited in the things that bring users back to the device rather than it sitting in a corner unused. It also seems like the Vision Pro is likely to be a lot more responsive. Android tends to have a lot of input lag compared to iOS and Apple's M2 processor will run circles around the Qualcomm XR2 in the Quest Pro - plus Apple has a dedicated R1 processor for handling real-time sensor data. The XR2 has one performance core from 3 years ago compared to 4 performance cores in an M2.

Meta can't even buy themselves a CPU that's competitive. Apple's M2 will be 40-50% faster on single-core stuff and it has 4 performance cores instead of 1 performance core in the top-end Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. On multi-core, the M2 is twice as fast. Plus, it has its own dedicated processor for handling all the sensor data!

When BlackBerry saw the iPhone design, they assumed Apple couldn't pull it off. They thought practically the whole inside would have to be battery. They weren't wrong about that, but Apple did pull it off. Is Meta thinking that Apple won't be able to pull off a better experience than their devices? I don't think companies are underestimating Apple at the moment.

Sometimes with tech, it's about getting over a hump. Everyone had been trying to do handheld computers since the 80s - even Apple's Newton development started in the 80s. Apple was the one who finally got it over the hump where it was really useful. Likewise, it's not like headsets are new - Nintendo's Virtual Boy came out in 1995, 28 years ago. But the Virtual Boy didn't get over that hump just as the Newton didn't. With the Quest, if I have to strain to read text, maybe it hasn't gotten over the hump. Again, I'm not an expert in this area, but my point is that it's not just about better specs for the sake of better specs. It's about better specs that overcome a barrier to usefulness. Things like latency and display clarity matter a lot when we're talking about a headset device.

And if we want to attribute Apple's success to its ecosystem, the Vision Pro ties into that ecosystem. You can run apps on Vision Pro and use it as a display for your MacBook. I understand the things I can already do if I had a Vision Pro, not just as a gadget.

The Vision Pro might still be a flop. It's expensive and it might not offer that much more when in the real world. However, the keynote was really impressive to me. It seemed like something I'd get after it had been out for 4 years - kinda like the iPhone. But we'll have to wait and see what happens.

That’s what I was getting at. I think the original commenter was implying BlackBerry (or RIM), not Microsoft or Google.

I understand what you say, but I think you underrating gaming market.

Thanks !

I'd personally compare BlackBerry to Kodak. They had a strong market position, brand and loyal customers. They also had a vision for what should come next, but little to no incentive in fully executing on it, probably didn't want to canibalise the existing sales, while also seeing too much value in their existing customers who only swear by their products.

That's also kinda where I see Apple to a lesser extent: they masterfully executed on the iPhone concept, tried to push further on the iPad, but ultimately see too much value in their current moat to risk losing it. That's where I see the HomePods, Apple TV, Apple Watch being fiercefully bound to the iPhone when they could have been independent products the same way the iPod was. Same way the iPad only got its OS in name and couldn't get much beyond being a gloridied iPhone in many respects.

Any of these products are successful in a vacuum, but given the size of the watch market for instance, the sales numbers for the Watch don't feel as successful as the iPod was.

I'm curious to see how the Vision Pro will work outside of the Apple ecosystem, as at this point it's touted as a display, and that should open the door for more than just being a macbook or apple TV accessory.

On why the iPhone succeeded...until the iPhone 4, it had miserable battery life and crashed all the time, you'd miss phone calls, "you're holding it wrong" was only funny because of how bad we had reception problems. But it did net browsing, photo handling, and emailing better than any device on the market (way better than BlackBerry for half of the world, in the sense that BB was stuck on the western market). So it was a powerful device with a unique proposition, but delightful? hell no. Better than android sure, but it took a long time for it to be smooth and stable IMHO.

On Meta...I have a Quest 2 and completely agree with all the point. It's not good, just "barely good enough" for the price it is. But I'd argue it's here, when the Vision Pro will be real next year, and who knows when we get the next iteration. While I don't see Meta successfuly pushing the field, the sailant point is that the Quest 2 and probably Quest 3 are PC VR compatible, where the Vision Pro has almost no chance to be. This means that the next Beat Saber or Supernatural could come to Steam VR, get tested, and be successfully enough to go to the Quest store, then perhaps the Apple VR store.

I base that on the observation that ML didn't come to Mac or iOS first, but went to the more open windows world first. I don't see new VR creators starting from a Vision Pro when next Christmas gift season will still probably be Quest headsets and perhaps Vive if they can get their price low enough. Perhaps Apple will have a shot at it in 3 years, but we can check back the situation when they arrive there (I'd love an ultra competitive landscape for the next 3 years)

I also find it super interesting that the main use case is as a macbook multi-monitor when macos isn't touch ready. It'd be super excited if they bring a big surprise in that area at the same time the Vision Pro hits.

My worst fear is still that Apple eats all the high resolution display factories of the space, the same way they litteraly consumed all the displays at the peak iOS times and competitors had the leftover, even as the display technology wasn't Apple's.

> Is Microsoft today in a fundamentally problematic position ?

I mean… pretty obviously yes?

Windows is rotting on the vine, Azure is nowhere near the market share of other players, and while they still have a large installed base of users they’ve done nothing particularly noteworthy in like a decade at this point.

If there’s anyone on the path to being the next IBM it’s them.

Other points aside, Azure is doing perfectly well, and is much bigger than Google Cloud.

Almost every large company is already a Microsoft customer, and MS does a great job upselling Azure to many of them.

(recent estimates are AWS ~33%, Azure 23%, GC 10%)

Azure ($75.3B in 2022 revenue) is only slightly smaller than AWS ($80B). It’s GCP ($26.28B) that’s way behind. Microsoft has always known how to sell through its channels.

Azure has over twice the market share of Google’s Cloud platform and the second largest cloud provider? How is that a failure?

I think a lot of people spend time on LinkedIn these days. And GitHub.

and using ChatGPT

I really don't understand why nobody else has managed making decent touchpads. Is it not extremely high priority??

I worked at an electronics retailer in high school for a couple years, my job was to sell laptops. I sold a lot of laptops. Nerds like us who post comments on hacker news can have a hard time understanding the mind of the vast majority of regular people who simply could not care less about trackpad quality. It's just not a thing most people even think about.

I think the average person does care about and notice quality, its just a question of if they can afford it. When I look around the coworking space, its almost universally macbooks. And these aren't tech people mostly.

But the uni student with a budget that only buys half a macbook doesn't get to care about trackpad quality.

Normal people don't say things like "The trackpad is unresponsive and the wifi drivers unreliable" They say "I just don't like it" "It feels kinda crap"

Most people don't care about 'drive shaft quality' or 'steering wheel quality' in their cars either, but you can be sure it will be taken good care of by engineering, and subconsciously noticed.

There's truth in your point. People do feel the difference even when they don't notice it, but it doesn't seem like that's always (or even often?) reflected in the bottom line. Nissan sells an awful lot of cars with their crappy CVT transmissions and crossovers continue to be hugely popular in the US.

People notice in subconscious but rarely in the wallet.

If I may, I’d make a slight modification to your statement.

The vast majority of people don’t care about trackpad quality when it comes to shopping.

They do care when they *use* it but they either take it for granted when it works well, or it’s too small a papercut to trade in their device and buy/research a new one.

but it all combines together to make a smoother experience when using it, and it can convert people as a part of a whole.

Yes, they buy bottom of the barrel and, if it doesn’t work, assume that is where state of the art is.

Few months back I’ve seen anecdotal posts somewhere that new generations of managers are trying to shift computing to phones and tablets because they’re “better than laptops”. No one enforces a delightfulness standard for Windows laptops, and it is creating a skewed perception.

The delightfulness factor is something that’s a big deal and that technical people trivialize and can’t be expressed adequately on paper for non-technical people.

I used to be a die hard Android and Windows/Linux power user. I’d scoff at all the stuff people would mention on iOS/macOS because “well I can do that too if I do this and that”. But then I switched back to iOS/macOS for a project and a lot of the papercuts being solved out of the box was actually such a huge gain.

That’s not to say Apple is perfect. They can improve a ton too (give me a proper path bar in finder please!), but (and I say this often) the products they make are more than the sum of their parts.

but of course none of that is something that is evident when you’re shopping for a product.

Plus, the question one would ask is: “can this do this banal task?” not “which one does this banal task better”. So I see why it’s not prioritized on other platforms.

Most people are just shopping for capability and specs. The delightfulness is too ephemeral to consider until you encounter it yourself.

I’m surprised we don’t have that yet. Your iPhone would make an excellent Citrix client just dock and wait for your text to show up as you type.

There was Samsung Dex. It even could run Linux. Didn’t take off so it was cancelled like 10 years ago.

> or it’s too small a papercut to trade in their device and buy/research a new one.

Most of the time they don't notice at all unless its truly atrocious or truly mind blowing (and whilst I can firmly say the macbook trackpad is the best I've ever used, lets be honest its not mind blowing). They might notice things don't feel as smooth as it did on their macbook (assuming they even had one last, if not how can you tell something is worse if its all you've ever had), but they're unlikely to narrow this down to the trackpad.

The vast majority of people don’t care enough to pay for it.

This is why people balk at the price of Apple Vision even though Apple managed to miniaturize a Macbook into a visor and added LiDAR, two 4K screens, a separate depth sensor, several other cameras, and even a 3D camera to it

That said, Mark’s devices aren’t bad for the price. They’ve been the best overall VR headsets for the past 2-3 years.

With lowcost laptops I've noticed that most users end up using a mouse instead of the trackpad.

My guess would be... patents? (Apple's got all the good ones?)

Apple did manage to patent the pythagorean theorem (“pinch zoom” uses the hypotenuse of a right triangle as the zoom factor), but, from what I can tell, the bad windows touchpad thing is self-inflicted.

What boggled my mind were the trackpads on some laptops that weren't just average, but actively bad.

The worst by far I've ever used was on a circa-2007 HP convertible laptop that ran Vista. Despite it costing more than some models of MacBook at the time, the thing was built with that cheap creaky "fake metal" glossy plastic, and that included its trackpad. The trackpad would've been bad enough just like that with the smooth plastic gripping at your fingertips, but to make it worse its surface had inverse dimples, and because its touch sensitivity wasn't all that sensitive you had to apply more pressure when using it which pressed your fingers down into the dimples and made them stick even worse. Oh and of course, as was customary for non-Apple laptops at that point it was also tiny.

It's almost as if it was someone's job to make that thing's trackpad terrible to use. Just mind boggling.

Oh God, the dimples. Or the textured trackpads that felt nothing short of sandpaper.

Windows led to a few market failures like this. One that comes to mind is high DPI displays. In terms of pixels per inch, today’s 1080p displays are laughable by 2001 standards.

It has been a quarter century since high DPI CRTs were affordable, and 20+ years since LCDs were.

However, Windows wasn’t compatible with such things until at least 2010, so here we are a quarter century later, and laptop lines still often only offer meh-for-the-late-90’s displays.

A more recent example is suspend resume. I’m not sure of the details, but I am sure that intel will never do better than S3 sleep from ten years ago, and Microsoft pushed them to change how sleep works.

It's certainly improved over the past few years to a point where they're comparable to Macbooks. Windows Precision drivers and large glass trackpads are slowly becoming common in mid to high tier Windows laptops.

I have an XPS 15, the touchpad is fine. When I use a macbook I don't think "oh my god the touchpad is great", although that might just be because I'm too busy thinking "oh my god this OS is terrible".

The touchpad is mostly fine now though you could argue Apple laptops are still more responsive. It wasn't always the case.

Why does every comment chain devolve into this(although you admitted it)? Apple touch pads are an improvement over all other laptop brand touchpads. But then this fallacy is the only response.

"These rounded corners in the UI really make me not care about the touch pad"

"I wish I could care about touchpads, my ssd won't replace itself without a soldering iron though!"

"They have touchpads? I use a mouse"

Great. Apple touchpads are next generation compared to most other laptops.

I've been really pleased by the touchpads on Valve's Steam Controller, but they don't sell the Steam Controller anymore. :(

They seem to have used them on the Steam Deck, so maybe they'll use them again in future projects.

Here's hoping and wishing for a "Steam Controller 2". Fingers crossed.

I was confused by "touchpad", I assume it's the trackpad ?

More extensive touch support, like having touch support on the laptop display alleviates a lot of the trackpad needs. It's still nice when it smooth and responsive, but looking at the the Surface devices for instance, it's nice enough.

Dell, HP and the enterprises that buy them don’t really care about UX.

Exactly, if Meta sticks with snapdragon+android, it's game over for them. If you've been following John Carmack, one constant theme in his posts while still working there was his dissatisfaction with the underlying stack (Os+Hw) and not pushing the envelope hard enough.

Apple has a huge advantage with its vertical integration and nearly complete control of the entire stack. Android being a janky/buggy/glitchy mess is the icing on the cake.

Carmack also pushed for more affordable headsets to increase adoption of the technology.

imo it is a technological marvel but the size of the demographic willing to spend $4k on a headset with no proven long term value is quite small.

> We've seen this story before and it hasn't ended well for the folks in Mark's position

I think Zuckerberg would be elated if it plays out like iPhone vs Android.

Google Pixel devices likely are not making much money for Google. The value of Android for Google is in getting their software services everywhere.

Zuckerberg is in a tough spot. Especially if Google uses its control of Android to push forward a VR version of it.

> We've seen this story before and it hasn't ended well for the folks in Mark's position

Isn't this what Android did? They seem like they're doing fine enough

> Isn't this what Android did? They seem like they're doing fine enough

I don't think Meta's aspirations are to be Android. They were first movers in this space, spent billions and billions, only to be the less profitable, less coveted platform?

As outsiders, this is already how we're looking at it when Apple stepped in, which is unfortunate, and why Mark's refusal to acknowledge reality isn't a great look.

They may have market share, but there’s very little money being made by Android manufacturers and likely also by Google. Apple has an overwhelming percentage of the profit share from the smartphone market even if they don’t have a majority of the raw market share.

I believe OP is referring to how most Android phone vendors make no profits.

That's fine with him, he doesn't want to make profits from the hardware.

Most of the software profits are on IOS as well.

I think you must know this, so I’m not sure what the angle is you’re playing.

The difference here is Zuckerberg gets to be the equivalent of both Samsung and Google in the Android analogy. That's going to unlock far more opportunities for ecosystem profit than Android did when split b/w OEMs and Google.

But there is even much more profits with ads and sales in those apps - that is the biggest market than selling software. On android it's even hard to track how much profits is via subscription because platform is less restrictive and apple.

And paid apps are slowly going away and are less relevant - it's been many years since mobile app peaked. Top apps these days in play store and app store are free.

> The Quest uses an Android based operating system and a lot of off the shelf components.

> We've seen this story before and it hasn't ended well for the folks in Mark's position.

market share of android vs iOS in 2023:

> Android 71.63

> iOS 27.71

“Thanks to its high average selling price and its healthy profit margins, Apple captured 50 percent of global smartphone revenues and more than 80 percent of the industry's profits in the first three months of 2023”

https://www.statista.com/chart/29925/apples-share-of-the-glo...

Apple is amazing at business. Hands down they are a phenomenal business. Destroying all other smartphone makers hands down.

Isn't this kind of the same as saying that LVMH is such a better company than Uniqlo? LVMH makes so much more money, but is it something I'm personally interested in or want to buy? That's a different question.

> Isn't this kind of the same as saying that LVMH is such a better company than Uniqlo?

Objectively from the perspective of capitalism, LVHM is a better business if it makes more money.

That doesn't mean you have to like LVHM products more than Uniqlo. That is personal preference and different from a business perspective.

71.63%, but made up of an inordinate amount of outright cheap and/or high volume/low margin shitphones that last 1-1.5 years before self-destructing under the burden of their own pre-loaded bloat and adware.

That's not business, that's a struggle for survival.

The billions of people in poorer countries are able to have access to the world's knowledge due to smart phones are better served by those cheap smartphone than something they can never afford.

You live in a bubble where everyone around you can afford expensive smartphones

Yeah but unit sold doesn’t matter much when apples units sell for 700 and android ones for 150

It matters when, in a world with only Apple, most of the world would still be using feature phones.

Might be true for world progress but for company profit and market share… well results speak for themselves

Speaking of trackpad, I have never touched a mouse ever again since I started using Mac and it’s been 7 years now.

I use my MBA in clamshell mode, but with an Apple trackpad. I used a mouse with my work PC when I was a lawyer, and I did enjoy having various buttons for open-in-new-tab, back/forward, right-click. But it seems like this is all easily accomplished with gestures on Apple's trackpads, plus scrolling is easier.

> We've seen this story before and it hasn't ended well for the folks in Mark's position.

I dont know man. Historically who has been in Mark's position with 10 Billion+ $$ to spend on any one thing?

Literally any too-big-to-fail company in history?

I am not sure I agree. Meta can aim to be the android of the VR market, providing a decent product for much less money and being able to benefit from having much more devices out there. If VR becomes anywhere near as mainstream as phones at some point, meta will be very well placed to capture that position, which could be incredibly profitable.

I use the Quest Pro right now, because my interest in spatial computing (I like Apple's new term so trying to use it, haha) is greater than my misgivings about Meta (even though those are significant).

I will buy the Apple thing, too.

There are a lot of interesting differences between them (obviously, the biggest one being the price, and deriving from that) but the one I find interesting is Apple's decision not to have controllers.

This is just like the infamous "if you see a stylus, they blew it" approach with the iPhone. Double down on the simplest possible input mechanism and pretend it is enough. Today, of course, Apple ships an excellent stylus that they are happy to sell you for $129.

(UPDATE: I think here I wasn't clear, based on several replies. I'm not saying this decision was wrong -- it was right, clearly. I just mean they may very well ignore the existence of controllers... right up until they release an awesome high tech controller for us to buy (as an option).)

The controllers on the Quest Pro are fantastic, and although Meta also seems to be pushing as hard as they can to improve hand tracking and gesture recognition, too, there are and will always be immense benefits to having a hardware controller compared to just waving your hands and pinching your fingers. Precision, haptics, joysticks and buttons, additional positional audio, and more.

I have no doubt that if Vision OS succeeds, it will also eventually get spatially tracked controllers as well. But it is going to start without them.

That to me seems like the main competitive advantage Meta's Quest lineup has, other than the price. It's obviously superior in terms of delivering a deeper and more varied lineup of games; Apple seems to understand that and are hardly mentioning games (although, that makes sense due to the price as well).

It will be interesting to see how Meta tries to leverage this advantage. OTOH maybe some enterprising developer will just figure out how to connect Meta's controllers (or other similar ones) to the Apple Vision Pro.

Although these devices will be compared to each other ceaselessly, I think they're targeting two distinct markets. Apple believes that Vision Pro is the future of personal computing. Meta keeps marketing the Quest as social-connected VR gaming device. The former market is far larger and anything that displaces the PC will be transcendental.

Although Meta will sell more units in the short-term due to Apple's pricing, I do think they will have a tough time catching Apple on the hardware. The eye-tracking, <12ms image processing and display, and the M2 are things that Meta is well behind on.

Zuck mentioned that activity and "doing things" are Meta advantages, but people don't want to exercise while gaming or consuming entertainment.

> people don't want to exercise while gaming

Quite a few do. I use Beatsaber, Pistol Whip, and Superhot (more yoga-y than exercise) for this. Boredom during exercise is my primary issue with sustaining it; VR has removed that obstacle.

Sure, some people do, but the majority of people are not looking to exercise while gaming. It's a niche use case. The Wii lost its novelty pretty quickly.

If you're gaming for 3-4 hours, watching a movie, or using the device for productivity you're going to be seated or standing still.

Also, Vision Pro can be a mobile device, albeit for <2 hrs. Imo, Gaming will not be the primary use case for these devices.

> The Wii lost its novelty pretty quickly.

It really didn’t. Ring Fit Adventure, a successor to the Wii Fit titles, sold 15 million copies for the Switch. Nintendo Switch Sports sold almost 9 million. Those are solid numbers. The kind of motion control the Wii used is still used for those titles, and they’re still popular.

Just because it sold a bunch of copies doesn't mean that it wasn't a novelty and got actively used. Fidget spinners sold like hot cakes. 15 million copies is also less than half of what Wii Fit pulled, so it sounds like people did in fact lose interest in Nintendo exercise games.

> Fidget spinners sold like hot cakes.

Fidget spinners sold like hotcakes for a very brief window of time. Nintendo motion games are continuing to sell millions of titles even 15 years after they first debuted.

> less than half of what Wii Fit pulled

Hmm, what numbers are you looking at? I see 22 million for Wii Fit, and 21 million for Wii Fit Plus (a separate title).

That's decent for single games, but overall those are low figures.

These companies are aiming to have installed bases in the hundreds of millions if not billions.

Active gaming will be a nice use case, but will not be the reason 40-50m people buy a headset every year.

Don't forget Just Dance. Just Dance 2 was the best selling 3rd party title for the Wii. Just Dance 3 was the 2nd best selling title of 2011, behind Call of Duty. As of 2013, Just Dance is Ubisoft's 2nd biggest franchise, behind Assassin's Creed. Teenage girls nowadays are still playing Just Dance all night at sleep overs.

Having used VR, I actually think I would rather move around for 3 hours than stand still for 3 hours

That's certainly true but sitting for three hours is better than either.

As someone who used to stand or move around while gaming, I'd much rather go back to that than sitting. Unfortunately for me I love the precision of a keyboard and mouse. One day I'll find the right compromise.

> Zuck mentioned that activity and "doing things" are Meta advantages, but people don't want to exercise while gaming or consuming entertainment.

A lot of people actually do. There is a whole community built around it.

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I'm unsure if you meant to deadname Emily, or if you are unaware of her public transition a couple of weeks ago.

https://youtu.be/b-owBhLGaH4

News to me – way to go, Emily! Love her videos, and really glad to see her taking this scary and exciting step into public life. Looking forward to more great content from her in the future!

News to me too. Explains why there hasn’t been any videos recently with them.

Noted.

Ew. Fat shaming is not a good look.

You don’t know them. You don’t know the reasons for their weight. They very well could be using the device daily to exercise for all you know and it could be an issue with his metabolism. Or another medical condition. Or a side effect of drugs. Or literally hundreds of other reasons.

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It is very obvious that that they have neither an exercise routine nor a healthy diet. It shows in the skin, the hair, the posture, the confidence etc. The only way that's not true, is if by some miracle he had multiple separate conditions that somehow when put together appear like a person who is sedentary by habit and enjoys junk food.

Nevermind the typical reddit mod looking apartment we saw in the $5k challenge. None of this some unique story. It's all the same pattern. It's just an exceptionally public one.

So you live with them? Or are their doctor? That's how you know all this, and can say it with absolute confidence, right?

Oh wait, no, it's all just speculation and shitty assumptions by someone who has nothing better to do with their life.

You don't know them. You don't know their struggles. Stop pretending that you do.

Fat can come and go, but your personality is here to stay.

Fat may come and go until you have a heart attack because of an unhealthy life style.

> You don’t know them.

If I did I would have helped them exercise and lose some weight. Get healthy. So that keyboard warriors don’t come along trying to defend their unhealthy lifestyle choices.

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I actually changed the pronouns once I saw the video that was pointed out and which multiple people pointed out was news to them (like seemingly everyone else, I don’t follow their channel and it was announced only 2 weeks ago so it’s not like it’s common knowledge yet), but I’m not the one that literally dead named them along with using their old pronouns.

Could you possibly be more misguided here? Like come on.

(you missed one of the pronouns, which might be the issue here)

Too late to edit now, but unlike the commenter I originally replied to, I at least made an effort rather than replying “Noted” and calling it a day.

But that’s still apparently not enough. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Changing their pronouns would have had no material impact on comprehension, even if you kept the dead name.

Using their name and linking to their video would have similarly been clear.

You chose to do neither.

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Gotta love making up excuses for refusing to honor one’s wishes and use their name and pronouns.

I thought it was because you wanted to “let people learn” or whatever BS you had originally come with. You spent three whole paragraphs talking about how much it would confuse people.

Turns out, you just don’t respect them enough to do such a simple thing. It was plainly clear from your fat shaming, but at least you’ve spelled it out in words.

You weren’t even the one being called a transphobe, you just decided to jump in and make it clear why you explicitly didn’t choose to update their pronouns or dead name after you found out.

> I can only assume you’re overweight as you’ve taken this whole thing very personally. Maybe you need some exercise?

I can only assume you’re a bigot as you’ve taken this whole thing very personally. Maybe you need to not be a shitstain on humanity?

Do better. It’s not hard.

> I can only assume you’re a bigot as you’ve taken this whole thing very personally.

Just remember you’re the one who can’t understand English. Not only can you not follow the conversation you’re having. But you literally fit the definition of a bigot and then called me one. That is hilarious.

Says the person who can’t take two seconds to correct someone’s correct name and pronouns when pointed out.

Because it would “be confusing” or whatever bullshit you came up with.

It’s pretty clear who the bigot is here and it’s not the person who is advocating for treating someone respectfully regardless of their weight. Or making an effort to change the pronouns and names used when pointed out.

Your comments are visible to the world, you realize that right? Just because they’ve been (rightly) flagged to death doesn’t mean they’re invisible.

Grow up. You’re clearly not mature enough for this site. Or the internet in general.

Lol because there’s no need for them to be corrected.

Your comments are visible to the world. Quite embarrassing for Microsoft to have an employee who rages at people and gets upset giving them a bad name.

> Lol because there’s no need for them to be corrected.

Because you’re a bigot who refuses to respect a person’s wishes, yes. You’ve made that clear already. Glad we’re in agreement.

Trying to spin advocating for treating people respectfully as a bad thing is the only thing that’s embarrassing here. And that’s sure not coming from me.

I’m done here, good luck continuing to live as a shitstain on the world.

Lol you can ask Santa for a dictionary to help break you out of the fantasy world you’re living in.

You’re not advocating for anything. You jumped in and started being angry, swearing in the first post (which you edited out when the tiny lightbulb went off and you realised that was a dumb move) and then continued to be loud and aggressive and try to paint a non existent picture.

So I’ll continue living my awesome life while you keep living in a bubble thinking the whole world is against you and being angry at nothing.

Sounds like the age-old home gym equipment tale. I imagine there are more stationary bikes being used as clothes rack than as exercise equipment.

Yup, I think the main difference is the default use case:

- Oculus <=> content consumption

- Apple Vision <=> productivity

> This is just like the infamous "if you see a stylus, they blew it" approach with the iPhone

> Today, of course, Apple ships an excellent stylus that they are happy to sell you for $129.

Apple Pencil does not work with iPhone, only with iPads, which... makes sense. Artists use them as drawing tablets. But nobody uses a Apple Pencil with an iPhone.

Also, as a single point of anecdata: My $129 stylus spends the vast majority of the time magneted to the top of my iPad while my fingers do the actual work. It’s not exactly a regret, but as a not-really-an-artist, it’s… probably money I could’ve spent better. :)

Same. But I would use it more if it would allow triggering all gestures (particularly home) without awkward assistive touch workarounds so it could be used for general navigation like the S-pen on my Galaxy Tab and phone.

Which I imagine is intentional by Apple for aesthetic reasons since iPad should only be navigated by touch.

Is that more because no one can use it with an iPhone?

The stylus support on Samsung flagships is very convenient to have cross device capability on, and everyone I know who has those devices feels similarly.

Eg when doing something on the tab with the pen and having a calculator open on the phone and seamlessly being able to use the pen for that. Support on phones, especially with the large screens these days, allows for all sorts of little synergies that make the experience much more smooth.

This kind of synergy is especially convenient for students and teachers. But because Apple hasn't decided to make a slick commercial about it "revolutionizing" computing, HN must act like it isn't a thing.

I'm not commenting on if apple should make iPhones compatible, I'm pointing out that the argument in the parent comment doesn't make sense, because Apple has never backtracked on "iPhone does not have a stylus"

Well, what you say is technically true, but when Apple Pencil was released, there was no iPadOS -- all iPhones and iPads were just iOS devices, at different sizes.

The Pencil is not a primary interface for iOS it is a specialized device that provides greater resolution than a finger. People love to try to point out how inconsistent and hypocritical Apple is and the criticism is usual unfounded, not thought through,...

That isn't what I was trying to say.

I was saying that Apple tends to ignore the specialized/higher-precision option initially, focusing on the majority of the market that may not need it.

But then they introduce it later. As I suspect they will do in this case, too. But that leaves an opening (maybe, temporarily, if they can capitalize on it) for competitors that do support more specialized input devices.

If you wanted to draw diagrams or use handwriting input, Android had a huge advantage at first, ... until it didn't.

Sorry I misunderstood. I agree Apple focuses on the general problem without trying to solve all the exceptions. Once they are comfortable with the working principles that start filling in the gaps.

It took me 3 days just to really feel I understood what the Vision Pro video demonstrated. I was very uncomfortable watching the initial video. The first feeling was voyeuritistic as if I was spying on the user. The second feeling was the horror of actual people using them in isolated squalid environments. Eventually I rationalized that the demonstration was really about hand/finger/eye tracking in space. The "spatial" interface was the most special thing they demoed. The rest of the demo was hardware power and the ergonomics.

>Apple Pencil does not work with iPhone

ehhh...

>But nobody uses a Apple Pencil with an iPhone.

"spatial computing" is such a silly marketing phrase. All we saw was 2D windows placed in a fake 3D world. It's all just an aesthetic upgrade, a minor QOL improvement that has its own downsides, nothing more.

That's a skeumorphic anchor to get people comfortable with a new technology. If you're going to introduce technology to the masses, you have to do it in stages. There's a lot more going on here than is apparent on the surface.

You could have said all of things about the original iPhone. It did similar things to a lot of existing smartphones at the time (send email, play music, browse web, make call).

That's a skeumorphic anchor to get people comfortable with a new technology.

Not just that. It also makes the Vision not just an ill-defined VR product, but also a 'MacBook Air or iPad for on the go with far more screen real estate'. This pitch resonates with pro users who are not necessarily interested in VR. The initial reaction of Apple-using friends/family is: I'd probably buy this as a replacement for a MacBook + external screen. It also makes the pricing more acceptable - it's about the same prices as a non-mediocre spec'ed MacBook Air + Studio Display.

> The initial reaction of Apple-using friends/family is: I'd probably buy this as a replacement for a MacBook + external screen

Then I believe they misunderstood the presentation, since this device is not a replacement for a MacBook, since it just can't run the same software. And even if it could, it would be much, much slower at it, since it has to spend huge compute resources on constant refresh of two 4k+ screens plus advanced vision algorithms to process the camera input and overlay the 3D graphics onto it in the expected locations.

For the significant portion of users that spend $2k on a macbook and then use it as a webbrowser 99% of the time I think this could work great.

They made a VR headset and used their own marketing name for it. A term which no one else uses.

It's called communication.

It's not a VR headset and it's not an AR headset. It's something else. It's reasonable to give your specific vision of these technologies a more human name.

Also, it's something that's going to be released in very limited quantities in a year from now. And it was announced at a developer conference so developers can start to prepare apps. We've only really seen a preview and the technology is in the earliest stages.

There's a ton of stuff they only mentioned in passing - like their proprietary camera format and cameras that can record the world in immersive depth-mapped 3D. Those will likely be licensed out to studios and sports leagues which can prepare content for Vision Pro.

"A term which no one else uses."

Yet. They've set it rolling and so far own a perspective separate to AR/VR. Leaves the competition brawling over headsets for a still-to-be-defined VR concept while they pitch customers on their thing. Computing. Ties in to work. Easier to justify spending $x000.

Hmm, you think so?

To me, the term just sounds better than "VR" or "AR" without meaning anything different (other than being less specific). There's nothing Apple-exclusive about it; it would apply to existing "VR" or "mixed reality" apps like Horizon Workrooms or Virtual Desktop just as much as to what Apple is doing.

Personally, I feel "spatial computing" sounds clearer and less silly than the previous terms. But, that's just my opinion so I guess we'll see if it catches on...

Spatial computing as an idea is from early 2000s. It was in Wired and sci-fi pulp and something the graybeards would hobnob about. Sometimes it just takes 20 years for an idea to come to fruition.

I wanted to know what Douglas Englebart would think about all this VR stuff, while I was watching the Apple Vision video.

I think he would love the internet access, think the web was stupid, and that Apple Vision is alien technology he dreamed of. He more or less spent his productive years defining the world we currently live in. I take him as man of vision and principal. He would be astounded by the tech and hate the content.

I was greatly disturbed by the product demonstration. After 72 hours I realized that since I work alone there are no real drawbacks to having a hands free computer. (I have been working in a 60'x30' studio that I have equipped with 8MP cameras, shopping for 4k and 8k projectors. The idea is to have the cameras act as an interface and use the projectors to create an image on the floor as feedback. The Vision Pro seems like it might be easier and cheaper. Although not as analog and collaborative.)

Hands anywhere in space they were visible acted as the primary interface to their ecosystem. The integration was so seamless that it was easy to miss the quantity of processing power and sensors at work.

Spatial computing is actually a good Apple name for this interface as it differentiates from the lower effort products that cost $3,000 less. This draws a line between AR/VR and what Apple is doing which is Spatial Computing. Apple needed to co-ordinate the fundamentals of Human Interface design and production. When they finally had same they could actually produce that also function they shipped it.

To be fair, the Apple stylus is considered an art and creative _accessory_, not the predominant way of interacting with the system.

It works so much better when it does but it’s not fully hashed it and a lot of stuff doesn’t quite work interface wise

Totally true, and I suspect that the same will hold true for Vision OS — controllers will always be optional (even when Apple has "the world's most advanced spatial controller" to sell us for $999/pair).

> Double down on the simplest possible input mechanism and pretend it is enough. Today, of course, Apple ships an excellent stylus that they are happy to sell you for $129.

The thing is, it is enough for general use. The Apple Pencil (or whatever they call it) is a specialised tool for people who need the extra precision.

The difference between modern no-stylus-needed touch screens and old stylus-required touch screens is exactly that, with the old screens they aren’t functional at all without the stylus.

To a first approximation, nobody uses the Apple Pencil as a primary input device on an Apple device.

I think there are a few reasons for this:

The Apple Pencil is only available for the iPad devices:

iPad navigation relies significantly on gestures that require multiple fingers, which is frustrating when holding the pencil.

The iPads are much larger in size then phones and it's often awkward to use the pencil as a primary input.

The pencil is kinda annoying to keep with the iPad, it magnetically sticks and is prone to falling off. My previous pencil fell and hit the nib, immediately breaking the tiny sensor that sits behind it.

They onscreen keyboard is too big to use with the pencil, and although you can use (a multi-fingered) gesture to make it smaller, it still isn't great.

For reference, I loved using the stylus as my primary input device for my Samsung Note. There were a bunch of quality of life features built around the stylus and you could stick it back in the phone to keep it safe.

True, although that might be where my analogy breaks down. Controllers are today the primary input device for pretty much all VR headsets out there. So, maybe the better analogy would be the Blackberry's keyboard.

And we know who won that one. I think Apple is probably right to just double down on bare hands and voice as the input mechanism for spatial computing. I'm just also saying that controllers do have some advantage, so Meta should probably try to leverage it where they can.

(BTW, I myself do use the iPad primarily with the stylus, now that you can use handwriting everywhere just like the Newton MessagePad of yore... but I concede that probably very few people do this.)

I guess my point would be that Apple's approach towards inputs with the iPad and, much more importantly, the iPhone were vindicated probably as thoroughly as anything in the history of the computer industry?

Jobs made the stylus wisecrack in 2010. In 2023, that statement remains dead on the money. Lots of things Jobs said didn't age that well. This one did.

Yeah, I actually agree with you completely. I probably didn't phrase things as well as I should have (maybe because I love me some stylus, haha).

What I meant was that probably someday Apple will be happy to sell us super high tech controllers for spatial computing, but for launch they are taking the same stance as they did with the iPhone, and going all-in on designing the whole experience to just use your hands.

(And, yes, this is probably the correct decision here, just as it was then.)

Controllers will not make the jump to lightweight/outdoor AR

Totally agree. Like a stylus (or physical keyboard) it is only an advantage in some subset of usage scenarios.

I would strongly recommend looking at the results people are achieving with Apple’s game porting toolkit just days after it was released. With the hardware that the vision pro is supposed to have, I seriously think it will be the best gaming headset on the market if the final product ends up living up to what was announced.

The best gaming headset on the market would have to be able to connect to a Windows PC. The M2 chip in the headset doesn't have the power to run an intensive game at 4K resolution for each eye. Even if the headset could be tethered to a Mac for additional power, the GPUs in Macs don't come close to the capabilities of the 4090, which itself struggles to support 2K per eye for demanding games. One potential solution could be foveated rendering, which has shown some performance improvements on the Quest Pro and PSVR2, albeit not significantly. However, it's possible that Apple's implementation of this might yield better results.

I still believe that for the masses (think console gamers and pc gamers without the gaming rig) cloud gaming will be the future.

I've been playing fps/rts/rpg games through GeForce Now on a MacBook M1 and so far there's few obvious drawbacks - good internet required, slight input lag which can be annoying for some FPS games sure, and not all games are available yet - but for those who only play a few games regularly, it's also much better than running the game on an i3/i5 Windows laptop.

I agree, the prospects for cloud gaming do seem promising. However, we can't forget that in VR, latency is a much more important factor. One solution could be for companies to establish datacenters near high-population areas to guarantee low latency. But, I believe a more effective approach might involve advanced foveated rendering coupled with technologies like DLSS. At present, it seems like a viable strategy for both Apple and Meta would be to sell "boxes" equipped with console-grade hardware that can wirelessly connect to their headsets, providing additional compute.

> I agree, the prospects for cloud gaming do seem promising.

Every attempt so far has failed, spectacularly. What is promising about that?

GeForce Now, Luna, Xbox Cloud Streaming, PS Cloud, Shadow, and a few others are still around. GeForce Now is especially awesome, being Nvidia's own offering with access to their latest GPUs at a very reasonable price point.

After thirty years of desktop gaming PCs, I sold mine and just use GFN now. It's completely silent (no fan), minor lag (only matters for competitive shooters), and much cheaper than maintaining a high end gaming rig.

Compared to consoles, it has much better graphics, can be played anywhere where you have good internet, supports mouse/keyboard, ultrawide, 120Hz, etc.

Compared to the Stream Deck, it has much better graphics, much longer battery life (it's just streaming video, not rendering on device), and no heat or fan noise. I also sold my Steam Deck because GFN plus a streaming portable (Logitech gCloud) was way more ergonomic.

Did cloud streaming really fail, or is it just a niche? It's come a long way since OnLive. Stadia was a royal fuckup but not because of its technology; Google just had no idea how PC gaming culture works. Their competitors are still around and doing fine, if not making billions.

It is still a very useful tech that I use daily.

I haven't seen anything about controllers that work with the Vision Pro. Lacking those is a nonstarter for a lot of VR gaming.

MKBHD reveiw of the AVP says Apple WILL NOT make controllers for the AVP.

That struck me as odd. (Obviously anyone can connect a bluetooth controller and give users some extra control, assuming this device supports open bluetooth for audio etc.)

It is one thing for Apple to claim that their latest gadget does not NEED any controllers for basic navigation and selection. Because they invested so much in perfecting a gensture based system. So far so good.

It is far more presumptious if they say they will NOT allow controllers.

When claiming credit for launching a new space called "spatial computing" -- it is very short-sighted / arrogant to state that a one click finger gesture is all you will ever need for all your comupting needs.

There are games obviously where multiple simultaneous actions need to be triggered. There are 3D modelling applications -- actually a great use case for a AR/VR HMD. And I am sure there are tons of other applications that can benefit from innovative and ergonomic approaches to interactions. Why would Apple go out of their way to say there will be no controllers.

Apple should ideally have an open SDK to allow third party wireless controllers. Knowing apple though ... they will probably sell $499 bluetooth earbuds and call them Apple Ear Pro or something.

I’m sceptical for a very simple reason. When Apple came up with the UI for the iPhone, the functionality of it wasn’t some vague promise, Steve Jobs gloated at length about how intuitive it all was while audiences gasped and applauded over and over. He did this by introducing several new sensors and technologies simultaneously.

Not really seeing that this time around.

I think a lot of that was just the Steve Jobs’s presence and presentation style.

It’s pretty bananas they’ve crammed an M2 into a headset with all the cameras, sensors, ML engines, and high res displays. The M2 chip alone (I have an M1 Pro) is still blowing my mind with the low wattage performance.

But much like the first iPhone, it is yet to be seen if it will stick. I do think it’s far more capable than existing VR headsets.

I really think people aren’t putting enough weight behind the fact that it’s going to have an M2 chip in it. Obviously there’s no way to tell if it’ll deliver until it’s released but the idea of having a headset with potentially the full power of a MacBook is kind of insane.

OTOH wasn't it inevitable -- that small devices of tomorrow will overtake the most powerful cutting-edge gadgets of the past in computing power, storage, performance.

Maybe in a decade small thumb-drives will have an M2 chip equivalent built into them. To encrypt/decrypt data on the fly with zero latency on multiple GB/s data. Or whatever other application can gobble up that much compute power.

I think the eye tracking is the multitouch of this generation of devices. It's not a new idea, but it's the first device to ship with it (at least in the "consumer" space). Even if they end up with some sort of controllers in the future, the eye tracking enables so many interactions. Not to mention foveated rendering, which they mentioned in a few of the slides. Basically, render a super high quality dot where the user is looking, and fade out the quality in the peripheral vision. 2x4k screens is a lot of pixels to render, even with the M2 being a decent GPU, but with eye tracking, it's possible to really push the rendering quality.

They have insanely low latency. Every VR has noticeable latency but so far everyone who have tried vision pro says it’s unnoticeable. That’s a huge leap forward. And this is in a device that doesn’t feel like a center block on your head.

I haven't heard that they won't allow them. Just that they won't make them. I suspect it would support Xbox and Playstation and Nintendo controllers at launch, even, since their other platforms do.

However, VR controllers are different in that they need to be tracked as they move through space much more precisely than those console controllers support. But maybe third-party VR controllers can also be supported. I think nobody knows that yet.

There's a reference in this developer video [0] to using VR controllers

[0] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10088/?time...

I guess that makes perfect sense, actually, now that I see they are making such a big push to make Unity games work. Presumably some of those existing Unity games can't work without such controllers.

Good news!

Yep, they explicitly mentioned (and showed, IIRC) that you can connect game controllers to the Vision Pro. Presumably it will indeed be PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch controllers, as well as the various third party controllers specifically sold for Apple devices.

But no word that I’ve seen on VR controllers.

If you hold one Apple Remote each on your hands, and your hands were perfectly tracked, isn’t that basically same as Quest 1 with controllers?

definitely not

IIRC, Apple didn’t make a stand to hold the Apple Watch charger either. At least for Series 0.

And, I don’t think they had a stand for the iPhone Magsafe either. Here’s the intro video showing it’s use with just the cable:

https://youtu.be/82po_sYbbio

Both examples strike me as strange since using either without something to keep the charger in place is a joy it setup, possibly worse than trying to keep an 8 pin from falling behind your bed stand again.

Apple doesn’t choose not to make these kinds of things because they aren’t needed. It chooses not to make them to narrow their focus.

Apple had planned to be out of the display market as well.

I believe the Studio display and even the XDR are possibly the result of failing to meet original timelines for Vision.

The company continues to sit out home networking despite the success of AirPort Extreme and generally confusing and messy state of the market.

So it is no surprise to me they wouldn’t be trying to guess at controllers. They are working on a platform.

There's a reference in this developer video [0] to "using VR controllers" – I don't think they're going to disallow them, just not make their own.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10088/?time...

Personally I think this is what has held Pads (and iPhones) back from becoming better at gaming: sometimes a PlayStation style controller is just way better than touch controls on an iPad. Touch controls often don't register with the same reliability as physical controls and it does not have any physical feedback.

Apple should have made a standard gaming control that all games could use.

But the Playstation controller is a (de facto) standard gaming control that all games can use. They just let Sony make it.

(IIRC though Xbox and Nintendo controllers can also be used.)

I've wanted finger guns as an input mechanism since the Kinect disappointed me with its lack of finger gun halo. But the tracking would need to be crazy precise.

As others have mentioned, I’m sure that this will support controllers such as a PlayStation controller like the other iOS devices. I also just personally view this as more of a computer worn on your head than a VR headset. I personally purchased the first Vive that released and sold it shortly after. I’ve also tried a few other headsets afterwards. I have yet to experience a time that VR headsets have seemed to be more than a gimmick for a variety of reasons. From what was showed I think the Vision Pro could be the thing that changes my opinion. I don’t even know that I would personally get one but I do think that if it delivers on the hype that they’ve built, it will the headset landscape.

You're not going to play VR games with a vanilla console controller. And if you're thinking of emulating non-VR PC games on the headset, that seems like it would not be all that compelling. What's the draw?

I was never talking about VR games, other people keep mentioning them. I brought up the game porting toolkit because of the performance people are achieving on their laptops that have similar or the same apple chip that the headset will have. I understand not everyone will see the appeal of playing regular games on a headset but I feel that it makes sense with what the way they are marketing it. The draw is that I could play AAA titles practically anywhere I want with just a headset and a controller. Those games would appear to be displayed on a full size TV or smaller/larger depending on personal preference.

I have yet to find a reason to buy and keep a VR headset as most things just feel so gimmicky to me. At this point unless you’re either tethered to a more powerful device to be able to do the heavy lifting for the headset or you have a standalone headset that can play some basic arcade like games. A single device that can be taken on the go and play new releases not made specifically for the headset would be amazing to me. Obviously until it’s released who can say what it will actually be capable of but if it has the equivalent power of a MacBook, when my mid 2015 MacBook Pro finally dies I’d honestly consider replacing it with the vision pro but wouldn’t run out to buy one to have in addition to the MacBook.