i wouldn’t normally be concerned since any company releasing a VR product with this price tag is obviously going to fail… but it’s apple and somehow through exquisite branding and sleek design they have managed to create something that resonated with “tech reviewers” and rich folk who can afford it.
what’s really concerning is that it’s not marketed as a new VR headset, it’s marketed by apple and these “tech reviewers” as the new iphone, something you take with you everywhere and do your daily tasks in, consume content in etc…
and it’s dystopian. imagine you are watching youtube on this thing and when an ad shows up, you can’t look away, even if you try to they can track your eye movement and just move the window, you can’t mute it, you certainly cannot install adblock on it, you are forced to watch the ad until it satisfies apple or you just give up and take out the headset.
this is why i think all these tech giants (google meta apple etc) were/are interested in the “metaverse”. it holds both your vision and your hearing hostage, you cannot do anything else when using it but to just use the thing. a 100% efficiency attention machine, completely blocking you from the outside world.
i’m not concerned about this iteration as much as people are not hyped about this iteration. just like how people are hyped about the next apple vision, i’m more worried about the next iterations with somewhat lower price tag and better software availability. i hope it flops and i know it probably won’t achieve any sort of mainstream adoption even if it’s deemed a success because it probably can’t get less bulky and look less dorky, but the possibility is still worrying. what are your thoughts?
You must log in or register to comment.
Yeah I am pretty concerned. I think if work from home or hybrid jobs start requiring devices similar to the apple vision pro, it will only further the divide between people that work from home and those that don’t, as well as increasing the barrier to entry to these jobs. Dividing the working class further.
It seems like a company that would require employee-purchased headsets would already require employee-purchased laptops. Do you know of any? Honest question; I don’t, but my bubble is pretty small.
Frankly I don’t think most people will ever want to strap goggles to their head to check their fucking emails or even do any real creative work, and that’s why this is one of the dumbest products ever to be shat out of Cupertino. No amount of iterating on the design will change this fact, and no, this will never all be contained in a contact lens or a normal pair of glasses because physics will still exist in the future lol. What we’re seeing is the usual hype from fanboys, stockholders, and paid reviewers that will fizzle out within a couple of months.
People comparing it to something like the first iPhone or a smartwatch is also stupid because A) while one can spend a whole day with their face pressed up against a screen, it’s not mandatory in order to use them, and B) those devices had inherent value to people right out of the gate. It’s almost a no-brainer to see the perks of having a full web browser and responsive touch keyboard on a phone when you’re coming from the awful hellworld of the “mobile web,” static physical buttons, and the shitty touchscreens of yore. The fuck does a pair of ski goggles do to improve computing compared to my existing laptop, phone, or tablet? On top of it, the Vision Pro seems like the most isolating, lonely, and dystopian sort of device that, like all of the similar facehugging gadgets that came before it, will people off just by looking at it. Just can’t see how this gains traction in any form outside of the nichest niches, and Apple doesn’t build shit for niche markets for long. This isn’t 2001 anymore; they’re a multi-trillion dollar phone company that sells computers on the side.
Really wish Apple instead poured their dragon’s hoard of cash into optimizing their existing hardware and software instead of this garbage. Hell, there’s actually some cool gestures and conventions they’ve demoed with AVP that could be developed into a device that helps people who require alternate input methods. Imagine if they actually made the Magic Leap but it wasn’t just astroturf! I fear other product lines will languish because capitalism is a fuck and they “must” go all in on “the next big thing” or else Tim Cook won’t have a “revolutionary” product category under his belt to retire on and/or they’ll be facing the repo men by the end of the quarter unless line go up 🙃.
In short, I wouldn’t worry about it; this too will flop. The only way people are going to stop using their existing workflow and drop it for this shit is if manufacturers/developers stop supporting them entirely and go all in on goggle computing, which would be suicidal for the industry and probably be met by tremendous backlash from anyone who does anything even mildly productive on a computer or who values doing what they want with the gear they own.
deleted by creator
I’m not american and i can’t imagine a world where someone with these weird ass ski goggles don’t get laughed at.
People used to think someone who used a cell phone in public was a weirdo too. I remember at my high school grocery store job coworkers judging someone walking down the aisle on their phone.
Not everyone cares if strangers are laughing at them. Especially the rich.
They do if it gets them assaulted and their $3,500 toy stolen.
Exactly the same with smart phones back in the day. And in fact still one of the most stolen items.
Precisely. Like Apple’s headset isn’t going to have lockdown and Find My features. It’s worthless stealing an iPhone now because it can easily be locked down and rendered useless.
Wow your country sounds horrible and toxic, I hope things get better and it evolves to the point where people can live their own lives without needless bullying and abuse for trivial things.
Could you imagine not having the social freedom to wear whatever the fuck you want without having someone else loudly judge you and tell you how to act?
/u/BruceTwarzen I hope you move to a better country from that shit hole you currently reside in and heal.
Maybe that user is still in secondary/high school and deals with that. I’m being charitable by this guess.
The last time I thought about what I might be perceived as when in public was when I was in school… I’m old now and free to go out in public with my partner in bad dragon hoodies.
I worry about how consumerism and capitalism will kill us all but I don’t give a shit about this in particular. If I saw one in the wild the first thing I would do is give the owner and endless stream of shit for buying such a stupid waste of money.
i’m probably not gonna see one in the wild since income levels here does not allow discretionary spending of 3500 dollars, but don’t needlessly antagonize people. just tell 'em it looks cheap and move on it will do more damage than recognizing it’s an expensive gadget :)
I’ll interact with the world the way I see fit, thanks.
Exact mentality of every asshole everywhere
I don’t care what you think.
What if the person with the Vision Pro got it to help with a physical disability, and it has greatly improved their quality of life? Or what if it was gifted to them by a now passed friend or family member, and now holds a great deal of sentimental value to that individual? Do you not agree that criticizing in these (and likely many other) instances would be an asshole move on your part?
You don’t know how or why they obtained it, and their possession of it does not harm you in any way, shape, or form. Do you still not agree that being vocally and directly critical of the other person’s simple possession of this item is an asshole move?
People said exactly the same thing about smart phones when they first came out.
No they didn’t. Cell phones were magic in the 90s and every major iteration was met with rampant consumerism. No one, at any point, said holding an internet connected device in your hand was stupid. Find me ONE article.
https://mashable.com/article/iphone-2g-original-naysayers
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/saw-this-on-reddit-tonight-a-2007-iphone-will-fail-column.2240010/ (can’t seem to find the original article, so this is commentary and quotes from what the article said at the time)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7419784 (additional quotes and commentary on the same Bloomberg article, with other similar articles mentioned)
http://suckbusters2.blogspot.com/2007/06/apple-iphone-debut-to-flop-product-to.html?m=1 (good summary of the points that were made in opposition)
Android was going to be very different before the iPhone was revealed. That moment very clearly ushered in a new era for smartphones and phone technology in general. Now smartphones weren’t just for business people with an IT team for support, or wealthier and tech savvy individuals, they were for the masses. That undeniably changed the world (for better or worse), and there’s no way anyone could have predicted the outcome with any confidence at the time.
Perhaps Vision Pro will be a success and usher in a new revolution in technology, or perhaps it will only ever be a niche device, or maybe it flops altogether in a short amount of time. No one can say for sure how things will play out until it happens.
NGL I saw the title and didn’t expect much from this. Good effort post, way to change my mind on this topic.
People will rip off the headsets if the ads are too intrusive and annoying. Which is why they’ll either be dead subtle, or they’ll offer you paid ways to avoid them.
I don’t think there’ll be mass adoption of this either way, mainly because it’s an expensive gadget coming at a time when folks on median incomes are feeling the pinch.
Which is why they’ll either be dead subtle, or they’ll offer you paid ways to avoid them.
Apple are masters of subtle corporate propaganda. They’ve indoctrinated a generation of people to believe Android is their enemy by making their messages show up in a less readable colour in the messaging app.
I think that’s mainly in the US, though. For the rest of the world the price tag is too high and the iPhone is the mark of the pretentious or the hipster. Or the iOS developer 😄
The rest of us are happy with our Android phones.
No one cares about the color the care about the fact that if the color is green that means sending videos will be garbage quality and they can’t reduce texts over data and can’t FaceTime or get replies in line. Which is fair because androids somehow still use sms and they finally started getting rcs with encryption and now google already started using the data for their ai
The blue message shit is just peak Apple bullshit. Signal’s messages are blue to, hopefully they continue to be more popular. Its so much better in every dimension and it actually preserves one’s privacy much better
Have you visited a website with an ad blocker recently? Because typical web advertising has become as intrusive and annoying as technically possible, and millions of people willingly accept that.
VR/AR/Spatial Whatever has the potential to be just as bad, if not far worse.
Have you visited a website with an ad blocker recently?
Do you mean without an ad-blocker?
i mean it’s easily circumventable, “and now you don’t have to worry about losing progress on your favorite game or losing battery, because when you are not using the headset it goes to sleep mode” or whatever, but you are right if the ads are too annoying people are probably not going to use it, or will they? this is the thing i already think the way ads currently are is very intrusive but there’s a large segment of people who are fine with it. and subtle ads are way worse imagine if they constantly put ads in your peripheral vision. it’s cartoonishly evil which is why it probably won’t happen but even giving that power to them is dangerous.
The whole point of AR is that you can look away from the ads. Plus, it’s Apple, they’re not really in the advertising business anyway.
I doubt people are going to walk around with these things in their heads. With some noise cancelling capabilities they may replace offices or at least monitors, but you’re still tethered to the wall if you want to use them for more than two hours (at purchase, batteries degrade over time…).
Facebook already sold this thing, and it’s commonly used for games like beatsaber, VR video entertainment (adult or otherwise), and maybe some Metaverse stuff but in the form of VRChat. Watching a YouTube video on Meta’s data-driven Quest doesn’t have you jump up and shout “coca cola” to skip any ads, so I doubt its competitors will either.
I think AR ads will he more subtle. Placing 3D versions of a product on the table next to you and showing someone walking over and using it, for example. Or just regular video ads now, but with more depth.
If the ad experience will become too terrible, people will go back to 2D.
“The whole point of AR is that you can look away from ads”
No, it isn’t.
“Apple isn’t in the advertising business”
Yeah they most definitely are, they are just more subtle about it.
“I doubt people will walk around with this on their heads”
They already are.
I’ll stop now.
Yesterday or a few days ago I’ve read that people already jailbreaked the vision. So if you must have one, you will still be able to tinker with it.
Someone found a way to crash the kernel, which may or may not lead to an exploit, which would be just the first step in a long process of developing a jailbreak. I wouldn’t get too excited yet. Even if one does get released, Apple can just patch the exploit, and it could easily be years before a new jailbreakable exploit is found.
It’s true that devices like these can gather a lot more data about you than a phone can. The amount of sensors that are always on and look at you and your environment should be a concern.
Luckily Apple isn’t directly interested in ad revenue, but more into what apps you use and their biggest interest was always to provide a friction free user experience so you actually want to use their products and are happy to spend so much money on them.
I personally am not a fan of Apple, because I’m not a friend of golden cages. So I’m just waiting for the Android version of the experience. Since this first iteration will be from Google as they would need to update their OS to really accomodate AR applications, that’s where my concern lies: How do we know that they are going to handle our data responsibly? Also AR does require quite some infrastructure to provide an interesting experience. Something Apple cannot do, is provide you with a shared experience with other users and to provide location specific, persistent content. There are many examples for such content, but for this discussion, let’s say a location specific ad in a fixed location somewhere in the city adjusted to your preferences.
Of course the virtual ad sucks, but such content could also be amazingly awesome and very useful. You no longer need to set up real-life signs, you just update what the virtual sign says in AR. Doesn’t need to be an ad, could be something interesting and useful.
But to provide location-specific, persistent content you need infrastructure. Infrastructure only Google and other tech giants have (see for instance the AR mode in Google maps that gives you directions). This is where I’m worried. It’s no longer enough to just get internet via a SIM card, maybe add your personal VPN on top to be safer. You now need direct connection to Google’s localization API and they’ll always know where all their AR devices are and because you wear it, they always know where you are, how you are, where you look etc… This should leave us worried.
If Google has an answer, how long will they support it? I bought a Daydream visor and controller, only for them to totally discontinue the project within 2 years.
If you look at it as an extension of Android, we’re at 15 years and counting. That assumes this is not just a fad however. Apple jumping into the market, may be an indicator that it will indeed not be a fad. That said, Google has made bad experiences with Google Glass in the past, but the acceptance of cameras in public has grown in the last decade and if enough people walk around with an AVP, head-mounted always on cameras will gain acceptance too.
“I’m not a fan of Apple, I’ll wait for android version”
There’s literally no difference. Pick the company you let harvest your data. You pick the latter. What’s your point?
My Android phone is so customizable it doesn’t run any Google services on it. That’s the difference: open source. But like I said, it’ll be quite a challenge providing an open source localization infrastructure. But there are already papers doing it with open street maps.
apple may get into the ad business after getting such a platform or something like google paying apple to enable this eye tracking “feature” for their youtube app. i think i overstated the ad part and in general the post make it seem like i’m way more concerned than i am, but the main point is ultimately it’s a much more controlled environment compared to any other medium, which is controlled solely by a corporation which cares for nothing except money, whether it is alphabet or apple it doesn’t matter. data collection is also another aspect of it that is worth thinking about.
i think the original description of the metaverse in science fiction is kinda in line with what you are describing. a one to one replica of the real world, and you can teleport to anywhere in the world and interact with it. a world controlled by google would be horrifying though.
If anything weird happens some hacker man would probably put up a tutorial on how to disable the eye tracker.
You could probably just put tape over it, but it wouldn’t be great as you control the entire OS with the eye trackers.
deleted by creator
Off topic but my bf has an Amazon tv and within seconds of turning it on it plays a prime advertisement, it sucks because the fire televisions are like the cheapest on the market, for a reason
I think that, in practice, putting a headset on is a big ask for most people. Phones caught on because they’re extremely convenient, almost everyone had a use case that was improved by a smartphone, and once they had it in their pocket it was a short hop to using the phone for other things as well. A headset though? Maybe if it was as unobtrusive as regular glasses, people would put up with it - but even then, regular glasses are so annoying that many people use contact lenses instead. So if you want to put any kind of technology on people’s head and keep it there all day, that’s where your benchmark has to be set, not way up in the same size category as a motorcycle helmet.
My biggest concern is that everyone will eventually be forced by societal and institutional expectations; for now people can easily choose not to wear them, but if/when your employer requires it for work or if/when the only way to talk to your friends is by using it, then you won’t have much of a choice.
For example, Zoom has very shady ties with the Chinese government (and several reports say that they’ve used it to surveil and censor people), yet many schools and workplaces required it (and many still do now). You could refuse to install/use it, but then you’d lose your job or fail your classes. It’s a similar story for TikTok, Discord, and Facebook before that.
I’m much more concerned about the very real and confirmed ties (see:
) Zoom, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, my ISP, my cell phone service provider, etc have to the security apparatus of the country I actually live in who have actual power and authority over me and a long history of murdering left wing activists.If you’re in America, I wouldn’t worry about the Chinese Government spying on you, and be much more worried about the American government doing it, since they can actually use what they find to prosecute you for crimes real or imagined.
But while it is true that you could get forced into using it by social pressure, my post is about how I really don’t think that the tech has the potential for the kind of mass adoption that would create those conditions. You could be forced to use it by your job, but then when you’re not working you can take it off - compare that to the cell phone in your pocket, which they can already use to call you back into work at all hours of the day, the emails they use to get you to give them free labor outside of working hours, and the other ways in which corporations have gotten their fingers into our off time I just don’t see this as a breakthrough or a new threshold being crossed in any way.
Bingo. At the end of the day it’s still something massive that sits on their head. It’s going to sell well as a gimmick. But people will get tired, their necks will hurt, some will get motion sickness, and over time they’ll collect dust like all of the others.
The fact is that vr technology is stunted until hardware can catch up, and by that I mean literally as easy as putting on sunglasses.
AFAIK there’s some strides being made here, like I think there are see-through LCD screens that work in the lab but aren’t mass production ready, so I can see the “final form” of this being a pair of glasses with the ability to put stuff in front of your eyes and all of the actual processing is done remotely by your phone.
…but even then, I think that lands the tech somewhere in the neighborhood of headphones, not the smartphone itself.
If the Apple Vision Pro is going to replace smartphones in the way Smartphones replaced flip phones, we wouldn’t have flip phones anymore.
Spoiler alert: we still have flip phones.
Lots of them, actually, albeit not “dumb” ones anymore… they all run either Android or KaiOS, and come with all the commensurate risks of having all your usage stats beamed up to the mothership for third-party sales and monetization.
Hell, we now have a rotary cell phone - the rotary un-smartphone - which is enjoying decent popularity and mental rent-free status among lots of techy people, despite being nothing more than a 1970s rotary dialler with an ePaper display for incoming text messages. And a few buttons for hard-set quick-dial options. I would love one myself if it wasn’t so expensive compared to a smartphone.
