I’d hope you’d know what you were spending this much money on if it wasn’t just for online attention.
The current model has it’s problems, but I really think this is the start of a new major product line for Apple. This isn’t going to be relegated to only the rich forever. There are a few problems to over come. It needs to be lighter, it needs to be cheaper, and it needs better battery life. All of those should be somewhat resolved in the next 10 years. When it does, I think the market will explode.
The big selling point? TV. I know over the last few years I have kind of fought with my mom because she is hurting her viewing experience for the sake of aesthetics. The TV is mounted, but has a cabinet in front of it. It is loaded with tons of seasonal decorations. The reason? She can’t stand the site of a cord. So instead, she has figures tall enough to cover part of the screen blocking the view of the TV, all so the cords can be hidden behind the figures. So yes, she loses part of the viewing area, and the remote doesn’t work unless you get up and go to the side of the TV so the IR sensor isn’t blocked, but it LOOKS better!!
The thing is, she isn’t alone. I bought a TV last year. During the time researching it, I would see similar opinions to my mom’s. Peopel would post pictures of their TV setup, asking if the size was OK, or if it should be higher, and the responses would be similar, telling the person to run cables through the wall, or get smaller stands or other complaints. It made me realize that many people care about those kind of things, and it will drive their purchase decisions.
All the Apple Vision Pro has to do is show them that you can have a TV, with no bezel, make it any size and position you want, you get rid of glare from the sun, and it has no visible cables. That alone is enough for people to want to buy it. It isn’t there today, but it will get there in the somewhat near future.
Given that most non-enthusiasts I know would consider 500 € to be way too expensive for a TV, prices will have to come down a lot for that use case. Especially for families where everyone would need one.
Apple is definitely no contender in that market; their prices would have to go down by 90-95 % to interest the mass market and they’re not interested in that kind of thin margin market segment.
The Quest is already pretty cheap. iPhones are not. The standard Vision will be half the price and people will buy it in droves with the right software.
I dunno. People said the same about 3DTV and that never took off even when more affordable models became available.
I don’t think VR/AR has a killer app so far. There are some neat things it can do but nothing that makes people chomp at the bit to get their hands hands on it.
VR gaming is nice but most gamers don’t consider it sufficiently better to a regular monitor to buy a VR rig. For screen replacement it gets worse because the constraints are even harder - smaller budgets, weaker host hardware, lower expectations that are already exceeded by traditional screens.
Apple might pull it off but they have one hell of a battle ahead of them.
I can’t argue with much of that, although I will dispute the 3DTV aspect, no one I knew gave a monkey’s about that and didn’t expect it to take off, mainly as we had experienced it in the cinema and saw little benefit. VR is a totally different kettle of fish in comparison, it reimagines interaction completely, and isn’t sitting in front of a static screen as per ‘3D’. HDTVs took off, then encouraged upgrades with 1080 and now 4K/HDR. Phones went from £30 to £1,000+.
VR makes Beat Saber a console seller (if I regard the Quest as one). Lack of controllers and games makes the Vision concept a difficult sell as it stands.
I find it to be fairly similar. Most people I know either don’t care about VR or bought/borrowed a rig and ended up not using it much. It’s typically seen as kinda nice but not nice enough to really bother with.
In terms of interactivity, most see VR as little better than the Kinect – and that didn’t exactly take the world by storm, robotics labs excluded.
I think most people are actually happy with their regular screens so it’s hard to sell them on something that does more.
Once there is enough demand, some Chinese or Thai OEM - maybe the same one that manufactures these for Apple or Samsung - will sell them for a couple hundred Euro.
The problem is that demand will have to be generated first – something HTC, Google, Microsoft, and Meta have failed at so far.
So far it seems that VR/AR is behaving somewhat similarly to 3DTV: Some enthusiasts are really into it and a market exists but most people aren’t excited enough to spend any extra money on it. They’ll have to find a way around that if they really want mass-market adoption.
I really don’t see these $3500 VR goggles (or any other goggles) being widely—or hell, even narrowly—adopted as a TV replacement. There are frankly an exhausting number of reasons why not. For one, it would only make sense for those who exclusively use their TV alone. That rules out the vast majority of television owners right off the bat.
What a shock 🙄
So they bought Expensive Apple Thing because Expensive Apple Thing? I’ve had a decent quality HMD for a couple years. It’s a lot of fun and pretty amazing initially, especially if you have a game or two that really takes advantage of it. However, as a utility, it leaves a lot to be desired. I was really hoping to do CAD with it, there were some modestly priced design programs that looked ok along with some free ones, because that’s a big hobby of mine. It really doesn’t work very well. The toolset for decent CAD is fairly large. A tiny wrist menu isn’t going to cut it, and the ability to precisely manipulate nodes or vertices isn’t there. Same goes for even basic functions like desktops and normal computer functions. Sure, they work, but now you have to constantly be manipulating windows instead of having an extra monitor and kicking back in an office chair.
The AR aspect could be fun, but again you’re either the one creating this content via design software with the aforementioned difficulties, or you’re the one popping the HMD on to view what your home designer says would be a nice new kitchen cabinet set in your home. A useful tool, but not a substitute for a computing and design environment.
I remember reading that it supports mouse and keyboard, but the main input control are hand motions
Not sure what that means. My current HMD supports mouse and keyboard… but seeing as Apples HMD is standalone, I guess you can hook up a keyboard/mouse via buetooth? Mine works through the pc it’s hooked up to. Nice feature, but I wouldn’t call it earth shattering. Both VR headsets I’ve used support hand gestures, but I’ll assume Apple has improved upon detection and depth of vocabulary.
Have you ever included the innovative tablets into you CAD work?
I am unfamiliar with that term, so I assume not.
Apple now is extracting maximum value from its most loyal customers.
Huh. And here I am, like some poor person, with no AR headset and $3500 extra in my bank account. I feel like such an idiot.
You’re definitely not like a poor person if you’ve got $3,500 lol
In this economy, most people don’t even have that in their account. I guess that’s part of the status bit… If you have these, who can say your not doing well?
In reality, it just makes them look like the assholes they very likely are.
They bought Tim Cook a new private jet. I thought they’d have figured by now.
He doesn’t own one already?
Why own one when you can own two?
That’s why they said a new one. Only peasants have just one private jet.
And here I am without even a private Cessna
Mate I have a private bike
Alright Mr Moneybags, no need to brags
He needs two so he can Van Damme between them.
I was not aware that existed. Why are they driving backwards? I’m more impressed by the skill of the truckers than that split.
For anyone else that is unaware. https://youtu.be/M7FIvfx5J10?si=WUoZYFGqwRvLl6a2
Seems it’s safer, if he fell, there’s not much risk
He only has 6, he needs 1 more for Sundays
“Just park it next to the others.”
They got a hololens, but like 8 years later, for the same price, and still just as useless.
try a thousand more than the horrorlens lol. Our hololens 1 and 2 devkits were $2400 iirc.
Wtf ever happened to hololens
Same thing that will happen to the Vision Pro. They stalled but eventually made a second version and had horrible production issues. After the second version was out a couple years they quit, laying off the whole team.
That’s really sad. Microsoft really should have been able to herald these into the mainstream. I guess they are just like Google now…
I was so excited when they announced that and showed Minecraft just hanging out in the living room.
I wouldn’t have used it long.
Apple Vision Pro Owners Are Struggling to Figure Out What They Just Bought
Im struggling to figure out why Apple Vision Pro Owners threw out $3500 on device without knowing what they can use it for
If I had so much money that 3500 dollars didn’t matter to me, I’d have one.
From what I’ve seen on it, I’d play with it for a day and forget about it.
Maybe an hour. Seems like it’s pretty cool but there’s nothing on the headset worth buying the headset for, even at half the cost. Even at a third.
If Apple actually developed the technology in a sensible way, and that’s a big if, it could actually be a really interesting product.
Right now it’s a bit limited as essentially it is a very very expensive second display which only works with Apple devices.
Apple puts out a product, Apple users buy the product. Nothing to figure out.
I just wonder how much Apple would make selling empty boxes and marketing them as such.
The new Apple Log®
“I love log!”
I’m sure that the iBox would turn out a fair profit.
They kinda do already; Apple sells a twisted piece of metal for $1k, and people buy it from them.
They are people who paid $4000 to be a voluntary QA team.
Is Apple heading down the road of Windows now? Release beta software and use the scream test to debug it?
You mean selling unrepairable beta products of questionable usefulness at insane prices?
Nah, it just has no apps, a poor battery life and like all new Apple product lines will be massively put to shame by its successors.
It doesn’t have a poor battery life it has a poor battery design. If they put a decent battery on the damn thing it would be okay, it’s not particularly power hungry but apple just give it a gnat’s testicle of a battery.
The design makes perfect sense. You can trivially add an additional pack with capacity if that’s your use case. The included pack does the power management and has enough for plenty of people without being in the way, and it’s as simple as plugging in any source of USC-C power at appropriate specs to extend it.
That would be a fine argument if the device didn’t cost more than my mortgage repayments. But for device that expensive, they absolutely need to put a decent battery on the thing.
A “decent battery” is bigger and more weight to carry around that plenty of use cases don’t want or benefit from. It’s not small for cost reasons. It’s because it’s a worse device if you force it to be huge.
The price is high, but only if you ignore how much tech is in it. A lesser but close dumb display from anyone else is thousands in its own.
Yes it’s got lots of cool tech in it, none of which does anything. Excuse me while I go and watch Netflix on a display that costs 1/10 of the money yet has thousands of times the functionality.
Being overly complicated doesn’t mean it’s worth money.
There isn’t a single use case that wouldn’t improve with a longer lifespan of the device.
It is nothing but Apple marketing bullshit to claim people want a small battery, and nothing but Apple greed to increase the profit by using worse components.
When iPhone was released App Store didn’t even exist. A smartphone without apps is just a phone and VR glasses without apps are just a 360 degree monitor you wear on your face. I think Apple’s reasoning here is to provide the hardware and see what people do with it.
When Apple released the first iPhone no one had an app store, originally Apple wasn’t even going to have an app store it was all going to be web apps and then they realized that they could make more money with an app store. It wasn’t a feature people expected, but people do expect apps now and they’re not present.
Yeah the iPhone was successful at launch because it was a sleek blackberry and had iPod like capabilities. But it didn’t blow up until the App Store came out. I expect this product to do the same, and in the same way, companies to release competitive products with similar capabilities in a feature war until the newest releases are mostly talking about resolution and processor speed instead of new features
Can confirm, I had an Apple Newton. Hardware with no purpose is just hardware. So far, this seems like it’s going where every VR headset goes. It’s a solution looking for a problem.
I think Apple’s reasoning here is to provide the hardware and see what people do with it.
for sure, and in the rest of the tech world, we call these devkits, not finished products. Apple is trying to convince rando non-dev apple fanboys to pay $3500 for the privilege of playing with devkits. And in many ways, it’s a dead end, especially on input. what a shit show.
I would be potentially interested in developing an app for it there are some things holding me back.
- There’s no documentation on how to develop for it, that’s a big one.
- I refuse to pay that much money for a dev kit
- It’s missing vital features like the ability to connect to a bluetooth keyboard without having to go via a MacBook
- It’s so expensive that only business users would buy it, and yet its battery is so small that it’s no good for business use, so where the hell are my customers going to come from?
- It’s only available in the United States again limiting the number of customers that I may potentially have
It just doesn’t seem like it’s been properly released yet. It’s a beta product with beta features and has been released as such except it has a non beta price. And also virtually no developers got early access so there’s basically no apps.
Amen brother, same situation here.
you’ll need an m1 or m2 dev box - so $800-3000+ for something with decent ram and storage. and you’ll want an apple care subscription, $400 for two years (which won’t actually pay for repairs, simply reduce the pain of them enough to justify); and you’ll need to pay an apple dev id - $100 for indies, $250 for enterprise iirc; and you’ll want to get some extra batteries to daisy-chain off the usb-c port on the existing battery because that shit only lasts 2.5 hrs at BEST. oh and spend another $100 on each devkit because they don’t come with a fucking case.
it’s like their dev chain is a fucking sadomasochistic loyalty test where the privilege to develop for the device’s barren ecosystem costs more and more at each step. All for the honor of writing xcode apps that are running on ipad os++
fucking hell
Now?
This article is idiotic. People know they are buying a first gen spatial computer. It’s not like you accidentally spend $3500
Many average consumers probably don’t specifically know what ‘spatial’ means, or what defines a computer vs a phone or whatever. People with too much money do spend 3500 carelessly, I have known a few of the types, and for the latest Apple technology I could see plenty of people buying it without even knowing what it really is.
They know what spatial computer means because they watched Apple’s short video that explains the product and how it augments your environment. If people with too much money buy one, why do you care? You care about all the other dumb shit they waste their money on too?
They can buy whatever they want haha I didn’t say I care, I was just saying the article title could be accurate, people spend money without knowing much about the purchase all the time.
People walking around with them on is basically just their wait of saying “look at my butthole!”
Remember the Google Glassholes?
Wait, are they ONLY wearing these? Because otherwise how are you seeing their butthole?
You’re going to tell me they sold 3500$ goggles without the xray specs the first Quest units had accidentally?
If I’m going to drop a rent payment on some bulky Overwatch Tracer goggles then they sure as hell will do x-ray specs.
Wait what? Xray specs?
Yeah. It’s like the emperors new clothes. Only other “acceptable” humans with the same ecosystem buy-in can see their virtual clothes.
Everyone else needs to look at their buttholes.
It gets displayed on a screen on the front of the device
For a second on my mind I Imagined a butt dildo with a night vision camera at the top… I am not going to check if that exists.
They bought themselves into a beta test/focus group. Apple still doesn’t know what this will be. It might be a Newton MessagePad. Or it might be the iPhone.
There was quite a different reaction to the iPhone when it launched, so I’m pretty confident it’s not the latter.
Apple is great at polishing and packaging things that already exist. The iPhone was a better Blackberry, the iPod a better MP3 player, the iMac a better all-in-one PC… I have a hard time thinking of stuff they truly pioneered. The Newton maybe? That did not end well for them.
If I had to bet, the Vision Pro will turn out to be a burnt pancake, but long term I have no doubt that something like it — something that augments reality one way or another — will become a thing. And in the meantime Apple has pockets more than deep enough to survive a failed Vision Pro.
The backlash against them trying to innovate is kind of dumb though. They aimed high for a change, and taking risks like this should be lauded not laughed at.
The problem is they didn’t aim high enough. AR/VR lives or dies on software. And for what they launched, it barely has the OS, and apparently that thing, although very polished UX wise, on security it’s a swiss cheese. And few people has the pockets to develop apps for it.
They are still failing, in 2024, to put touch capability into their computers. This isn’t a company that does innovativion well, and it hasn’t been for over 15 years. It’s totally fine to scoff at this attempt.
I really don’t see touchscreens on laptops to be something to judge a company’s innovation on. I work in communications and I can really only think of two coworkers that personally own touchscreen laptops.
It’s 100% not anything like the original iPhone. Say what you will, it will never be that.
This is America: you’re either a duper or a dupee.
I’m a duper.
You guys are the dupees.
You guys all think I’m a hero and I’ll accept that responsibility
