I bought the base model shortly after launch. It went from the coolest piece of tech I had ever handled to in a drawer untouched for at least a couple weeks. It probably would have mostly stayed there or been sold on eBay, until... right at a year ago I was in stopped traffic and hit by a distracted driver at highway speeds. Two broken hands, fractured sternum, head injury with vision issues, life changed in an instant. Fast forward a few weeks - hurt, bored, unable to use a computer comfortably I started using it to mirror my Mac with a lap desk & a Magic Keyboard/trackpad. It was a godsend, I was able to comfortably use my computer, communicate, watch TV, etc. Now, today, I'm mostly recovered, but I still use my VP daily, when not in meetings it's my preferred interface to my Mac, working without it feels like I'm missing a critical piece of the interface.
snitty · 2h ago
I demoed the Apple Vision Pro. It demos incredibly well. And there's very little to do with it.
This isn't a problem unique to the Apple Vision Pro. There's still relatively little to do with an Oculus, PSVR2, and many other headsets.
Honestly, my favorite part about my PSVR2 is the ability to cut off most everything other than what I'm doing just then.But it's kind of a lot of work for that feature.
archerx · 2h ago
I was really into VR in the beginning. My friend got the occulus DK1 and my mind was blown. I got a DK2 which ironically felt less immersive since the field of view was smaller but still very impressive.
I demoed it to a lot of my friends and everyone was very impressed but no one ever asked to go back. When I realized this knew there was a problem and that when I started doubting the adoption of VR.
Once Meta/Facebook bought occulus, I full checked out and never bought another VR head set ever again.
I still managed to make a VR version of one of my games before fully quitting. I don’t know what it would take for me to care about VR again.
wkat4242 · 1h ago
I'm the opposite. I backed the DK1 but it was unusable to me. Way too nauseating. The high persistence tablet display was horrible, the pixels were so massive.
Then when Facebook took them over they finally had the chance to buy first class custom made components instead of going for scraps from the mobile industry. I don't like Facebook/meta either but their cash was desperately needed.
I also really appreciated the gift of the Rift consumer version, they were under no obligation to do that.
Mindwipe · 2h ago
There's a heck of a lot more to do with the Quest at this point, as it actually has a software library. Developers don't actively trust Meta, but at least get some impression Meta want them to develop things.
Apple considers developers so far below them nobody is willing to touch it with a pole.
dlachausse · 2h ago
The software library for the Quest is almost entirely games.
To Apple’s credit, nearly every iPad app works on it unless the developer specifically opts out.
I don’t think the issue is how Apple treats developers, it’s simply a matter of market share. Making apps for Vision Pro won’t be profitable until there are a lot more users.
No comments yet
sometimes_all · 2h ago
> It demos incredibly well. And there's very little to do with it.
Reminds me of the VR storyline in HBO's Silicon Valley.
LorenDB · 3h ago
Just to be clear, the Vision Pro does have its niche. As an example, SadlyItsBradley (VR leaker guy) keeps talking on Twitter about how he uses his daily.
Also, if the people who say it hurts would get a third-party strap, I bet they would feel better. I use a halo strap on my Quest 3 and it makes it way more comfortable.
taspeotis · 2h ago
I don’t think Apple launching a new product, that is used daily by a guy on Twitter, is the endorsement you think it is.
LorenDB · 2h ago
I'm not saying it's a massive endorsement. I'm just pointing out that the niche exists.
secstate · 50m ago
No one is saying the niche doesn't exist. The embarrassing part is that ever since Jobs' triumphant return to Apple their magic was making what looked niche blow up into an everywhere device. Since Jobs passed, Apple has slowly been losing that magic, and this headset is a beautiful illustration of Apple's inability to find those everywhere devices.
Honestly, at this point, if Jobs were still there we'd probably have no VR headset, but a TV with appleTV built in that also magically provides Atmos surround without any extra hardware and magically "just works" to find any and all content you'd want to watch from any service. The resurrected Apple used to be good at finding what people didn't even know they wanted. Now it's a zombie walking around hoping people see the value in what they make.
robg · 19m ago
This. I know TVs don’t have great margins. But OLED plus a great UX would seem to generate better margins in Apple loyalists than those folks buying Samsung or LG or Sony.
hiatus · 2h ago
It's a $3500 device. It should come with a quality strap.
hfgjbcgjbvg · 2h ago
lol what’s the niche? Porn?
hfgjbcgjbvg · 2h ago
Like let’s be real here. The first thing I did was fire up a massive browser and went straight to pornhub.
wkat4242 · 1h ago
I like sexlikereal (open it in the deovr app) better, their content is optimised for VR.
It is indeed one of the niches that VR is great for. There are many others like gaming. But porn definitely is one too.
hfgjbcgjbvg · 2h ago
What’s even more sickening is this ai company has pictures video and a voice recordings of all our loved ones.
wkat4242 · 1h ago
Apple seems to have focused way too much on the hardware and totally ignored the whole "what do we do with it". Having a bunch of floating ipad screens is not enough justification.
The movie watching is nice and I often watch movies on my meta quest. It's comfortable to watch for hours. But the quest was 400$ not 3500$. It needs much less justification.
Also I game a lot in VR. It's so fantastic. Even old games gain a totally new dimension such as half life 2, gta san Andreas. This is not even possible with the vision pro despite being more than 7 times as expensive.
abirch · 2h ago
Personally I would use this for live sports. Imagine being court side for the NBA finals? Have cameras / AI that would let you do a 360 view.
robg · 17m ago
The cameras they use for MLB look exceptional. I’m really surprised they haven’t done more in this direction. Sports get better ad revenues than scripted TV.
kalleboo · 2h ago
Apple really needs to make some deep investments into content, instead of all the short sub-10 minute demos they're releasing currently
robertlagrant · 2h ago
This is exactly the sort of thing they should do.
hiatus · 2h ago
This is flagged while an apple product announcement is trending on the frontpage now. Sus.
I wonder if there's enough interest to push the tech so that these devices are cheap and light enough to be interesting outside of a niche.
ourguile · 2h ago
I'm honestly surprised by this. I still use my AVP about once a week or more, it's my preferred method for watching shows, movies and YouTube. I would be interested to hear what others are using for 3rd party straps and I also wish there were more apps and more environments. But I'm very happy with what there is so far.
ubermonkey · 2h ago
Bah, clickbait.
It's a $3500 VR headset, so a niche bit of kit from the jump. Nobody's made this work in a meaningful way, and the initial reviews of the Vision Pro made it clear this was no different (though there were kinds words about Apple's implementation of this level of tech).
Another commenter notes that it's beautiful, does what it does well, but there's little to do with it. That's utterly true. Maybe in a few years, that'll be different, but I think the real problem is that Apple brought it to market before the rest of the market was ready to jump forward. It's too expensive for the level of mass adoption that would jumpstart a VR software ecosystem (ie, in the same way the iPhone catalyzed phone apps).
wkat4242 · 1h ago
I think the quest made it work much better. The price point is so much lower that there's lower expectations to meet, and it can actually do a lot more than the apple vision like roomscale gaming. For lack of motion controllers the vision pro can't do that so you're stuck consuming static content like movies and floating ipad screens.
hiatus · 2h ago
I've wondered if the pricing is to avoid cannibalizing their other product lines. Why buy an iPad Pro if the Vision Pro is only a bit more?
dlachausse · 2h ago
I would absolutely buy one if it was about half the price. I can think of lots of uses for it.
My kids love our Quest 3. It’s a great system for gaming. They’ve clocked hundreds of hours playing Beat Saber and Gorilla Tag.
If Apple can lower the price significantly and make it more comfortable I think there is potential for this to be a successful product.
No comments yet
andrewstuart · 2h ago
I saw a YouTube review of new generation absolutely tiny be goggles. Looked much more viable.
Molitor5901 · 2h ago
I don't think we will get wider adoption of augmented wearables until we get something more like Deamon glasses - as light and wearable as a pair of glasses, but also discreet.
lesuorac · 2h ago
I dunno, I think Google Glass if released today would do significantly better.
I'm sure android phones could be paired to it now and you'd swipe using the phone against a keyboard displayed on the headset. It just seems like it should be much nicer to read things without crocking your neck.
wkat4242 · 1h ago
It wouldn't. I have a Google glass enterprise 2. It's still a product waiting for a niche even today. The display is too small and too high up in your vision that it's annoying to use, the input method (trackpad on the stem) is terrible. For once I don't blame Google for stopping it.
FirmwareBurner · 2h ago
>I dunno, I think Google Glass if released today would do significantly better.
Why? Its users would still be called "glassholes" just like before. Nobody likes looking stupid in public, and wearing AR ski/diving goggles in public makes you look like a complete tool.
Then there's the issue with privacy. People wouldn't want to be constantly filmed/scanned in public by other people's AR goggles. It would be like wherever you go people having their smartphones pointed at you.
Apple VP is a niche solution looking for a niche problem. It's no iPhone moment.
Reubachi · 2h ago
Bit of a nitpick on one of your subpoints (I agree with your sentiment overall);
GG won't/didn't fail due to the perception of "this person is filming me without my consent", that is a strawman meant to create more headlines than the less-sexy "it just doesn't have much purpose and is too expensive." Exactly like with VisionPro.
We're already under 1080p surveillance 90 percent of our waking lives out of the house. A person wearing glasses with a UI layer and a camera walking down the street likely isn't saving that picture, footage, to their home server to then send me a citation over. But the commercial businesses, police, DOT etc sure are, and are all subpoena-able by courts. Less so with a guy wearing glasses.
lesuorac · 1h ago
> GG won't/didn't fail due to the perception of "this person is filming me without my consent", that is a strawman meant to create more headlines than the less-sexy "it just doesn't have much purpose and is too expensive."
That's assuming that the headset isn't sending the data to Apple as part of normal operation.
But ignoring that, you're right -- one of those two things is certainly worse than the other, but they're both still bad.
FirmwareBurner · 1h ago
>We're already under 1080p surveillance 90 percent of our waking lives out of the house.
Who's "we"? This is not the case where I live. I live in an EU country with very strict laws for privacy and restrictions on video surveillance. You aren't allowed to film random people on the street without their consent, except with some exceptions.
AR glasses would require retooling of such laws, not to mention gaining the public's trust as "send all public images to some megacorp's severs without their consent" is not a popular public opinion here. In Germany for example Google street view was not allowed for a long time also because privacy laws and public outrage(justified and not).
I also dislike your defetist line of thinking "well, we're under 24/7 surveillance anyway, so we might as well allow Apple and Google to spy on us in public now while we're at it". How about NO, how about they can fuck right off.
Though I think long term enough into the future, it's inevitable that governments, even within EU, will allow these corpos to have this surveillance as long as the data is processed and hosted in the EU, and the EU gov gets front door access to the data to spy on its citizens to prevent us from voting right wing candidates.
mrklol · 2h ago
Yep, that’s the way to go till we have something like contact lenses :D
This isn't a problem unique to the Apple Vision Pro. There's still relatively little to do with an Oculus, PSVR2, and many other headsets.
Honestly, my favorite part about my PSVR2 is the ability to cut off most everything other than what I'm doing just then.But it's kind of a lot of work for that feature.
I demoed it to a lot of my friends and everyone was very impressed but no one ever asked to go back. When I realized this knew there was a problem and that when I started doubting the adoption of VR.
Once Meta/Facebook bought occulus, I full checked out and never bought another VR head set ever again.
I still managed to make a VR version of one of my games before fully quitting. I don’t know what it would take for me to care about VR again.
Then when Facebook took them over they finally had the chance to buy first class custom made components instead of going for scraps from the mobile industry. I don't like Facebook/meta either but their cash was desperately needed.
I also really appreciated the gift of the Rift consumer version, they were under no obligation to do that.
Apple considers developers so far below them nobody is willing to touch it with a pole.
To Apple’s credit, nearly every iPad app works on it unless the developer specifically opts out.
I don’t think the issue is how Apple treats developers, it’s simply a matter of market share. Making apps for Vision Pro won’t be profitable until there are a lot more users.
No comments yet
Reminds me of the VR storyline in HBO's Silicon Valley.
Also, if the people who say it hurts would get a third-party strap, I bet they would feel better. I use a halo strap on my Quest 3 and it makes it way more comfortable.
Honestly, at this point, if Jobs were still there we'd probably have no VR headset, but a TV with appleTV built in that also magically provides Atmos surround without any extra hardware and magically "just works" to find any and all content you'd want to watch from any service. The resurrected Apple used to be good at finding what people didn't even know they wanted. Now it's a zombie walking around hoping people see the value in what they make.
It is indeed one of the niches that VR is great for. There are many others like gaming. But porn definitely is one too.
The movie watching is nice and I often watch movies on my meta quest. It's comfortable to watch for hours. But the quest was 400$ not 3500$. It needs much less justification.
Also I game a lot in VR. It's so fantastic. Even old games gain a totally new dimension such as half life 2, gta san Andreas. This is not even possible with the vision pro despite being more than 7 times as expensive.
It's a $3500 VR headset, so a niche bit of kit from the jump. Nobody's made this work in a meaningful way, and the initial reviews of the Vision Pro made it clear this was no different (though there were kinds words about Apple's implementation of this level of tech).
Another commenter notes that it's beautiful, does what it does well, but there's little to do with it. That's utterly true. Maybe in a few years, that'll be different, but I think the real problem is that Apple brought it to market before the rest of the market was ready to jump forward. It's too expensive for the level of mass adoption that would jumpstart a VR software ecosystem (ie, in the same way the iPhone catalyzed phone apps).
My kids love our Quest 3. It’s a great system for gaming. They’ve clocked hundreds of hours playing Beat Saber and Gorilla Tag.
If Apple can lower the price significantly and make it more comfortable I think there is potential for this to be a successful product.
No comments yet
I'm sure android phones could be paired to it now and you'd swipe using the phone against a keyboard displayed on the headset. It just seems like it should be much nicer to read things without crocking your neck.
Why? Its users would still be called "glassholes" just like before. Nobody likes looking stupid in public, and wearing AR ski/diving goggles in public makes you look like a complete tool.
Then there's the issue with privacy. People wouldn't want to be constantly filmed/scanned in public by other people's AR goggles. It would be like wherever you go people having their smartphones pointed at you.
Apple VP is a niche solution looking for a niche problem. It's no iPhone moment.
GG won't/didn't fail due to the perception of "this person is filming me without my consent", that is a strawman meant to create more headlines than the less-sexy "it just doesn't have much purpose and is too expensive." Exactly like with VisionPro.
We're already under 1080p surveillance 90 percent of our waking lives out of the house. A person wearing glasses with a UI layer and a camera walking down the street likely isn't saving that picture, footage, to their home server to then send me a citation over. But the commercial businesses, police, DOT etc sure are, and are all subpoena-able by courts. Less so with a guy wearing glasses.
It was a thing - https://www.google.com/search?q=google+glass+user+punched
However the world has changed in 11 years.
But ignoring that, you're right -- one of those two things is certainly worse than the other, but they're both still bad.
Who's "we"? This is not the case where I live. I live in an EU country with very strict laws for privacy and restrictions on video surveillance. You aren't allowed to film random people on the street without their consent, except with some exceptions.
AR glasses would require retooling of such laws, not to mention gaining the public's trust as "send all public images to some megacorp's severs without their consent" is not a popular public opinion here. In Germany for example Google street view was not allowed for a long time also because privacy laws and public outrage(justified and not).
I also dislike your defetist line of thinking "well, we're under 24/7 surveillance anyway, so we might as well allow Apple and Google to spy on us in public now while we're at it". How about NO, how about they can fuck right off.
Though I think long term enough into the future, it's inevitable that governments, even within EU, will allow these corpos to have this surveillance as long as the data is processed and hosted in the EU, and the EU gov gets front door access to the data to spy on its citizens to prevent us from voting right wing candidates.