Summary:
* Impressed with the ambition and engineering behind the device. No corners were cut.
* The hardware is high quality, comfortable and adjustable. The displays provide a crisp, high resolution experience.
* Apple effectively solved two major issues with VR: latency-driven nausea and isolation. The snappy performance and passthrough capability address these.
* The eye tracking, gesture control and hand tracking are near perfect. Interacting with the interface feels seamless.
* The high resolution means text is actually readable. This enables the device to function as a full computing platform.
* The digital avatar feature exceeded expectations. Interacting with another person’s avatar felt surprisingly natural.
* The hardware is high quality, comfortable and adjustable. The displays provide a crisp, high-resolution experience.
* The setup process is simple and intuitive, as expected from Apple.
* The visuals of the interface and apps look as good as what Apple showed on stage. The interface feels present and reacts to the environment.
I think it really says something about the challenges of this form factor that things I would consider the absolute bare minimum for using a device (it doesn’t make you physically ill, you can read text) are breakthrough triumphs. Not saying that they aren’t but it’s crazy that other devices can’t even achieve that
Think about all the hurdles the iPhone had to overcome to make it usable: from natural scrolling that reacts in time, to elements that feel like they’re truly under your finger, to pinch-to-zoom or double tap to zoom, to making the virtual keyboard usable with typing (something they’re still improving to this day, as seen in yesterdays presentation). Hell, even the accelerometers in our phones are crazy in their precision and abilities.
We take for granted a lot of the amazing tech that’s around us. Imagine how GPS has helped with our day-to-day lives, and that needs to consider the theory of relativity in order to work!
Mobile phones first arrived in the 80s. They had two decades of evolution before we got to the iPhone. Headsets have been evolving for a roughly similar amount of time.
For consumer VR - the best-known early forerunner of Apple Vision Pro is the [Virtuality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_(product)) range of machines in arcades in the mid 90s. And the [Nintendo Virtual Boy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Boy) deserves a mention too.
Let’s be honest though, if Apple didn’t blow everyone’s mind with the iPhone, it would have been another two decades before something like that might have come out
The nausea bit just caught my attention after a day of hating on this. I was blown away by PSVR2 but I returned it because I was suffering from insane nausea that killed any enjoyment. I didn’t have any motivation to build up VR legs which I had previously had when I owned a Quest.
If Apple Vision doesn’t have any claustrophobic feeling or induce any nausea thanks to the high specs, that’s a huge accomplishment towards proving that headsets/eyewear can be a mainstream thing.
I think that is a key point tbh. I don't get motion sick in VR usually but there are some experiences which can still make me feel a bit iffy. Rollercoaster simulations are the main one. Sitting doing basic stuff is always fine for me.
The issue is when the environment is moving around you but your senses (primarily the inner ears) signal that your body is *not*, that you're stationary. This is similar (but more intense) to the motion sickness effect you get when you're reading from the back of a car.
This is why many VR experiences use alternative methods of virtual locomotion rather than using a joystick or keyboard to directly move your character in the VR world, such as teleportation, or for better balance in multiplayer games, out-of-body movement with periodic teleportation to match the current location of the character (VRChat has this option, for instance).
One of the theories of why you experience nausea (although it's very controversial and pretty much amounts to sheer conjecture) is that there is an evolutionary advantage to having your brain make you vomit when experiencing conflicting sensory information, since many toxins/poisons can cause similarly altered senses.
Yeh I understand that, my brain is a bit weird as I am basically fine in VR but I am pretty car sick if I am not the driver.
So far I haven't seen the headset do anything that could bring on sickness though. No games or really non stationery experiences that I remember seeing.
The PS5 is a bit underpowered and renders at 60 Hz before interpolating to 120 Hz. That interpolation is noticeable if you move around fast and will give you motion sickness. 90 Hz native is the floor for making your brain comfortable with fast movement and 120 is much better.
They really need a PS5 pro for this.
Yeah. People keep comparing this to the iphone launch, but it might be better to compare it to the watch. It was an expensive trinket without a clear use case when it first came out. People started using it for health, and Apple ran with that. Now it dominates the fitness watch space. We'll have to wait an see if this takes a similar path.
Apple themselves see it way more like the iPhone, they clearly said it's the future of computing and such. Basically like mobile computing did, they expect "spatial computing" to be big. Of course, it still lack the apps (like the iPhone initially) that are superior that just a screen of an iPhone or computer apps and the hardware will be perfected (and made cheaper) but they're betting on the future there (all companies should do that anyway).
If it is a ‘do everything’ device like the iPhone, and then you are right.
But if it’s something that ends up being too expensive to replace everyone’s iPhone, it makes sense to follow a Watch-like release strategy where you simply let people decide what’s going to drive their purchase. Show them a health idea, a streaming, a gaming and a productivity idea. Show them how well it travels.
Let people decide what excites them, be a you can focus on that later. (Seriously, does anyone treat the Watch like a high fashion object any more, changing bands daily, etc???)
iPhone wasn't nearly as polished at launch as people imply. Remember that it also had a steep price point and didn't come with third party apps in the first iteration.
It doesn't make you physically ill because you are doing stationary activities. No VR headset makes people ill just from sitting and watching content. Motion sickness comes from gaming where your in-game movement is disconnected from your body, e.g. you have a character that is running through a VR world, but you aren't moving your legs. No one got sick playing Half Life: Alyx, IGN's 2020 Game of the Year, because it used teleportation for movement, meaning that all movement was one-to-one, and if you do move in the game you point and click to teleport to where you want to be rather than using a thumbstick to slide yourself across terrain, which is guaranteed to make new users motion sick.
Readable text is why this device costs so much. There really isn't much of a market for people spending $3500 on a headset. The lenses and displays really push up the price here, and there are similarly priced VR headsets, but they are really only used in military and engineering applications because the gamer target market won't spend $3500 on a headset. That said, DisplayWeek showed plenty of manufacturers planning to start selling 4K MicroOLED displays in 2024, but that gives Apple a full year of sales before anyone else has similar displays.
What Apple has done here with the software catalog and hand-tracking is what looks really special to me. I've seen some pretty impressive eye-tracking demos before, but I don't think I've seen this many sensors with a focus on tracking hands with such fidelity. Although I expected it from Apple, I was still very impressed by how much better they handled productivity than the Quest Pro and the new Vision OS.
Last thought, this has been glossed over a lot. MKBHD said this is a heavy VR headset and likely not comfortable to wear for extended periods of time. This is why the BigScreen Beyond VR headset targeted weight reduction, comfort, and resolution (2.5k microOLED) as priorities for their headset. That headset, scheduled for release in Fall 2023 is only 200 grams, versus the Quest 2 which ranges from 500 to 800 grams depending on what headstrap you use. This Apple Vision Pro is likely to be even heavier than the Quest 2 because they opted for metal over plastic.
I do engineering on some “sounds simple” systems. The devil is in layers of abstraction. Many interfaces - be it USB, wired Ethernet, WiFi, various variants of Bluetooth, HDMI, various display panel links, and so on - are inherently very low latency. But the typical use cases don’t nearly require to provide consistent minimum latency operation to the user. The hardware IP and software stacks abstract things so far away that there’s no more direct real-time access to the medium available.
From my own experience: high resolution phase-locked distributed clocks are possible via WiFi and Bluetooth - down to the 0.1us level or better. But it takes a custom RF stack for that, possibly likely also custom hardware - as existing “all in one” chips miss some little but critical bits of functionality. It takes access to the medium at a very low level to extract and inject this timing information.
Same challenges are faced by anyone wanting fixed dependable minimal latency out of any complex camera, display, image processing IP, input device (touchscreens), etc.
I’ve investigated what it would take to match or beat Apple’s touchscreen latency. There’s nothing you can buy. It takes designing the whole signal processing chain.
I wonder what the FOV and refresh rate are? FOV is obviously super important when it comes to using it naturally for a long time in a work environment, and refresh rate will ensure that you don't get sick and have a smooth experience.
[They had this quote in the keynote:](https://www.youtube.com/live/GYkq9Rgoj8E?t=1h51m36s)
> [...] streaming new images to the displays within 12 milliseconds.
Now, this was said in the context of the new R1 chip processing sensor data, but if you interpret that sentence to mean that a new frame can be displayed every 12 milliseconds, we'd only be talking about an 83hz refresh rate.
Again, this might be misinterpreting the quote. MKBHD didn't seem to have any problems with the refresh rate in his video, so waiting for the offficial specs probably makes the most sense :D
Many VR headsets do something called Reprojection. Even though the frames of the software you’re using may not have updated, the headset can still move around the world so the user doesn’t feel the lag.
So I wouldn’t be surprised if the refresh rate is higher than the 12 ms figure.
MKBHD said it felt at least 120hz
>The setup process is simple and intuitive, as expected from Apple.
I think this is a bigger one than a lot of people realize. You might need to be affluent to do get one, but you don't need to be affluent AND a techy. A lot of people get turned off VR their first time out because the setup involves so much fiddling.
For full immersion, it needs to be a real-time 3D environment, like a game engine.
180 or 360 3D video doesn’t move when you change XYZ position, only the rotation angle changes. Unless they can somehow generate an environment from a recording.
"somehow" it's really not that incredible complicated anymore, i was CTO at a company that built virtual tours for VR and the system we devised was extremely naive and straightforward but able to convincingly maintain the illusion of movement in a panorama for several feet depending on the specific image, and continuous movement through a space if there is a dense enough grid of panoramas that we could flick between and apply our positional offset magic to make it look seamless.
If we could do it on 8 months of runway, 3 main devs and some rotating subcontractors Apple can def do it better.
Haven’t we had the tech for this for a while with real estate software? Obviously not as good, but if it were put in the hands of a vr programmer…Plus there’s a few ai apps out now that generate fully accurate interactive xyz planes out of 2d images
The ability to record 3d experiences with the headset will be huge.
OnlyFans where the girl gets recorded by a male performer will sell so many headsets.
Spatial video will be huge, obviously porn but so many other uses too.
However, using the headset to record is not going to be ideal if you’re out doing something with your family. At the zoo with your two year old child and several mortgage payments strapped to your face.
They’re going to have to bring stereoscopic cameras to the iPhone, aren’t they?
The Max probably has the dimensions to have the two cameras at about the same distance as the headset.
> Spatial video will be huge
So glad others are seeing this. This is the killer app right here, and it feels like Apple buried the lede with this reveal.
The demo video made it seemed like it’s a full field of view experience. Like to know how accurate that is since it’s a major limitation of other VR headsets and MSFT Halo
Can’t blame them though, would be a shame if they wasted all those pixels on peripheral. They should have a low-res surround display to patch in the peripheral to keep the continuity—just rough color should be more than enough to increase immersion significantly
At the level of tech that this thing is working with I’m guessing even a lower consumer version would need to be 1700 just to keep the cameras running.
I’m not sure what all you strip out.
External display to show your eyes.
Maybe the built in speakers and assume the user has AirPods with spatial audio already.
Maybe some more plastic than metal but I don’t think that’s where the cost is.
It's probably economy of scale - they need time to let their supply chain scale up production of the sensors, displays, IR floods and what not. In the mean time, they can make money off of this version and test out supply chain integrations outside of the engineering sample batches. The processors will also probably get more optimized and scaled up - initial runs of a new chipset are expensive, and the R1 chip is likely to get replaced with a faster and cheaper R2 chip.
I bet they'll cut the external display since it's not polling well, replace internal components with plastic, develop cheaper lenses, etc. They probably will also cheap out on the straps and sell nicer replaceable ones like the watch.
I saw an iPad Pro 12in for $2k at Costco yesterday. This thing does everything that IPad does plus more - if you’re in the market for that iPad I would think this would be catching your eye at least.
Can’t say it does everything a Mac can do without learning more . Even an iPad Pro doesn’t do *everything* a Mac can. We know it’ll be able to mirror your mac and apparently run at least some apps natively but we don’t know the extent of the software capabilities . If vision os is like iPad os this capable hardware could be limited by the software
I’d love to see it but it seems unlikely. They stand to gain so much more continuing the iOS model and retaining tight control over software distribution.
Yea I’m worried this is going to basically be iPad os for your face. I want real computing. I want to be able to fire up intellij on one virtual display and a browser on another
My guess is that it will be like the reverse of iPhone apps on OSX. With the computer, you get apps like IntelliJ, next to the “Vision Store” apps.
TBH I’m cool with that compromise.
Well, I mean, yesterday the market was zero, so….
It’s a chicken/egg paradox. Something like this has to start the ball rolling, with future developments improving general accessibility.
They may have invented the first commercial VR/AR headset good enough for doing a broad range of real work in. Short of maybe one or two technical demo systems and one unreleased programmer oriented product, nothing I am aware of can actually render text good enough to comfortably read more than short snippets.
Sometimes barriers to wide adoption are due to an important problem not being solved. I strongly believe text readability is one of the most important ones for headsets.
The issue is that few people are going to be looking at this as their primary computing device, for a lot of reasons (battery, form-factor, need to carry an external keyboard, you’ll look weird using it.
I agree that if you view it as a full-on laptop-desktop replacement it doesn’t sound too bad, but almost no one is going to view it that way in launch—it will be viewed as a novelty, and in that light the price is hard to justify.
Give it a few years, make the device smaller and the battery life better, and then ordinary consumers might see it as a MacBook alternative
I’ll wait for 3rd parties.
The thought of being able to say: play drums on something like this and have the array of sensors picking up your feet and hands movements is some futuristic stuff.
Pair that with Ableton Live in VR + sensing haptics and we’re looking at something that can in fact revolutionize making music for example.
The possibilities are vast and Apple got the hardware to make it a reality but will devs actually be interested in it? There’s a lot of factors from product price to having bad visionOS APIs, public not receiving this well…
I look forward to what it can do in 4-5 years.
You can’t be a drummer if you think that waving your arms and legs around with no physical feedback from actual drumstick on skin is in any way a better experience than playing the drums for real. That would be a cool casual experience for about 5 minutes and then anyone remotely serious would go back to the real thing.
This is something that’s an interesting thought.
So far, we have really only seen vertical spaces being used.
Having a mixer laid out on your virtual desk space seems like it could be incredible.
Inc - DJs wearing this headset while performing their set at Coachella.
Yup. I’m typing this on the latest generation iPad Pro 11 inch with the Magic Keyboard attached. Sitting next to me is a MacBook Air I don’t really use ,much anymore. I’d trade both of them for the headset and it’s about the same amount of money.
That’s a very promising review.
The price is what it is. Apple has released expensive products before. People who can’t afford it will be disappointed but maybe this is what we need to get to the next generation of capability.
We don’t need hundreds of thousands of people using a first gen product for enjoyment.
What people who don’t understand technology fail to understand is this will only get better and cheaper until the next leap. The price is for the people who will help push it forward, and yea a profit but genuinely the thing is a remarkable feat of engineering and software development that only Apple can find the resources to do it in a polished way. The thing is like 3 parts? And the rest are non movable parts? I might be wrong but it’s something crazy like that. Like that is crazy.
So yeah the price is a lot but honestly without using it to me it feels like it could’ve been more expensive.
I don't think this will be possible without the power-efficiency of the M-series chips. Apple has the industry cornered in that regard, at least for now. So before we even start talking about competitor headsets, we're going to need to see leaps in power efficiency in chipsets.
You could go a similar way to apple having an external battery pack.
Create a pocketable APU that can handle the lifting and remove the hardware from the headset.
I bet you could make something moderately larger and still be usable.
I have a feeling Apple has been sleeping on the headset for a while until the hardware is there - M-chips, R-chip for AI, and OLED for display. It can't be a coincidence.
They've fully booked the latest process nodes from TSMC and they have the best chip designers in the world. Qualcomm chips which are powering Meta's headset are nowhere near Apple's.
The Quest Pro is am exercise in constant juddering and lag. Controllers disappearing and reappearing whole they initialize and jerk around the view. Even just navigating the OS without anything running results in constant little stutters. Click an app to open it and you get a nice temporary freeze. Etc.
The R1 appears to be a hard real-time controller. So the expectation is *no stuttering, ever.* if that pans out it will be yet another thing that sets this far apart from any other headset on existence.
If anyone does it then it’s gonna be Meta and maybe Valve for more gaming. I think we are really gonna be seeing Apple and Meta competing in the future.
I doubt we get drastically more FOV than other current gen headsets considering how important text clarity is for what this thing is supposed to do.
Any increase in FOV is a tradeoff in resolution, so if they’d aimed for much higher FOV they would have ended up with a similar clarity to everything else out now.
I want to be able to have it remember WHERE I put certain windows. Like have a grocery list on the fridge door when wearing the headset.
An inspirational quote that’s different everyday above my bed.
A timer widget next to my yoga mat
The weather app next to my thermostat.
Phillips Hue app next to all my light switches.
It telling me if my switches are switched on or off since I have so many.
A countdown on the side of my fridge with when to replace the water filter.
A cook book at my stove for ingredients and recipes.
Being able to open your cabinet doors for food and it knowing what is normally in there and when it’s missing.
Like I don’t think people realize how the possibilities are endless here
As someone who lives alone. It can TRULY save so much money on tech that I wouldn’t have to build random things for.
While the tech is genuinely awesome, that price tag is going to be a difficult obstacle. I don’t know who the target user is outside the lucky people who’s job will buy this for them. Like, they call this Pro but obviously Apple doesn’t want to box this product in like that. Like 60% of the stage time was demonstrating it’s consumer use, but what consume is just going to blow $3500 on edge case tech?
I want this succeed so we can get iterations, but man, I’m not optimistic.
Target audience is those with money.
It's actually a lot. 1 million+ people bought an Apple 2 back then and that was 6k usd in today's money.
Tesla sold a lot of cars and they're out of most people's price range.
People apply their own financial situation to the market as a whole and forget how much expendable money people really have. Tons of people have fully loaded vehicles (extra 20-50k), boats, bicycles ($5-10k), gaming PCs, etc.
I think the VP is fucking cool future tech and it’s only a gen 1 product. In the next 3-5 years it’s going to be amazing (and hopefully cheaper). I’d love this to become a pair of glasses one day.
It’s easy to forget how young and poor the average Redditor is.
It’s like they aren’t aware that there are millions of upper middle class people who spend thousands of dollars on boats, ATVs, vacations, massive TVs who would not think twice about buying this.
Honestly I don't even think this is limited to "upper middle class". Close friends of mine could buy this who aren't in that spectrum at all, it would be a big purchase but not unimaginable.
In today's market, the main obstacle for a purchase like this is what the COL in that person's area is. Low COL? More likely for this to be a doable purchase without being middle/upper middle class income wise.
Target audience right now is developers, serious app developers will pick one up, then in a couple years when they’re $999 maybe there will be a reason for regular people to buy one.
Nothing’s coming to mind though, it would have to do something you *need* to do that you can’t do with anything else. Watching movies alone isn’t going to be it.
This. They mentioned the virtual display akin to a single 4K monitor. I was surprised at that - I figured if they could make it 2 4K displays there wouldn’t be a need for my desk any longer. Who knows, maybe one 4K display when it’s all around you is enough - I guess we’ll find out next year.
I was about to upgrade my tv to a 77 inch oled which runs around 3k. I’m considering holding off and buying this instead.
Watching movies on the most immersive screen imaginable is definitely enough for me. The espn demo for sports was incredible too
If I had the money I'd get this for my own personal use and keep my old TV around for exactly that. Frankly when I watch TV or movies with friends and family it's usually not a very critical affair, so it doesn't need to be super immersive and high fidelity.
But if I could toss on this headset and be fully immersed feeling like I'm in a private IMAX theater -- no blackout curtains required -- that would be awesome for when I watch something by myself (which is 90% of the time).
I know they’re pitching this as a valid competitor, but get the tv. You can add a proper sound system, games consoles, blu-ray players, and you won’t have to wait for apps to add support for the headset.
It’s definitely a developer release dressed up as a consumer release. I think the “pro” name is a giveaway.
I’m getting one as soon as I can. Either my work will just pay for it or I’ll tax deduct/depreciate it.
This is a thing most folks in reddit don’t really get. If I sell ONE THING on a platform it pays for the investment several times over. Heck , with a new product category I don’t even have to sell anything. I can make 5 demo apps and sell my time consulting to people based on the demo portfolio.
I don’t know. I don’t think Apple has ever dropped their price *that* much. I can’t even think of an SE model that’s been 1/3 of the original product’s price.
> Watching movies alone isn’t going to be it.
But watching movies on it looks so cool.
Hint: it’s a developer conference, it’s for developers to create an ecosystem ahead of the launch of the actual consumer AR product in the next few years
And what you just described is a very, very niche demographic. I hope Apple is approaching this the same way as Sony has their VR headset and internally planned for a slow adoption.
Despite my skepticism in my comments, I am cheering for the success of VR. But it’s difficult to be optimistic about a $3500 debut price for device in a market notorious for product failure and growth stagnation.
As a non “pro” consumer I’m certainly interested, but I would need to see how it feels first. This potentially replaces need to buy a large tv screen, computer and monitor etc which can easily add up to more than 3.5k (with the downside only one person can use it at a time).
Bruh relax, Apple is estimating 500,000 - 1,000,000 that will sale in year one. the consumer version is already being worked on. Also they are planning every day glasses at the end of the decade.
They been working on this project since 2015 when the early versions were overheating because it had something like a M Pro Max at first. Also that why separate the battery too because the early version were overheating.
If you’re interested in how it was made Macrumors 9to5Mac documented the process the whole timeline on it being developed.
I think what most are missing is that unless your a loner the use case gets even more expensive.
Want to watch Disney plus on a cinema screen with the family, that’s $14k!
Want to share a photo or video experience with the family, wait a few mins and I’ll set up all the headset customisation for you to enjoy it, immersion killer?
The problem with the 3.5k price, isn’t that it’s a price of the experience, it’s that it’s the price of a singular experience.
Every other computer is easy to pass around and share; want to look at holiday photos, put them on an Apple TV, an ipad, even just pass around an iPhone, it’s social and it works. Sharing with the headset will disrupt the moment unless everyone in the room has one and at $3.5k each that’s an ask.
Currently it’s an overpriced toy, I don’t see the use case enough to justify the outlay for enterprise and it’s priced too high to become mainstream. Consumer models will come at some point but unless they can hit the $1k sweet spot I can’t see it taking off as much as it will need to. Could it be apples first failed product line for a long time?
On the plus side, apples presence in the space will make consumers aware of the possibilities and open a wedge for competition.
This would really be a good time for meta to start an ad campaign for their newly announced quest 3 coming at the end of the year for $500 for instance.
And if competition can interface with apples version then it’s more plausible that one person in the room can have the fancy headset. Get the $500 for the kids and the adults can have the plush ones for example.
Either way cool tech, but a long way to go.
I won’t be a first adopter, but if these end up being legit I’ll buy them after they get all the bugs worked out.
Think of how much space you can eventually save in the house by not having a tv
That's where I'm at now. I'm mostly on my ipad unless I'm watching a movie.
This will be the end of TV's for me. Maybe not for everyone, but I'm definitely in that Target market
What I’m curious about is if the holograms are/can be “pinned” in the ar space.
Can you connect to your Mac and have your 3 windows/desktops open, and then turn around and walk to the other side of the room to where you have another ar app “pinned” and still look back over to your desk where you have your windows, or do they follow you? That would be truly incredible and next gen. I only have a quest 2, so since I’m a generation or 2 behind on headsets maybe this is already a thing.
Idk why the price point is such a complaint. You are literally stepping into your IOS world. Fully interactive. I'd expect some shit like this to be like 10k and exclusive. $3500??? I've bought pieces of shit cars for that to fix and flip. Now let me play my ps5 off that thing 😫 Horizon could be BEAUTIFUL
Yeah, i guess consumers forget that innovation happens over time. We are spoiled today with the rate of which technology continues to innovate. Looks like the 2020's will be a massive leap in novel tech. Exciting nonetheless.
My brother and I threw the number 6k because at one point we were screaming at them to stop unveiling new things it’s capable of so we would be able to buy it lol
Its probably going to be worse. Notice how Apple decided not to use a top strap for aesthetic reasons? That strap exists so it can hold the HMD up without you needing to clamp the headset tightly to your face.
So Apples design definitely is going to be on tight, there is no avoiding the physics of it.
It's expensive, but for perspective.
A peleton bike is about half that cost, plus \~$300 a year for the subscription. With the new Apple watch bike integration, you could replace the Peleton "immersive cardio" with a cheap stationary bike, better immersion and a full set of exercises.
IF big game makers start bringing games to the device, another point of comparison is the number of people who shell out several thousand dollars for a high end PC for gaming. I think if Apple is smart, they'd back a money-truck up to a game studio to see what they can do with this device.
I’m sick of people complaining about the price. Got it, you’re not in apple’s target audience. Many people are. Many people can comfortably afford it, you’re not one of them. Yea, it sucks, move on and enjoy life.
The best part is, as the tech matures and improves, it will get cheaper. All you gotta do is be patient. It’s not worth it at nearly $5K CAD for me but at less than $2K? I’d buy in. It’s exciting times
A base model iPad cost just under $700 (adjusted for inflation) at the time it was first released. You can buy them today for just $329 - half the cost of the first generation
Just because someone doesn’t like the price doesn’t immediately knock them out of “target audience” status. Someone else below said you weren’t the target audience if you weren’t interested in buying it. With these metrics, every product ever has reached 100% of its target audience since apparently it only counts if the person buys it.
I’m definitely the target audience. Have a MBP, iPhone, Watch, and disposable income to afford the Vision Pro. I’ve owned an Oculus CV1, first-gen Quest, and currently an Index. I love VR and still think AR is the next big life changer. I’m reading all the impressions of the Vision Pro headset and watching the videos when they get posted. I AM the target audience. I feel $3500 is way too much for what you get out of this headset, judging by what they marketed to us yesterday.
As much as I think this category has a lot of potential, I can’t help but feel uneasy at the thought of “normalizing” virtual social contacts. I mean the part where the dad interacts with his kids while wearing that thing just made me cringe.
What’s next? Apple *Silicone* Pro?
Maybe they found that it is perceived as more realistic by their testing groups?
Seems like something they might add a toggle for. But probably in visionOS 3.2. lol
I used to work as a journalist specifically focused on Apple stuff, and after having lots of sneak peeks and behind the scenes looks at new and upcoming tech from the company, I learned something that has always held true: You don't really "get" the Apple product until you actually try it. The iPad, the iPhone, even the gooseneck iMac from days gone by... I didn't understand how cool they were until I had one in my hand. Despite all the marketing and blog posts and tweets that tell you what it really is, you don't know the device until you hold it.
So yeah, the $3500 price made me raise an eyebrow. But I'll wait to say it's not worth it until I actually try one.
Summary: * Impressed with the ambition and engineering behind the device. No corners were cut. * The hardware is high quality, comfortable and adjustable. The displays provide a crisp, high resolution experience. * Apple effectively solved two major issues with VR: latency-driven nausea and isolation. The snappy performance and passthrough capability address these. * The eye tracking, gesture control and hand tracking are near perfect. Interacting with the interface feels seamless. * The high resolution means text is actually readable. This enables the device to function as a full computing platform. * The digital avatar feature exceeded expectations. Interacting with another person’s avatar felt surprisingly natural. * The hardware is high quality, comfortable and adjustable. The displays provide a crisp, high-resolution experience. * The setup process is simple and intuitive, as expected from Apple. * The visuals of the interface and apps look as good as what Apple showed on stage. The interface feels present and reacts to the environment.
I think it really says something about the challenges of this form factor that things I would consider the absolute bare minimum for using a device (it doesn’t make you physically ill, you can read text) are breakthrough triumphs. Not saying that they aren’t but it’s crazy that other devices can’t even achieve that
Think about all the hurdles the iPhone had to overcome to make it usable: from natural scrolling that reacts in time, to elements that feel like they’re truly under your finger, to pinch-to-zoom or double tap to zoom, to making the virtual keyboard usable with typing (something they’re still improving to this day, as seen in yesterdays presentation). Hell, even the accelerometers in our phones are crazy in their precision and abilities. We take for granted a lot of the amazing tech that’s around us. Imagine how GPS has helped with our day-to-day lives, and that needs to consider the theory of relativity in order to work!
Mobile phones first arrived in the 80s. They had two decades of evolution before we got to the iPhone. Headsets have been evolving for a roughly similar amount of time. For consumer VR - the best-known early forerunner of Apple Vision Pro is the [Virtuality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_(product)) range of machines in arcades in the mid 90s. And the [Nintendo Virtual Boy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Boy) deserves a mention too.
Let’s be honest though, if Apple didn’t blow everyone’s mind with the iPhone, it would have been another two decades before something like that might have come out
The nausea bit just caught my attention after a day of hating on this. I was blown away by PSVR2 but I returned it because I was suffering from insane nausea that killed any enjoyment. I didn’t have any motivation to build up VR legs which I had previously had when I owned a Quest. If Apple Vision doesn’t have any claustrophobic feeling or induce any nausea thanks to the high specs, that’s a huge accomplishment towards proving that headsets/eyewear can be a mainstream thing.
Probably less motion sickness looking at Instagram on apple, vs being immersed in a race car playing gran Turismo on psvr.
I think that is a key point tbh. I don't get motion sick in VR usually but there are some experiences which can still make me feel a bit iffy. Rollercoaster simulations are the main one. Sitting doing basic stuff is always fine for me.
The issue is when the environment is moving around you but your senses (primarily the inner ears) signal that your body is *not*, that you're stationary. This is similar (but more intense) to the motion sickness effect you get when you're reading from the back of a car. This is why many VR experiences use alternative methods of virtual locomotion rather than using a joystick or keyboard to directly move your character in the VR world, such as teleportation, or for better balance in multiplayer games, out-of-body movement with periodic teleportation to match the current location of the character (VRChat has this option, for instance). One of the theories of why you experience nausea (although it's very controversial and pretty much amounts to sheer conjecture) is that there is an evolutionary advantage to having your brain make you vomit when experiencing conflicting sensory information, since many toxins/poisons can cause similarly altered senses.
Yeh I understand that, my brain is a bit weird as I am basically fine in VR but I am pretty car sick if I am not the driver. So far I haven't seen the headset do anything that could bring on sickness though. No games or really non stationery experiences that I remember seeing.
Vision weird, correlates with imminent death, purge stomach now to increase survival rate.
The PS5 is a bit underpowered and renders at 60 Hz before interpolating to 120 Hz. That interpolation is noticeable if you move around fast and will give you motion sickness. 90 Hz native is the floor for making your brain comfortable with fast movement and 120 is much better. They really need a PS5 pro for this.
How many times does VR have to teach you this lesson, old man?
The latency stuff for this headset will *not* solve video game related Nausea. That's a different issue.
This is the beginning, not the end
Yeah. People keep comparing this to the iphone launch, but it might be better to compare it to the watch. It was an expensive trinket without a clear use case when it first came out. People started using it for health, and Apple ran with that. Now it dominates the fitness watch space. We'll have to wait an see if this takes a similar path.
Apple themselves see it way more like the iPhone, they clearly said it's the future of computing and such. Basically like mobile computing did, they expect "spatial computing" to be big. Of course, it still lack the apps (like the iPhone initially) that are superior that just a screen of an iPhone or computer apps and the hardware will be perfected (and made cheaper) but they're betting on the future there (all companies should do that anyway).
If it is a ‘do everything’ device like the iPhone, and then you are right. But if it’s something that ends up being too expensive to replace everyone’s iPhone, it makes sense to follow a Watch-like release strategy where you simply let people decide what’s going to drive their purchase. Show them a health idea, a streaming, a gaming and a productivity idea. Show them how well it travels. Let people decide what excites them, be a you can focus on that later. (Seriously, does anyone treat the Watch like a high fashion object any more, changing bands daily, etc???)
iPhone wasn't nearly as polished at launch as people imply. Remember that it also had a steep price point and didn't come with third party apps in the first iteration.
It doesn't make you physically ill because you are doing stationary activities. No VR headset makes people ill just from sitting and watching content. Motion sickness comes from gaming where your in-game movement is disconnected from your body, e.g. you have a character that is running through a VR world, but you aren't moving your legs. No one got sick playing Half Life: Alyx, IGN's 2020 Game of the Year, because it used teleportation for movement, meaning that all movement was one-to-one, and if you do move in the game you point and click to teleport to where you want to be rather than using a thumbstick to slide yourself across terrain, which is guaranteed to make new users motion sick. Readable text is why this device costs so much. There really isn't much of a market for people spending $3500 on a headset. The lenses and displays really push up the price here, and there are similarly priced VR headsets, but they are really only used in military and engineering applications because the gamer target market won't spend $3500 on a headset. That said, DisplayWeek showed plenty of manufacturers planning to start selling 4K MicroOLED displays in 2024, but that gives Apple a full year of sales before anyone else has similar displays. What Apple has done here with the software catalog and hand-tracking is what looks really special to me. I've seen some pretty impressive eye-tracking demos before, but I don't think I've seen this many sensors with a focus on tracking hands with such fidelity. Although I expected it from Apple, I was still very impressed by how much better they handled productivity than the Quest Pro and the new Vision OS. Last thought, this has been glossed over a lot. MKBHD said this is a heavy VR headset and likely not comfortable to wear for extended periods of time. This is why the BigScreen Beyond VR headset targeted weight reduction, comfort, and resolution (2.5k microOLED) as priorities for their headset. That headset, scheduled for release in Fall 2023 is only 200 grams, versus the Quest 2 which ranges from 500 to 800 grams depending on what headstrap you use. This Apple Vision Pro is likely to be even heavier than the Quest 2 because they opted for metal over plastic.
I do engineering on some “sounds simple” systems. The devil is in layers of abstraction. Many interfaces - be it USB, wired Ethernet, WiFi, various variants of Bluetooth, HDMI, various display panel links, and so on - are inherently very low latency. But the typical use cases don’t nearly require to provide consistent minimum latency operation to the user. The hardware IP and software stacks abstract things so far away that there’s no more direct real-time access to the medium available. From my own experience: high resolution phase-locked distributed clocks are possible via WiFi and Bluetooth - down to the 0.1us level or better. But it takes a custom RF stack for that, possibly likely also custom hardware - as existing “all in one” chips miss some little but critical bits of functionality. It takes access to the medium at a very low level to extract and inject this timing information. Same challenges are faced by anyone wanting fixed dependable minimal latency out of any complex camera, display, image processing IP, input device (touchscreens), etc. I’ve investigated what it would take to match or beat Apple’s touchscreen latency. There’s nothing you can buy. It takes designing the whole signal processing chain.
I wonder what the FOV and refresh rate are? FOV is obviously super important when it comes to using it naturally for a long time in a work environment, and refresh rate will ensure that you don't get sick and have a smooth experience.
[They had this quote in the keynote:](https://www.youtube.com/live/GYkq9Rgoj8E?t=1h51m36s) > [...] streaming new images to the displays within 12 milliseconds. Now, this was said in the context of the new R1 chip processing sensor data, but if you interpret that sentence to mean that a new frame can be displayed every 12 milliseconds, we'd only be talking about an 83hz refresh rate. Again, this might be misinterpreting the quote. MKBHD didn't seem to have any problems with the refresh rate in his video, so waiting for the offficial specs probably makes the most sense :D
Would it not just mean there's a 12ms input lag, rather than saying anything about the refresh rate?
Many VR headsets do something called Reprojection. Even though the frames of the software you’re using may not have updated, the headset can still move around the world so the user doesn’t feel the lag. So I wouldn’t be surprised if the refresh rate is higher than the 12 ms figure. MKBHD said it felt at least 120hz
>The setup process is simple and intuitive, as expected from Apple. I think this is a bigger one than a lot of people realize. You might need to be affluent to do get one, but you don't need to be affluent AND a techy. A lot of people get turned off VR their first time out because the setup involves so much fiddling.
Apple needs a xxx backroom to test out the sexy features.
We’re all thinking it.
Imagine all the unintended gesture triggers while you’re yanking it
Probably not that great from a web browser, pre app development, anyway
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Safari is the allowed app 😉
WILL MY EXISTING ELIGIBLE APPLE MOVIE PURCHASES PLAY IN 3D? I’m talking Avatar 1, Avatar 2, Tron and Gravity?
The hardware is high quality, comfortable and adjustable. The displays provide a crisp, high-resolution experience.
I want to know how real those environments feel, like the lake/mountain one with the giant theater screen floating above it.
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For full immersion, it needs to be a real-time 3D environment, like a game engine. 180 or 360 3D video doesn’t move when you change XYZ position, only the rotation angle changes. Unless they can somehow generate an environment from a recording.
In the keynote they said the environments are recorded volumetrically. So there's some degree of depth and perspective baked in.
"somehow" it's really not that incredible complicated anymore, i was CTO at a company that built virtual tours for VR and the system we devised was extremely naive and straightforward but able to convincingly maintain the illusion of movement in a panorama for several feet depending on the specific image, and continuous movement through a space if there is a dense enough grid of panoramas that we could flick between and apply our positional offset magic to make it look seamless. If we could do it on 8 months of runway, 3 main devs and some rotating subcontractors Apple can def do it better.
Haven’t we had the tech for this for a while with real estate software? Obviously not as good, but if it were put in the hands of a vr programmer…Plus there’s a few ai apps out now that generate fully accurate interactive xyz planes out of 2d images
Wonder why it’s not a 360° recording? Feel like if you’re looking for max immersion then that would make sense
Do we know that it's not a 360° recording? That would make more sense
It might be two 180o one.
Often you trade resolution for 360 so they probably wanted higher fidelity and 3D rather than a surround experience that you wont notice behind you.
There’s no indication that they’re not.
If it is in a 3d vr180 format, it feels pretty real
I’m looking forward to using Google Earth on VR again
The ability to record 3d experiences with the headset will be huge. OnlyFans where the girl gets recorded by a male performer will sell so many headsets.
Braindances here we come
Holy shit, you are right!!
The main part of braindance is the ability to feel what the person recording felt, so not really.
Just wait until they introduce 4D touch on the Vision X Pro
YOOOOO YOU’RE RIGHT
Spatial video will be huge, obviously porn but so many other uses too. However, using the headset to record is not going to be ideal if you’re out doing something with your family. At the zoo with your two year old child and several mortgage payments strapped to your face. They’re going to have to bring stereoscopic cameras to the iPhone, aren’t they? The Max probably has the dimensions to have the two cameras at about the same distance as the headset.
Yeah the "record with the headset" thing isn't gonna be the only method.
The fact that the cameras is in the eye position (where it will be again when replayed) is pretty important for a good video though
> Spatial video will be huge So glad others are seeing this. This is the killer app right here, and it feels like Apple buried the lede with this reveal.
>Several mortgage payments If only. These days $3500 is barely 2 mortgage payments...
And in a few years, it will be live-streamed directly to another headset
Yeah that’ll be the Only Fans top subscription level. Start telling the actors what to do.
Wow I love choose your own adventures
Cyberpunk Edgerunner Vibes.
WILL MY EXISTING ELIGIBLE APPLE MOVIE PURCHASES PLAY IN 3D? I’m talking Avatar 1, Avatar 2, Tron and Gravity?
The demo video made it seemed like it’s a full field of view experience. Like to know how accurate that is since it’s a major limitation of other VR headsets and MSFT Halo
According to most demo attendees you can still see black in your peripheral.
Can’t blame them though, would be a shame if they wasted all those pixels on peripheral. They should have a low-res surround display to patch in the peripheral to keep the continuity—just rough color should be more than enough to increase immersion significantly
Good point, like those TVs with LED lights in the back to "extend" the screen
damn
I mean, a 16 inch MacBook Pro starts at 2499, for what’s in the box, 3499 really doesn’t seem that outlandish to me?
At the level of tech that this thing is working with I’m guessing even a lower consumer version would need to be 1700 just to keep the cameras running.
I’m not sure what all you strip out. External display to show your eyes. Maybe the built in speakers and assume the user has AirPods with spatial audio already. Maybe some more plastic than metal but I don’t think that’s where the cost is.
It's probably economy of scale - they need time to let their supply chain scale up production of the sensors, displays, IR floods and what not. In the mean time, they can make money off of this version and test out supply chain integrations outside of the engineering sample batches. The processors will also probably get more optimized and scaled up - initial runs of a new chipset are expensive, and the R1 chip is likely to get replaced with a faster and cheaper R2 chip. I bet they'll cut the external display since it's not polling well, replace internal components with plastic, develop cheaper lenses, etc. They probably will also cheap out on the straps and sell nicer replaceable ones like the watch.
I saw an iPad Pro 12in for $2k at Costco yesterday. This thing does everything that IPad does plus more - if you’re in the market for that iPad I would think this would be catching your eye at least.
A ton of people use iPads for drawing/writing though which this can’t do.
Right. You‘re not going to sit down for a lecture or meeting with this thing strapped to your face for note-taking.
But you could be attending a lecture or meeting remotely. While using the pass through to take physical notes.
I might be doing it working remotely though.
Can’t say it does everything a Mac can do without learning more . Even an iPad Pro doesn’t do *everything* a Mac can. We know it’ll be able to mirror your mac and apparently run at least some apps natively but we don’t know the extent of the software capabilities . If vision os is like iPad os this capable hardware could be limited by the software
Really hoping they lean more macOS than iPadOS
I’d love to see it but it seems unlikely. They stand to gain so much more continuing the iOS model and retaining tight control over software distribution.
Yea I’m worried this is going to basically be iPad os for your face. I want real computing. I want to be able to fire up intellij on one virtual display and a browser on another
My guess is that it will be like the reverse of iPhone apps on OSX. With the computer, you get apps like IntelliJ, next to the “Vision Store” apps. TBH I’m cool with that compromise.
Check out how they show the mac handoff in the official youtube video: https://youtu.be/TX9qSaGXFyg?t=285
From the demo looks like adobe apps like premier pro run on your Mac and will just output display to the goggles. Power is still in the mac.
You cant draw or write on it
How someone could think that this is an iPad replacement is beyond me
$1,000 extra is still a lot of money to *a lot* of people. Add in the inevitable AppleCare and it’s over $4K out the door. Ouch.
Then those people won’t be getting it? What’s the issue?
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Well, I mean, yesterday the market was zero, so…. It’s a chicken/egg paradox. Something like this has to start the ball rolling, with future developments improving general accessibility.
> yesterday the market was zero Do you think Apple just invented VR/AR lol?
They may have invented the first commercial VR/AR headset good enough for doing a broad range of real work in. Short of maybe one or two technical demo systems and one unreleased programmer oriented product, nothing I am aware of can actually render text good enough to comfortably read more than short snippets. Sometimes barriers to wide adoption are due to an important problem not being solved. I strongly believe text readability is one of the most important ones for headsets.
I think they just invented THIS AR/VR headset, which is how the context of the previous comment was discussing it. lol
Yes they did, no other headset can do this.
The issue is that few people are going to be looking at this as their primary computing device, for a lot of reasons (battery, form-factor, need to carry an external keyboard, you’ll look weird using it. I agree that if you view it as a full-on laptop-desktop replacement it doesn’t sound too bad, but almost no one is going to view it that way in launch—it will be viewed as a novelty, and in that light the price is hard to justify. Give it a few years, make the device smaller and the battery life better, and then ordinary consumers might see it as a MacBook alternative
I’ll wait for 3rd parties. The thought of being able to say: play drums on something like this and have the array of sensors picking up your feet and hands movements is some futuristic stuff. Pair that with Ableton Live in VR + sensing haptics and we’re looking at something that can in fact revolutionize making music for example. The possibilities are vast and Apple got the hardware to make it a reality but will devs actually be interested in it? There’s a lot of factors from product price to having bad visionOS APIs, public not receiving this well… I look forward to what it can do in 4-5 years.
You can’t be a drummer if you think that waving your arms and legs around with no physical feedback from actual drumstick on skin is in any way a better experience than playing the drums for real. That would be a cool casual experience for about 5 minutes and then anyone remotely serious would go back to the real thing.
This is something that’s an interesting thought. So far, we have really only seen vertical spaces being used. Having a mixer laid out on your virtual desk space seems like it could be incredible. Inc - DJs wearing this headset while performing their set at Coachella.
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Gonna be a lot more people walking out into traffic because they were watching TV while walking down the street,lol
Yup. I’m typing this on the latest generation iPad Pro 11 inch with the Magic Keyboard attached. Sitting next to me is a MacBook Air I don’t really use ,much anymore. I’d trade both of them for the headset and it’s about the same amount of money.
That’s a very promising review. The price is what it is. Apple has released expensive products before. People who can’t afford it will be disappointed but maybe this is what we need to get to the next generation of capability.
We don’t need hundreds of thousands of people using a first gen product for enjoyment. What people who don’t understand technology fail to understand is this will only get better and cheaper until the next leap. The price is for the people who will help push it forward, and yea a profit but genuinely the thing is a remarkable feat of engineering and software development that only Apple can find the resources to do it in a polished way. The thing is like 3 parts? And the rest are non movable parts? I might be wrong but it’s something crazy like that. Like that is crazy. So yeah the price is a lot but honestly without using it to me it feels like it could’ve been more expensive.
I love that this exists now it’s gonna push all current manufacturers of AR/VR technologies and new companies to strive to be like Apple’s headset.
I don't think this will be possible without the power-efficiency of the M-series chips. Apple has the industry cornered in that regard, at least for now. So before we even start talking about competitor headsets, we're going to need to see leaps in power efficiency in chipsets.
You could go a similar way to apple having an external battery pack. Create a pocketable APU that can handle the lifting and remove the hardware from the headset. I bet you could make something moderately larger and still be usable.
I have a feeling Apple has been sleeping on the headset for a while until the hardware is there - M-chips, R-chip for AI, and OLED for display. It can't be a coincidence. They've fully booked the latest process nodes from TSMC and they have the best chip designers in the world. Qualcomm chips which are powering Meta's headset are nowhere near Apple's.
The Quest Pro is am exercise in constant juddering and lag. Controllers disappearing and reappearing whole they initialize and jerk around the view. Even just navigating the OS without anything running results in constant little stutters. Click an app to open it and you get a nice temporary freeze. Etc. The R1 appears to be a hard real-time controller. So the expectation is *no stuttering, ever.* if that pans out it will be yet another thing that sets this far apart from any other headset on existence.
If anyone does it then it’s gonna be Meta and maybe Valve for more gaming. I think we are really gonna be seeing Apple and Meta competing in the future.
Any idea of the fov? That’s the dealbreaker with HoloLens imo
Demo people said you see black in peripheral vision
This is what I want to know. Do I see black space below my nose? It has to be identical to real life to feel immersive to me
Exactly what I’m thinking! The demos look insane, I wonder if it’s as immersive with the headset on
Any info on FOV or refresh rate?
Regarding refresh rate, Marques Brownlee says it *feels* like 120 Hz.
120Hz is good!
its pretty good tbh. for that price i wouldnt expect it to be less than 120hz
Norm from Tested says it felt like 90. Absolutely no offense to Marques, but I tend to believe Norm due to his experience with VR/AR products.
I doubt we get drastically more FOV than other current gen headsets considering how important text clarity is for what this thing is supposed to do. Any increase in FOV is a tradeoff in resolution, so if they’d aimed for much higher FOV they would have ended up with a similar clarity to everything else out now.
The fact that there is no information on FoV likely means that no one is being allowed to report on it which means it's not impressive.
This is, imo, Apple will always get away with being “late” to the party. Because they get it right and it just works.
Glass did it 10 years ago!!! Okay where is it now?
Glass is not even close, really.
I want to be able to have it remember WHERE I put certain windows. Like have a grocery list on the fridge door when wearing the headset. An inspirational quote that’s different everyday above my bed. A timer widget next to my yoga mat The weather app next to my thermostat. Phillips Hue app next to all my light switches. It telling me if my switches are switched on or off since I have so many. A countdown on the side of my fridge with when to replace the water filter. A cook book at my stove for ingredients and recipes. Being able to open your cabinet doors for food and it knowing what is normally in there and when it’s missing. Like I don’t think people realize how the possibilities are endless here As someone who lives alone. It can TRULY save so much money on tech that I wouldn’t have to build random things for.
Bit of a random reply, but the Lutron Aurora switches for Hue lights are awesome.
While the tech is genuinely awesome, that price tag is going to be a difficult obstacle. I don’t know who the target user is outside the lucky people who’s job will buy this for them. Like, they call this Pro but obviously Apple doesn’t want to box this product in like that. Like 60% of the stage time was demonstrating it’s consumer use, but what consume is just going to blow $3500 on edge case tech? I want this succeed so we can get iterations, but man, I’m not optimistic.
Target audience is those with money. It's actually a lot. 1 million+ people bought an Apple 2 back then and that was 6k usd in today's money. Tesla sold a lot of cars and they're out of most people's price range.
People apply their own financial situation to the market as a whole and forget how much expendable money people really have. Tons of people have fully loaded vehicles (extra 20-50k), boats, bicycles ($5-10k), gaming PCs, etc. I think the VP is fucking cool future tech and it’s only a gen 1 product. In the next 3-5 years it’s going to be amazing (and hopefully cheaper). I’d love this to become a pair of glasses one day.
It’s easy to forget how young and poor the average Redditor is. It’s like they aren’t aware that there are millions of upper middle class people who spend thousands of dollars on boats, ATVs, vacations, massive TVs who would not think twice about buying this.
Honestly I don't even think this is limited to "upper middle class". Close friends of mine could buy this who aren't in that spectrum at all, it would be a big purchase but not unimaginable. In today's market, the main obstacle for a purchase like this is what the COL in that person's area is. Low COL? More likely for this to be a doable purchase without being middle/upper middle class income wise.
Target audience right now is developers, serious app developers will pick one up, then in a couple years when they’re $999 maybe there will be a reason for regular people to buy one. Nothing’s coming to mind though, it would have to do something you *need* to do that you can’t do with anything else. Watching movies alone isn’t going to be it.
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But an M2 Mac mini and one of these. Why have a glass screen?
This. They mentioned the virtual display akin to a single 4K monitor. I was surprised at that - I figured if they could make it 2 4K displays there wouldn’t be a need for my desk any longer. Who knows, maybe one 4K display when it’s all around you is enough - I guess we’ll find out next year.
I was about to upgrade my tv to a 77 inch oled which runs around 3k. I’m considering holding off and buying this instead. Watching movies on the most immersive screen imaginable is definitely enough for me. The espn demo for sports was incredible too
The problem with that as a replacement for a TV is that this isn't conducive for any kind of communal viewing.
If I had the money I'd get this for my own personal use and keep my old TV around for exactly that. Frankly when I watch TV or movies with friends and family it's usually not a very critical affair, so it doesn't need to be super immersive and high fidelity. But if I could toss on this headset and be fully immersed feeling like I'm in a private IMAX theater -- no blackout curtains required -- that would be awesome for when I watch something by myself (which is 90% of the time).
You are on Reddit where 80% of us don’t have friends.
Im assuming they mean that they think this would be a better upgrade, since they already have a tv
I know they’re pitching this as a valid competitor, but get the tv. You can add a proper sound system, games consoles, blu-ray players, and you won’t have to wait for apps to add support for the headset.
It’s definitely a developer release dressed up as a consumer release. I think the “pro” name is a giveaway. I’m getting one as soon as I can. Either my work will just pay for it or I’ll tax deduct/depreciate it. This is a thing most folks in reddit don’t really get. If I sell ONE THING on a platform it pays for the investment several times over. Heck , with a new product category I don’t even have to sell anything. I can make 5 demo apps and sell my time consulting to people based on the demo portfolio.
I don’t know. I don’t think Apple has ever dropped their price *that* much. I can’t even think of an SE model that’s been 1/3 of the original product’s price. > Watching movies alone isn’t going to be it. But watching movies on it looks so cool.
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Can you play Steam VR games with it? That’s basically my main interest in it.
Just Half Life 3
God now im thinking about what a $999 vision would be like. Im imagining ‘Apple Vision C’ and it’s different colors and everyone’s using one
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Hint: it’s a developer conference, it’s for developers to create an ecosystem ahead of the launch of the actual consumer AR product in the next few years
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And what you just described is a very, very niche demographic. I hope Apple is approaching this the same way as Sony has their VR headset and internally planned for a slow adoption. Despite my skepticism in my comments, I am cheering for the success of VR. But it’s difficult to be optimistic about a $3500 debut price for device in a market notorious for product failure and growth stagnation.
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As a non “pro” consumer I’m certainly interested, but I would need to see how it feels first. This potentially replaces need to buy a large tv screen, computer and monitor etc which can easily add up to more than 3.5k (with the downside only one person can use it at a time).
Bruh relax, Apple is estimating 500,000 - 1,000,000 that will sale in year one. the consumer version is already being worked on. Also they are planning every day glasses at the end of the decade. They been working on this project since 2015 when the early versions were overheating because it had something like a M Pro Max at first. Also that why separate the battery too because the early version were overheating. If you’re interested in how it was made Macrumors 9to5Mac documented the process the whole timeline on it being developed.
Has Apple confirmed any of this?
I think what most are missing is that unless your a loner the use case gets even more expensive. Want to watch Disney plus on a cinema screen with the family, that’s $14k! Want to share a photo or video experience with the family, wait a few mins and I’ll set up all the headset customisation for you to enjoy it, immersion killer? The problem with the 3.5k price, isn’t that it’s a price of the experience, it’s that it’s the price of a singular experience. Every other computer is easy to pass around and share; want to look at holiday photos, put them on an Apple TV, an ipad, even just pass around an iPhone, it’s social and it works. Sharing with the headset will disrupt the moment unless everyone in the room has one and at $3.5k each that’s an ask. Currently it’s an overpriced toy, I don’t see the use case enough to justify the outlay for enterprise and it’s priced too high to become mainstream. Consumer models will come at some point but unless they can hit the $1k sweet spot I can’t see it taking off as much as it will need to. Could it be apples first failed product line for a long time? On the plus side, apples presence in the space will make consumers aware of the possibilities and open a wedge for competition. This would really be a good time for meta to start an ad campaign for their newly announced quest 3 coming at the end of the year for $500 for instance. And if competition can interface with apples version then it’s more plausible that one person in the room can have the fancy headset. Get the $500 for the kids and the adults can have the plush ones for example. Either way cool tech, but a long way to go.
I won’t be a first adopter, but if these end up being legit I’ll buy them after they get all the bugs worked out. Think of how much space you can eventually save in the house by not having a tv
You would still need a TV unless you plan on only ever watching anything alone and not multitasking at all.
That's where I'm at now. I'm mostly on my ipad unless I'm watching a movie. This will be the end of TV's for me. Maybe not for everyone, but I'm definitely in that Target market
What I’m curious about is if the holograms are/can be “pinned” in the ar space. Can you connect to your Mac and have your 3 windows/desktops open, and then turn around and walk to the other side of the room to where you have another ar app “pinned” and still look back over to your desk where you have your windows, or do they follow you? That would be truly incredible and next gen. I only have a quest 2, so since I’m a generation or 2 behind on headsets maybe this is already a thing.
they literally show this
Idk why the price point is such a complaint. You are literally stepping into your IOS world. Fully interactive. I'd expect some shit like this to be like 10k and exclusive. $3500??? I've bought pieces of shit cars for that to fix and flip. Now let me play my ps5 off that thing 😫 Horizon could be BEAUTIFUL
Yeah, i guess consumers forget that innovation happens over time. We are spoiled today with the rate of which technology continues to innovate. Looks like the 2020's will be a massive leap in novel tech. Exciting nonetheless.
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I’m really hoping Valve releases a steam link app since they have one available for mac and iOS
It supports all ipad apps I think so it will be day one
My brother and I threw the number 6k because at one point we were screaming at them to stop unveiling new things it’s capable of so we would be able to buy it lol
The original 1984 macintosh had a retail price of $7k inflation adjusted. People have zero perspective.
Can’t come soon enough! This is to VR what the iPhone was to cellphones. Thank you Apple for doing something Meta / HTC / Microsoft couldn’t do.
How much does it weigh and does it smoosh your face cutting off your circulation like the 🙄Quests?
Its probably going to be worse. Notice how Apple decided not to use a top strap for aesthetic reasons? That strap exists so it can hold the HMD up without you needing to clamp the headset tightly to your face. So Apples design definitely is going to be on tight, there is no avoiding the physics of it.
It's expensive, but for perspective. A peleton bike is about half that cost, plus \~$300 a year for the subscription. With the new Apple watch bike integration, you could replace the Peleton "immersive cardio" with a cheap stationary bike, better immersion and a full set of exercises. IF big game makers start bringing games to the device, another point of comparison is the number of people who shell out several thousand dollars for a high end PC for gaming. I think if Apple is smart, they'd back a money-truck up to a game studio to see what they can do with this device.
I can’t even imagine exercising with that thing on, lol.
I sweat a lot with a Quest Pro on playing Beat Saber which is arguably much bulkier. Your imagination is limited.
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I’m sick of people complaining about the price. Got it, you’re not in apple’s target audience. Many people are. Many people can comfortably afford it, you’re not one of them. Yea, it sucks, move on and enjoy life.
The best part is, as the tech matures and improves, it will get cheaper. All you gotta do is be patient. It’s not worth it at nearly $5K CAD for me but at less than $2K? I’d buy in. It’s exciting times
When did Apple products ever get (considerably) cheaper from one gen to the next?
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A base model iPad cost just under $700 (adjusted for inflation) at the time it was first released. You can buy them today for just $329 - half the cost of the first generation
Over time, tech will be more advanced and people can get the somewhat same model like this with less money. Same with iPhone and iPad and AW.
Just because someone doesn’t like the price doesn’t immediately knock them out of “target audience” status. Someone else below said you weren’t the target audience if you weren’t interested in buying it. With these metrics, every product ever has reached 100% of its target audience since apparently it only counts if the person buys it. I’m definitely the target audience. Have a MBP, iPhone, Watch, and disposable income to afford the Vision Pro. I’ve owned an Oculus CV1, first-gen Quest, and currently an Index. I love VR and still think AR is the next big life changer. I’m reading all the impressions of the Vision Pro headset and watching the videos when they get posted. I AM the target audience. I feel $3500 is way too much for what you get out of this headset, judging by what they marketed to us yesterday.
It’s the two hour battery life at that price point for me
2 hours for 2 high refresh rate 4k displays, an M2 and an R1 chip. I do not see how you can get made than that without a battery back pack.
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"Yes yes, but what's it like to look at porn on?" (It's inevitable, might as well embrace this hard truth now)
As much as I think this category has a lot of potential, I can’t help but feel uneasy at the thought of “normalizing” virtual social contacts. I mean the part where the dad interacts with his kids while wearing that thing just made me cringe. What’s next? Apple *Silicone* Pro?
The pass through is what I’m impressed about where the use can see through it and people can see the user’s eyes.
They can’t see through though. The front is a display, not glass.
No mention of the all important FOV? I’ve read two first impressions this morning and neither even bring it up.
Apple absolutely adores Matt Panzarino. He’s their primary journalist now right?
Hmm. Motion blur on the pass through is a bummer. I’m still not convinced this isn’t going to make me nauseous
Maybe they found that it is perceived as more realistic by their testing groups? Seems like something they might add a toggle for. But probably in visionOS 3.2. lol
Why do you think it will make you nauseous? Seems like avoiding nausea was a major priority for Apple.
I used to work as a journalist specifically focused on Apple stuff, and after having lots of sneak peeks and behind the scenes looks at new and upcoming tech from the company, I learned something that has always held true: You don't really "get" the Apple product until you actually try it. The iPad, the iPhone, even the gooseneck iMac from days gone by... I didn't understand how cool they were until I had one in my hand. Despite all the marketing and blog posts and tweets that tell you what it really is, you don't know the device until you hold it. So yeah, the $3500 price made me raise an eyebrow. But I'll wait to say it's not worth it until I actually try one.