There is no doubt that AR will eventually get good enough that the devices are paper thin, weigh nothing, and have no external battery (of course). Everyone wants _that_ device, but you have to start somewhere. Apple can afford to be patient in this space and their considerable moat of intellectual property will allow them to carve out the high end of the AR market and then work down as they did with iPhone.

It would not surprise me if they are earning 90% of the gross margins in the AR device space within three years.

Just not the same scenario and game plan. Brilliant design is one thing, but Apple has landed at the intersection of Hardware & Software in a developed field. Right? Steve Jobs pulled back from running OS on clone hardware, because Apple’s winning scenario was to do both to make great designed products.

At 3k+ this is classic early adopter scenario. Maybe there are enough people with stupid money who will work out issues for the later ~1k version…provided another company doesn’t sweep in and eat Apple’s lunch

I had a friend who had just bought a high end Nokia. We arranged to meet for lunch. She got hopelessly lost because Nokia's GPS and mapping were crap.

Apple's just worked. Same with the App Store.

I'd guess this is going to have some kind of VApp Store. But I suspect what it really needs is plain old MacOS running everything as usual, with slightly customised support for virtual displays.

I still remember when the only option for GPS directions was buying a dedicated Garmin, or paying your cell carrier for an extremely crappy and very expensive service that was hard to use because phone screens were too small. Everyone I knew used printed map quest for directions.

GPS being standard on smart phones is just so flipping good compared to what we had before and am positive is still the killer app that pushes people to get smart phones.

This make astonishing growth in Google Maps.

Google tracks your location so that they can track ad conversions based on store-visits (no I'm not kidding).

It sounds so incredibly unrelatable in 2023, but you have to put yourself in that time. Web browsing was just something you did at work, or at home. Period. Visiting that website while on the sidewalk was really one of the major game-changers in my life.

I guess we’ll need to wait to see what happens with this. Apple has a good track with proving tech literate people wrong.

Holy sht. Can people really* stop comparing launch of VR and with Iphone?

I have been reading tons of comments here and only to see the OP, and folks with similar post here to be proven wrong. Again after again, proven wrong!

The fundamentals question is where is the killer app! Like original poster, this shouldn't be hard for a three trillion dollar company!

Only if there was a way to filter out post that go along the lines of

"....The first iPhone was pretty crappy.... "

The difference here is of course that VR/AR has been thriving already. Apple is late to the game as they are most of the time, but the reactions I have seen so far in YT/Twit comments are the amazed reactions of the tech illiterate general public, they don't care what it does, but it does have an Apple logo!

Apple is not bringing anything new to the table. No virtual objects, no 3d anything, just 2d planes showing video/photos which non-Apple VR/AR has had for the longest time.

This is just from the briefest search: https://www.vrdesktop.net/. Already exists and looks more fully featured than Apple's stuff.

Apple is a 1T company, the "richest and most technologically advanced company in the world", so why don't they act like it?

They do seem to have an impressive resolution on the thing, but only Apple can ask for 3.5k, no other headset bothers to have as high a resolution atm because they know consumers will balk at such a high price...

Apple's press release shows it as if some rando people are using the thing at home as if it's not going to be art studios, etc that buy the headset and a couple of hardcore Apple fans. No regular person is buying a 3.5k VR/AR set to look at a crappy 2d photo gallery app.

Other VR/AR software for existing headsets like the Vive/Oculus etc already do actual virtual objects/interaction as baseline and Apple couldn't even be bothered to include something like that for their press release. Because they don't need to, I suppose. People will eat it up anyway.

For your point about the no virtual objects, what would you want Apple to do? Create an entirely new OS requiring developers to build everything in a purely 3D environment? It'd be DOA if they did that. They have to highlight how EASY it is to port their current apps to VisionOS. Hell, they released Rosetta years before the M1 came out and there's STILL some apps that don't support M1 Macs. They have to make it easy, and allow the developers to decide to flex their muscle on this thing.

iOS apps in the first year or two of the app store looked god awful because no one really knew what to DO with the thing, but now we do. I think VR like this is going to be the same way.

From what they showcased and the initial reviews out right now, this does look to be the most technologically advanced mixed reality headset. But obviously the most technology advanced headset is going to be eyewateringly expensive.

Apple back in the day was always, the customer doesn't know what they want, you have to show it to them. This is going to light a fire under every other headset makers ass that they can't push out headsets with shit camera delays, poor screens, and shody controls anymore and expect to make money.

And you're right, people will eat it up because it's Apple and only they can get away with it. I'm not buying it, I have to afford groceries somehow. But the rich finance bros buying it to show off their wealth bankrolling Apple's R&D for the next few years to make a more consumer-friendly one? Yeah, knock yourself out. I'll buy refurbished one in 2026.

Let's look at the actual improvements here over the quest, roughly in order from what I consider best to worst:

1) higher resolution screens. This requires more powerful onboard processing and more expensive screens and is an obvious win.

2) better pass through. Again requires better onboard processing and cameras on the front of the device. This is nice to have but I don't think it's a game changer.

3) hand tracking by default. No controllers is in some ways nice but also limits the number of inputs you can have (unless you have virtual controllers, but I can see a lot of accidental button presses with that). It also doesn't preclude adding controllers later but they haven't shown any sign of even considering this.

4) displaying your eyes on the front when talking to people. This is by far the most dubious feature, it looks ridiculous and requires them to add a high definition curved screen to the front of the device. How much does this add to the cost? I think it could be easily cut, just take the damn thing off when talking to people.

The actual value this brings over something like the meta quest is probably, to me at least, a 2x improvement. I might be proven wrong (or they might come out with a real killer app) but as it is I can't see the point.

It's definitely not for me, but I feel like I'm getting their vision for the future of this product line and I'm gonna go conspiracy theorist for a minute here.

1) The clips of people wearing them in from of their kids or doing laundry, etc just screams that we want to get people used to having a screen in front of them, and cameras on their face. Make this the "norm" or at least some form of socially acceptable to do what Google Glass tried and failed to do in 2013. 2) The heavy focus on hand-tracking, eye-tracking, voice controls, and built-in speakers makes me think they want this to be used without needing to carry anything additional with you, obviously. No AirPods, no iPhone, no Mac needed.

I find this product to be an introduction to tackle these societal issues so that when they release a pair of regular-looking glasses that have this type of tech, people aren't going to be afraid of cameras looking at them all the time, or feel disconnected from the person wearing them. And be able to control it all with just their hands.

To me, this product was released way before it should have (frankly I believe it needs 5 more years), but as a lot of companies are pushing AR/VR and it's kinda floundering around right now, Apple had to release something that could keep interest in the product group alive long enough that they can release their proper vision.

Proper, well integrated passthrough that seamlessly works with my laptop is crucial for this to work and judging by the marketing material it seems to be extremely well implemented. I simply can’t work with even the quest pro, because the clarity (resolution) simply isn’t there and all the implementations are cumbersome (yea I’ve tried all apps including metas own).

All the other features like 3D video recording are gimmicks to me, but it doesn’t matter.

They did show 3D objects in the key note, someone sent one through messenger that the user pulled out from the message and interacted with it. Then they showed a 3D heart which could be taken apart in to sections. Next they showed a life size 3D formula 1 car with the aerodynamics.

Presumably this will be a thing since they support on the iPhone and tries making a pretty big deal from by showing virtual legos and other stuff in a keynote a year or two ago.

The ARKit seems to have been designed for this thing since it wasn’t ever a very good experience on the iPhone.

https://developer.apple.com/augmented-reality/

Yep it iterated and yep app store really rocket charged it beyond where it was envisaged on day one. But it was also an existing market, albeit one that was at the foothills of its potential.

AR/VR too is at the foothills of its potential. But the fundamental problem is: even when its potential is realised, it'll still just be relatively niche and relatively fringe. This stuff simply is not going to be mainstream in a serious way. And without being mainstream, there is no real revenue stream of utility for a company of Apple's size.

I have no idea why people are doing such backflips to come up with potential use cases but most of them just aren't runners. This will sell to an extent for Apple but it'll be a rounding error on their balance sheet at best - even in future versions - though I imagine a lot of the tech will end up elsewhere, so it won't be a complete lost cause for Apple.

I think previous AR/VR devices didn't quite have the right sweetspot of hardware features (too low resolution, tied to one spot, extra controllers), but this one looks like it might just do it. What it doesn't have is a low enough cost, so it will be a slow start. I'm also still curious if there will be a "killer app" that encourages people to get into it, but the long-term vision of spatial computing is itself enough of a killer feature. I just wonder how long that will take.

I can compile code on my laptop - can I do that on a vision?

I can plug a xbox on my TV, or watch it with 4 people. Can I do that with a vision?

This... judging by extremely careful wording of a web which needs to play very very nice with vendors to get these early access peeks, seems to not have it. More like nicely polished hammer looking for nails everywhere. Yes, many aspects fine tuned above competition, but competition is not asleep and the gap is not that big. In some aspects, it will be objectively worse (constant powerbank cable which lasts barely 2 hours, realistically a bit above 1 hour breaks immersion very effectively compared to ie Quest, plus you want to have 4 powerbanks and furiously swapping over one longer evening? Not even going into sharing ultra expensive device with rest of household).

Phones are absolute must in modern world, they were already 90% there when first iphone arrived. VR/AR goggles are still considered idiotic by majority of population, maybe Apple can change that but it will take few years at least.

It had some must have killer features for the time. Blackberry and feature phones had some pathetic "mobile web" while the original iPhone would load real websites.

…anyways, arguable. What’s inarguable is that the iPhone 4, which came along only 3 years later, was a damned miracle. Beautiful design, Retina screen, something approaching a “real” camera—just remarkable progress in that time.

I’m unsure if Apple is going to be able to pull off that hyperspeed progression this time. The Vision Pro seems to have truly wild capabilities, but for a lot of money and with very little battery life. Are we going to have a big leap in price/performance soon? I dunno.

I didn’t really get what the fuss was about until the iPhone 6 (aside from software and arguably Android had caught up by then)

Just think what Vision will be after 10 iterations and a decade of time.

It was my first iOS device and I even paid the 14.99$ for the update to get mail, calendar and contacts. I played way more games back then than I do now since I was often without a Wi-Fi network.

This particular song has gotten pretty familiar.

No Wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

The Vision is about the 50th VR device, in a market that's already quite busy with the Vives, Indexes and Quests. It brings nothing new, and is just one more high resolution VR device (which existed before for cheaper).

Even if Apple made a similar price cut here, the device would still cost over $2000.

The true genius was getting AT&T to subsidize the handsets and pay for the marketing, which gave Apple a lifeline worth billions and essentially created the market.

Assembling furniture

- 1d written description : 1 person half a day

- 2d illustration : ~2 people and a 3 days

- 3d animation : ~3 people and 2 weeks

- 3d interactive thing : a small team and a month.. At least ?

Is it really going to yield a ton more sales?

You can see it in other media. Zillions of creative people write books, a lot fewer shoot movies, and fewer still make interactive narrative video games

All the 3D experiences you end up having are quite simplistic bc no one wants to invest in it. Could you make an Avatar level narrative in VR? It'd be super tricky, but maybe with enough money you could. (arguably there aren't enough people at the moment who know how to make compelling 3d interactive experiences). Will it be worth the extra cost ? Unlikely. It's hard to imagine it being more than marginally better at best

Maybe AI will somehow help speed up the process substantially (and lower the costs), but I'm a bit skeptical it'll help enough

The only thing I can think of where VR would make a huge difference is maybe horror. I'm not into horror, but I could see VR being a huge step up in terms of spookyness

of course still a gimmick

I’m more exciting about a new version of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmFk0AKbXlQ

Given the design already in CAD, how about 1 person in a day.

That is, it's trivial if you carefully followed the best practices, did everything correctly at every step to make sure the internal representation is semantically correct and complete - and not bashed stuff around, copying and pasting and dragging by hand, until it looked okay-ish on the screen, like everyone else does.

Hell, you can even interactively edit things in the Unreal IDE. But it's still a serious task.

It takes more work, but also (hopefully) provides an additional value. At sufficient scale it might make sense to do this (something like IKEA).

There are at least 1,000 books written for every movie shot, even including material shot by amateurs with their phones.

Figures range from 500,000 to one million books published annually.

However, if you include self-published authors you’re looking at close to 4 million new book titles published each year.

> However, if you include self-published authors you’re looking at close to 4 million new book titles published each year.

Combining those, you claim that less than 4,000 movies are shot each year, “even including material shot by amateurs with their phones”.

I can’t see how that can be true. Google tells me there are about 2 million weddings in the USA each year. From that, I think it’s a very, very safe bet that over 10,000 wedding videos are shot in the USA each year, with the real number probably over a million.

Add in corporate videos, wedding anniversaries, videos about sports teams winning championships, high-quality tube channels, etc, and I expect the total number to easily be over 4 million.

And that still puts the bar higher than “material shot by amateurs with their phones”

People often hire professionals to shoot them.

So this would include things like YouTube videos, Twitch, etc, but not a private wedding video that doesn’t get published.

I bet the videos still win.

When I talk about “material shot by amateurs with their phones” I was referring to independent very low budget movies, the modern version of Peter Jackson's Bad Taste, not videos shot by people at parties, they do not classify as movies IMO.

Should we also include in the book category people's personal diaries, internal companies documents, sportsbooks, wedding picture books, school yearbooks, etc.?

Therefore the effort people put into making the complicated products (movies, games) pay off despite the initial expense.

Only for a handful of titles though.

Most movies lose money, they sell very little if not nothing at all.

Most books don't sell as well, but it costed a very tiny fraction of the cost of a movie production to publish them.

It's mostly a single person in their homes in their spare time.

> Therefore the effort people put into making the complicated products pay off despite the initial expense

The initial point was that most can't afford the more complicated products, but can still produce useful low tech manuals. It's doubtful that the high tech version of the manual would drive more sales, because the product in this case is not the manual, but the furniture (or whatever else).

The AR/VR manual could cost more than the actual product to make.

I'm not convinced that's a good bet. YouTube and especially TikTok exploded by going in the opposite direction.

But it's a move that could integrate Apple's movie and audio software, high end hardware (Studio and Pro), content studio ambitions, and now Vision Pro as a consumption device.

There's a lot more money in lowering the cost of entry to a new ecosystem than raising it. That's how the App Store exploded and drove iPhone sales, and how Amazon has a unicorn business just from self-publishing.

Going for the high end can work too, as long as the content and product are good enough. But it's a much tougher challenge.

I really doubt that considering writing a book requires a lot more effort than shooting a ‘movie’ on your phone.

Don't be fooled by the raw numbers, look at the big picture.

Anyway that's not a fair comparison, you don't need special hardware to read books, you already have it installed by the OEM, they are called eyes.

But in all fairness books help to sell a lot of devices too

By 2018 Amazon reported selling close to 90 million e-readers. By 2022 the number of Kindle devices sold globally was over 150 million. By 2027, Statista projects the number of e-reader users to grow to 1.2 billion

The problem is e-readers are very reliable, so people don't buy them new every 6 months.

Which is also why people buy books, they are very reliable and last for centuries, without consuming a single drop of energy.

Books are sold in the millions per week and e-books in the hundreds of thousands.

It's a completely different market.

There was someone on here some time ago who showed and talked about his setup, he had been doing his job as a software developer reclined in VR for years at that point.

Here's the thing though: smartphones didn't have "a" killer app per sè I don't think, but they became part of everyone's daily lives in a really short timeframe. PCs and laptops didn't have "a" killer app, but pretty much everyone here has it as their day job.

I don't think it's about whether it has a killer app or not, I think it's whether it can become normalized and mainstream, and be listed alongside the TV, PC, smartphone, the car, etc; something everyone will have in one way or another.

That said, I'm cynical myself; modern-day VR and AR has been tried for a decade now or thereabouts; Google wasted billions on Google Glass, Facebook bet their whole company on the metaverse / AR / VR and has had to backtrack, Magic Leap was a mystery company that raised billions and failed to deliver, Oculus and Vive have their place now as a somewhat niche and pricey gaming implement - popular as arcade / events (I went to one for a birthday party this weekend) and middle class households that have the money and space for it.

So there's a market, mostly in gaming, but it's not become as mainstream yet as e.g. the smartphone. I don't personally believe it will, but if anyone can take an existing concept, iterate on it and make it mainstream, it's Apple.

The touch interface elegantly solved the problem of not having a full keyboard and mouse.

The ultimate vision for these headsets is not yet realized: to unintrusively overlay enriched visual information over our surroundings. This doesn't hit the unintrusively piece by a longshot, nor are the apps that realize this vision even announced.

Vision Pro does, however, provide a first step platform to develop those apps when the tech does shrink to an everyday wearer.

The smartphone's killer apps were messages, phone, email and calendar. By the time the iphone came around it was just to eat Blackberry's lunch because it gave us multitouch as the killer interface.

Vision is a general purpose computing device. There is not really a single “killer app”. The whole concept is flawed

I'm talking about actual usage. My personal observation is that usage of voice calls is declining - especially among the young.

"Calling emergency services is the killer app for smartphones" - no. "Killer app " implies that this is the reason people buy them. If this statement was true then people would buy cheap feature phones.

It's worth repeating the original statement here:

> smartphones didn't have "a" killer app per sè I don't think, but they became part of everyone's daily lives in a really short timeframe. [...]

to which alach11 replied:

> The killer app for smartphones is being a phone.

And this is WWDC. They’re getting this in front of developers to build the first third-party apps. Years ago, we applied to get Apple TVs for $1 and then came up with an app to launch on it. If you’re early, you have limited competition and can rank in the charts relatively easily (obviously at the risk of fighting over a smaller market).

It will have the added advantage of being private, so nobody can shoulder surf what you're doing.

But ergonomically, writing emails, presentations and filtering spreadsheets - I'd need to use it to see how fun that might be.

I guess you can see through the screen, so you know if somebody needs your attention ?

One will have more success with the wall outlets, but most flights don't have these. Even many international flights don't offer them.

When they launched the firs iMac, the paradigm shift was personal computers are for everyone, and belong to every home and should fit into your surroundings. There were a lot of things you could not do with your iMac that you could do with a lot of much cheaper PCs, especially outside the US. You could do a lot more with your BlackBerry than you could with the iPhone, but here we are.

This seems like a similar strategy. They are trying to win the space by changing the paradigm and moving xr from metaverses to visual computing.

That said, they have had a lot of flops with this strategz as well (Pippin, Newton, eWorld, iTunes Ping) so it's not a given that this approach will work.

But I'm definitely happy to see this strategy reemerging, as opposed a gazillion versions of iphone with a slightly better battery, one more camera, and less or less periphery in the box.

When they released the iMac, they sold 800.000 computers by the end of the year, and that was 32% of those buys were people who have never owned a computer previously. So they were going for the Windows users, but also for people who have previously never seen the need for a computer. By creating an easy to use product aimed at the masses, they created a product-market fit in an untapped market segment where there was none.

When you think about it, smart phones did not exactly have a product market fit - there were mostly mobile phone users, and kind of smallish dying market of handheld computers, some Blackberry/other users that were I guess what you'd call a smartphone users. First iPhone did a lot for unifying those users into a smartphone market.

So I see some of that here as well. By introducing Vision Pro in a demo that showcases all the most popular uses of desktop/mobile computing, they are pushing the XR into the space of mobile/desktop users who were not interested in XR previously. It's the opposite of the killer app approach, but I think it can work for them and is a tried tactic. And it pushes bring XR closer to general use than gaming.

But definitely a larger leap of fate, as you point out.

People owned smartphones (blackberries and palm) and PCs, use them a lot and had established (not speculative) use cases. Clear market signal while VR only has significant traction for a handful of games.

Why don't they just have an iPad and digital avatars? Then you don't need to strap goggles to your head for an identical experience.

However the only reason these are needed is because you're wearing something that obscures your face. With your iPad scenario, you could use the camera view of your actual face.

Whereas with an iPad I can use it as a second display with my Mac anyway and put the chat on it. It might be better, but it doesn't sound to me to be quite the slam dunk that it sounds like to you.

I am happy to be proved wrong though so I'll be waiting for reviews of how it actually works with groups

It's oddly draining doing zoom or meets where you can't make mutual eye contact. If you look at the camera you cant see their eyes, and vice versa.

If the digital avatar is as good as it looks, it could resolve that and make teleconferencing less exhausting. Not to mention worry less if you're having a bad hair day. ;)

I don't see what the headset brings to the table other than forcing people to fix existing issues.

The experience is worse because the VR now introduces avatars so I can pretend to pay attention whilst doing coding, whereas if it was on my iPad I could do coding, unload the washing machine, etc. It is restrictive.

Also fixing the eye focus is already a thing for streamers and ML video correction.

They should be bursting at the seams with out of this world ideas that this amazing hardware could support. And yet, nothing.

Looking for a killer app you are looking at this to be a traditional VR or even AR device, that is not what this is.

This is about having a screen anywhere, multiple screens and turning anything into a screen and any environment into one, hence the name Vision Pro, that is how Apple are trying to sell it.

If you watched the keynote I think that was clear, everyone else seems to missing the point and comparing this to traditional headsets.

The fact when they showed gaming, it wasn't a VR or AR game, it was a traditional game on an AR screen says it all.

I can already do all that traditional stuff on a macbook or ipad, and "have a screen anywhere", and those things are more portable because I can just sit it on the table instead of having to untangle A CABLE from my clothing and then find somewhere to place a headset that doesnt sit flat like an ipad or macbook.

Then there's the fact that ipads and macbooks have keyboards.

With no killer app, this is a boondoggle, I think.

Video calls work great (well once we've sorted out the eye contact issue - now there's a real problem that needs really solving[1]), even with all the ML in the world avatars will be just a pale reflection of the real thing.

[1] You need a screen that is also a composite camera array, so that software can track the eyes on the incoming video feed and place the camera for the outgoing feed at that (moving) location. Sort of like a phased array for light. Thus when you look at someone's eyes, they see you looking directly down the camera.

I've noticed different people have the valley in different places, so I'm not at all surprised if it creeps some people out.

I think most people are trying to find better value in the product.

Headsets focused on providing a screen already exists, NReal is a decently selling product. Sure the Vision Pro has way better resolution, but we're also assuming that NReal and co will have better resolution in their next iterations.

To jest, if a VR screen dedicated device comes to market in 2024 with a tad lower resolution than the Vision Pro at half or a third of the price, will the Vision Pro still have a market as a virtual screen ? At that point it will need to justify the price with all the other things, the hand tracking, the surroundings integration etc. All the stuff people are trying to find value in outside of it being a screen.

It's Project Looking Glass 2.0

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

However, Vision Pro is by Apple. The first iteration is probably as useless as the first iPhone and first Apple Watch. Its for early adopters, and it just has to be Good Enough (tm), with prospect to become better. Compared to say AirPower, the hurdles were purely technical, and couldn't be solved for the first iteration to be Good Enough (tm); so it was canned. Also, once its a commodity, Apple seems to shy away. See AirPort.

Apple only works on something after it's a commodity that they can polish better than others and overprice it. Which is why I'm amazed about statements that they are the ones that introduced personal computing, mobile computing and other stuff. The reality distortion field pays off really well.

Merely being able to do that on a nice screen is enough for me. I don’t want to or need to get directions for assembling my furniture. Heck, in real life, I like many people will just fiddle with the furniture and read no directions at all…

No one will care and studios are going to explore this field until they converge on a cheap but good enough standard to enhance their regular content. Maybe it will be a projection of the color palette of the scene outside the viewport. Maybe they will scan the surroundings of the scene and project it. But I'm pretty sure they'll just tout the quality of the 3D experience and that'll be good enough.

In reality, they are worthless, it's like looking at a CRT from 1995

At a certain point higher resolution changes how you can use it

I just want to display fake screen, in HD, everywhere in my environment.

The quest does not have high enough resolution for this.

I would love a huge virtual area with multiple screen so I can see far more of whatever I'm working on.

That would be a game changer.

But Safari, 3D movies, Avatar FaceTime, and maybe some games? And that's all?

That's a tough sell, especially at this price.

It could have had a killer app: games. Most VR headsets suck in one way or another, Apple could make one that's actually nice to use.

Sadly, for some bizarre reason Apple still don't understand games. They even have pretty good GPUs now and they're still not making an Apple TV Pro to compete with the PS5.

Even just the Vision could've been announced along with a couple exclusives, but instead they have an offhand mention of Arcade.

Could they really not have given some units to some game devs and tell them to come up with some cool ideas?

This thing just feels incredibly rushed. It's like Apple felt left out of the all the AI hype the last couple months, so they were forced to show this thing before it was really ready.

VR is a peripheral, not a console. Very few people would choose a VR Magic game over Magic the gathering arena.

Given enough time and adoption I believe it will happen

Kojima is sufficiently famous and well liked to bootstrap a gaming ecosystem, though. They could've gone further and announced an Apple TV Pro, a decent controller, Vision non-Pro (cheaper headset that requires an M1 Mac or Apple TV Pro) and one full Kojima VR game as an exclusive. That could've been enough to start competing with Microsoft and Sony for console games.

Because if you go outside wearing this you're going to get instantly mugged. If they were to release something like Pokemon Go before the price comes down, that would likely just result in a bunch of kids getting murdered on the subway or whatever. Much better to drive down the costs by first selling it to people who are excited to use it for coding or whatever.

Perhaps they can find application is e-commerce. Sites could start building virtual stores and you get a feeling that you’re browsing wardrobes. I don’t know if that’s a thing but it kind of makes sense as a use case.

Early adopters first, of course. Maybe it really is too early? Depends on the response.

Oops.

At this point, floating pages and waypoints are the "Hello World" of AR platforms.

Being able to stand side by side with people to work on something rather than broadcast my face into their face. It's just... so much more natural. All of the social cues like concentration, wandering away to think, nodding your head along with a group conversation you stumble upon and are now actively engaged in. If I can bring my data/apps in but keep them private - sold

Interacting digitally with the environment - this is a new one but I think it's going to be huge. Anything involving maps or layouts, you can plan it prior, and then overlay it on the day when you get on site. AR on a phone is meh because you have to hold it up, but when it's just a gesture I think it's going to open up whole new use cases that were just out of reach (pun intended)

It could be great, but productivity will likely need over 4k per eye to be anything beyond a novelty.

Depending on how the hardware develops, it could become something great for sure. most people calling it a novelty are taking about the device as it's been announced, not the theoretical future it could potentially have if it was different.

And when on the move would be better than... nothing, which is what it's competing against. Look at phones, they're absolutely abysmal for both input and output. But they're mobile. Laptops? They're not as good as desktops.... but they're mobile. Virtual displays? They're mobile, allowing more bandwidth in, it's going to be good

I do completely agree that the promise is there, I've been saying for years that VR/AR is completely pointless as a gaming medium and it's only future is in exactly what Apple is aiming for, here. 4k per eye is just not going to be enough realistically

This is a general purpose computing device, so seeing it have a great browser setup is a big deal.

It will have an App Store like the phone (this was in the keynote I think). I don’t think there will be side loading unless it is govt mandated requirement.

It is aimed at general population and not developers.

If you only can do Apple-approved-stuff on it, it will be boring. Let people release half-baked demos and cool tech. Don't force everything to go through their "review" process.

Would you rather: a. wait 5 years for apple to release some functionality in their SDK. or b. wait 3 months for someone to release their own software doing the same?

Yes, the iPhone is boring. It's taken a decade to reach its potential, because everything needs to be provided by Apple. Compare to an actual general computing device like a desktop computer, where you can innovate at your own speed.

If it is your expectation that Apple would make an openly hackable headset, I think you have unrealistic expectations, so I find a strange thing to be frustrated about.

As to what is better, open or closed, I think it is very challenging to deliver a complete product in an open way, I can’t think of one successful consumer device that ships in that way.

When I consider privacy and security, the locked down devices Apple create are a positive, especially with a device as personal as a headset with eye tracking etc.

iPhones are not boring, they are used by billions of people to do amazing things every day. Don’t Under estimate the significance of ‘boring’ things like a high quality camera and the ability to share photos easily, Apple Pay / Wallet, and safari in your pocket. It is literally life changing for people, eg grandparents can get daily photos of their grandkids, that is the kind of thing Apple try to do with their devices and services. TBH I don’t know what that ‘boring’ thing is with the Vision Pro, but I’m sure if there’s a future where headsets / glasses are common place Apple will be part of it, and this is the starting point for it.

Apple in contrast? They deliver a whole different game in terms of quality and capability, and now others will take up developing stuff for the platform, just like it happened with every new class of device Apple pushed out. And financially, Apple doesn't have to take care of anything, they have more cash on hand than the GDP of entire countries (165 billion $ [1], more than Kuwait, Ukraine or Venezuela [2]).

And even if there don't appear any VR apps - movie addicts will love it.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/05/how-markets-biggest-companie...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

What this will allow is for you to watch a movie with your friends remotely in a way that is compelling.

My gf and I were long distance for a few months. It was really hard, but being able to video chat every day really helped. Unfortunately, anything beyond that was difficult, like watching a movie, because the experience was awful. The closest we were able to do was use a browser extension that would sync our streams, and then have a chat box.

With this, remotely, you guys can watch the same movie, chat, see each other, hear each other, still hear the movie, etc...

Will it replace watching am movie IRL? Of course not, and it doesn't have to. I don't think they're trying to replace physical interactions, but they're making a great case for how we can augment and extend our virtual ones.

I don't even think he installed it.

Which is exactly why they will not buy one of these. It would literally be a downgrade. Movie lovers have better than non-IMAX quality setups.

But it's okay, I think. It has the browser, Unity integration, okay visual passthrough, etc. Ticks all boxes.

It's a platform. It'll get cheaper, it'll get better, and developers and the market will do the rest. There's a lot of time between now and "early next year" for 3rd party devs to come up with a lot of apps and ideas.

As someone else said, this is the first release of something that'll end up the size and weight as a pair of sunglasses; at that point, I think it will be as ubiquitous as iPhones are.

When I travel this is a game changer for me. Right now I lug a small second screen so I can work. I will happily drop $5k to fix this problem and just travel with this plus a small laptop.

They did show a few third party apps interacting with real world objects (the train moving on a table) but I wonder what amount of that was concept and what was real.

Connecting the virtual objects to those in the real world I feel is a killer feature that will open up a huge set of opportunities. If this doesn’t have that yet, it’s still more VR than AR in my book.

And think about the mainstream industry. It's been years and the peak of AR is still Pokemon Go and VR is Beat Saber. Apple Vision looks to be twice as good as the Meta Quest for 10x the price.

I don't necessarily know the answer here, but my gut feeling is that defining this device based on a "killer app" is like trying to define the original iPhone as needing a "killer app". It didn't necessarily have such a thing but it did end up being pretty big.

The Maps app was so much better than printing MapQuest maps or trying to use the flip phone version of MapQuest.

Being able to access the real internet from anywhere was futuristic.

You could use iMessage without paying $0.10 per text?!?! Can you even imagine paying $0.10 per text (and $0.25 for every text after the first 100 per month?)

Visual voice mail was also a game changer at the time.

And you got an ipod along with all that. (The iphone was my first "big" ipod device)

This new headset also looks like a technology demonstration. That doesn't mean it will become the next iphone, but it certainly has potential.

Very literally Excel, for business users. That's what most laptop users were running in the 90s.

Then Word for personal use, typically students writing their thesis/homework.

The original iPhone's killer app was an affordable data plan. At the time, data was stupid expense, priced almost as a velben good. But by 2007, AT&T launched a $60 unlimited data plan for their iPhones. Feature phones have been using the web since the turn of the millennium, but nobody could afford it. Nobody bought the smart phones that existed because nobody could afford it. The Motorola Sidekiq was an unattainable toy for most families, but that unlimited data plan suddenly made smart phones viable to most of the population.

For reference, that plan with unlimited data still had a limited number of calling minutes and texts per month!

Those were the critical features that fueled laptops for several years, taking money from people who found a reason to work on the go. It was a considerable jump up from super tiny (but still used!) computers like Epson HX-20 or super heavy (luggables). The people using them for spreadsheets and word processing joined the field engineering and military applications.

Hell, laptops stopped being synonymous with "business executive" in popular vernacular only after 2000s.

The TRS-80 model 100, an earlier laptop, found a killer app as a word processor and communication device for reporters. Some were still using them into the late 90s.

And the ones that didn't really have killer apps are from a litany of defunct companies/model lines like GRiD.

Those form factors were massive improvements in portability and accessibility, without necessarily having a killer app compared to its predecessor (laptop not doing anything a desktop didn't do, iphone didn't do much new at first but now has translator apps and GPS and stuff)

The headset, though, seems clunkier (awkward non-flat shape, has cables, no keyboard) and you trade that off for... a bigger, 3D screen that shows you mostly the same thing.

I could be wrong, but it feels like an expensive regression in portability.

If it has no killer app and isn't a revolutionary form factor in terms of portability and ease of access, can it win? Maybe it's easier to access than I'm imagining. Maybe I'm wrong. We'll have to wait and see, I guess.

I'd love to work comfortably lying in a hammock, couch or bed. The monitor part is solved, it seems, I just need one of those split keyboards where each half attaches to one hand.

I'd also love to feel like I'm in a colossal movie theater without all the viruses, noise and popcorn from other people.

I'll pay good money for either.

Walk into a physical store and stand in an aisle. How many products can you see in a 360 field of vision?

Visit any webstore. How many products can you see on your screen at once?

To me this is the completely obvious application for VR. But in order for it to be actually useful you would need an online shopping experience that worked with it. At the very least you would have to 3D model every product.

Nobody wants that. People shop online to avoid the annoyance of a physical location. I can shop for things while I squeeze out turds, why would I ever exchange that for strapping an overpriced screen to my face? The average person favors convenience and cheapness above all else, to a huge extent.

Melee in VR feels awful. It feels like swatting flies.

Shooting in VR is amazing. There are multiple games that let you play Star Wars battlefront knockoffs so you can cosplay the droid army.

Go look at the VR porn subreddit. It's really not impressive. Also the story that VHS won because of porn is a lie. Porn doesn't drive innovation like most people claim.

Spending $3500 just to wank at VR videos is crazy.

Don't underestimate the power of shame; it's not about getting off, it's about getting off in private without anyone knowing about it. And it's about being in control, because an escort can say 'no', will not just disappear when you have post-nut clarity, will have their own boundaries.

Tell me you've never had sex. Sex and VR porn no matter how realistic are words apart.

You sound like those people who want AI to mimic human behavior, yet there are so many more interesting applications outside of that constraint.

This has no killer app and is being sold at full price.

I think it may be positioned more for professional use and then, "oh yeah, you can have a great movie and game experience, too."

Yes.

> If they did, would anyone care?

Also yes.

This is the same problem we saw with the metaverse. It's all hype and no substance. Their best ideas to put into the presentation were looking at web sites.

Why would web sites be better to look at in VR?