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Regarding the discussions about the VisionPro: I was visiting family friends over Christmas and they had given their kids a MetaQuest. After seeing how utterly ridiculous they looked using and wearing it. Then after a few minutes one of them goes “It’s making me sick” I am now 110% in Leo’s court. VisionPro is absolutely dead on arrival, if that’s how I’d look wearing this thing I’m out.
An absolute marvel of technology, ergonomics are terrible. This was put in the pipeline back when VR was the ‘next big thing’, and should have been killed when it was determined the world didn’t want these things.
I tend to agree regarding the VisionPro; however, it seems to me this is an early version of the device and these early versions are not for mass appeal. They are developing the technology that will lead to product(s) that will be very different than these early devices. Hopefully Apple will stay the course with technology advancement and not sunset products too soon like we have seen with Google.
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Worth noting that no one saying this has actually used it.
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For me, the VisionPro was the highlight of the year. This is the first time I’ve really seen a VR headset, since I first tried one in the early 90s. It finally seems to bring everything I thought it would be to the party.
I’ve tried other solutions over the years, but they all came up short. The Microsoft VR headsets from HP & Co. were going in the right direction, but fell short. The rest seem to have concentrated more on gaming.
In the 90s, I had envisiged a visual code debugger, where you could wander through the code and see hot-spots, where code was being executed a lot, follow a visual trace through the code objects, interact with other programmers etc.
The Meta social interactions fell short of what I had envisaged 2.5 decades earlier, the Vision Pro seems to be the closest to what I though VR would be. The headset is a problem, but, thereagain, this isn’t something you would wear in a social setting…
With regard to the iMac, I wanted a tangerine one, when they were first launched, but they were hideously expensive in the UK and I was a Windows programmer, so it would have been a huge leap for me to go Mac - I had previously used the original Mac, Mac Plus, SE, SE/30, before our company moved to purely Windows in the early 90s.
I finally bought a 24" Intel iMac of the first generation, but was burnt by Apple, which quickly dropped it, and whilst 24" displays and PC prices had plummeted (at the time, with an educational discount, the iMac 24 cost around the same as a good Windows PC + 24" display. By the time they dropped support a couple of years later, a 24" display cost around 200€ and a decent PC around 800€, but the iMac 24" had gone up in price from around 1,500€ to nearly 2,000€! For the relatively short support window (Microsoft continued providing Windows updates on the BootCamp side for a further 10 years, after Apple dropped support on the OS X side), I felt burnt, but did go back when the M1 Mac mini came out.
I think a lot of people are missing the long game here. The vision pro release is to get apps and data for a type of AR glasses like the Meta glasses. You need years of data to make it work the way people want them to. to. So Apple starts here drops price every year or 18 months until those glasses are ready. A good example is xreal glasses, people are enjoying them because they are more like AR than VR way cheaper and do the job they are meant for (second screen) Its like the Apple car I dont think they are buiding a retail car . Tim Cook is about services so if Apple can nail down self driving imagine the services revenue from a fully automatic taxi service. I just think Apple is looking at the long game and at a 3 trillion dollar company they have that option. One thing that showed me their patience is not releasing any ipads this year. I’m sure that is a huge loss with the holidays. But they probably have thier eyes set on a further goal.
My 2 cents
With a price tag of $3499, not counting the $500 Carl Zeiss prescription lens (for those who need them) and a requirement to come to an Apple Store for a custom fitting, this most certainly is not a mass-appeal device. This is what qualifies as an elite-tier item for either a business or someone with buckets of disposable cash.
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And that’s ok. What is important right now is to get it into the hands of developers in order for them to create experiences for it. It’s tech, it will get better and cheaper over time.
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Exactly, I see a lot of promise in what they have shown so far, more than with the headsets from other manufacturers, but it is way too expensive for normal people, like me. Maybe in 3 or 4 generations, it will be ready for prime time.
The hardware is at a stage where it is nearly good enough but way too expensive to build in quantity. The hardware needs to improve dramatically (especially in size, weight and efficiency) and come down in price at the same time.
We saw this with PCs, laptops, phones and tablets, they all started off incredibly expensive and for rich enthusiasts and the odd poser, but over the generations, they became better and more affordable.
Only a lucky few could afford the Apple Lisa, when it came out (over $8,000). Even the Mac was incomprehensibly expensive when it came out, especially for people used to ZX Spectrums, C64s and maybe an Amiga or ST. IBM PCs and clones were similarly expensive, the base, 64KB IBM PC 5050 cost several thousand, and you needed to add a floppy drive, keyboard, monitor, graphics card and PC-DOS to that base price!
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These particular systems were popular because there was a desire or need to use them to do something specific–learn tech, play games, run a spreadsheet or recipe database… everyone could visualize a use. That is the problem I see with VR/AR/MR… there are uses for select people (like training in corporations) and some of the games have been mildly successful, but as so many people just can’t physiologically withstand the interface (at least 10% of the population are said to get “motion sickness”) I think this is more of a push to build a demand, rather than a pull from the populous as a whole.
A lot of that motion sickness could be down to the current state of the tech.
Some of it is down to eye and ear disconnect - the eyes say you are moving, your ears say you are sitting/standing still, but there is also the problem that the displays are too low-res and the refresh rates and the lag between head movement and the display keeping up. Apple is, again, the only one realistically coming close to this - I think it is supposed to be 6K 160Hz(?) and Apple is at 4K 90-120Hz at the moment? And the latency needs to come down as well.
Basically, since the first commercial headsets in the early-mid 90s, they have all just been proof of concepts, marketed as finished products. The hardware is still several years away from being market ready, but these companies have to somehow try and scrape back some of those R&D costs…