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Comment by bluescrn | Hacker News Reader

It feels like another pretty Apple device which is purely for consuming content, and of little use for serious work (or serious play). And $3500 is way too much to pay for that sort of device.

A UI that relies entirely on eye tracking and arm motion tracking, without a single button for 'accept' or 'back' or 'fire' in the case of games seems incredibly limiting. They didn't demonstrate text entry, did they?

I expected to see Apple's headset being demonstrated as a product for professionals, perhaps for architects, product designers, and engineers to visualise their designs for clients. Maybe it could have also found a niche in education.

But no, they seem to have iPad-like use cases in mind, and for that, the price is way too high.

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What I find interesting about apple devices is that despite what you said, the engineering is usually top notch and beats most competitors. For example, I use an iPad Pro for hand writing notes. I don't care about iOS or any other fancy feature there might be, I have this device purely for writing notes. But the interesting thing is that I haven't found any other tablet that does specifically the hand writing as good as this one. It turns that specific aspect into a unique selling point for me and it almost seems like the competition has given up in terms of that. With this device I could see a similar thing. Regardless of whether this brings any new features over the competition, the engineering seems to be outstanding. Because of that I could see people buy this for a specific use case that it excels at, all the while not using it for "everything". Somewhat of a ramble but I hope I could bring my point across.

I don't think anyone seriously expects the price to stay at $3500 forever. If the first gen product is successful enough to warrant a gen 2, I suspect by Gen 3 we'll see a more approachable price point.

The biggest hint for this is the name: "Vision 'Pro'". Why call something "Pro" that doesn't build on another product to enhance it with other features? The pro moniker for Apple has always been a sign of increased functionality for power users.

Mark my words; we will see a mass-market consumer focused version of this product within 5 years if gen 1 is a success.

For “serious play” I imagine you could hook up a Bluetooth game controller, just like you can with an iPad (and it sounds like this will run iPad apps).

Likewise for work you could use a normal keyboard. I think they did mention that in the presentation.

This ability was demoed in the third or fourth minute of the intro. (NBA 2K23 with a PS5 controller)

Ah, good catch, thanks!

The AR aspect here is really clever -- you can use normal keyboards and controllers because you can just look at them when you need to.

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