Apple forced to make major cuts to Vision Pro headset production plans | Hacker News Reader

Apple forced to make major cuts to Vision Pro headset production plans

ft.com

87 pointsmacleginn320 comments

I am very pessimistic about the future of VR beyond it being super nice for niche cases. But I think there’s something fundamentally good about:

1) Apple taking a stab at it, because it’s the kind of thing where UX really matters and Apple does UX well.

2) Apple not being trapped in the “if we can’t sell a billion of them then why even bother?” mindset that so many other companies get trapped in, often because they’re not bursting at the seams with cash, talent, and runway.

> Apple does UX well.

I hear people say this often enough to question my own sanity, because I don't find Apple's UX to be very good at all. I find it confusing and it makes things difficult to figure out.

Could you provide an example of the sort of thing you’re talking about? Because I’m the type of person the other commenter was talking about (I’ve been in the Apple ecosystem for a very long time), and I feel I’m too close to it to have a reasonably objective viewpoint on it one way or the other.

Sure. iPhones and the Apple desktop OS. In both of them, I am lost as to how to accomplish anything but the most common stuff. The design of the OSes is such that it's not obvious how to do anything, and they provide very little guidance. You have to already know how to do what it is you're trying to do.

This is even worse on Apple smartphones, because a lot of stuff is done using mystery gestures that you have to already have memorized.

Skeuomorphism used to provide a small amount of relief, but since that's gone out of fashion, it eliminated even those clues.

In short, I find Apple's user interfaces to be very opaque. In fairness to Apple, this is also true of Android, Windows, and Gnome. But in the case of Android, it feels intuitive to me simply because I've internalized how to do the stuff that it gives no hint as to how to do.

The macOS 'application centric' window system model is an excellent example IMHO.

Alt-Tab (erm... Cmd-Tab) switching through applications instead of windows (and then having a separate hotkey to tab through windows, but only within one application), and that mess combined with the fact that there can be UI applications that just have a menu bar but no open windows is just incredibly bizarre (and even though I'm now a primary Mac user for more than a decade it still feels incredibly clunky - at least there's this gesture-controlled 'exploded-desktop-view' as a workaround).

...and when it comes to the new stuff:

- hiding the scroll bar, what a completely non-sensical decision from a UX point of view, I now need to wiggle the touchpad to see where I am in a document, and how much of the document I'm currently viewing (yes I know that this can be disabled, and that's the first thing I do on a new Mac, along with inverting the scrolling direction)

- arranging buttons vertically in popup dialogs on macOS devices with landscape display orientation (arguably it makes sense on an iPhone with portrait display orientation, but in either case the vertical arrangement makes it a lot more likely to accidentally hit the wrong button)

- the new settings panel is just a massive step back from the old one (which wasn't all that great either)

- don't even get me started on iOS, if you don't know the 'magic gestures' nothing makes sense (same shit on Android though)

As a daily mac user at work (against my will), there is much to complain about mac's UX. The big problem here is that no way anyone is objective given that most UX becomes "good" after repeated use.

I have many examples, but I'll just pick one. When having multiple instances of an app, the doc adds a "dot" by the app icon. This dot is present no matter whether I have 2 instances or 10 instances. Oftentimes I forget instances there (which can open due to many reasons, including for instance private browsing) because it's not easy to tell that I have 3, instead of my usual 2 instances.

Additionally, switching instances is unnecessary slow and requires more clicks than the older Windows taskbar (which is hopefully coming back as MSFT imitated Apple's terrible UX). Maybe you love this but I objectively lose productivity with this UX decision.

How about iOS Settings? There are, counting now, 8 sections of settings before the ninth which is “all third-party apps alphabetically” (that last one is mainly where you can grant/deny a short list of entitlements for those such as location, cell data, etc.)

Those 9 sections are all unlabeled for some insane reason (I suppose maybe this type of plain table view thing has never had a UI element to make headings?), so even the intent of the designer is unknown. If you want a certain setting, you just have to keep scrolling. There is Search in here, though the search is mediocre and it’s still hard to find things.

Oh, and Settings has a junk drawer too called General, which seems to mostly mean “someone was forced to pull 15 or so items into a subfolder, and it also uses the “random groups without headings” method of organization.

All of this seems low-effort and like the designers didn’t learn even basic lessons from 40 years of GUI design (or like the ones calling the shots are fine art majors more concerned with words like “uncluttered” and “elegant” than “usability” and “discoverable.”

Like how are the "maximize window" and "minimize window" buttons even supposed to work? (That traffic light on top of your windows)

Or why don't we have Copy and Paste keys on our keyboards. Or Undo and Redo keys?

Or why is the USB drive in the back of an Apple monitor?

Or why is everything so opinionated?

Or that mouse that could only be charged with the cable plugged into the bottom so you couldn't use it?

Or in earlier versions of OSX, you had to upgrade the OS by starting iTunes (wtf?) ...

It’s getting harder and harder to see the good UX under a layer of bugs and minor issues Apple can’t be bothered to fix (mainly talking about macOS)

My dad got an iPhone despite us being an Android family because word on the street was that they're easy to use.

For the life of him he can't he can't look at a text message while in a phone call and then get back to the call menu.

He unknowingly mutes notifications for contacts and has no chance of figuring out how to unmute them.

He accidentally calls his contacts all the time.

With me one example of poor UX with iOS 16 they’ve butchered “Do Not Disturb”. While I appreciate the added user control of Focus tabs, it has made DnD a much more annoying feature to use and access. Instead of a simple one-handed swipe up and press, I need to swipe up, click into the menu, and stretch my thumb while balancing my phone to enter DnD one-handed. For someone like me, who’s friends always seem to message at inopportune times and send 50 half sentences, its a rather common feature I enjoyed before that is now much worse to use.

Also Apple just killed some of my app notifs with the update and despite all of my settings being proper some apps like Instagram just don’t work.

Mac's windows system was good on the original Macintosh 1984, with a very small screen. It was worse than Windows' one for the Macs of the 90s with screen sizes comparable to the ones of the PCs. It was clear to me that a single global menu stuck at the top of the screen was a bad choice. I never bought a Mac because of that.

20 years later, given an Android and an iPhone, they were equally difficult (or easy) to use. Furthermore, after having used Android for years finding stuff on an iPhone was definitely difficult. Probably the other way around is true.

A personal example for me is that on the iphone, the default view shows me 24 icons, which is way too many to be useful. Its so useless, in fact, that most tech savvy users simply swipe up and use the search feature. But there's no way to know that you can swipe up to get to the search feature, leaving most non-tech-savvy users to visually inspect pages of icons, one at a time, until they find the app they are looking for.

Window management on OSX.

If you are using Apple products since decades of course you are used to it - except some complaints between major releases. If you just come from any other corner, oh well...

I'm pretty sure they still force auto arrange of the icons on the home screen.

It's probably invisible to most Apple users but it's a bit puzzling to anybody coming from anywhere else.

The problem is you aren't their intended audience.

I too thought Apple UIs were confoundingly bad, but one day I decided to take a step back and approach it as any ordinary man would. I pretended I knew nothing and cared nothing about computers.

You know what happened? It was intuitive. It was consistent. It was harmonious. My mind was blown.

Apple UIs are made for the ordinary man, not for tech nerds and professionals like us. Forget alt-tabbing and window managing, the vast majority of people on the planet don't know and don't care about computers; and it's those people Apple caters to.

I’d suggest you didn’t look at it from the perspective of an “ordinary man”, but instead, you dropped your longstanding assumptions from using Windows.

You don't think the more parsimonious stance is that you have different preferences?

> 2) Apple not being trapped in the “if we can’t sell a billion of them then why even bother?” mindset that so many other companies get trapped in, often because they’re not bursting at the seams with cash, talent, and runway.

I feel like the iPhone mini being only two years long is a strong counterpoint to this. There's a small hope for an iPhone 15 mini, but with no 14 mini, it's a long shot. It accounted for 6% of all iPhone sales in it's first quarter, after a delayed and rocky launch.[1] There is a small but somewhat vocal minority that want smaller screens, which Linus Tech Tips' sub-channel Mac Address covered recently. [2]

[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/news/iphone-12-mini-sales-a-disast... [2] https://youtu.be/BjhiYa0KsSM

There was such a little difference between the 13 and 14 low end models, there was really no purpose for a “14 mini”. If you want a mini phone, you could buy the 13.

Apple also doesn’t update the SE every year.

A smaller iPhone isn’t exactly an exploratory venture into a new market. And loud minorities don’t make a market.

Loud minorities can form a market, if they are willing to put their money where their mouth is. But too often they don’t (cf. the “brown manual diesel wagon” from the car world. Enthusiasts say they want one, but when a manufacturer puts one out, they don’t buy enough of them).

Maybe. But as we’ve seen (https://www.imore.com/iphone/lackluster-iphone-14-plus-sales...), the Minis did outpace the non-Pro 14s. Obviously as the 14s sit on the market if they will outsell the minis. It’s just a matter of essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy of being available and the latest SKU. But the velocity was not there. So expect Apple to react accordingly. I’d like for them to settle on set sizes. Hands aren’t evolving every year, they need to stop screwing around.

I use an iPhone 12 mini that I ordered on launch day and love it. Finally a worthy successor to the 5S/SE1.

Why can does apple need a new mini every year, or even every 2 years? The 13 mini bought today will probably still do everything that 90% of customers need it to do for another 5 years. Even the SE which is 3 years old now can probably do most things for another 5 years.

Also, the 12 mini was released 6 months after the 2020 SE, and the 2020 SE was released ~4 years after the previous SE. it stands to reason that many people who wanted a smaller phone jumped on the 2020 SE, and then had no reason to buy a 12 mini.

Also, the 12 mini battery life sucked. The 13 mini is perfectly usable though.

> 2) Apple not being trapped in the “if we can’t sell a billion of them then why even bother?” mindset that so many other companies get trapped in

It seems to be the opposite with folding phones. A lot of Android manufacturers releasing them, despite low sales numbers, while Apple apparently thinks: if we can’t sell a billion of them then why even bother?

Apple are at the “the technology isn’t quite there yet” phase. When they enter the market you’ll know you’ll probably get something semi reliable.

I'm typing this on a foldable phone right now, which is plenty reliable. One of the enduring myths about Apple's late entry into product sectors is the idea that they're waiting to "get it right". The first iPhone was a joke, it took them until the 3GS to get it right.

This is a good counterpoint to what was posed above.

That being said I feel like this is almost the obverse, they have a product that sells well so they don't need to follow each trend that comes out. So they can pick and choose which way they run with things.

Not to speak of the discontinued iPhone mini.

The iPhone 13 mini is still available for purchase:

https://store.apple.com/xc/product/IPHONE13_MAIN

Any source that they stopped making it?

VR with extremely light eyewear coupled with extremely high resolution where real life is indistinguishable is essentially being able to pick your reality. I don’t think there’s any doubt that this wouldn’t be a niche thing.

It’s not clear we will reach that before we will reach direct brain interfaces.

I agree about VR, but I'm really excited for advancements in AR!

I'm a really avid mountain biker, road cyclist and snowboarder, and I'd love some basic telemetry displayed in the goggles or glasses I'm already wearing. Nothing kills a ride faster than having to stop to pull out your phone to see if you missed a turn or to figure out which unmarked trail you're supposed to take. (Not to mention all of the information we current have to look down at our cycling computers to see: HR, watts, cadence, etc.)

As a trail runner, same - I really look forward to a future where decent glasses can show route details/programmable workout info/etc. and I can leave the watch at home. Less crap to carry + more info readily available would be awesome!

I know that's not the problem Apple's solving here, but I'm hopeful that anything they can do to push AR will filter down quickly.

Absolutely! I feel like VR is still in its Napster phase.

Seems like existing helmet HUD technology should be sufficient for some basic telemetry.

I agree. My guess is that they are at fork in production ramp. They need to choose between high production high risk or low production low risk.

If they are 100% certain this is the final form factor they would take one path. If they think we need to get this out in the world and see how it is useful they would take the other.

Even if they only build 100,000 units, it should be enough to build hype and get developers onboard for their more affordable mass market 2nd gen device coming in 2025.

For context, Oculus sold only 56,334 of their DK1 devkits.

The Oculus Quest series sold around 20 million units so far, still not a lot of hype.

I’m curious what the usage figures are like: everyone I know who bought VR rigs basically stopped using them and if the WSJ was right earlier this year the best MAU was a third of the total sales:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-parent-bytedance-battles...

I suspect that gets back to the space / isolation problem: if you don’t live alone there’s probably just not enough time where you’re using VR to be worth the purchase price to most people. That doesn’t get better until they’re cheap enough that the entire household can have their own or people find professional reasons to own one.

Oculus were nobodies more or less back then and didn't have apple's supply chain expertise, and even still their devkits were only like $300 USD 10 years ago.

I feel like the major cuts are because of lack of hype. I don't think anybody understands if there is a market for this, so nobody is sure how much money to put into developing for it.

To me this feels like the first apple product in a long time without a compelling use case and no solid idea of who the potential customer is.

I don't think they will have problems selling a few 100,000 units at $3500. The first testers report that the displays are indeed extraordinary and using them as desktop monitor replacements is feasible. That alone is a great use case.

> using them as desktop monitor replacements is feasible. That alone is a great use case.

For some, maybe, but not for everybody. I certainly would never use them for this, no matter how good they were at it.

again, the issue is development dollars. Its great that its high resolution displays, the question is if your company wants to dump hundreds of thousands of development dollars making something for the vision pro when its not clear there's a consumer market for them, or who the target market is.

Sure apple could sell 100,000 anything. The question is are you going to be able to make any money developing for apple's $3500 VR headset or not. I don't think that these can be used for desktop replacements makes them worth it as desktop replacements. $3500 is an "out there" price with no ecosystem level market, in my opinion.

“Out there” for who?

Apple has customers who will buy multiple $15,000 configuration Mac Pros without batting an eye. That’s the price of the tool and for what they’re working on (perhaps a $250,000,000 movie) it’s justified.

The Vision Pro, as announced, clearly isn’t much of a consumer product. The price is too high. But that’s not surprising, it does have ‘Pro’ in the name.

When the Vision or Vision Air. come out in a few years for $1000-$1500, that will be the (higher end) consumer move. And by then software will exist.

For now it seems more for executives. Maybe travelers. On The Talk Show Gruber and Panzarino were talking about how useful it would be for working on secret designs or private financial information or HIPAA information in public. You could be in an airline seat or at Starbucks or whatever and work on the information without anyone else being able to see it, unlike a laptop screen.

And it’s not hard to imagine how it might be very useful to architects or certain other businesses that might be willing to spend the money for an expensive tool to buy expensive software if it really helped them out.

I don’t think Apple will have problems selling them, even at $3500. Is it the next iPod? No.

But right now, they have got to be 109% constrained on those insane displays. Nothing else in the headset seems anywhere near as hard to manufacture.

Is it feasible or is it something they'll do day after day for one year up to the point that they'll store their monitor away in the basement?

By the way, how do you show something inside the VR headset to somebody sitting near to you? Do you buy two headsets one for you and one for guests? One for each family member?

If I was a developer, I’d adopt this platform wholeheartedly.

Anyone who is willing to pay $3500 for this device is also likely to pay a lot for apps and games. Way better than extracting pennies out of Android users.

If these headsets ends up collecting dust on a shelf after a few weeks, as most headsets seem to, then it doesn't matter how wealthy the owners are. They won't buy apps for a device they no longer use.

Apple tends to be good at getting technology into people's hands and then iterating based on the use cases that emerge. The iPhone without being able to write apps for it seemed like a really bad idea at the time, but they were able to iterate quickly and get feedback that let them launch the app store more effectively.

Their Vision Pro just needs to get into enough company's hands for people to start exploring what markets might exist. The direction Apple will take things if it turns out that most of the demand is in the medical field will be a lot different than if the demand turns out to be in education. By growing where the demand is initially, they can lower the cost of entry which will make it possible to go into other fields where their is value but lower margins.

> Apple tends to be good at getting technology into people's hands and then iterating based on the use cases that emerge. The iPhone without being able to write apps for it seemed like a really bad idea at the time, but they were able to iterate quickly and get feedback that let them launch the app store more effectively.

The iPod is an even better example, the first three or so versions didn't hit the mark, but with 4G they finally had the right feature set to sell them like hotcakes.

It sounds like you agree apple has no idea what the use case is or who its for.

>> To me this feels like the first apple product in a long time without a compelling use case and no solid idea of who the potential customer is.

This is exactly how the Apple Watch started! Today it's the most popular wearable on the market by a huge margin.

> Oculus were nobodies more or less back then and didn't have apple's supply chain expertise, and even still their devkits were only like $300 USD 10 years ago.

Those also required a high-end PC costing costing thousands of dollars and lacked key technologies like eye-tracking. There simply won’t be bargains here for many years: VR is less demanding than AR but even there the low-end approach hasn’t seen popular adoption because your brain’s threshold for something seeming real is quite high and has failure modes like nausea and vomiting.

The Vision Pro is Apple’s take on that problem trying to see if they can sacrifice on pricing but actually hit a threshold where the quality is high enough to work for most people. It’s going to be interesting to see if the productivity applications they demoed are going to be as good as they looked – if that experiment doesn’t work at this price, it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the field.

Man you really hate this thing!

Apple has the luxury of being patient, and the benefit of a developer ecosystem and bottomless funds. This release may or may not be huge (I don’t think it will), but the one after, or the one after that, probably will be.

I agree Apple doesn’t know the use cases or customers that will be big for gen 3 in a few years. So what? They didn’t know that for the Watch or iPhone either. The markets evolves, as markets do, and the developers experimented, and later-generation hardware evolved to support how people used earlier generations.

I can understand skepticism, but I really don’t understand adamance at this point.

I don't think it's hate, it's simply skepticism. I adopted VR early on with the Vive and have since stopped using it completely, and I'm similarly skeptical that even Apple can pull a VR device off and make it more than a novelty. Still, we'll see if they manage it.

> the benefit of a developer ecosystem

Apple hates 3rd party developers, the ecosystem exists because there's money to be made off Apple users. If there's no users of an Apple device there will be no developers - and frankly, there's no incentive to even hack around on their devices.

You've totally imagined my emotion and somehow taken 4 posts in discussion as "Adamance" as if having an opinion of this device and talking about it on HN is outrageous.

You're outrageous. It seems to me you're the one outraged that someone would do anything less than praise it breathlessly.

I can think of so many use cases if it were good. If it were good, you could replace all Displays with it. Games, Movies, Remote Meetings etc. Oh and Porn. So much porn.

The problem is the pricetag. It's 10x too expensive for mass adoption and 5x too expensive for developers to bother working for it.

Not useful for movies. Netflix and chill is not about the media it’s about the people. Many console games as well. Most individual gaming is done on smartphones at this point. Same with porn. Remote meetings you want to see the person’s eye clearly (it helps identify body language).

If it were a smartphone killer maybe you could eat that market, but smartphones are commodity products at this point. You can’t compete in that space at 3.5k usd. Even if it was good, it still will be a niche product for enthusiasts. It needs a low price and a mass market killer app.

Games - will be available on cheaper a oculus or valve headset you can give to your kids.

Movies - same thing, also not worth the headset price.

Remote Meetings - why do I want to wear a headset that stops a video of me being recorded? The presentation they had exactly showed that people who didn't wear the headset had video of them and people wearing the headset just had an avatar card. It was the opposite of helpful. This headset makes remote meetings worse.

Porn - its an apple device - any porn will just be web based because otherwise apple won't allow it.

None of these use cases are $3500 compelling. There's no target market, and no compelling use case. It's a brand new helicopter skidoo hybrid and as impressive as it sounds its not clear why it exists yet.

> If it were good, you could replace all Displays with it

Except when you want to show the display to multiple people at the same time.

I think 5x is closer for mass adoption. Oculus is selling their new ones starting at $500, and Apple could easily match that tech and more. They're probably have to give up gimmicks like the front eye screen, though, and they'd have to target gamers, which is a group they completely left out of the presentation.

Apple's name behind it, and advertising it as a work device as well as a gaming device, would let them steal a lot of the market.

And I say that as someone who doesn't currently own any Apple products.

https://archive.is/7uy6M

TLS gives no cypher overlap error.

This is likely a result of Cloudflare DNS redirecting you, since archive.today does not have its DNS set up in a way that Cloudflare likes.

Holy hell this drove me crazy the other day. Firefox wouldn't work, but my backup, Chrome, did. But a fresh Firefox profile also worked.

So I figured I must've left a bad user-agent string or something in my about:config. But after lots of trial and error with FF settings, curl/dig, with VPN, without VPN... turns out it was because I was using Cloudflare DNS. I forgotten I'd switched a while back when I was getting dropped packets to quad9.

My best assessment is for whatever reason Cloudflare's DNS gives a different A record pointing to a non-TLS (or broken TLS) redirect, so Chrome worked because that's allowed by default. A fresh FF profile also worked because it defaults to DoH thus bypassing the problem completely. My VPN worked because it has its own DNS. But because my daily driver FF profile is set to use system DNS with forced TLS, it'd hit the broken redirect it got from Cloudflare and die.

So as usual, it was DNS.

get firefox

Firefox is the only browser that gives that error message. The same error yields a different message on Chrome.

I switched back to Firefox Developer Edition in 2017-ish.

I've been seeing the no-cipher error intermittently on Firefox as well.

The site is working for me at the moment.

From the beginning, this product was a very classically Apple strategy of 'let's just take the Next Gen technology, integrate it well, and beat everyone else to market.'

Similar to the iPhone 'winning' capacitive touch (or the iPod winning with Toshiba's mini HDD's), Apple plans to 'win' on SOTA hand tracking, camera-based full-color passthrough, face tracking, etc.

These are all things that Meta (and the rest) have talked about, but have not yet executed on.

It's not surprising (given this strategy) that the first runs are at low yield, the $3tn question will be can Tim Cook fix the problem fast enough (he was largely chosen as CEO because of this exact skill).

My guess is that this follows a 1/2 scale iPad trajectory - People like it, the early days are choppy but no one denigrates the product's quality, the product defines the category (and potentially becomes the category like iPad did), then over time the category becomes a utility product (e.g., iPad cash registers driving a lot of sales) rather than a 'new' iPhone.

The Vision Pro looks like a lot of fun but I'm not sure what the use case is.

Unlike the iPhone, this is clearly an indoor device, not an AR system to navigate around town.

It seems a much more immersive desktop experience, but are you really going to be more productive using AR than a 4k monitor or two? Maybe so, but I wouldn't take that for granted until people start actually using these for work.

It does seem like it has a lot to offer for gaming. That isn't Apple's traditional market, but it could be the direction they're going in.

It seems they are really against VR gaming. No controllers, nothing shown in the announcement video. They apparently really want to focus on their immersive AR desktop. But who wants to pay $3500+ for ... floating screens?

that alone is not mass market, but I'd imagine there's application in industrial settings, especially when you have robotics operating in a factory floor. I imagine walking through a factory and seeing realtime analytics data and even having the ability to do on-the-fly settings changes on the working robots could be quite interesting.

Meta is kind of the Xerox PARC of VR, in that they're doing a lot of great research but utterly failing to productize it.

Think for example of their work on virtual avatars [0]. That research is FOUR years old but looks about 1000 times better than Apple's "Personas" from visionOS. But Apple will actually ship.

[0]: https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-oculus-codec-avatars-vr...

Lol if that's what their researchers made, how did we end up with disembodied legless wii avatars?

The hardware they have in production is underpowered and wouldn't be able to render those high fidelity avatars. That is also why their version of the meta verse looks like it does. They want to be independent of the "legacy" platforms, so their device has to do all of the compute while also being affordable for wide adoption.

Because no one told them they could add a zero to the price of the headset. haha

They also had prototypes with a reverse passthrough screen. They didn't ship it likely because they are focused on low cost.

I don't know, at this point I would still count Apple as only talking about it, too? Thing isn't released, after all.

And you'd probably be surprised to know just how capable other offerings are, too. I'm a broken record, but the PS5 VR is quite impressive. Yes, you have to have a cable to hook up to the PS5, but not having a battery is an odd benefit. Not to mention the general cost difference. And my understanding is that it isn't that far ahead of the Meta offerings.

People (admittedly access-dependent friendly people [0]) have worn it and say it roughly lines up with demoes. There is no such analogue for Meta, Nreal, etc.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFvXuyITwBI

I'm interested, but I'm not seeing anything in that video that really sounds as magically new as it is being reported. Eye tracking, in particular, is already doable with the existing options. For what it is, it works well. Still isn't nearly as good as using a controller.

This was also the first time I read about your FaceTime usage being an odd 3d rendered version of you.

> classically Apple strategy of 'let's just take the Next Gen technology, integrate it well, and beat everyone else to market.'

If that were true, they’d long have an iPhone with a foldable screen, and would have shipped AR/VR glasses years ago.

I don’t think that ever was their strategy. IMO, they figure out what a good product needs and build it as soon as technology allows.

That always requires integrating technology well, and often also requires using new tech, but that’s just a consequence of wanting to build the best possible.

Beating everyone else to market certainly isn’t (high) on their list (“less space then a nomad”, “my Nokia could do that years before iPhone”, etc)

Yes, they only beat people to market in the sense that once they release a product, everyone else realizes that's what the product should be and creates variations on it—so in hindsight it looks like Apple's take is the "first."

Which is weird because with the vision pro is not really any "first", they are incrementally doing a lot of things a bit better. My stupid guess is they probably worked for so long on this that they figured they have to ship something and see what sticks. It's cool that they do, of course.

But the use-cases displayed in the demo video are just weird, not what I expected apple to come up with.. you don't buy a ski-mask to make 3D photos of your kids, or buy a ski-mask to watch 2D facetime windows of conference call participants even if they are floating in mid-air instead of on your phone..

> If that were true, they’d long have an iPhone with a foldable screen, and would have shipped AR/VR glasses years ago.

I think you’re really confusing my point here.

There were plenty of touch screen devices before the iPhone, but only a few niche devices had capacitive touch screens.

Apple doesn’t throw too-early technologies against the wall (folding phones still have visible creases when opened, for example).

The article includes a (entirely made-up speculative) growth projection, which says it will grow very differently from the iPads.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-forced-cuts-vision-pro-...

The fact that not a single person wore the Vision Pro or showed off anything other than prerecorded/rendered videos during the keynote should have given everyone a clue about how far along in production it was.

Everything about it gave off the vibe of marketing teams overhyping a product and engineering left to pick up the pieces afterwards, which is very unlike how Apple usually works.

Journalists were allowed to wear the headset during closed-door sessions after the keynote. It exists and it works. By not allowing anyone to be photographed wearing the headset, Apple appears to be doing some kind of preemptive damage control about the fact that headsets look dorky no matter how expensive they are.

They literally had hands on demos for journalists after the event...

Yet not a single one of them was allowed to even take a picture of themselves wearing one. Why was that?

Speculating, but Apple wanted to make sure that the only people photographed using the headset were models and actors who are very attractive. That way whenever a news outlet runs a story about it, they have to use the picture of the attractive/cool people using it, and people make an association that the headset makes people attractive/cool.

https://youtu.be/Df_2BBTvJ2o

Video of a journalist using it.

Why is that significant?

This seems like exactly what Apple would do.

The passthrough face requires a face scan thing that wasn't ready yet. For controlling avatars viewed in a virtual mirror I think I read they gave you an avatar of someone else to control.

If the passthrough eyes were available, clickbait journalism would also probably do things like intentionally cross their eyes and get a goofy look on it, then write and article about how the headset will make you look extra goofy.

With no reverse passthrough

I don't understand why grossly misinformed comments like this always make it to the top in these threads.

Yes, the headset exists and it works. People wore it after the keynote and wrote about the experience.

because the overall vibe of HN isn't about sharing knowledge, it's about showing off by sounding the most confident or cynical or just negative.

most threads are of extremely low value. it is sad, it's significantly worse than even just five years ago.

“Exists and works” is not Apple’s normal bar for a product launch. They routinely ship 100M units in a sales cycle.

The existence and functionality of iPhone at launch:

> They had AT&T, the iPhone’s wireless carrier, bring in a portable cell tower, so they knew reception would be strong. > > Then, with Jobs’s approval, they preprogrammed the phone’s display to always show five bars of signal strength regardless of its true strength. > The chances of the radio’s crashing during the few minutes that Jobs would use it to make a call were small, but the chances of its crashing at some point during the 90-minute presentation were high. [1]

This mobile data hackn was among many other problems with the product at the announcement of iPhone.

iPhone sold ~1.4 million units in the first year. But arguably, the Vision Pro is easily 10x more complex of a product than iPhone was. It is also a much bigger leap in human computer interaction than a touchscreen.

I think these sales projection numbers seem reasonable for what the tech is, and if anything the system’s stability at demo was way further along than iPhone.

[1] https://archive.is/Bo5f5

My theory is they set a bunch of unattainable goals for the team. The deal was they would ship the product when these milestones were met.

Once the goals were met they had to ship the product despite uncertainty on how exactly it would be used.

They could tell it could be used but have no insight if it will be used.

This is not true for the iPod, iPhone, iPad, or Watch.

Based on the articles I've read about this product, it might be the most advanced consumer tech we've ever seen. It would be a surprise if the production was a smooth sailing.

It's created seemingly for a high growth part of the cycle and not a recession. It might fail based on that timing?

Good thing for them we're[1] not in a recession, then[2]?

More seriously, if anybody launches a platform that can't weather a recession, it wasn't going to make it long-term anyway. Windows 3 launched around the 1990 recession, IBM PC launched into the 1982 recession, iPhone launched during the 2007/2008 recession. Platforms take time to take shape. A recession occurring early in a platform's life might even be beneficial, as it will make management more forgiving of "missed" sales targets in the early years.

1 - The USA

2 - Seriously, we're not in a recession and haven't been for 3 years. The economy grew at this rate most of the last decade and there were no complaints about us being in a recession. Money costs more now is the major difference.

Apple was just valued at over 3T. NVIDIA spiked. Infrastructure Bill spending is coming through as I understand it.

We're in a post-vid slump growth phase.

Growth, or bubble? I don't forsee a world where Apple paves their way to 5 trillion dollar valuation. Both of their highest-margin products (iPhone and App Store) are under threat and require immediate re-arranging. They're an easy bet because "big company strong", but have so many mounting issues to deal with on the global stage. It's extremely unlikely this period of growth lasts into the future.

Nvidia is, as you said, a spike. One driven by AI but will probably be irrelevant in a few years. They're still great at engineering and CUDA will almost certainly continue to dominate, but the AI boom won't last forever. Once ASICs hit the scene it will be game over for GPGPU vendors, like it was with crypto in 2021. They'll still have gaming and industry markets to cater to, but their spiking days are numbered.

no one should underestimate apple. have you seen the inflate phone prices outside of USA? guess how much iphone 15 will cost... they ll make more money than ever and in 3 generations the vision pro will as well

How is it so much better then other passthrough vr headsets?

Its fidelity is considerably higher with a 4k+ MicroOLED panel for each eye, which eliminates screen door effect, aliasing, etc making use cases that involve reading a lot of text in it more feasible. Its passthrough is also extremely low latency at 12ms, and it’s built with a full M2 SoC which is a good deal beefier than anything integrated into other standalone headsets.

I just want to point out that despite this is one of the highest resolution VR screens on the planet right now, the pixel density would have to double once again in order to achieve Retina resolution. This is why Apple doesn't say "Retina" when talking about Vision Pro.

For people who think they'll be designing and coding on Vision Pro virtual screens all day might be disappointed.

But in about 3 more generations all of these features will be the standard in 500$ headsets. Just being better by making a device more expensive doesn't lead to more sales.

What's the killer app for this device which other devices on the market don't support today?

Depends what kind of passthrough you’re talking about.

If you’re talking about additive displays like xreal , magic lens or HoloLens, then the Vision Pro has a much higher field of view of the content and the ability to display things that are darker than the real world , in exchange for looking at a screen of the world instead of directly at it. Those trade offs are subjective so I won’t focus on them because the tech is so different.

If you compare to other VR headsets with cameras feeding video to the screen, there’s a lot:

1. Clarity is higher. If you look at the footage from their product video which they said is shot from device, it’s a lot more stable and clear than anything up until you get to the $6k Varjo XR-3.

2. Latency is lower apparently. Most other headsets have more of a delay between photon in to photon out based on people who’ve tried it.

3. Better reprojection of the image. If you look at videos of pass through from the Quest Pro, as you move, things warp in the view. From videos from the vision pro, it doesn’t seem to have any of that. (Obviously I’m just taking each company at its word that videos are honest)

Supposedly the Quest 3 is significantly better passthrough than the Quest Pro but very few people have tried it and said anything in depth about it, so it’s too early to judge.

I quite frankly don't understand what makes this the most advanced consumer tech ever.

What about mRNA vaccines? Centimetre-accuracy differential GPS navigation systems that fit the palm of your hand, like the uBlox f9p? 3D printers like the Ultimaker S5 that can feed carbon fiber thread into the print? High-end cameras like the Sony A1?

What is the defining feature(s) that makes a new VR headset so much more advanced?

It really pushes the envelope on many fronts - thermals, displays, materials, sensor integration, specialised hardware… I would never expect any rollout like that to go as planned.

All of them are basically iterations on current customer devices, with main advantages coming mostly from: 1. Apple willing to attach mind boggling price tag to it. You can engineer much more things if price tag is 10x of industry leader (oculus 2). 2. Apple is taking a big shortcuts with external battery, that gives you a lot of extra power, space and thermal leeway.

I’m not saying that they didn’t make something great - it does seem great. And given it’s Apple, they’ll likely have great polish and attention to detail, that make a HUGE difference.

But it’s not a best thing since sliced bread. It’s not a technological breakthrough. It’s “just” a new generation of customer electronic device, that’s better than previous one.

If you replace "display" with "image sensor", the Sony A1 pushes the envelope on all those fronts as well.

And of course Apple is buying the displays for their headset from Sony, so who is doing the envelope pushing there?

The Apple Vision Pro is much more advanced than a random 2023 Intel laptop or any Android device.

You mentioned some cool tech stuff, but it's all too categorically random and distantly unrelated for a fair and meaningful comparison.

I don’t know that I agree with the wording of the parent post, but I understand the sentiment. It does include a lot of hardware that is relatively cutting edge, and the insanely low latency on the system is reflected in that.

While calling it “the most advanced” might be a bit of a stretch, the sophistication of the hardware was something that I wouldn’t have previously thought possible. Some of your counter examples fall short of that complexity. The actual mRNA vaccines are pretty technologically simple, the complexity in differential gps is in its algorithms rather than hardware, and is that camera really groundbreaking (genuine question).

> The actual mRNA vaccines are pretty technologically simple,

Apple vision is even more technologically simple. You get the screen, attach some sensors to it, sprinkle cameras, add CPU, battery, lenses and you’re done.

> the complexity in differential gps is in its algorithms rather than hardware,

I could somehow understand your ignorance when it comes to mRNA - it’s outside of typical software engineer field of expertise. But GPS?

Yeah, complexity is just in algorithms. Building a satellite that can survive decades in space, building and attaching extremely precise clock to, some solar panels and antennas, thrusters and few other minor details, then getting that onto the rocket and injecting into very precise orbit - that’s an easy part! And especially doing that in 1970s!

All those things are easy compared to leet code! /s

Well, now - Financial Times doesn’t give away much for free, do they.

https://archive.is/7uy6M

The Bypass Paywalls plugin works well with FT [0].

[0] https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

If you're on iOS then I find that this shortcut works pretty well - simply open the paywalled link, share and then "Unpaywall".

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/71648f5ad34f4d8f972718e5f36...

nomen est omen

For all the people saying that this is dead on arrival or will never gain traction because it's too expensive, too bulky, too whatever: this is going succeed. The first watch serious sucked, but now it has all kinds of sensors and an always on display. A lot of those unique components (like the stereoscopic display) will get mass produced, which will bring down cost. Refinement will improve abilities.

This particular headset? It is too expensive, too bulky, etc. But, I can tell you that in time any serious developer will have this. The only thing that will make me give up my ultra-wide monitor is this: an ultra-wide screen monitor that I can take anywhere.

Consider the alternative -- most people don't care about this device...how many non-video-game playing people bought a VR headset until now?

This is not VR.

the watch is a poor comparison.

Is this the next iphone or not? That is the question.

Neither the iPad nor the Watch were the best iPhone. No one seriously thinks Apple will sell 80 million+ headsets a year

It doesn't need to be the next iPhone to be a great business. Famously, AirPods alone would be a Fortune 200 company (probably higher now).

This assumes that an independent accessory vendor could somehow worm its way into Apple's multi-billion dollar marketing campaigns. Airpods sell primarily due to the value of being a 1st-party Apple accessory.

I think the limiting factor of this device is apps/experiences.

For this kind of money and discomfort you require mind blowing 3D experiences for it to be worth it. The problem with that is that those are impossibly hard/expensive to build by 3rd party developers.

The risk is that you'll end up with endless 2D apps projected into 3D, or poorly made 3D apps similar to today's AR apps with shitty graphics.

For this specific article, it’s 100% speculation.

I’m not saying it isn’t true, but rather there is no evidence to support it. Ars Technica is also reporting on this topic this morning, and they are also missing evidence-backed sources. It’s all Wall Street analyst speculation.

Read with several large, coarse, grains of salt.

I read many positive posts written by users who went to the conference. I'd like to try it out but I also do not think I'm going to wear a headset a few hours everyday. I wonder if I can rent it for a few weeks from my company...

While I'm sure Apple would prefer a full scale production run, limited availability for a new product often can create a demand frenzy that is overall beneficial as production is able to ramp up.

It may create demand for the hardware, but it will diminish demand by developers to make apps for it, knowing the audience will be small. And Apple has an ecosystem to bootstrap here. If they fail, the whole platform will die.

I'll be curious how they navigate the difficulties of getting this category to self-sustainability.

It’s good, however, it’ll be able to run macOS and iOS apps on virtual flat panels.

I haven’t looked into the SDK and what it offers, but I read it’s not full room immersive as some gaming sets are.

I'm not sure what the demand frenzy is for an unproven $3500 VR headset with no killer app during an economic slowdown.

I'll be getting one to use for coding. One person does not a demand frenzy make, but having 'infinite' monitor space is a killer app to me.

What does Apple's virtual monitor provide over the N existing virtual monitor solutions that you've waited this long? Honest question as this tech has been around for ages.

$3k is a lot of money and I already bought 4k monitors, desk, etc..

MacOS seems to have pretty spotty monitor settings stability, I'm regularly having to fix a setting that was forgotten for no reason.

Activating PIP mode on my 4k monitor causes OSX to shit itself as it rearranges everything, which is odd because there is no perceptible change to OSX's understanding of my monitors. This means my 4k monitor is somehow reporting PIP as a change in monitors (basically snitching on me) when I'm PIPing in an unrelated device.

Ubuntu, Debian, Garuda don't have this behavior. They remember settings better and don't shit themselves when PIP gets activated.

For reasons like this, I'm skeptical that Apple Vision Pro will do a great job at the monitor replacement angle.

However, I'll follow that closely and probably wait for a gen 2.

Having something on my face all day and looking like a minor burn victim for an hour after isn’t worth all the space in the universe.

They think it'll be another goldrush and want to be the one with the killer app before the novelty wears off and the shovelware takes over.

"Beneficial" ? Are you a scalpel ? Only scalpels benefit from that shit...

Is there a developer program that gets you early access to a head set ?

There will be, yes: https://developer.apple.com/visionos/work-with-apple/

The headset is the early access product.

How would anything else be the early access product?

In the past Apple has sent out early access dev kits that were quite different from the final consumer product.

When they switched from PowerPC to x86 in 2005, the dev kit was a Pentium 4 motherboard in a Power Mac G5 case:

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

Apple never used any Pentium CPUs in Macs except for this loaner model. The first Intel Mac desktop was an iMac, so completely different form factor.

it really is amazing to see so many people with such strong opinions about a device they've never used, entering a market that doesn't really yet exist, in a year.

why does every thread about an Apple product end up just as a competition to see who can have the least informed but most negative take on whatever it is?

Times like this are when people can only speculate. There’s too little information for anything else. The discussion is tautologically speculative. Some will be optimistic and others will be pessimistic and the only thing informing the disparity of those opinions is the authors’ personal perspectives and biases. You’re frustrated by something that is only natural.

Maybe VP 2.0 already shows enough gains that this is a smart choice?

Obviously this is just one of many cases.

Because of supply chain issues

okay - if it's a successful product then production can be scaled up.

paywall and I'm not really interested beyond the headline anyway.

You didn't miss anything.

Talk about brain dead. Here is a product but it can't be mass produced.

This makes me worry they might cancel the solid gold Vision Pro Edition next.

You may have to go to third party accessories for that https://caviar.global/catalog/virtual-reality

WTAF! I mean I know there is a market for everything, but a gold-plated vision pro… and a Rolex-embedded in a smartphone case…

To each their own.

I obviously don't know anyone who would buy this, but my impression of the product category is that it's for rich people who can't cope with owning the same Vision Pro as any chump with $3500 sitting around. How is it supposed to be a status symbol if it doesn't cost $40k like their watch?

Same with a Rolex embedded phone case, having all the money in the world won't buy you a fancier iPhone than anybody else, so if you're intent on turning everything you own into an excessive status symbol you have to take your device that already has a built-in clock, and add an less accurate but handmade and more expensive watch to it.

I have a hard time imagining who exactly would be impressed by that, but what do I know?

I got to try one (several big companies got them in advance) absolutely brilliant.

I was worried my Unity Game dev contracts were dead for good, but I'm back now baby.

Apple saved my consulting biz with their Unity partnership!

Have you also used any Meta Quest devices and are you allowed/willing to say anything about how the experience compares between them?

Apple vision pro's screen is extremely extremely high quality. It's what Vr should have been to begin with

The only thing that sucks is no controllers

why would your unity gamedev consulting be dead without this?

anything happening in this space?

Probably referring to the announcement of partnership with unity [1].

[1] https://www.uploadvr.com/apple-vision-pro-supports-unity/

At least in my little corner of that world, Unreal has been gaining mindshare and market share pretty aggressively for the last five years. This is forcing me to start thinking about Unity again.

Economic downturn lead to unofficial freezing of contracts

What kind of software, speaking as an independent developer, is going to work well with a market of only some 100k's of users globally? Yikes...

What kind of software would you sell to corporations or rich early adopters?

We'll see in Q1/2024 when the Vision Pro comes out for real.

apple enterprise is an even thinner slice of that

All you need is something like the Avatar 3 production buying a 1000 of these so they can show the previz live for everyone on the greenscreen set.

LOL. This comment rhymes with Steve Ballmer talking about the iPhone circus 2008.

If the market likes the headset, there’s no reason it has to be limited to 100k units. Figure out how to make an average office employee 10% more effective and it pays for itself quickly.

Well the article does mention "high net worth users" so maybe it's time to bring back the notorious I Am Rich app[0]

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich

100k rich users though

compared with around 1 billion people with credit cards loaded into an iphone, 100 million macbook users

vision pro apps need to return 1000x-10000x

Leaving only longer term options for devs

I don't think so - solidifying yourself as the first / best app in the new ecosystem can be absolutely worth it. Until Apple takes your app and includes it as a native functionality like those journal apps that are done come iOS 17.

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