Comment by RC_ITR | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RC_ITR | Hacker News Reader

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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.

Full color pass through and good hand tracking are not available on any headset even near the mainstream.

The pass through on the PS5 is nice, I'm assuming the cameras are not color, though? That or there is some other reason to not have color pass through? Curious on if anyone has given that a discussion.

The tracking of my hands, though, is one that just feels misguided. The controllers provide haptic feedback that is needed for many games. To the point that I would view hand gestures as completely irrelevant?

Is the eye tracking much better than the PS5? Again a thing that feels neat and is nice to see. But then I quickly turned off all controls based on it, as I would rather the indirect options with my hands. In almost all cases.

> 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..

I have a lot of the same skepticism, but then I was also skeptical about the Apple Watch, and I'm wearing one now! That original Apple Watch was RIGHT at the edge of being a usable product. It was so slow and had so many connection issues.

My guess/hope about the 3D videos is that they'll bring 3D capture to the iPhone. For conference calls, I can sort of see the value—I might actually prefer being an avatar so I can sit on the couch and have plenty of room to open multiple documents and Slack threads.

> 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.

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