I think it's meant to be used with a Mac for most productivity use cases. That's how I intend to use mine: VSCode, terminals, compiling all happening on my nearby laptop with the Vision Pro as "just" a 4K monitor, and then extra apps like Slack, Zoom, Safari, Mail, music, etc, floating around as native visionOS windows.
In addition, it can be used as an iPad-like media consumption device, e.g., on an airplane, but I see that as an additional (and for me only supplementary) use case.
Another comment mentions that you’re confined to the host computer’s “screen” and can’t break applications away from that rectangle. But you could imagine that being a possibility in the not-too-distant future.
I don't think that is true. I think 'most people' don't need a computer for more than what an iPad can do, and that your use case is more exceptional than common.
Computers as we think of them, with a somewhat permissive operating system that let's you execute whatever you want are probably going to decrease in relevance to somewhere akin to how they were in the 90s -- incredibly powerful devices useful to some people who need them for particular reasons or just like using them. Everyone else will be fine with whatever the equivalent of the smartphone/tablet OS is.
I've never made my iPad work for me on a business trip except for something very short where I won't really be writing. I also don't draw and, while I could probably do photo editing on it well enough, I wait until I get home and use old-school Lightroom.
It’s true that they’re limited but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t work that’s well-suited for them.
I think it's worried about not being able to apply a 30% tax on third party software.
Meta isn't really opening up their headset, since the whole point of that adventure for them was to have their 'iphone' type kingdom.
Our best bet might just be Microsoft but they gave up on mixed reality windows, and Idk if they're really gearing up to jump into this product space.
I'm fascinated in the idea of Vision pro, not sure I'm ready to shell out for what is basically just a really great movie watching experience. I can see the movie pretty well on my 4k tv, and I'm not sure the improvement is worth the cash.
My understanding is that Apple is making excuses about being slow to support WebXR.
As much as the media has benn fixated about the failed Horizon Worlds (which is a very interesting story that I've never seen elaborated from a software dev's perspective) you might not know that the successful model for Quest is the same as publishing on other game consoles. The market for single-player games for MQ is really healthy but multiplayer games are really thin on the ground which makes the "metaverse" idea look pretty dodgy. I mean, there is the multiplayer VRChat but you're going to have to rub shoulders with weaboos and furries which keeps other obnoxious people away.
https://www.roadtovr.com/apple-vision-pro-webxr-support-safa...
While this is true for the desktop and iOS/iPadOS Safari, their VisionOS version of Safari comes with full WebXR support. Which was confirmed explicitly in this Apple’s tech talk[0] and by the fact that it is indeed supported in the VisionOS simulator (which has been available for quite a while already).
0. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10279/ (ctrl+f “webxr”on the transcript, as I don’t know the exact timestamps, but I confirmed by doing ctrl+f myself)
This is something I've been wondering about. The Vision Pro's displays are 4K per eye, for the entire field of view. The monitor I'm sitting in front of is 5K, and takes up quite a bit less than my full field of view.
Surely the virtual Mac screen (and everything, I guess) is gonna be substantially lower resolution than traditional high-DPI screens at normal viewing distances?
Depends on your typical FOV to your monitor.
If the headset manages to be 4000 pixels wide, but that is filling say 110 degree FOV, then if your virtual display is 44 degree FOV, it's only going to be represented by about 1600 pixels wide. 4000/(110/44) = 1600.
I wish we knew what the actual resolution of this headset is and what the FOV is.
They say it's 23 MP total, so if the screens were square that would be 3391x3391.
If the FOV is 100 and our virtual screen was 50, then the screen would be 1695 pixels across.
And finally you lose some effective resolution because of the nature of the virtual screen being not aligned perfectly with the headset's panel. Since your head would be slightly askew in relation to the virtual monitor due to head tracking.
https://kguttag.com/2023/08/05/apple-vision-pro-part-5a-why-...
If you hold your head steady while looking through a window with a plastic screen on it, things outside are obstructed. If you move your head slightly back and forth and focus in the distance, the screen pretty much disappears.
Your brain can do some motion smoothing to determine the "actual" content, even if it's sampled. I'm not sure how you could quantify it, and it only helps a relatively small amount, but it's there.
That's exactly what corporations like Apple want their devices to be.