Hacker News Reader

Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I don't think "mirroring" is quite the right term. It's effectively a 4K monitor for the laptop, with the laptop screen going black. Most (all?) Mac laptops don't have a 4K screen, so you have more screen real estate than "mirroring" would make you think.

But this is sufficient for many use cases (or at least, mine). I pre-ordered one with the idea that my main work will be on the 4K monitor, with most of my superfluous apps floating around as native visionOS apps. That's mail, a web browser, and zoom, which all have apps now, and Slack, which I could just use Safari for but may have a native app in the future.

View on HN

The screen real-estate is the same as for a 1440p screen. From The Verge’s review:

“There is a lot of very complicated display scaling going on behind the scenes here, but the easiest way to think about it is that you’re basically getting a 27-inch Retina display, like you’d find on an iMac or Studio Display. Your Mac thinks it’s connected to a 5K display with a resolution of 5120 x 2880, and it runs macOS at a 2:1 logical resolution of 2560 x 1440, just like a 5K display. (You can pick other resolutions, but the device warns you that they’ll be lower quality.) That virtual display is then streamed as a 4K 3560 x 2880 video to the Vision Pro, where you can just make it as big as you want. The upshot of all of this is that 4K content runs at a native 4K resolution — it has all the pixels to do it, just like an iMac — but you have a grand total of 2560 x 1440 to place windows in, regardless of how big you make the Mac display in space, and you’re not seeing a pixel-perfect 5K image.”

> 4K monitor

It's more like 1080p monitor. The virtual monitor only covers a small part of the VisionPro's display. You can compensate a bit for a lack of resolution by making the virtual screen bigger or by leaning in, but none of that gives you a 4k display.

To really take proper advantage of the VR environment you really need the ability to pull out apps into their own windows, as than you can move lesser used apps into your peripheral vision and leave only the important stuff right in front of you. You also miss out on the verticality that VR offers when you are stuck with a virtual 16:9 screen.

4k is important because of perspective, rotation, and aliasing. Just sending 1080p would look terrible.

It is a 1440p display.

Which is the resolution that the majority of PC users are likely using.

I think Slack is native already: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/01/apple-vision-pro-avai....

Slack's approach of being a glorified webview everywhere is really paying off (a bit of sarcasm here, but I see it as net positive)

We're pretty close to "Write once, (rewrite a bit,) Run everywhere"

lol yeah, the ux is great across all devices i have tried the app.

even the big UI update recently as completely overwritten how the old app used to look in my memory

the only feature i have tried and not really cared for is the "Canvas" feature

Slack is largely UIKit- and Swift-based on iOS. I suspect they are bringing over their iOS app rather than a visionOS-focused one, though.

Is it mirrored as some HEVC video stream from the laptop, or are UI elements actually rendered on headset itself?

It's streamed from the laptop. Technology-wise it's very similar to a screen sharing session but initiated from Apple Vision Pro instead of a Mac.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com