I bought it and tried it for two weeks and ended up returning it. It's really cool, but even aside from the issues with 1.0 like not being able to just pull up individual app windows from my mac or multiple desktops -- it's just too impractical, it takes too much effort to get into this thing.
A phone, a tablet, a laptop, you can pick up, immediately use, put down, interact with the world around you, pick up again, zero friction, it's not restrictive, it's not an item of clothing, it doesn't take over your whole world and sensory system and thus alienate you from everyone and everything around you.
Not only is it that whole extra thing, but it needs to be plugged into a special battery pack, so you have another usb cable dangling onto this bulky pack which is daisy chained to your laptop or another charging port unless you want it to die in 2 hours. So you pull out your laptop, plug it into a charger, pull out your headset, plug it into its battery pack, plug that battery pack into your laptop, put on the headset, untangle yourself from the wires and figure out where to set the battery pack to be out of the way...
It's just so much faffing around. Plus it's fucking huge and takes up the majority of my backpack and I like to travel with a single carry on backpack.
A pair of Raybans with a usb c cable sticking out, maybe I could see that being legitimately usable without having to make a giant effort just to use it. It seems like a few companies are getting close to that, but I have yet to try those alternatives.
Apple Vision Pro is the modern equivalent of John Sculley’s Apple Newton
May be Google was on to something with their glasses and may be some version of electrochromic glass goggles that also works as a display is the answer.
I agree that Apple is not what it used to be. They normally don't go for still evolving tech and swoop in with a better product(and experience) only after the product's viability is established.
Remember just a few years ago when Meta was trying to convince us that the metaverse was the future.
It works with phones, too, which is cool!
No one is going to go through all that to open up Apple notes and YouTube when your phone and MacBook does exactly the same thing.
You sound like you are fundamentally unsuited to the device. You move around a lot and don't like being isolated. I work in my Quest 3 primarily because it isolates me and takes over my whole sensory system. I love going to work on beaches, mountain tops, or co-working with friends or colleagues virtually. You sound like you want literally the opposite of all that.
I'm the same way. When I saw the reviews and the travel case, it seemed completely impractical for anyone who doesn't check luggage, on top of bringing a carry on and personal item.
I also prefer to look like a waste of time for any would-be thief of pickpocket. It seemed like a Vision Pro would put a target on my back that I didn't want.
Beyond this basically all prices for every consumer item are completely arbitrary. They almost never reflect real value and almost always are priced based on what people are willing to pay. Act accordingly.
Doesn’t mean they’re worth the cost, but now you know.
Powerful apes signal status with fancy fibers, I guess.
I wouldn't advise anyone to buy it, but I would strongly encourage everyone to try it out in an Apple Store.
Btw I said iPad. Apple says it’s a computer. Falls short in some key ways, but not unfixable
It is heavy but I don’t mind it. I can see how that might be a deal breaker.
Btw I honestly think that if apple wants to market this thing as a computer, they need to include a keyboard and trackpad. It adds so much to the utility factor that it’s basically indispensable for me. That it works well without one is testament to apples amazing engineering, but they really should be packing those in imho
These things are going to be killer productivity devices if
- price down. obviously.
- lower weight, better battery
- combo keyboard and mouse accessory offered that fits into a carrying case
- able to host Mac apps, or a Mac vm, or something similar. Let me run vs code, IntelliJ, and a terminal with a local container with my build tools. Or blender. Or photoshop. Etc etc etc
Btw protip, tea tastes fine through a metal straw
It's a shame as a user. I paid for the device, I should decide what happens on it. Apple doesn't have an innate right to store revenue.
Disallow installing apps from outside the App Store, provide no system UI to do so. Prohibit apps from being app stores themselves or running code that didn't pass app review, with exceptions for dev tools etc. Make apps able to escape the sandbox, at least in some ways.
Even if an app somehow sneaks past app review and gives users unfettered access to their devices, it can't ever get too many users. If it's unpopular, it's not a concern to Apple, if it becomes popular, Apple will know about it and can levy very heavy contractual fines on the dev.
Consider trying a counter weight. Hunting supply stores sell them for nightvision goggles, and when I tried one on my friend's Valve Index it was shocking how much better it felt.
It will make it significantly worse for people moving their head a lot or walking around.
That's the same issue as the Airpod Max, which are extremely well balanced but just so damn heavy, so I guess people just build neck muscles ?
I can't help but think about this story every time I hear someone talk about metal straws.
https://www.today.com/health/health/metal-straw-punctures-th...
Sounds burny
I do like work in VP, it feels more isolated and easier to focus. There are some side effects, e.g, less water drinking, tend to sitting for longer time etc.
I also watch movies+shows regularly on it but that’s on the order of 2-3h of use at a time.
Otherwise I would code and work in them for a few hours a day. I find the environment incredibly focusing.
I do not have this issue using the Oculus Pro, or any of the myriad headsets I've had in the past.
It should be noted that I spend on average >20 hours per week - sometimes 40 or more - using a Pimax Crystal as well. The weight of the AVP is significantly less than that, so I’m not feeling the “it’s uncomfortable” stuff that others report.
Turns out that I'll typically be at my standing desk for some / most of the morning then move to the Vision Pro in another part of the apartment in the PM. I enjoy using the VP a lot, even after 8 months it still has a magical feel for me, but I also find that immersion is a great focus boost.
One recent app that sucked up a lot of "Vision Time" for me was Fly [1], which is basically Google Earth in the VP. Flying above 3D cities in particular is amazing and being able to dip into Street View to look around a location very cool.
Yup, it's heavy and not particularly comfortable, though I've long since grown accustomed to both, but if it broke I would likely buy another. It's that useful/enjoyable for me.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40663619
[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fly-explore-the-earth/id650196...
I haven’t used it recently because I don’t travel with my AVP (again because it’s too heavy).
You can only use first party desktop extension if you use iCloud. Naturally I firewall off all Apple services from my desktop computers.
It's really not for me and most others probably but he swears by it
I don’t think that’s a dealbreaker - as long as the device can actually act as a standalone computer.
But it can’t, at least not for developers. It’s much closer to an iPad that only runs 10% of the apps you want. Maybe this is sufficient if your job only requires communication, and not, like, actual work.
So you end up with an expensive, socially awkward accessory to your MBP, which quickly gets left at home, because it doesn’t really do anything better than your existing devices.
(The one use case AVP handles well: watching a movie, in bed, alone. Which is kinda bleak.)
I recently had a friend with similarly good vision try it out, and he didn't think it was so bad until I mirrored the Mac display, and he agreed it was unusable.
Very disappointing for me, as this was something I was looking forward to for a long time.
I was present when Randy Pausch made the empirical lecture on screen real estate at CMU almost two decades ago. I believed strongly in that argument and was lucky to hear it before the last lecture.
However, as my work and tools evolved, I found myself abandoning the triple monitor Windows, Mac, Linux setups I used for the kind of portability work I did then.
And so while I did the apple vision pro demo when I interviewed at Apple this summer I experienced probably the most legitimate and extreme dichotomy between the value proposition of infinitely extensible screen real estate and diminishing returns on that real estate.
Put simply, that dichotomy is standing on the shoulders of poorly designed HCI for decades. Apple gets a free pass on design here but they should be held to a much higher standard.
If they were, we'd have something approaching Bret Victor's dynamic land or at least a desktop metaphor not siloed in a Cartesian model hundreds of years old when what we need is n-dimensional.
The data out-dimensioned displays decades ago. What the world needs now is a better tiling window manager, not another attempt to solve the problem by extending human vision while causing head and neck trauma we may never understand.
Raymond Loewy said, "most advanced yet acceptable, not most advanced yet bone crushing.
When I used apple vision pro, I found the experience so compelling I pinged all my friends working in AR singing its praises and potential applications in things we'd worked on together: radiation oncology treatment devices, visualization, robotics, and autonomy. But the thing that stopped me in my tracks was the ungodly physical trauma that accompanied the experience. That's saying something given I am an adult with nearly perfect health and no orthopedic issues whatsoever.
The thing that shifted my perspective on screen real estate was realizing that monstrous monitors are big tech's mcmansion hell. I did my day job on an 11 inch Chromebook running Linux a decade ago. I still ask why I need the morbidly obese MacBook pro m I have now with a 16 inch display and 32 GB ram.
Soon we'll see that big tech is just reading big pharma's playbook from decades ago. The reason it's hard to see now is that big tech did not finish reading the playbook, particularly as it applies to side effects foisted on an unsuspecting public. Give it a few years. I hope I'm wrong.
Having the something similar to a multi monitor setup in a portable setup is amazing.
the negatives are the battery and the weight after couple hours. I can do a max of two 2-3 hour sessions per day and anything more would be pretty rough. Ideally I just do one 3 hour session and the rest on MacBook.
is it cool...yep! is it a necessity? nope. would I recommend it? nope. do I love it and use it a lot? yep
I can't wait to see what Apple does with this after 2-3 generations. i still think VR is looking for that killer app.
Anyone want to buy an (Oculus) Quest Pro. It's barely used! ;@)
A major improvement happened with the release of beta version 2 of their operating system, which made the keyboard visible even when the immersive environment is fully turned up. This change allowed me to have the best of both worlds. Obviously, I have it plugged into an outlet through the battery or it would never last for such a long time. I’ve tried going back to the Oculus, but there’s no comparison. I love it!
I seriously guess if there is more than one or two in my hole country.
As a comparison, there are lots of iPhones and MacBooks here.
I've never even heard of a single person talking about it.
