Also Meta could catch up if it was just software. But how big of a deal is the M2+R1?

Anyway the metaverse was already being retracted, else this Vision Pro could have hammered Meta.

Clearly Occulus has to evolve to match VisionPro. Controller has to be optional. It has to have better AR. Meta has to be the more "open" alternative to Apple's ecosystem barriers.

This was Microsoft's warcry for years: who cares if Apple has better software? We have better hardware. Well guess what, software matters and it matters more than hardware. If you have both, you have literally a generationally-defining product (e.g. the iPhone), but even if you just have the software, you'll still eat your competitor's lunch. Why does everyone have MacBook Pros these days? Prior to Apple Silicon, it certainly wasn't the hardware.

Meta's about to get a rude awakening because "we can fix the software later." As if technical debt doesn't exist and as if you can so easily get engineers that eagerly want to clean up someone else's mess.

Oh, I don't know about that. Admittedly there were some awful choices made between 2015 and the emergence of M1 architecture, but Apple's reputation for making well engineered hardware goes at least as far back as to when they started milling Macs out of aluminum. I'm thinking back specifically to the PowerMac G5 in 2006. It was designed well, felt solid, and when you opened it up, it continued to look well made. I recently popped open my 2015 Macbook Pro because I'm finally having hard drive issues, and for as much as I have railed against Apple fanboyism over the decades, it looked so nice inside I wanted to take a picture. (Why?! Who cares!? What would I even do with that picture?)

I got tons of mileage out of various Dell desktops and self-built machines over the last couple of decades. It was better bang for the buck, I didn't have to fuss over proprietary connectors and a locked down operating system. When the company I worked for made a big shift away from (it's okay to chuckle) Coldfusion and MS SQL Server to Ruby on Rails and MongoDB in 2013, though they offered to let me continue running on Windows, I asked for a Macbook because that's what everyone else was using. Might as well learn. Didn't much like OSX but the hardware was better than any Windows laptop I'd used. Later I bumped up to a 2015 MBP, which I only just retired this year.

While I was Windows at home and MacOS at work, last month I snagged a Macbook Pro w/ 64gb of RAM from B&H for $2400 - the first Apple computer I've ever paid for myself - and it's replaced my Dell desktop and that 2015 Macbook that my old job let me keep.

I effectively skipped the bad Macbooks, so my perspective is tinted by that. But even during the bad years, even my friends who continued to operate in the MS domain were buying Macbooks and dual booting them into Windows.

I had access to a Surface tablet through work early on. It was really nice! Just like a Zune. The Surface Pros looked pretty great too, but anecdotally, I never saw them outside the context of visiting a business that was a strictly MS shop.

I still like Windows as an OS better. But Apple's new architecture (which importantly doesn't have me carrying dongles around, or even needing them at home) was compelling enough for me to take the plunge.

There's lots of little details which are well made, but bad decisions: the screen hinges tend to be a little too floppy, the trackpad is oversized, removing the physical buttons makes it hard to use, moving the power button from a separate area to the "eject" button location on the keyboard (and making it look like a regular key), everything they've done with keyboards (flat, overlay spaced keys with no surface indentation and less and less travel). The ridiculously sharp edges of the body chassis which cut into your when you rest your hands there (seen at least one video of someone just filing a bevel into the machine to fix it).

They look great, but that's all they've ever seemed to me: in usability details they've always felt terrible (even MagSafe, which seems like it should be great, feels great, and yet has seemed pretty lacklustre when I've had to use it with a work machine).

The two things I agree on for the 2016-2022 laptops are the sharp edges and terrible keyboards. Maybe take a look at the new laptops next time you get a chance, the edges on my MBAir and 16MBPro from 2022 are waaaay more comfortable than my previous two MacBooks and the keyboard feels much nicer too.

Back to point one though, to me the trackpads are well sized, the hinges are smooth and just right and the power button being where it is is a none issue, I even quite liked the touchbar.

What on earth are you talking about? Microsoft is a software company first. They rode the Windows advantage for more than a decade and didn't have anything to do with the hardware, because they aren't a hardware company. Windows ran (and was preinstalled) on everything, from the lowest tier of trash to the highest end machines, and Microsoft didn't care about the quality of the hardware, because they owned the platform that everyone used for computers. Office is another software product that still doesn't have any real competitors and is one of Microsoft's biggest cash cows.

On the flip side, when exactly did Apple have better software than Microsoft? Their office suite is barely usable for anything outside of the most basic use cases. Apple beat Microsoft in mobile, and Microsoft kept its head in the sand and assumed the Windows advantage would live forever and didn't wake up until Ballmer was gone, after Apple had started eating their lunch in the laptop space, but the assumption was that Windows was so good people wouldn't switch, not that Apple had bad hardware and good software, if only you could run it somewhere else.

Microsoft is named for being SOFTware for MICROcomputers, they don't have a blind spot around software. This is some Soviet revisionism or something.

> Meta's about to get a rude awakening because "we can fix the software later." As if technical debt doesn't exist and as if you can so easily get engineers that eagerly want to clean up someone else's mess.

I don't know, Meta is probably the largest employer of PHP developers in the world, I bet they can find people willing to do some other masochistic shit too.

The Vision Pro is really a first-product distraction for the Apple fans. This only further validates the market for XR devices and Meta's Quest's lineup will be the cheaper alternative for those who don't have iPhones or Macs (Since Android phones still outnumber iPhones) [0].

I'm only interested in the next iteration when it gets smaller and cheaper and when Apple announces a direct competitor to the cheaper Quest. Probably 'Apple Vision'. Then it will get its 'iPhone' moment, but it is not going to be the Vision Pro.

> Meta's about to get a rude awakening because "we can fix the software later." As if technical debt doesn't exist and as if you can so easily get engineers that eagerly want to clean up someone else's mess.

Meta is fine. They will just copy Apple and make it cheaper and at worse case, become the Android of XR headsets and glasses.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272698/global-market-sha...

It’s not like it was better built or had a better screen than cheaper alternatives or anything.

Gaming can't be good, because there's no controllers. Even if the hand and eye tracking is absolutely S-tier, you're never getting something like button input from swinging your empty hands around, twitching your fingers. Just the occlusion from the back of your hand would be enough enough for that to be impossible.

Fitness might be more doable, but even then I think you're going to be very limited with hand tracking only. I think there's a reason why Apple skipped over those segments almost entirely.

EDIT: I meant "VR" controllers, as in things that are tracked in 3d space. Of course you can use a game pad or MKB, but that kinda misses the point of being in VR in the first place.

There are a LOT of WWDC sessions on visionOS; hopefully it’s shown off in one of them. EDIT: Trackpad usage shown here https://developer.apple.com/wwdc23/10076?time=914

VR controllers aren't simple the way a game pad is. They need a full tracking solution, which means sensors with base stations, cameras with some form of vision based tracking, or the headset needs to be able to track them based on some reference points (infrared lights or something). And that tracking needs to be fast, precise, and correctly positioned relative to the headset.

Using the Index controllers with the Lighthouse base stations is kinda plausible from a technical standpoint, but that would mean Apple would need to allow the headset to work with SteamVR, and that seems very unlikely at this point.

Re: 1, it’ll be interesting to see how well the camera system works in practice. All of the reviews are quite positive about precise movements so it might be that they’re throwing hardware at this problem but I’d also be surprised if they were not very carefully tracking performance – if the accuracy isn’t there, it’d take an unusually un-Apple like product manager to risk a billion dollar investment rather than enable that class of device.

PSX games with a PS5 controller on a theatre screen? My inner 8 years old is going to loose his mind.

But that doesn’t solve the issue for the mainstream.

Using only gestures means no haptic feedback and it gets de-synced as soon as the camera can't see what you're doing.

Take Apples gestures for example (e.g. tap your thumb and index finger together to click). As soon as your hand is rotated in such a way that your own fingers are hidden from the camera, you actions stop being applied. This will also happen should one hand cross the other, or resting your arms down while standing, or reaching up for something, or even resting on a couch with your knee up.

The only VR headset I've tried that can do hand tracking (Oculus Quest) sucks at it and games there didn't pick up on it as an input at all, as far as I know.

However, just because VR controllers won't exist for the Apple Vision at release it doesn't mean they never will. Perhaps Apple will release some later, or it'll be a third party release. Heck, someone might unironically release a Nintendo Power Glove style controller that works incredibly well with Apple Vision.

Because none exist.

Sensitive hands and wrists. Pain and fatigue using them.

Having to swap out batteries. Recharging AAs is a hassle, but I don't like using disposable ones.

More clutter to keep track of, store and organise. Kids misplace them frequently.

More crap to have to keep clean, sweaty and oily hands leaving residue on them.

Would rather just have a single device, the headset, that I put on and not have to deal with a bunch of other accessories.

Assuming it could run Virtual Desktop, there’s your Half Life Alyx in ultra high res.

if it was under 1k usd I would probably pick one up for work. maybe give it a few more years.

Why? When I go to an imax cinema I am impressed with the immersion, I don't feel the need to jump around and act out the scenes in front of me.

I certainly don't think so? My guess going in was that fitness would be one of the main plugs — especially because high-end fitness devices already cost a fair amount, and that would have made their tail end, "How much would a computer plus a screen plus umm... it's $3,5000!" go a lot more smoothly.

I do think that's likely high on the road map, particularly given such a large investment in Fitness+, but also can see them being very wary about encouraging any high-energy movements with a $3,500 device. I think it's the pricing and dev-kit-ish nature of the v1 more than too obvious.

But Vision Pro does seem to imply a future Vision Sport.

The platform launch was very locked down. For incremental hardware upgrades, they put hardware in the hands of devs by either shipping out early or bringing devs to their offices to work on prototypes in a secure environment.

Jesus set up the room boundaries, it's really not that hard.

Basically, a Game Boy or Switch for VR.

Is this the same team who came up with a phone that bends in the pocket?

- 1 Their customers have historically chosen metal and aluminum for their products, and Apple is in the business of building what their consumers prefer.

- 2 Glass and Aluminum conduct heat better than plastic. The 2hr battery suggests thermals are a great consideration where the materials chosen were not just for aesthetics. Perhaps plastic could've worked, but see point #1.

I had just showed him WA state and no ill effects, but I didn't have issues on a pre-release vive prototype or release occulus OG while doing barrel rolls and back flips or movement vluprs.

So I crank up the details to super high and enjoy the awesome rendering detail and save myself from motion sickness.

Elite Dangerous is the only VR app that gives me any motion sickness at all and is also my favorite app in VR so far.

Incidentally Google Earth has comfort options exactly due to that reason, such as the option to narrow the field of view when moving around. I wonder if that option was enabled?

Interestingly I tried out F1 2022 in PCVR mode with it and was surprised to find that didn't make me feel ill. A lot of it comes down to the refresh rate and quality of tracking as its the lag that causes a lot of the nausea.

What is even more impressive is when a VR version of a big, popular game is the best version of that game.

Affordability is somewhat relative. If something is truly compelling, people will spend a lot of money to get it.

"Exclusive" in games consoles is a loaded word that means "exclusive to this platform and not available anywhere else".

If the intended meaning is what you suggest, then I'd recommend removing the word "exclusive" and just saying "there is no affordable VR console with lots of big games".

VRChat, Superhot, Simpleplanes, Flight Sim, Ultrawings, Phantasmagoria, Htiman, Nearly all VR compatible racing games, Rec Room, Euro Truck Simulator, Most VR compatible horror games like Phantasmagoria, etc etc etc.

Did you even try to look it up?

I do not need to "look it up", I own and play Superhot on the Oculus for example.

What in your knee-jerk reply would you say contributes to the conversation about whether "VR exclusives" are needed for a given platform to succeed?

I'm going to help you by providing the context for this conversation (not written by me, but in the initial comment I was replying to), which is:

> "The adoption problem seems to be that there is no affordable VR console with a lot of big exclusive games."

There you go. What do you think "big exclusive games" means in this context? Do you think it means "exclusive" as in "Nintendo exclusive" or does it mean "exclusive" as in "it's designed for VR first, regardless of headset brand"? Or something else maybe?

something that people will look at and think “I need VR so I can play that”. The closest so far is half-life alyx, but that’s really not cutting it.

I was really impressed by the Oculus "First Contact" (or whatever the one with the robot is called). I wonder by there are so few games that feel like it.

Beat Saber is pretty cool, but what killed it in my family is that you cannot see what the other person is seeing, so it's a bummer when you're not donning the headset. Unlike with a regular videogame, where you can watch the screen even if you're not playing.

The problem with Valve is that their platform is PCs, and a gaming PC + VR headset is too expensive for most people, who often don't already own a proper PC. The problem with Sony is similar: The PSVR 2 is not a standalone console, but just an add-on to a PS5, and PS5+PSVR2 is too expensive for people who are just interested in VR. It's like trying to sell a Game Boy which requires you to already own an SNES for it to function. It would be a flop.

The Meta Quest 2 is in a better position, it's standalone and rather affordable. But Meta can't support it with big games like Sony or Valve could. Meta doesn't have the expertise and probably also not the will to develop expensive AAA games in order too push Quest sales. They are more interested in the metaverse than in becoming a games company.

Nintendo could perhaps make a successful VR console, but it would require massive investments in AAA titles, which would be very risky for them, given their size. And Sony isn't interested in a standalone system.

Microsoft would be more likely. They have huge cash reserves and can afford to lose large amounts of money until they become profitable, as they've shown with the first XBox. But I they haven't shown any ambitions so far to invest billions into an "XBox VR" console and corresponding AAA games.

In some cases they use it well, like Beat Saber. But how much is that worth to people?

I get why they didn't want to go the controller route, but they'll surely be very aware that it greatly limits what can be done with games.

Remember, the iPad doesn’t come with a controller, but you can use a Pencil with it if you want.

Same thing will likely happen with the Vision products.

Moreover, making elaborate games like civilization wouldn't be economically feasible even if they could be appropriately controlled by default. The price for the headset is so high that not many people will buy it. Then elaborate games can't sell enough copies in order to be profitable. For example, it seems unlikely that even a success like Half Life Alyx made its development cost back. The hardware install base is too small.

I think Apple is playing the long game here. Moore's law and manufacturing improvements will cause the price to go down over time.

Remember, the first Macintosh cost $3,000 in 1984. Today most Macs cost less than 2/3 of that price before adjusting for inflation.

My point was that it would be like walking around Madurodam while playing a game.

And standing would be optional. Apple showed most people sitting down, so I’m presuming you could do that.

But you should be able to do VR while sitting down and "walk" using gestures or a controller.

[0] - https://www.kat-vr.com/

Why? No, seriously, why? People say this as if it is a given, but how would VR improve a game serious that is built around strategy as it's main selling point. How does VR improve Civ as a game? In fact, there are very few genres and types of games that the immersion VR brings is worth the limitations: Weird controls, isolation, headaches, wearing a mask, expense, physical exertion etc.

I'm so tired of people who don't seem to know anything about either video gaming or VR gaming parroting this empty hype of how VR magically makes all games better.

VR is a peripheral, not an advancement in rendering technology.

It's a city. I live in a real city. SimCity is this flat set of graphics on a screen. I'd much rather be able to view my city that I created and see what it looks like on a human level.

I get your point, and many things would not be good.

But for me at least, SimCity would be. So would Call of Duty (and I know that because I've played 1st person shooters in VR before on multiple occasions).

But that's just me.

Meta was proudly boasting about how the Quest 3 will have "Over 500 titles" - thats not something to boast about, it's just highlighting how incredibly poor the platform has been from a developer adoption standpoint.

But there are clearly still problems to solve. And some of them do involve hardware capability. Basically for the mass market they’re just not there yet.

The apple headset certainly appears to have significantly more power and capabilities in many ways. It will be interesting to see what pops up.

Though obviously a future version with a lower price will be necessary for it to truly go main stream.

Either way, if I was gaming, playing a new single player 2D (Last of Us, etc) game on a MASSIVE screen on the Vision Pro seems so exciting. Beat Saber and throwing my hands around? Not so much.

A flop indeed. /s From [0]

"Standalone VR headset Quest 2 from Meta (formerly Oculus under Facebook) has outsold Microsoft's Xbox Series X/S consoles, according to the latest information from the International Data Corporation (IDC)."

> Apple is right to ignore it.

Incorrect.

Apple didn't ignore it because they cannot ignore it. Apple is targeting both gaming and for work just like how the Meta Quest Pro has done so.

[0] https://www.thevirtualreport.biz/data-and-research/65297/que...

The resolution on the Q2 is also just way too low for certain games, I think a MtG-type game would be super cool on the Q2 (and the games I tried in this vein had /massive/ potential that was thrown away completely due to blurry text). In the ends the Q2 has way too many downsides and not enough upsides to keep me using it. I will be getting a Vision Pro at launch though, the resolution alone almost would sell it for me but the emphasis on AR and productivity are the clincher.

But isn't it still the most succesful application of VR?

I don't see another application of VR / AR that will prevent the device eventually gathering dust once novelty has faded. Certainly nothing in the presentation from Apple.

But they also showed full support for pairing standard Xbox and PlayStation controllers and playing with those the way you can on any other Apple platform (except the watch, of course).

Can you name a better product in the price-bracket?

Five times the price, yeah. Today. This really feels like a product aimed at developers right now not the mass market yet.

Which fits. The iPhone took a few years to really take off. The Apple Watch took a few years to really takeoff.

When Apple TV was being developed they were handing them out to devs for free like they had millions they were trying to get rid of. I was a lowly single app creator and they happily sent me one.

For the Intel to M1 migration they did something similar but required them to be returned this time, and limited which devs they sent them out to.

The first Intel Mac and the first ARM Mac were DTKs: Developer Transition Kits.

You’d buy them from Apple at a reduced price, could use them to get your software running, and then had to give them back when the real hardware was released.

There was nothing similar for the watch, iPad, or iPhone though.

Not todays market, which has evolved.

In my opinion, with the possible exception of South Korea, that is purely a matter of apple's global pricing vs local purchasing power and a huge number of those android users would have an iPhone if they could afford it.

I don't think that's true. Samsung flagship phones cost the same as iphones (at least in the UK) and they sell very well here.

Interestingly, the Quest 2 seemed less buggy when I had one.

>Eye input is not shared with Apple, third-party apps, or websites. Only your final selections are transmitted when you tap your fingers together.

Along with this small video: https://www.apple.com/105/media/us/apple-vision-pro/2023/7e2...

Which is great and important for me to see, but I'm unsure how that jives with features such as foveated rendering.

One notable takeaway is that eye tracking of saccades is loosely correlated with cognitive load. In fact, “cognitive load” was a product that would be licensed to developers to use in their apps so that difficulty levels could be dynamically adjusted to keep users in a sweet spot for learning.

Especially when combined with a PPG sensor which can in theory detect if a man gets aroused (HP never investigated developing a model for that, but some comments from friends who were DoD-aligned contractors expressed alternating concern or interest in it, because they knew from their own career and independent research what applications might be possible with those technologies)

…it could be used to infer things which someone might prefer to keep private (I.e. which categories of things they have an emotional response to).

Apple definitely is aware of this and is heading off potential issues by not only not providing that data to third party app developers but also even to Apple itself. Apple does have a strong pre-existing framework for dealing with sensitive health data, so they could have decided to capture similar data and treat it the same way they deal with ECG data. HP did not have a HIPAA compatible framework so they threw away 99% of the PPG data and distilled it down to just “heart rate” which was the only data source available to app developers from the PPG sensor.

(Downside is that one loses the capability for hovering, but strikes me as the correct trade off.)

Now imagine the game has advertisements, or loot boxes, or something else that the game company wants to know if you've looked at. How does Apple prevent them from learning that, if they're able to know what they need to know for the game to function as a regular FPS?

The question will be how easy it is to reconstruct that information from the last exact position + movement info...

I wish someone on the SDK team there could observe me as I tried to search for this information and failed because it would be super-informative on how to (and how not to) succeed on creating a wider community of apps...by making SDKs easily available.

<All opinions are completely my own personal opinions>

Zuck was probably part of the problem... a room full of POs pushing for stupid shit while building on a rocky foundation.

If Vision Pro will succeed Meta could be seen as the cheap-ass alternative. 3500USD vs 500USD is like Ferrari vs. Kia. Not everyone can afford the former.

If Vision Pro doesn't succeed, the market will likely move on from VR completely, leaving Apple and Meta in the same place. Money spent, product introduced, tried, didn't work. Move on.

Not because Meta had a better product, but Apple putting its might into this product category means that "Meta" is vindicated in investing here -- that there exists / will exist a viable market for this technology in coming years.

All the damage done by the poor quality 3D renders of AR/VR worlds from Metaverse -- that made a layperson laugh at the concept of AR/VR -- is probably partly offset by the positive press and marketing budgets that Apple will bring to the table.

Let's be real. You can have all the money in the world, but that doesn't guarantee you access to talent. It doesn't guarantee that you made insightful technical decisions that hamstring you later in the product cycle. It doesn't free you from short-sighted managers or employees who just care about making it to the next vesting cycle.

When you're a billion-dollar(haha, not so significant these days) company, you have a tremendous pressure to show results. You have tremendous pressure to show innovation and be first to market. It has no bearing on the quality of the products you release in the short-to-medium term.

A lot of people probably don’t remember what Android looked like in 2007. Using the Android pre-release SDK next to an iPhone, you’d come to a similar conclusion as yours: how does Google release a mobile OS so behind the curve? Should they fire all their product managers?

Same story with Windows in 1986. It was difficult to see how the graceless file manager from Microsoft could compete with Apple’s holistic GUI.

Give it four years. I think Meta intends to be the Windows and Android of this third wave of UIs. Validation of the market by Apple is exactly what they’ve been waiting for.

metas strategy is to release a cheaper consumer product and improve it iteratively. Hate to break it to you but day1 apple vision pro will have software bugs too.