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Apple’s new headset meets reality

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401–410 of 527 posts

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brother you’ve got to get off that kool-aid, this just isn’t healthy.

Which part would you disagree with?

The Apple Park part is delusional. It's just a big corporate office, yet they're ascribing some magical powers to it.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only worked there briefly (I never officially had an office there — Covid times and all that). I don't see it as any different than any of the other Apple campus buildings I worked in (like Infinite Loop) with regard to productivity. (I've always compared it to some beautiful, modern art gallery — but without any art.) But to the above degree, I have to say I enjoyed all large Apple work environments (even some of…

They must have some art!?

You’re expected to build it

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#403
post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm willing to spend $3,000 on a device that I would want to use every day. The reason I don't spend that much on existing VR tech is that I don't want to use it.

Most people don't have $3k of disposable income for a single non key purchase. How big even is this market, at $3k? 50 million people worldwide?

Next thing, you’ll tell me Apple wanted to charge $5k (inflation adjusted) for their new products in the 70s, and we know how that went. People simply don’t pay for new, powerful technology.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#404
post #184

From the information available so far, the Apple headset will be fairly close to Meta's Oculus Quest in terms of hardware: Portable and with external cameras to allow for orientation and "mixed reality". Maybe Apple is on the right track here, since the Oculus Quest has sold more units than all the other VR headsets combined. But there is one big difference: Apple's headset will be a very expensive premium product (a…

> It may be more feasible to sell $3000 smartphones than to sell VR headsets at this price. Sure, now it is. But what about when the iPhone was first introduced? It didn't cost anywhere near this much money. For a new product category such as this it makes sense to start out with a cheap product so that as many people adopt it as possible, then you can begin introducing more expensive versions when you have the apps…

Apple has almost never started out with a cheap product. The only notable exception would be the original iMac G3, and even then it was significantly weaker than every competitor in its price range [1].

[1]: http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9811/09/macvp2.idg/

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#405

Why not a lightweight, unobtrusive AR glass that uses the iPhone as the main compute engine and delivers notifications, navigation, speech recognition & translation to the glass in a clear way. None of this has to be super high-quality or super low-latency, and I’d still pay 500 too buy it. I don’t care for VR, games or metaverse. Tell me what plant/insect I’m looking at, what’s that star/satellite in the sky, help w…

Sounds super boring. I'm glad you're not in charge of Apple

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#406
post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most important thing is frameworks. No joke, nothing is currently stopping Apple from making a headset that ships with support for Half Life: Alyx. If they support DXVK at a protocol level and ship a Wine runtime like the Steam Deck does, they could support Beat Saber, Tabletop Sim and VRChat without their developers even knowing. But they won't. As-is, Apple's insistence on iron-fisting their ecosystem is hurtin…

They still would have to _license_ Half Life: Alyx (a Steam exclusive designed for the Valve Index) or Beat Saber (by Meta-owned Beat Games). > It's the reason gaming on Mac died Some gaming on Mac died because they are pinched by consoles on one side and custom-built gaming rigs on the other. The majority of their sold systems are battery-powered, and your first chance at a GPU power envelope of even 150W is the Mac…

> They still would have to _license_ Half Life: Alyx

Nope. The user can license it, as long as the client is supported. And good news too, recent Steam updates have added support for ARM64 clients on Unix systems.

> Some gaming on Mac died because they are pinched by consoles

I mean, most gaming on Mac died because of inconvenient 32-bit lib depreciation and Apple's coincidentally unfortunate refusal to support a standardized graphics API. With Proton, Macs are a Steam Deck. Without them, they're a Steam Machine. They're not mega-powerful machines in the first place, but neither is my Thinkpad and it still plays nice with Wine.

> why so few developers take the effort to build and support their iOS games for iPadOS and macOS.

Now that is a head-scratcher. My best guess is that the market is thin, and the carrot at the end of the stick isn't big. It's much easier than porting a DirectX or Vulkan title from scratch though, that's for certain.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#407
post #371
post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really important to remember: - Apple Watch: $447 at release (inflation adj); $250 today. - iPad: $695 at release (inflation adj); $450 today. - iPhone: $877 at release (inflation adj, carrier subsidized); $800 today. Similar story with all of their products. Apple has a history of releasing new product lines with the "top end" expensive models (remember in 2017 when they released both the iPhone X and iPhone 8). Ear…

> Historically: It has practically never been a good bet to bet against Apple, even if all the logic says to [1]. This time could be different. I would not bet on it. Historically? What?! Apple had about 15 years of lukewarm products. Even during their initial phase many products were commercial flops. Their post iPhone era is an outlier.

They’ve had plenty of lukewarm products in their post iPhone era as well.

And it’s not as if the original iPhone didn’t have its own issues that Apple had to quickly pivot from.

Plus there’s a lot of talk about gaming here but Apple don’t have a good track record for gaming: their games console was a massive flop. macOS isn’t seen as a gaming OS (I see more talk of Linux than is do of macOS) and Apple Arcade is yet another one of those lukewarm products. So I’m questioning whether this headset is targeting that market…and if it is, whether gamers would even take it seriously.

I’ll definitely be watching this piece of hardware to see what happens but I don’t feel confident that this will be “another iPhone”.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yet another vr headset that is measurably less awful while still not being good is still a massive advancement. apple can afford to iterate, and their high end and business customers can afford to participate in that process. it won’t be siri, but they wouldn’t be rolling it out if they didn’t have something that felt different.

Except that I'm pretty sure it won't work with anything but Apple ecosystem. No chance in hell it would work with existing SteamVR libraries or Oculus Stores. And Apple's domain is currently entirely empty of any VR/AR/XR applications. While I expect Safari to get OpenXR^W WebXR support (IIRC it's still not there, right?), even if the hardware specs will be suporior, it is hard to call it an advancement (something th…

I think you mean WebXR in regards to Safari, not OpenXR.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#410

I don't think there is a consumer market for head mounted AR anymore - if there ever really was. That makes me sad having been in AR since 2010 - and knowing what we could do with it if done right. I just don't think society currently has an appetite for a $3000 product that gives the wearer visual superpowers (that is the promise after all) and is an impossible to ignore distinction between classes. I honestly think…

>I don't think there is a consumer market for head mounted AR anymore - if there ever really was. All it takes is a killer app to come along. AR music instrument instruction is my bet. If Apple released this one app along with the glasses it would become a massive hit.

That sounds like a massive gimmick to me. Something that looks cool in demos, but doesn't really translate well into practical use.

Might as well just buy a keyboard with lights built into the keys.

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