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? =! Vision Pro
Notes on Vision Pro
201–210 of 700 posts
Re: Notes on Vision Pro
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's insane that a billion-dollar company like Meta actually felt proud to release such a steaming pile of trash. Can you name a better product in the price-bracket?
If you have a product that's 5x as good, but 2x as expensive, literally everyone will buy it. The iPhone is the perfect case study.
If you’re comparing the Quest 2 to the Vision Pro, it seems more like 2x as good for 5x the price.
Re: Notes on Vision Pro
#203From years of observing first-hand how hard it is to develop software, I’m shocked that Apple continually makes products that fit their aesthetic (eg. The crown and headband evoking the Apple Watch) and have coherent and mostly-baked software on launch like this. Is there a book about how they’re able to operate at scale and deliver such consistent things? Do they just have an insanely good product team? How do they…
You could say the same about Dyson or Oxo or Bodum. Having a single esthetic and coherent product line is a choice.
On the face of it, it sounds like a company would want coherency, but in practice it means leaving a lot of money on the table for every single of your products. Any consistent design decisions means anyone who's not pleased by it has no option in your lineup to go to. That's of course a gamble Apple is willing to take.
For instance, Apple consistently uses glass and metal in their product design, the only exception I can think of being airpods and their mouse. I personally prefered the plastic for weight and comfort, so that set me out of the market for their headphones and I went to Sony for instance.
Same for laptops with touchscreens, if you care any bit about them Apple is a no go to you. Same for so many things.
PS: on inconsitencies and incoherencies, Windows is the king of the kitchen sink approach, and it's consistently stayed ahead of Apple in numbers. Another instance on how being opiniated isn't only a positive aspect from a business perspective.
Re: Notes on Vision Pro
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has to be evident to Apple that Siri needs dramatic changes. They keep building hardware that needs robust voice support.
I would not be so sure, mainly because of ecosystem lock. I sincerely doubt a double-digit percentage of Apple employees have touched and android phone or used OpenAI APIs. Big problem with ecosystems is you don’t know what you’re missing.
> I sincerely doubt a double-digit percentage of Apple employees have touched and android phone or used OpenAI APIs
I strongly doubt you're right. Apple is full of geeks; just because they tend to be tight-lipped doesn't mean they aren't paying attention to all the same stuff we are.
Re: Notes on Vision Pro
#205From years of observing first-hand how hard it is to develop software, I’m shocked that Apple continually makes products that fit their aesthetic (eg. The crown and headband evoking the Apple Watch) and have coherent and mostly-baked software on launch like this. Is there a book about how they’re able to operate at scale and deliver such consistent things? Do they just have an insanely good product team? How do they…
I know it's a joke, but I think it's still a good illustration: https://i.imgur.com/XLuaF0h.png
From everything I've heard, Apple's org structure is a lot more focused and UX-driven from the top down than basically any other large tech company. That means you get a lot less compromising and in-fighting.
The other side is how Apple makes money compared to other companies. Meta makes money mostly by selling you (the user) to advertisers (the real customers). Same with Google (70%ish ad revenue). Microsoft is a hot mess of competing B2B fiefdoms (the vast majority of their revenue comes from businesses, not consumers). Amazon only makes a few products directly for consumers, and mostly makes money from being a marketplace + AWS. That leaves Apple fairly uniquely positioned as a premium consumer hardware company that also sells consumer software services to enhance the experience and... drive more hardware sales.
Re: Notes on Vision Pro
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Entirely serious question: is this something that can be trained? That is, after a long enough time of use and strengthening of the appropriate muscles and neural pathways, the headaches and such go away?
Surely you are already moving your eyes to look at click/tap targets anyway. Why would there be any additional muscle strain or neural pathways needed? Clearly moving our eyes doesn’t cause problems because we move them all the time as it is.
Maybe that's why some people prefer keyboard shortcuts; I don't move my eyes around the keyboard when typing, or when pressing Ctrl+S or Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V or in Windows I can Alt-Tab repeatedly and the highlight moves and I can looking around at the available windows while watching the selected one change with my peripheral vision. I can keep typing in a textbox for a bit while looking away, but with a virtual keyboard or speech to text which might be getting it wrong that's less of an option.
Compare with a smartphone, I can move to tap the 'back' button in Safari without moving my eyes to the back button. Looking "at" the phone generally is enough to see where my finger is, and say clicking on links I can look at the link and move my hand to it and move my eyes away while my hand is moving.
Having to coordinate looking and clicking - while I haven't tried it - I can imagine that feels more load-bearing, more effortful, more constraining, more annoying.
Re: Notes on Vision Pro
#207Reading through his notes, I couldn’t help but think “I don’t know this guy, but it seems like he has spent years thinking deeply about interfaces. Also, he sounds ex-Apple.” It made me smile when I got towards the end and my suspicions were confirmed. Andy’s thoughts were infinitely deeper than anything else I’ve read about the device+interface so far. In particular, I liked his observations that so far it’s mostly…
Reading through it, I was struck by the contrast of how broken the web page was with what the author was saying about UX. The author seems experienced in the field, but the site felt completely broken. I don’t know if it’s a device or browser issue, but reading on my iPad, if I tried to use my right thumb to scroll, the page acted as if I had reached the end of the article, even though it was clear there was more because the last visible line was only half-visible. (And this was after having to manually zoom in because all the text was shoved to one side and tiny.) Scrolling with my left thumb worked about 50% of the time. The rest of the time it worked as poorly as scrolling with my right thumb. I gave up after about 5 paragraphs.
Re: Notes on Vision Pro
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not a VR headset, it is a computer with its own OS and M2 processor. I don’t think that VR or AR was mentioned a single time in the Apple event. They say this is the first device for spatial computing and that this is equivalent to the first Mac as far as changing OS UI goes. This will be another part of the Apple system along with Macs, iPhones, iPads, etc. You will never be able to use this as just a monitor e…
Right, so: it's just another VR headset, just beefier. Have you not been paying attention to Meta's Quest and the like? Modern VR headsets are computers, they run their own OS, with applications/games loaded onto the device itself, and they can be used as a VR display client for other operating systems. This is an M2 computer strapped to your head: it can bloody well do VR, let's see what folks do with this device th…
Quest Pro owner[1]: it's "a total waste of money", "embarassing how much of an unpolished piece of garbage it feels like", it's "a steaming pile of trash", "infuriating", "buggy", "janky".
MKBHD on the Vision Pro: better image passthrough, better responsiveness, better hand tracking, better eye tracking, better image quality than any other headset he's ever used.
You: "overpriced hardware".
No, better hardware.
Re: Notes on Vision Pro
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very varied by person. My friend used a index on my 4090 dedicated (All other monitors to the 2080ti). Running at full frames on google earth. He puked his guts out 20 minutes later and took about 40 total minutes to recover. I was watching the stats the whole time. He just suddenly went urp right in the middle of mt rainier. I had just showed him WA state and no ill effects, but I didn't have issues on a pre-re…
Wait, were you the one controlling where he was going? Like zooming him around the planet? Cause that’s a sure fire way to make anyone nauseous.
no I showed him how to navigate while watching me on the other monitor...then let him fly around and talked him through the controls.
Re: Notes on Vision Pro
#210[flagged]