Apple plans a slow, appointment-only rollout of Vision Pro

From my perspective:

1. Eye tracking for interaction vs hand tracking. If the UX works out, the amount of precision that can be reached is just far higher with less effort - just seems to be an easier technical problem.

2. Resolution and lensing. Most VR headsets have fairly low quality fresnel lenses which cause distortion near the edges (basically - if you want to see something in good detail, you have to tilt your whole head to look at it), and in general the resolution is not good enough to see things that are 'far away' (those who play games like DCS have to use the 'binoculars' feature with headsets to accurately see targets). With a device like an HP Reverb, the resolution is probably close to good enough, the lensing is not - the Meta Quest Pro has a good enough lens, but not resolution. I'd expect the lensing on the Apple device to be top of market, and we know the resolution is ~2.5x more dense than the Meta Quest Pro - which should be closer to going from SD to HD TV rather than HD to 4k. Essentially, if you try to code on a Meta Quest Pro, the text looks a bit blurry. With the Vision Pro, it won't.

3. Custom face cushion + prescription lenses. Comfort is everything with these devices and nothing is worse than a headset putting pressure in the wrong places. It'll cost much more, but be totally worth it.

4. People claim common nausea when using VR. I've felt it too, but only on certain headsets. My money is other companies know what causes folks to feel bad, but have had to make technical tradeoffs which mean that nausea remains a problem. I'd put money on Apple having done serious research into 'what causes nausea when using headsets' which causes this to minimised on their headsets.

5. Software stack and usability. VR stacks are typically fairly clunky, usually Android derived, usually behaving a bit like a dodgy phone. iOS/MacOS are usually not most feature-ful, but a core usually works very very well. Will likely push bar a lot higher, change the shape of industry (e.g. samsungs are so good because of the iPhone competition).

Basically, having used some of these devices - the complaints I have with these right now, are the same things that Apple has real, technical solutions for. And the price isn't even _that_ high compared to other players in the market. Pimax Crystal is $1600 for what right now is a fairly buggy user experience. Their vapourware Pimax 12k is listed as starting at $2400 for the most basic model, though it's been in that state for well over a year.

Yes because “analysts” have been spot on when it came to Apple ever since in the 80s.

> unclear use cases ... a small group of enthusiasts

Apple's image announcement is just for future positioning: this really is a "Pro" device, for specific market segments and use-cases - niche. It's how apple won desktop publishing years ago.

Segment 1: creative professionals keep buying more and bigger screens. Vision Pro (VP) can eat that budget, and provide as many displays as you want. (The technology appeal is that a display must be high resolution everywhere - but VP only needs to be hi-res where you're looking, giving arbitrarily large "displays"). Apple carefully and specifically claims text is crisp. The engineering question is if Apple has actually done this: is it as good as a physical display? (or close enough)

Segment 2: creative professionals who make 3D objects: industrial designers, architects (but not yet engineers - they have different priorities). Also directors: cgi sets and set extensions have long been standard, and directors (and production designers etc) use an ipad to "see" the fully dressed cgi set, overlaid on the practical set. This is a better version of that. I can see James Cameron and Denis Villeneuve ordering any many as they can use - if it actually help. (aside: maybe for actors in rehearsal, but interferes with mocap).

Creative professional collaborate, hence Apple's huge efforts on the eyes being visible. A real question is will it be enough, for effective and natural communication, in a real-worlx work-flow situation? Will Jim be able to ordsr people around, or will he have to rip it off?

By announcing it after years and years of work, Apple shows they think they have enough of it, for it to be worthwhile for some people.

Provided they can get a genuine foothold, in actually making people more productive (real ROI, not jus enthusiast prosumers), then this has endless upside. If they can, users, usages and sales will grow fantastically for decades....if

Surprisingly the GP didn't include price of the device as a reason, but the 30% Apple cut/likely uplift in price that developers need to charge to recuperate development costs - which are far more significant than developer hardware costs.

A non-Apple device without the moat would be better. GP also didn't ask for free apps.