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Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it's not

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Re: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it's not

#191

Post by bombcar »

vel0city wrote: post #114
monkeynotes wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No way will this tech destroy phones as you know them today. What is going to destroy phones is natural language. Maybe, maybe in the distant future this tech will be mature enough to provide the visual support to a natural language first device. xBox addressed a very well defined product sector with a couple of big players doing stuff that is well understood. xBox wasn't a toe in the water, they planned a whole stra…

> they didn't break much new ground with the xBox I kind of disagree with this. They made networking and online gaming on consoles finally a thing most home consumers were interested in. Sure, there were some earlier forays into online gaming/networking on previous consoles (SegaNet, for example), but those were generally pretty niche. Sega only included a dial-up adapter by default, while the Xbox shipped with an Et…

A big part of the success of the Xbox (and maybe it's not the Japan destroyer the fanboys wanted it to be) was that they really really let it be its own product, and develop an ecosystem. They not only made it a "PC for your TV" which was widely what it was held as on release, but also expanded the capabilities of what a console was expected to do.

Sadly they also popularized and solidified the "pay to play games online" feature of consoles, vs the "online play is free except for MMOs" that PCs normally have.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it's not

#192

Post by janeshchhabra »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #173
_xnmw wrote: post #153

This review confirmed this is exactly what I need. I don’t care about my hair messing up, I work from home. I don’t care if the display doesn’t look as good as reality, that was never my expectation anyway. The display just needs to look good enough to work with fine text and hi-res images. I don’t care if it’s too heavy to wear for hours at a time, I always work in 25 minute blocks anyway. Breaks are good. I don’t c…

Same for me but there was a single sentence that more than halved my interest in buying this: you can’t have multiple floating windows of MacOS. It’s all in one single floating window. This is by far the biggest flaw for me, and a really stupid one. Hopefully a software update changes this

+1, this makes it harder to interop with mac working environments which was my biggest usecase for this device.

Sure, I can do other safari windows for research and stuff, but what I really want is different windows of IDEs, code search, docs, and work artifacts. Many of which may not be accessible through the vision pro (VPN, device certs, etc.), but are through my macbook.

If we could have at least 4 or 5 mac windows, it would be much better, otherwise it's akin to a macbook + external monitor. Hopefully they figure out a way to add it in, but it's hard to buy with such an obvious usecase missing.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it's not

#193

Post by bombcar »

Ancapistani wrote: post #181
monkeynotes wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No way will this tech destroy phones as you know them today. What is going to destroy phones is natural language. Maybe, maybe in the distant future this tech will be mature enough to provide the visual support to a natural language first device. xBox addressed a very well defined product sector with a couple of big players doing stuff that is well understood. xBox wasn't a toe in the water, they planned a whole stra…

> No way will this tech destroy phones as you know them today. This device? No, absolutely not. I see it as a speculative play by Apple: release a very capable device with a bare-bones ecosystem at a high price. "Early adopters" will buy it because that's what they do. "Influencers" will buy it, because that's what they do. Their social media posts about it will give Apple all the data they need to nail down the size…

> They're very rarely used for telephony, and many other devices are capable of doing so.

This is a really important distinction. And if you calculate your phone bill by actual minutes used for talking, it's an insane number of dollars per minute.

I'd be completely unsurprised if the amount of "talking on Zoom/Teams/voice chat" is soon to surpass the total number of minutes talking on phones.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it's not

#194

Post by bombcar »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #116
monkeynotes wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No way will this tech destroy phones as you know them today. What is going to destroy phones is natural language. Maybe, maybe in the distant future this tech will be mature enough to provide the visual support to a natural language first device. xBox addressed a very well defined product sector with a couple of big players doing stuff that is well understood. xBox wasn't a toe in the water, they planned a whole stra…

> What is going to destroy phones is natural language. Then the Watch is the future.

Dick Tracy will have his revenge, in this model or the next.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it's not

#195

Post by janeshchhabra »

hbn wrote: post #190
whamlastxmas wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same for me but there was a single sentence that more than halved my interest in buying this: you can’t have multiple floating windows of MacOS. It’s all in one single floating window. This is by far the biggest flaw for me, and a really stupid one. Hopefully a software update changes this

The 1 monitor cap and the fact that it's only a 1440p resolution makes me think it's a bandwidth/latency limitation, I wouldn't hold my breath on software fixing it.

Yeah, you would likely need a hardwired connection over thunderbolt to do more. It's unlikely such a connection is possible with the specs today (only usb-c is on battery, and unsure if that can transfer data).

Re: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it's not

#196

Post by GeekyBear »

browningstreet wrote: post #164
GeekyBear wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you think of examples where a company starts making a product in a new category and nails it on the first iteration? Experience shows that they will keep on iterating on it year after year. The thing I was most interested in was if they could nail an intuitive UI right from the outset.

VR headsets have been around for many years now and why does anyone believe a somewhat better version of those things would hit critical mass? It seems like the form factor is as much the problem as any of the implementations. Many people really wanted an Apple version to be a game changer. Maybe this game can’t really be changed?

This isn't the mass market version of the tech. This iteration is a developer kit that early adopters can also buy.

Apple has always said that they want a version that fits in a glasses style form factor as their mass market product, but the tech wasn't there yet.

> Apple CEO Tim Cook said that it will be a while before the technology available for augmented reality glasses rises to Apple’s standards, according to British Vogue.

“There are rumours and gossip about companies working on that, and we obviously don’t talk about what we work on. But today I can tell you that the technology itself doesn’t exist to do that in a quality way,” Cook told Vogue.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/11/apple-ar-glasses-tim-cook-sa...

They keep iterating on it in-house, and keep finding that the tech still isn't ready.

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/apple-glasses

I think the current plans are to focus on a cheaper version of Vision Pro in the short term.

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/apple-glasses-reportedly-dela...

Re: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it's not

#197

Post by smaccona »

nox101 wrote: post #106
PaulHoule wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good analysis. Part of it too is that Apple feels pressure to do something innovative. They made some big bets in the 2000s that paid off very well but a company that has a hit like the iPhone becomes profoundly conservative. The trouble is that there aren't many market opportunities bigger than smartphones, there's a possible iCar and an iHouse and that's about it. Apple's worst fear might be being successful as a n…

I wonder if an iTV would sell. All mondern smart tvs are covered in ads and spying. monitors of similar sizes cost 3x to 4x. so to me there might be a market for a non spying iTV with bultin Apple TV for say 1.5x. Or not, not sure enough people care about those issues.

What I do is buy a smart TV, never connect it to the network (thus making it a dumb TV), and plug an Apple TV (or other devices) into it. So far, this has worked - I haven't seen any ads from the TV itself (the apps running on the Apple TV are another story), and it can't phone home about what I'm watching or otherwise doing with the TV.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it's not

#198

Post by annexrichmond »

I haven't used VR/AR in a while, so I don't know if I should have expected this, but those black borders seem pretty large, and I think Apple made it seem the field of vision is much larger than it really is.

The Verge hit the nail on the head with hand gestures. The input device is critical for a new computing platform. This is too awkward to be something you do all day.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is the most returned Apple product.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it's not

#199

Post by monkeynotes »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #94
monkeynotes wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No way will this tech destroy phones as you know them today. What is going to destroy phones is natural language. Maybe, maybe in the distant future this tech will be mature enough to provide the visual support to a natural language first device. xBox addressed a very well defined product sector with a couple of big players doing stuff that is well understood. xBox wasn't a toe in the water, they planned a whole stra…

Hard disagree. Phones and computers do text/images/video. Voice input and audio output is a poor substitute for text and not at all a replacement for images/video.

I didn't say there wouldn't be a screen. But natural conversations will be much more fluid and efficient than a keyboard and google search. Having a conversation is so much better for all sorts of applications.

Today's smartphones have to evolve this way, imo. I don't know what the most efficient hardware realization would look like but I imagine it's something that isn't in your pocket most of the time, more of a sleek wearable. It will need to be able to hear and see what you do.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it's not

#200

Post by chaostheory »

htk wrote: post #142
GeekyBear wrote: post #37

Some other early reviews that are up: CNET - Apple Vision Pro Review: A Mind-Blowing Look at an Unfinished Future https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/apple-vision-pro-review-... WSJ - Apple Vision Pro Review: The Best Headset Yet Is Just a Glimpse of the Future https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-vision-pro-review-39f2d82e?mo... Tom's Hardware - Apple Vision Pro review: A revolution in progress https://www.tomsguide.com/c…

It's interesting to see a common theme of "It's great, but not there yet."

That’s also a good summary of the 1st iPhone’s reviews.
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