Live data from Hacker News

Apple Vision Pro review

wsj.com

451–460 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#452
post #276

Lots of surprises on the downside from all the reviews. Pass through much more limited in quality with motion blur, pixelation, distortions, limited color and dynamic range. The eye tracking driven input method which was seen as holy grail turns out to be annoying after a while because people don't naturally always look at what they want to click on. Personas straight up aren't ready. The lack of AR features is the b…

i generally agree with the sentiment of this post. it does appear to be a beta/dev kit. i will say that the productivity criticism is a BIT unfair. It may be the case that you can only have 1 MACOS display, but you can have many non macos apps running right alongside the 1 macos display. You could have your macos display doing things that only macos can do, and then run the vision pro version of discord or teams or s…

iOS/visionOS lacks good window management tools for this though and since macOS Apple has not demonstrated they can build them for new platforms. Maybe visionOS will motivate them to actually get it right, but that hasn't been shown off yet.

I think about all the apps I'm running and switching between on my computer now, using shortcuts and toolbars and docks to arrange, hide, and switch between them. Everyone using multiple apps on visionOS just looks chaotic.

I once had a second portrait monitor next to my ultrawide. I had to get rid of it because it was just too tiring to be constantly turning my head so far to look at it. It didn't work out.

I cannot imagine how uncomfortable it would be if each app needed to be in a different physical space that required turning my head to use. Painful.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Maps falls in that category. Maps was bad when it came out but after years of effort (and a lot of money), it's pretty good now. That was no small feat given how good Google Maps already was when Apple Maps started.

In my area (Long Island), Apple Maps works great (better than Google Maps). I hear that it falls down, in rural areas, though. [ edit ] Looks like I pissed in someone’s cereal. Didn’t mean to, but different strokes, and all that… I was just recounting actual personal experience, which, I suppose, isn’t popular, hereabouts. Just for context, I have been writing Apple programs, since 1986. I am totally committed to the…

Apple Maps in New Zealand is really, really good. Travel estimates are nearly perfect.

In smaller countries though, it's total rubbish. Samoa, travel guidance is nearly non-existent. Tahiti, very patchy. In those countries, Google Maps was perfect.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#454
post #132

It is interesting how many here are excited about this for productive computer work. It’s also what Apple advertises with. But what is the account situation like? For years I’ve been complaining that I can’t easily use my private iPad with my company Mac because they have separate Apple IDs. Things like sidecar for a quick virtual whiteboard are basically impossible. AirPods have gotten better over the years where to…

> But what is the account situation like? These devices are going to have your sweat, makeup, odours etc on them. So you're really not going to want to share a device with anyone else.

OP is talking about the reverse. Using one Vision attached to two different laptops with two different iCloud accounts, so they can use it with both their work and personal computer.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When is the last time they launched a "so so" product? All of them! The first version of the iPhone, iPad, iPod, watch, AirPods... They all had similar reviews. "Seems like a tech preview, not really ready for general use, too expensive", etc.

First iPod and iPad were fine.

The first iPod had a wheel that physically moved and would get dirt and stuff stuck in it/have issues. The HDD would also freeze up. It was better than alternatives at the time, but it wasn't really until the click wheel it got really refined.

The first iPad was similarly expensive, thick and underpowered. It wasn't until a couple generations in that it was good.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#456
post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My launch day Apple Watch was unbelievably bad. Not even good for telling time as the raise-to-wake feature was so flaky. So by the sound of it, the Vision Pro might be starting in a better position than the watch.

My job at the time gave me a brand new Series 2 and it was annoying to interact with... when it was new. Dropped frames, missed touches, etc. There was still a little bit of lingering hope there would be "killer apps" outside notifications and exercise. But nope, nothing more interesting came, and OS updates ruined performance so badly that I happily returned it to my employer 2 years later and opted not to buy my ow…

As a counterpoint, I had a Series 2 for years and it worked really well. It was slow, so third party apps were not really usable, but the core functionality of the watch was perfectly fine. That is, until an unfortunate incident broke its screen while in the sea.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#457
post #276

Lots of surprises on the downside from all the reviews. Pass through much more limited in quality with motion blur, pixelation, distortions, limited color and dynamic range. The eye tracking driven input method which was seen as holy grail turns out to be annoying after a while because people don't naturally always look at what they want to click on. Personas straight up aren't ready. The lack of AR features is the b…

What do you mean, it can't run multiple monitors? I thought it lets you pop out windows free standing, no concept of monitor at all.

This tool evidently overcomes the display limitation: https://github.com/saagarjha/Ensemble

"Ensemble (formerly MacCast, before the lawyers had something to say about it) bridges windows from your Mac directly into visionOS, letting you move, resize, and interact with them just like you would with any other native app. It's wireless, like Mac Virtual Display, but without the limitations of resolution or working in a flat plane."

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#458

The complexity of our systems has increased a lot, and I dont think the tooling has caught up yet. Its sad that the fastest thing we have now is log.Printf("asdasdf") and grep the logs on the pod :) Debugging multithreaded application is as difficult as it was 50 years ago, maybe VR debuggers will allow us to debug complex interconnected systems or models in a more intuitive environment. Also I think having hundreds…

Apple can’t even get lldb to not crash trying to show me the values of variables in the current stack frame… the intuitiveness of the UI is far from the top of my priority list.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s my understanding that eye tracking isn’t great as an input method, it should be used more for stuff like rendering or NPC interactions.

It's going to be a great, sneaky way of installing an ad blocker onto wetware - users will train themselves to not even gaze at anything resembling an ad, lest they look at it long enough for the headset to register it as a click.

Apps are not able to register where you’re looking. Only the headset itself does.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First iPod and iPad were fine.

The first iPod had a wheel that physically moved and would get dirt and stuff stuck in it/have issues. The HDD would also freeze up. It was better than alternatives at the time, but it wasn't really until the click wheel it got really refined. The first iPad was similarly expensive, thick and underpowered. It wasn't until a couple generations in that it was good.

They were both significantly better than alternatives and didn't cost 7x as much as this does vs meta quest 3.
Post reply on HN