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Apple Vision Pro review

wsj.com

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Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#681

Post by crtified »

rwalle wrote: post #639
crtified wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What would VR add here? I'm imagining an AI VR tutor - heck, with some legal deepfake+AI style evolution, perhaps that tutor could actually be a famous player, talking to you. The 3D view gives, well, a 3D view, and all the advantages it entails. For example, when you are with a physical real world teacher, you don't have a fixed view. You can observe from any angle, the teacher can observe and correct micro errors…

May I ask if you play any instruments and taken music lessons for a serious amount of time? My guess is not, because to me it is obvious you don't understand how this works and are just imagining things. Speaking as someone who takes private piano lessons and have been practicing daily for the past 8 years: If this were possible, music teachers would have already been replaced to some extent. But that has not happene…

> My guess is not, because to me it is obvious you don't understand how this works and are just imagining things.

That's great! I'm glad to hear that your 8 years of music practice has given you some firm opinions, and I'm sure you'll continue learning over time. Speaking as a player and composer of 25 years, former music teacher, and maker of the instruments I play - for whatever such things are worth - I believe my ideas have some merit. But only time and technology will show whether-or-not such AR (and AI) musician overlaps eventuate.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#682

Post by jojobas »

kj99 wrote: post #664
nvarsj wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This iPhone trope has gotta die. I worked at Motorola when the iPhone came out. Every single engineer knew this thing would blow everything else out of the water. It was one of the largest leaps in consumer tech devices ever. I assure you the Vision Pro is nowhere close to that.

How can you assure us that Vision Pro is nowhere close to that? Do you have one? As someone who bought the original iPhone, it was extremely impressive, but had many many flaws. The browser was practically unusable over 2g and the whole pinch to zoom the New York Times desktop site was never actually practical. I think the parallels are clear. I also bought the original MacBook Air. Now that truly was terrible and st…

Iphone was made from pretty much what was available to other manufacturers plus some secret software sauce, and was priced like a Blackberry of the time. There was immediately plenty of use cases that competitors kinda did, but not so well.

These googles are as bespoke as it gets, are priced at 7x the competition and more than a flagship laptop, steer clear of the most popular existing use case, which is games, and offers... what exactly again?

That's quite some difference.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#683

Post by internet101010 »

paulkrush wrote: post #636
nvarsj wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This iPhone trope has gotta die. I worked at Motorola when the iPhone came out. Every single engineer knew this thing would blow everything else out of the water. It was one of the largest leaps in consumer tech devices ever. I assure you the Vision Pro is nowhere close to that.

Peak Blackberry was 2011. It's easy to forgot that that the iPhone takeover took years and many releases.

I kind of find that hard to believe but maybe there were government/enterprise purchases boosting it or something? As far as I'm concerned Blackberry died with the Blackberry Storm 2 in 2009, which was a huge piece of junk.

I used to go back and forth to Shenzhen all the time trading refurbs and by 2010 I straight up would not buy anything other than Android devices because 1) iPhone was actually more expensive in mainland China due to it being a grey market item back then and 2) demand for everything else fell off a cliff.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#684

Post by vel0city »

8note wrote: post #578
diebeforei485 wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first gen iPhone had a much better UX than other phones, so missing a few features like copy and paste was palatable. I do think future generations of AVP will do well. Iterating and applying learnings and customer feedback will make this a good product.

The iPhone also came with a great data deal for the time, as I recall.

Not really. I had a cheaper unlimited AT&T unlimited data plan than the original iPhone data plan, and that included 3G data!

The trick was to just buy the smartphone outside of the plan. Then you get unlimited data at half the price. I'd pull gigs of data a month on my "dumbphone".

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#685

Post by gigatexal »

It’s a first gen product. It’ll get better with software updates and better hardware. The original iPhone was a barely useful soap shaped thing that didn’t even have copy and paste. Of course this thing is supposed to be the future of computing but it is still very much a first iteration. It’ll get better.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#686

Post by kj99 »

jojobas wrote: post #682
kj99 wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you assure us that Vision Pro is nowhere close to that? Do you have one? As someone who bought the original iPhone, it was extremely impressive, but had many many flaws. The browser was practically unusable over 2g and the whole pinch to zoom the New York Times desktop site was never actually practical. I think the parallels are clear. I also bought the original MacBook Air. Now that truly was terrible and st…

Iphone was made from pretty much what was available to other manufacturers plus some secret software sauce, and was priced like a Blackberry of the time. There was immediately plenty of use cases that competitors kinda did, but not so well. These googles are as bespoke as it gets, are priced at 7x the competition and more than a flagship laptop, steer clear of the most popular existing use case, which is games, and o…

> Iphone was made from pretty much what was available to other manufacturers plus some secret software sauce, and was priced like a Blackberry of the time.

Neither of these statements is remotely true.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#687

Post by tsunamifury »

volemo wrote: post #674
mvkel wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the surprise to me too. Lower FOV than a Quest 3? Inexcusable.

That’s a double edge sword though. Were they to make it 180°, we would critique it for spreading the precious pixels. “With those 4K your virtual monitor is 1080p at most!”

Apple used to excel at making the right trade off here. Choosing what feels right over numbers.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#688

Post by klausa »

wkat4242 wrote: post #658
steveBK123 wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you want to use your actual Mac it can't do multiple monitors lol, literally the only use case I could convince myself to spend this money on (hey its cheaper than an XDR ). Even then I was having trouble convincing myself since.. all indications were you wouldn't want to wear this more than a few hours at a time, so ultimately you still need the real physical monitors for the other 80% of your workday.

Instead of having multiple virtual screens I would prefer a lot more if I could simply spread individual Mac windows around my virtual space. In mixed reality the whole concept of a virtual monitor makes no sense, it's just an unnecessarily limiting abstraction you could easily do without. The whole room is your "desktop". It's basically what the SimulaVR guys are aiming at, and I'm surprised Apple didn't go this way…

I imagine it's mostly a CPU/battery/bandwidth concern at this point — having one wireless 4.5k/60 (or is it 90?) stream from your Mac is difficult enough; having a potentially unbound number of them (for arbitrary number of Mac windows open) is a different problem altogether.

But there are 3rd party solutions that will let you do just that though: https://github.com/saagarjha/Ensemble

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#689

Post by tcmart14 »

crooked-v wrote: post #366
wahnfrieden wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tim Apple reportedly overrode the design team on launching it prematurely relative to their typical standards in order to enter the market and begin iterating before waiting too long. It’s the first new product category made under his leadership and he’s eyeing retirement, as context. Btw, don’t forget visionOS 2.0 is just 18 weeks away. (Source: WWDC is every June and every platform gets a version bump, as we saw wi…

> don’t forget visionOS 2.0 is just 18 weeks away Source?

Its speculation, but probably reasonable speculation. At WWDC, I think almost every OS version gets an announcement of a major version bump. They will announce the next macOS major version, iOS major version, etc. So it is totally reasonable to suspect they will announce the next major version of visionOS.

Edit: But since it is still so new, it could not be until WWDC 2025 that visionOS 2.0 gets announced.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#690

Post by nox101 »

wkat4242 wrote: post #658
steveBK123 wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you want to use your actual Mac it can't do multiple monitors lol, literally the only use case I could convince myself to spend this money on (hey its cheaper than an XDR ). Even then I was having trouble convincing myself since.. all indications were you wouldn't want to wear this more than a few hours at a time, so ultimately you still need the real physical monitors for the other 80% of your workday.

Instead of having multiple virtual screens I would prefer a lot more if I could simply spread individual Mac windows around my virtual space. In mixed reality the whole concept of a virtual monitor makes no sense, it's just an unnecessarily limiting abstraction you could easily do without. The whole room is your "desktop". It's basically what the SimulaVR guys are aiming at, and I'm surprised Apple didn't go this way…

I know the implementation needs a lot to be desired but just in case you were not aware, the Oculus Rift shipped with this feature and it still exists via the link on Quest AFAIK. You pick the last icon on the UI bar that appears and it lets you select any window to pop out separately

Here's a screenshot of 4 windows plus the deskop.

https://pasteboard.co/hPKLrKgp5vjy.jpg

This features has been there for nearly 9 years?

(note: In my view there was passthrough and I could see my room but the screenshot function didn't include that).

It seems limited to desktop + 4 popout windows but I know it used to support more because when I first got the Rift I tried to see if I could get 6 videos running + desktop all at once. It worked.

There are issues though

(1) it's just showing the desktop's image, that means it can't adjust the resolution of the window. Ideally you'd pick a devicePixelRatio and a resolution and it would re-render but no desktop OS is designed to do that.

(2) It's Microsoft Windows, not an OS that Facebook controls which means they're at Microsoft's mercy and whatever features Windows supports. No easy way to add better VR controls. For example, IIRC, you can't size a window directly. Instead you need go to the window showing the full desktop, size it there, that will then be reflected in the popout window. If that's not clear, there are 2 size. The size in VR. The resolution of the window. If the window is a tiny 320x240 pixel window on your desktop and you make it 5x3 meters in your virtual space, all Oculus can do is draw those 320x240 pixels. You can go back to your desktop, size the window to 1237x841, now Oculus can draw those 1237x841 to your 5x3 meter VR pane. But, since Oculus doesn't control windows (or maybe they're lazy), there is no way change from 320x240 to 1237x841 by directly manipulating the pane in VR. Instead you need to do that in the desktop pane in VR.

(3) IIRC it's got some weird issues with the active window. Since it's really just grabbing the textures of the Windows OS compositor and showing then in different spaces, that's separate from Windows' itself's concept of which window is the foreground window. So, as you select windows, you can see on the floating window of the "desktop" the front window keeps changing.

These are all really just a function of (2), that Facebook doesn't own the desktop OS.

The same problem would exist with the Mac. Apple, since they control Mac, could maybe make it work but it would be a huge change to MacOS. They'd effectively need each app to run on its own screen and each screen to be a different resolution and device pixel ratio. Plus they'd need to map in all of the other features to mac MacOS to be usable in AR

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