Apple Vision Pro review

That bar shows a small lower-res preview of each of the desktops, it is not rendering all the desktops at full 4K res. Essentially the smaller a window appears on the screen, the lower effort is needed to draw it.

The hypothetical use-case that the GP is talking about here, is AR -facilitated collaboration — people in your "see-through" view of the world being able to interact with the AR objects in your field of view, or vice-versa. Being able to AirDrop something to someone's iPhone by dragging a file from a window over to their body that you can see through the lens. You and your SO on the same flight, next to each-other and both wearing headsets, able to see the same set of shared/synced AR objects, and therefore watch the same movie. That kind of thing.

While this is an intended use-case for the Vision "platform" as a whole — it's an implicit promise of the whole "spatial computing paradigm" phrasing — I don't think this kind of AR-facilitated collaboration was ever intended to ship with the Vision Pro.

Why? Because, nobody in the Vision Pro's target market — at least as Apple would have it — wants or cares about AR-facilitated collaboration. I'll get to why in a moment, but in short — it's because it's the Vision Pro. And like Apple's other Pro products, it's mostly intended to be something possessed by an individual but owned and managed by their employer.

Now, Apple clearly intends to build VR -facilitated collaboration — but hasn't yet. That's what all the reviews mean when they say "the collaboration" is half-baked in the Vision Pro. The people in Apple's target market for this thing, expected VR collaboration, and it's not there. But that's an entirely different thing from AR-facilitated collaboration.

The Vision Pro as a specific product offering, almost certainly came out of Apple employees doing pandemic WFH, and realizing that all current "remoting" solutions sucked. Especially if you're a hardware engineer and trying to get a good look at a 3D real-world prototype of a thing. The people who are actually there in the office could just come in and stare at a real 3D-printed prototype. But the WFH people had to settle for looking at a 3D model on a screen... or maybe setting up a Windows machine, connected to an Oculus Quest, and using special compatible CAD software, in order to be able to do a walkaround. And that CAD software definitely didn't let them just paw at the 3D object with their hands.

The Vision Pro is clearly aimed at the "high-fidelity sensory feedback" half of the remoting problem. It's thus the complement to the companies who build telepresence robots — those robots solve the high-fidelity presence and interaction half of the remoting problem. (And you could really do some clever things by combining them!)

But note what else Apple released during the pandemic: Freeform, a piece of collaboration software. In fact, Apple added collaboration features to many of their first-party software offerings during the pandemic.

Apple never thought they'd extract their best work from their WFH (or now, travelling) employees by having them "show up to the office" with a telepresence robot. They rather expect that the best platform for all their engineers — in-office or otherwise — will be a digital office: one made of collaborative apps. And specifically, "level-of-immersion responsive" collaborative apps — apps that can switch between (or be compiled for) both lower-fidelity 2D screen-based UX, and higher-fidelity 3D spatial UX, on the same codebase.

It's this sort of 3D spatial collaboration-app UI experiences that the Vision Pro lacks in 1.0 but will clearly add later. (Which is why Apple cancelled WFH as soon as they could: their "solution to the remoting problem" isn't baked enough for them to usefully dogfood yet!)

But this is effectively VR-facilitated collaboration — working with other people who could be in arbitrary places, in VR or just interacting through a screen, where you see their VR avatars (personas) instead of seeing them. It's "Metaverse stuff" — but don't let Tim Cook catch you calling it that.

But AR-facilitated collaboration — i.e. having other people who are part of your work, present in the room with you, with some or all people in the room wearing Vision headsets with the see-through turned up, and where people wearing the headsets are interacting both with shared AR objects and with others present in physical space (rather than their VR simulacras in VR space)... this all has zero relevance to the remoting use-case. If you're in the office, then you're not going to be wearing a Vision Pro... because you can collaborate by just getting people in a room, and using various screens (AirPlay on an AppleTV display for shared viewing; your Macbooks for running collaboration tools; etc.)

Now, AR-facilitated collaboration is likely a use-case for the "Vision platform" as a whole. (Otherwise, why bother with the AR OS features?) AR-facilitated collaboration, is what a self-employed / freelance creative professional — someone who isn't remoting into some [idea of an] office, but who does have people [e.g. clients] physically present around them who they need to interact with them and with their work — would want. AR-facilitated collaboration would therefore be the defining use-case for a later "Vision Studio": a "prosumer" model targeted at such creative professionals — the same sort of people who buy themselves a Mac Studio. It would match the Vision Pro's targeting (which, if you haven't considered it, will almost certainly end up squarely on "businesses buying these for their remoting employees" — even if the early adopters are individual tech nerds.)

A screenshot would be blurry because of the foveated rendering

The device doesn't even have a power button