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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

#111
post #105

I feel like this will be a spectacular flop. It’s the first major new Apple product announcement that I completely forgot about (and I mean completely) in the time between announcement and ordering. Nobody I know is even talking about it, unlike when the Apple Watch came out, or the iPad. The experience needs to be as life-changing as the iPhone if you’re going to normalize people wearing ski goggles around the house…

Not to mention, there is no chance I would ever wear this at home in front of my family. My guess is that many feel the same; it’s just too anti-social and weird. If it can be used for VR/AR, there might be some industrial applications, but Apple seems to be positioning this more as a replacement for monitors.

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

#112
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t it have some weird and Very Apple design flaw where it’s hard to charge and use at the same time?

The battery is external, i.e. already next to you anyway, so plugging in power is rather simple. You could also have multiple batteries with you, though I don't know the price of an additional battery.

It's $200 for an extra battery, all of the accessories have a steep early adopter tax. Besides, has anyone confirmed whether or not the AVP has an internal backup battery so you can hotswap the external battery without rebooting it?

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

#113
post #36
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone at Apple had to design the watch to detect certain hand motions and purposely ignore them . That's a thing that someone had to do, otherwise false positives would be embarrassingly pasted across the Internet for to be laughed at.

Shouldn't the watch be on your non-dominant hand?

That's all very well for the folks who only need one hand...

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

#114
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole thing feels very ... "original xbox" to me. Hear me out. It was argued that a big part of the original xbox for Microsoft was making sure they had a toehold in the gaming console market because that market had a change of disrupting the personal computer - and if that happened, they wanted to be there for it and have something ready to go. They did something similar with phones, and we can see how it specta…

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 Ethernet adapter. Shipping the Xbox with Ethernet made networking on the box pretty simple right at the time when people started buying home routers and broadband internet and opened up the console to easy LAN gaming.

Microsoft made Xbox Live a pretty massive feature of the console a year after launch. While Xbox Live launched a year after the console shipped, I'd still say the planning of it and including the Ethernet port was something nobody else in the console gaming world was doing and ended up defining the console gaming future.

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

#115
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole thing feels very ... "original xbox" to me. Hear me out. It was argued that a big part of the original xbox for Microsoft was making sure they had a toehold in the gaming console market because that market had a change of disrupting the personal computer - and if that happened, they wanted to be there for it and have something ready to go. They did something similar with phones, and we can see how it specta…

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…

Natural language is even worse than video for quick content consumption: you can’t quickly skip through content that way the can fast scroll through a blog post.

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

#116
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole thing feels very ... "original xbox" to me. Hear me out. It was argued that a big part of the original xbox for Microsoft was making sure they had a toehold in the gaming console market because that market had a change of disrupting the personal computer - and if that happened, they wanted to be there for it and have something ready to go. They did something similar with phones, and we can see how it specta…

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.

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

#117
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole thing feels very ... "original xbox" to me. Hear me out. It was argued that a big part of the original xbox for Microsoft was making sure they had a toehold in the gaming console market because that market had a change of disrupting the personal computer - and if that happened, they wanted to be there for it and have something ready to go. They did something similar with phones, and we can see how it specta…

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…

Mobile phones and VR are different non competing markets. AR might eventually compete with phones once you can wear an AR device all day everywhere you go. AR and VR should be treated as distinct; a good VR headset is bad for most AR usecases and vice versa. Maybe at some distant time there will be hardware capable of doing both really well but not for many years. VR fits into daily life as a social experience and will be obvious once eye, face and full body tracking are included with the headset. Even before that if someone solves the network problems with concurrent users and delivers an experience that handles audio well enough to work with multiple people having conversations within earshot of each other. AR is really just putting screens and overlays everywhere, conversational interfaces will have more and better impact than that.

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

#118
post #33
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could imagine that might have been why it came about originally but that line of thinking doesn't seem to justify the R&D spend alone. I'd imagine they have some belief in it being able to make new business of its own. If I'm not mistaken this is the first properly post-Steve product?

I think AirPods were post-Steve? And they were both widely mocked at launch and wildly successful.

Like so many Apple things, I thought AirPods were dumb until I got some (as a gift). I'd tried some Logitech wireless earbuds just a couple months before first trying AirPods. Those were dumb. God they sucked.

I've avoided the Watch for that reason. The little conveniences of various Apple-thingies are the sort of stuff you can't un-experience, and then you're stuck buying the damn things forever.

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

#119
post #27
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole thing feels very ... "original xbox" to me. Hear me out. It was argued that a big part of the original xbox for Microsoft was making sure they had a toehold in the gaming console market because that market had a change of disrupting the personal computer - and if that happened, they wanted to be there for it and have something ready to go. They did something similar with phones, and we can see how it specta…

I could imagine that might have been why it came about originally but that line of thinking doesn't seem to justify the R&D spend alone. I'd imagine they have some belief in it being able to make new business of its own. If I'm not mistaken this is the first properly post-Steve product?

> that line of thinking doesn't seem to justify the R&D spend alone

I'm sure they're also looking to use the technologies they develop for this in other products, too.

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

#120
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for the slight tangent, but: What's the current state of VR&AR Headset friction / boot time? This is what I expected Apple to solve first. With VR/AR headsets, the friction to 'boot in' seems to be one of the biggest problems in adoption, and one that I feel Meta et al don't openly talk about. (Note, I am ignorant of this field in general). How close are we to seamless, quick boot, such that one puts on a heads…

This is a pretty strange complaint to me. When you use a VR headset you don't really put it on and take it off frequently during a session. When you take it off you can plug it in and it'll stay in standby, which is similar to phone standby. Its also not any slower than Playstation standby.

It's not a complaint (from me or my acquaintances), it's something that I thought (possibly incorrectly, but as mentioned I am ignorant hence me asking) was a hindrance to the success of the market. I.e. when I speak to most people re: VR/AR, they say something like "It sounds like a lot of faff", or "I have one gathering dust, I can't be bothered to use it".

I have no skin in the game and no intention of buying anything for another couple of years at least, FWIW.

Anyway: Sibling post says ~5 seconds from standby - Which seems very reasonable to me, so I suppose it's just lack of compelling features (subjectively to the people in question, not regular users) that result in the 'gathering dust'... Which means the people I have spoken to haven't wanted to bother keeping it on standby (thus increasing the barriers further).

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