Apple hopes to convince people to buy its $3,500 Vision Pro headset using free 25-minute in-store demos::undefined
Oh. My. Goodness.
$3,500?!? HAHAHAHAHAHA
It is not meant for the end consumer at this stage, it is a tech demo and development kit.
The real consumer variant will probably be released in a year or two.
Did they say this or is this your pet theory? I don’t feel like that is necessarily the best strategy, since people won’t develop for it, when there’s no users and no users will appear when no one develops an ecosystem for this thing…
This isn’t really a “pet” theory — just economics. VR represents an entirely new product line, and with Apple’s expansion into services, a whole new way to value-add to those services and entire ecosystem; capturing more recurring revenue. This price point is based on new manufacturing costs at a much smaller scale than their other product lines.
It’s Apple, so it’ll never be “cheap”, but it can’t remain at this price point and stave off competition for long. Within 3 years they’ll either drop the price and introduce a pro version, or release an SE version, that’ll still probably be around $2000-2500 — but bringing it within reach of the people who’d normally buy “pro” devices.
This is interesting because you’re correct that this is almost certainly a dev kit that they’re making people pay for.
However: this is very unlike Apple to do if it’s true. We ask ourselves, “What is the enthusiast or middle class user able to afford for good VR?” And as we’ve seen, consumer headsets are aimed at less than $1000.
So the plan is for Apple to put out an amazing headset with the best materials and best screen and eye tracking and all this, only for them to wait some years before releasing a worse version of this that still costs over $1000? I can’t see how Apple would get beneath this price point. And I can’t see how they’d justify themselves.
So your average consumer isn’t using this anytime soon. Did they just make a weird toy line for the rich?
At best this may help scaling up production of the necessary components (in particular the displays)
Did they just make a weird toy line for the rich?
Well it is Apple, they sell status more than anything else.
You have to start somewhere. The iPhone was a game changer so it took of instantly. Something like an AR/VR headset is still pretty niche even today about 10 years after VR really became a thing.
It should be marketed as a dev kit, but they’re marketing it for consumers
Well, why not capture some consumers at the same time?
This very article says that Apple is pushing it onto “walk-in” consumers.
So?
They need to build hype, and if that means they are pushing a demo on walk-ins,then I don’t have an issue with it as long as they accept a “No thank you” from the customer.
So… I can’t buy it? If I can, you’re either lying, wrong, or have an agenda.
So… I can’t buy it?
If you can afford it you can buy it, the purpose of a product does not need to affect availablility.
you’re either lying
Why go straight into calling me a liar? This just shows that you don’t want to have a proper discussion.
wrong,
This is quite possible, I have been wrong before, and I will be wrong in the future, it happens, and is not the end of the world unless you realy fuck up.
or have an agenda.
I can’t figure out any agenda that I would push regarding the Vision Pro.
In the end, it is a theory, based on resonable data available to me.
I’d buy it if it was the kind of tool that earned me $5000… but it’s still really hard to justify the business use case for VR these days.
If I can lie on my couch while typing away on my custom virtual workspace it might be worth it but the resolution requirements make that unlikely any time soon
This thing is overpriced but there’s no way Apple ships it if they don’t have the pixel density to render text in a way that doesn’t make your eyes bleed. It’s being marketed as a work device, after all.
Yah but my dream setup is something that mimic 2/3 monitors sitting on a desk (or some VR-optimized version of that). In the real world those monitors are each 1080p+ and sitting in full view so the whole “scene” you’re looking at has many more pixels than just what is on all the monitors combined. If you scale that scene down to 4K resolution then the text on those monitors would likely be blurry or unreadable.
Obviously there are other ways to make a 4K resolution usable by zooming way in but that’s much less “screen” real estate than what a real workspace offers.
Also it’s too heavy to wear comfortably for long sessions
Drone pilot?
It also has basically no battery life and once that mostly useless battery becomes completely useless you are never unplugging that thing from the wall because you bet Apple made that battery impossible to replace!
The battery pack is literally just USB c.
Not impossible, just impossible to afford
Have you heard of the Apple Cheesegrater?
Shit I’ve bought MacBooks for work that cost as much as that headset, and my current laptop costs about as much as this.
$3500 is nothing for a computer, let alone a prosumery AR/VR heatset with a computer built in.
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My work PC costs twice that. There’s Apples influence has nothing to do with my Thinkpad.
I’ve worked on workstations that cost as much as a nice car. Apples pricing only comes close because they charge so much for storage. When you’re working with triple digit gigabytes of ram machines it ain’t cheap.
Apple makes by far the best laptop out there. No machine comes close when it comes to performance and battery life. Intel has a decent performance per watt under load, but under light non idle loads it’s not even close. My Thinkpad is incapable of getting decent battery life. Lenovos 10 hour battery life is a damn lie. I get 30 minutes to 3 hours at best. Our work MacBook pros easily get 10+ doing the exact same workload. AMD gets close, but they’re falling down the same trap Intel has been for the last 10 years.
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And I thought Apple consumers were out-of-touch!
A lot of tech, including computers, commonly cost that much for a long time. It’s not a totally outrageous for consumer tech.
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They could have made it stream wirelessly from your MacBook
yeah, no. People really don’t understand how much bandwidth you actually need to stream even normal 4k 60hz video, let alone something like this. For reference, when I was figuring out how to dump my pc in the basement and have the monitor in my office, I had to run 12-strand fiber cables to do it.
Parsec?
I’ve tried several remote desktop apps but the compression artefacts very quickly give me a headache. So I splurged for MTP cables and the display port dongles, and it works like a dream. Also, MTP connectors are pure fibre porn.
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you need about 20 gigabits per second for 4k 60hz. Or more, for higher resolutions and refresh rate - which vision pro has, compared to ~6 gigabits per second, that you need for your quest pro’s resolution. That’s why they make these.
And having compressed video streaming to a VR device sounds like my worst nightmare.
Wifi 7 has a peak rate of 40 Gbps.
Maybe it does, and it still would (probably) not be enough for two 4k 90hz displays that this has.
And is nowhere in any consumer product today. How is it relevant to this discussion?
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take a deep breath and realize; if you cannot afford this, you are not rich enough to be part of apples target audience.
no matter how much you want to tell yourself that you are.
I didn’t know apple target audiance was a total of 400.000 people which is the total amount the’ll make of these.
Seriously this is a proof of concept for rich kids children to be test users. I doubt it will visible move the needle on their profits.
You have some strange ideas, do android users enjoy being the “target audience” of google?
I am loyal to no brand, own a mix of devices and boycot some. Love tech, fuck capitalism.
It certainly is a big beta test product. I see it like the Tesla Roadster.
Isn’t that kind of like saying that if you can’t afford 2024 MB S63 AMG then you’re not in Mercedes Benzs’ target audience? I bet the profit Apple makes from selling iPhones dwarfs the earnings from selling these goggles even if they’re successful.
Second hand my dude
But the biggest issue is it wont run facebook oculus apps
Why would I want Facebook apps?
I think what was meant here is that it won’t run apps designed for the Oculus Quest lineup (which is based on Android), not the actual Facebook application
iOS doesn’t run android apps. I don’t think many people will care. Most apps can be ported.
The apple vision pro doesn’t have motion controllers like the quest line of headsets, so apps would have to be redesigned for hand tracking instead.
Also, apple said recently that devs have to cannot describe their apps using the words VR, AR, or XR on any platform it is on, they have to be called spacial computing apps, so anything with VR in the title like VRChat can’t get ported without a full rebrand.
Is 25 minutes a long enough in-store demo test time to have a $3500 wank?
The bigger question is what will you do with the other 24 minutes?
Well it’s indicative about the amount of content you’ll have for it when you buy it.
Yea what kind of privacy and amenities are provided?
Is this going to introduce “body tracking” similar to oculus hand tracking so it knows where the body is for it to become an AR wank? That’d be a game changer if VR wank.
Half of the US can’t afford a $1000 emergency. $3500 for a toy seems steep in that context.
That’s what credit card debt is for!
Jokes on you, my credit card is maxed
Half of the US is over a hundred million people. The rumours are Apple has supply constraints that will limit global sales to about a million devices for now.
This can’t possibly be a mass market device - it’s just not possible right now to manufacture that many. The tiny screens are 3,400 DPI and 5000 nits (that’s about 10x brighter than a typical TV or computer screen). It’s going to be a while before tech like that can be mass produced.
They named it Vision “Pro” which in Apple marketing speak basically means “the really expensive one”. Their “Pro” desktop PC tower has a baseline price of $7k and fully upgraded it comes in at almost $13k which is actually cheaper than they were when they used Intel Xeons a couple years ago (those could hit something like $80k).
There will probably be a non-pro equivalent one day, which will be far cheaper.
Oh hey, it’s that time again. Copy-pasting from the last time around…
—
Because the price is always the main topic, I’m gonna drop a link to an AR/VR expert contextualizing the Vision Pro price within the current (well, 7 months ago) market:
Apple Just Beat the “BEST VR Headset In the WORLD”… and did it cheaper.
Norm from Tested on yt had good things to say after his hands-on with the headset iirc a while back. This is just the price of a flagship VR device ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For $3500 it better be good. But I doubt the value is added linearly since you get a pretty decent vr headset for under $800
Totally agree.
Relatedly, I think people would be surprised how little the Apple Tax really is when accounting for specs and performance. That said I’m sure the margin is quite a bit higher on this device than an mbp. It’s very clearly not positioned for consumers but for businesses and bleeding edge enthusiasts
OK, but that doesn’t make it affordable or relevant.
It’s like comparing a Ferrari and a Lamborghini. It doesn’t matter because the world runs on Toyota Corollas.
Additionally, VR lives and dies on software.
I mean, it may not make a difference to you, but it makes a difference to people who are into Ferraris and Lamborghinis.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Apple Just Beat the “BEST VR Headset In the WORLD”… and did it cheaper.
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Good bot, Piperman! Feddit Rocks and Youtube… nots…
It feels very much like most stuff that’s likely to be developed for it will have the feel of “museum exhibit at home” or AR-ified iOS app.
The inability to use any controller is going to lose them a lot of latency and precision sensitive usecases. It is very Apple to make it totally standalone, but it’s going to cost them a fair bit.
A lot of real time remote control usecases will be impossible for latency issues alone, it won’t be a good solution in most multiuser environments (both due to no relative tracking, but also cost and hygiene issues for shared devices), it won’t be great for bringing into public spaces (poor long range tracking, etc) or small spaces (limits gestures), hand tracking camera position means you have to hold your hands up and mostly open (accessibility issues), etc.
Even if the hardware can do more, Apple won’t give developers access to more.
Oh yeah like I wanna get head lice from the snot-nosed kid some mom dumped there so she could go get some Starbucks in peace.
Honestly, I just want to experience it for 25 minutes and then I think I would be good. My Valve Index does enough for me for gaming, and I am not wearing a headset all day to work.
As someone with an Index, I’m interested in this because it doesn’t need the lighthouses. The fact that the index can only work in one place in my house without needing mount points severely limits its usefulness to me.
That’s a good point! My lighthouses sometimes disconnect to, so I have to unplug and re-plug them to get it working, which is a barrier in itself.
The price is always the joke, but this is aimed at commercial buyers right? Not consumers
Oh boy, you’ve got a lot to learn about apple consumers
If its amazing like revolutionary amazing it would change my mind, if it’s just a vr headset nope.
It’s a mixed reality headset that works. Still too expensive for consumers.
I don’t believe Apple made this product to sell. it might be just marketing ploy to keep people talking about Apple and how they are always ahead of the curve. they have a brand reputation to maintain.
They don’t care if it sells or not. It shows the tech industry that they are still “at the forefront” and “relevant”. Apple can’t appear to be left behind. This is also a way for developers to jump in and start making things for Apple’s inevitable AR glasses that this thing was supposed to be. In 5 years, they’ll use all the data and development they’ve collected from this headset for their newer devices.
This is exactly right. They did the same thing with the iPhone. Launched with minimal features, riddled with bugs, the butt of every joke and cynical opinion, and let the consumers tell them exactly what was wrong with it in excruciating detail. 5 years later, a literal majority of all human beings alive had one in their hands (or similar products from their competitors). Will this specific product be any good? No, probably not. But in 10 years or so, it may very well be the next thing everybody has to have in order to function in society
Id buy it right now if it was maybe $500.
Spatial computing is the future.
I don’t need 3 screens. I need a pair of spectacles.
Screens have always been the bottleneck. The phone tablet monitor tv.
Glasses can do entire field of vision.
It doesn’t even do spatial computing well. It can simulate a single 4k display and that’s it. You can have some other apps floating around you, but not much.
If I could simulate 8 4k displays all around me, or freely float my full blown Mac OS programs and resize them to infinity then I’d be cool with this. But I’ve got more screen in front of me right now than the vision could ever hope to do. And Apples “apps” are far too gimped to be useful. Notes and email are cool, but not much else.
It uses foveated rendering, so yeah it is effectively close to looking at a hidpi display across your entire field of vision, in a sphere around you. And you can use it effectively as a virtual monitor with a Mac, but you really have to design for the interface for a good experience
Then it’s not spatial. Maybe they will bring that to the table.
That’s what we need. I agree if it’s a downgrade from your Mac.
It’s an upgrade from my Thinkpad.
But price is the issue.
Once devs get it. They can improve.
I’d buy one if it were useful enough.
How’s it not useful? It provides an additional display to the ecosystem and a kind of immersion that is simply unrivaled unless you’re with friends and family (weirdos)
The cost here is a bigger decisive factor, it’s meant for early adopters, developers and tech entrepreneurs who will actually influence how the general public ends up using it for.
I don’t think they were saying it’s not useful. Personally I can’t see myself wearing this often enough to justify the cost
I’d buy one if it were reasonably priced.
That’s a no from me dawg
Is this VR or AR or both? And how robust is the actual software support?
To give a non-snarky answer, it does AR with external cameras and an incredibly low lag such that those who have tried it have said makes it almost natural (the resolution apparently isn’t perfect, but there is no discernible input lag when looking around which happens on other similar devices). But you can dial up the opacity to wind up in a fully VR environment. So, it is in fact, both.
Your question about software is a big one. Apple is advertising 1M apps available at launch (good) but these are iPad apps, which can run on Vision OS without any modifications by the developers (not so good). That does not mean it will be a good experience. I was listening to a podcast today where a developer clearly stated that after getting a chance to try their app on device at a lab, they totally stopped development because they missed the mark completely with their imagination and the simulator on how it should work. You’ll still be able to run their iPad app, but until they get their hands on their own hardware to iterate more rapidly, they’re giving up.
All that to say it’s unclear how many apps will be natively designed to work with it on launch, and if these will be any good.
Thankfully I don’t live in the US so I am immune to this particular reality distortion field. For now…
Careful there, that’s about the amount of time it takes to realize that it’s just a gimmick that has no use in your personal life, and very narrow industrial application. They might actually lose potential buyers rather than gain some.
I’m sure the demo will be highly controlled to only showcase general use practically and entertainment.
This, I just want to experience it for 25 minutes and then I think I would be satisfied.
Apple users don’t care, they’ll buy it simply because other people are buying it. Buying Apple products is partially a status symbol to a lot of non-tech people.
Jesus. Y’all actually need to believe that about people who own a particular phone or computer hu?
I work in the tech industry with support engineers. This is the smartest group I’ve ever worked with and we support a ton of services, more than the typical SE supports - everything from databases to networking to load balancers to virtual machines.
We all own iPhones.
It’s okay to own an Android. You don’t have to justify it by making up a story for yourself about how all people who buy Apple products are mindless drones.
Being an engineer and being smart are not synonyms. I’ve met quite a few dumb engineers in my life. Fine engineers, quite shit at making any non specifically engineering related decisions. Just the implication that choosing Apple is the smart choice is plainly a disingenuous argument. Every choice is an exercise in compromise, and choice of smartphone OS vendor is no different.
Remember that doctors used to prescribe tobacco and taking up smoking. Authority doesn’t automatically means someone is always right on everything.
Being an engineer and being smart are not synonyms.
The fact that I mentioned those two things separately should indicate to you that I believe they don’t always go together. I mentioned it and called out the specific services we support to counter the claim that only “non-tech” people buy iPhones. That’s complete and utter bullshit.
Just the implication that choosing Apple is the smart choice is plainly a disingenuous argument
Good thing I didn’t say that then, hu? I said the smart group of guys I work with all chose iPhones. YOU read into that and came out with “smart people ONLY choose iPhones”.
You’re just adding your voice to the original person I responded to. Neither of you seem to be capable of just being happy with your purchase. You must believe that iPhone users are stupid. Does it make you feel better or something?
How pitiful. The only one overly aggressive about defending their own purchase is you. I never said anything about either choice being better. Specifically I argued the opposite. But you seem extremely sensitive and eager to fight online for a multi billion conglomerate tech corp. They don’t need you, and no one was attacking you in particular. I was just commenting, you know, in a public forum, to try and provide an additional perspective that overall doesn’t actually differ much from yours. If you want private conversations go to a chat.
