Takeaways From the Vision Pro After 6 Months

A lot of the assumptions about Meta cancelling their new high end headset, and hot takes on the Apple Vision Pro seem to be based on a pure faith belief that the Apple Vision Pro is a good product paradigm.

As someone who has worked in VR, using it for construction, engineering, design and visualisation of large three dimensional objects, where sight lines and aesthetics were primary considerations, and thus having actually used it for tasks that were defined by the need to have stereoscopically three dimensional tools to do those tasks which couldn't be done on a 2D screen, let me just say...

...It's not. The Apple Vision Pro the single stupidest device Apple has ever made.

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There are two markets for computing that require the effort and comfort cost of wearing a headset:

- Consumer: Cheap, disposable, low-end optics: self contained headsets (Quest, Vive XR Elite), and,

- Professional: Expensive, durable, high end optics: tethered peripheral headsets for high end graphics cards (Varjo, Pimax).

What Apple made is a refrigatoaster; a "Nuts & Gum, Together At Last" act of hubris, combining the cost of a professional headset like the Varjo XR4, with the rapid built-in obsolescence of the Quest, and the laughably low-end graphics capabilities of the M2 iPad Pro, all in a giant bulky headset whose primary use case is either 2D iPad apps floating in space (which includes movie watching), OR a single highly compressed VNC connection to a Mac. Most importantly, what it can't do, is act as a 6 degrees of freedom 3d tracked display for another device (A VNC stream is not "being a display").

What the AVP is not, is a headset that is good for using three dimensional tools within a three dimensional environment, because of the aforementioned tablet GPU, which simply can't sustain the geometry and texture demands of a complex virtual working space. What's most laughable about that limitation, is that is the one thing you can't do with 2D screens - it's the one use case that ONLY a stereoscopic headset can deliver, and it's arguable that it's the only use case worth the hassle of wearing a headset to be able to do the task.

And once you hit the wall of the now superseded iPad M2 processor - that's it, you've reached the end of what the device can do. With a professional VR headset, you just get a more powerful graphics card, and get back to your expanding work needs. And that comes to the core of Apple's problem - Apple doesn't like upgradable graphics, and immersive headset computing is built upon GPU-centric systems, where upgrades are necessary.

Oh, and cable tethering? Literally no one who actually uses headset comouting cares about this. The tether is something you gain a proprioceptive awareness of within about a minute, and then it's no more in the way than any other part of your body. I've put hundreds of peope, from young children, through to elderly pensioners through tethered walk around VR systems (VIve), and have never once seen someone have a problem with the tether. The people who demand VR must be wireless or untethered (or not use controllers) sound like the people who complained that smart phones wouldn't succeed without hardware keyboards. Missing the forest for the trees. Immersion is SO powerful, nothing else matters when you're working in it.

If all you want is virtual screen glasses, there are better quality options which provide more displays, cost less, & weigh a fraction of the Vision Pro's bulk - Look at Visor's upcoming device as an example of what's happening.

Let's also not forget that people generally don't like wearing glasses. People let scalpels cut into their *eyes* to avoid wearing glasses, so the entire idea there's going to be a glasses-based general computing revolution is scifi fantasists forgetting that Snowcrash was a *satire*. It's as improbable as NFTs becoming the future of art, or Cryptocurrencies becoming the future of money. Or LLMs becoming a product at all.

There is a huge future for headset computing, but it's not for the general public, in the same way that welding helmets are not for the general public (welding training being a big VR use case). A "Pro" work tool is defined by being the thing that a specific task requires, and Apple has foregone the things professional users of stereoscopic computing require, to make a product whose actual use case is an iPad that has solved (sortof) iPadOS's broken multitasking paradigm.

It's an iPad you wear on your face, and the value of an iPad, is the price of an iPad. Realistically, it's having a bunch of virtual iPads hovering in space, and frankly that's the dumbest idea Apple has ever had, especially as more people are trying to disconnect from in-your-face technology (which was the entire rationale for the Apple Watch, when it wasn't being Jony Ive's gold watch hubris).

> The Vision Pro is arguably the highest-profile and most important device debuted by Apple since the iPhone in January 2007

who's making this (preposterous) argument, other than the author of that article? the Vision Pro failed to make any sort of splash. who is even talking about it? the only times I saw it mentioned in the past few months is in articles about how an person X spent Y hours with this devices and here is the verdict. there's absolutely no buzz around this device nor this technology.

To follow on, what Apple should have made, is a lower-end, cheaper (even loss-leading), simpler transparent optics lightweight set of glasses, with no world tracking, limited arms-length lidar, whose only purpose was to recognise the geometry of the user's other device (QR tracking hidden in the refresh rate) screens, and then display around them in a grid the other apps / spaces currently running on it, so you can swipe them in to the centre on the physical screen with an air gesture.

It's a solution to multitasking / task switching, that makes your existing product more valuable, and useful.

That's a product.

An expensive underpowered iPad replacement you have to endure on your face, and scare your children with freaky Robocop 2 CG eyes, is not.

Even if I got the Vision Pro for free, I would not use it other than to try it out, then forget about it, and let it collect dust(but that's just me).
Add to it its silly price tag.
You really have to be a trillion+ dollar company to miss the obvious market demand, timing or potential; and let yourself burn that kind of cash on a product that few people need, and that will simultaneously dig a crater in their bank accounts.

Apple has spent 10+ years crapping on everyone else in the world and no one wants to work with them. Feels like that part is a bit underreported. They've created a culture where no one wants to work with them unless they're literally paying them to (see Apple TV stars).

It's not shocking that they continue to struggle launching new products that are not iPhone accessories. Even where they've had success (watches & headphones), they've hampered 3rd party access in the name of "privacy" that they end up winning by default.

It used to be the slogan "Only Apple can do this" was a mark of true wow'ing innovation. Now it's a statement of corporate interest & focus.

VR is a tough sell and I genuinely think Apple got almost everything right for mass market adoption. Which is what they should be going for, another thing they got right.

What they failed at is the price, but to get the price in the right spot they would have had to sacrifice the tech that made their goggles better suited for mass market.

A vicious circle. And since they won't see any large uptake (you can't even play simulators on the damn thing because Apple and gaming etc and simulations are where VR goggles shines albeit not in a mass market way so maybe that doesn't matter anyway)

Where was I. Yes, no large uptake in owners means even less incentive for third party devs to save apples ass. It will age like the touchbar or the butterfly keyboard or PRO laptops with only USBC on them