Apple hopes to convince people to buy its $3,500 Vision Pro headset using free 25-minute in-store demos

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.

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.

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!

And I thought Apple consumers were out-of-touch!

Have you heard of the Apple Cheesegrater?

A lot of tech, including computers, commonly cost that much for a long time. It's not a totally outrageous for consumer tech.

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.

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

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.

That's what credit card debt is for!

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.

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)_/¯

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.

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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.

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.

Oh boy, you've got a lot to learn about apple consumers

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.

It's a mixed reality headset that works. Still too expensive for consumers.

It's whatever you need it to be, baby. Just hand over the cash and Apple will make your dreams come true.

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…

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.

As someone who wears a VR headset for about 8 hours a day on average and has for nearly ten years now, I can say our definition of gimmick varies somewhat.

Apples headset of course won't do well, but it sounds like it will raise awareness that it isn't a gimmick or a fad. And people that try it, will buy a practical modern headset instead.

The newest generation of headsets are as clear as a 4k monitor, despite not having enough actual pixels to literally display a 4k monitor at a comfortable viewing distance. There is a sort of free temporal anti-aliasing gained by the fact that your head will never be in the same exact place frame to frame, which effectively works out to percievably double the resolution clarity. A modern headset does have enough pixels to display more than raw 1080p at a comfortable viewing distance.

So even if you are not using them for actual VR, at the very worst, they replace a 4k screen at whatever size and distance you choose to have it at. I recommend about 20 feet away and scaled up to about 60 degrees accross your field of view. Unlike a monitor placed 3-4 feet from your face, or a TV 8-10 feet away(or a phone screen less than a foot away), 20 feet is very comfortable for your eyes. So you won't get eye strain anymore.

And as for what environment that screen is in? Anywhere... including your real reality. The current generation of VR headsets has near-perfect clarity of a well-lit room that seamlessly blends with whatever virtual content you want to superimpose on it. The clarity goes down with worse lighting conditions, either with too much range of brightness, or not enough light in total.

Usually I will put my virtual screen beside or below the TV that the rest of my family is watching. Until it gets too dark out that the comparatively bright TV screen just gets washed out by camera optics(hopefully we get settings for this in the future, it could very much be fixed in software), then I move my screen to cover the TV, which is of course placed in the most comfortable viewing position from our recliners. I choose whether I want to hear audio from and see outside of the headset, or whether I want to ignore the outside world and focus entirely on my virtual screen.

And that is just the least interesting thing you can do with a VR headset, and enough to already justify the 500 dollar price tag of a practical VR headset. As an incredibly low latency remote 4k monitor you can place wherever you want, at whatever size and distance you want. Even if it would be through a wall. Still incredibly comfortable to view for way too many hours in a row.

You could also use a VR headset to do VR stuff. I occasionally do that too. It's also good and more than worth the purchase price, as there is nothing else like it and no other way to experience that.

And then of course there is the porn. Even completely ignoring that exists, VR would already be awesome and very worth the price. But most people with VR headsets don't ignore that it exists, even if they pretend they do. And let me tell you, there is also nothing else like that. But, you have to be careful/selective, as with all porn, most of it is terrible. You can find some good stuff for free, but as always the best stuff is not free.

Suffice it to say, the future really is VR, just like it really was computers, cell phones then smartphones, even if the first computers, cellphones and smartphones didn't feel at the time like they were gonna catch on. Try telling someone when the first iPhone came out that people were going to spend hours playing games on their phones, and that phone gaming was going to be literally 3x the size of the next biggest gaming market. The next biggest being computer games. Then consoles.

https://images.app.goo.gl/W2YBPTryTf675ZGD7

There isn't a more up to date version of this info graphic, 4 years ago mobile was only double computer. And VR has significantly increased since then, the Quest 2 wasn't even released yet for this infographic. Quest 2 sold 20 million units, that's just one headset, the highest selling one, but there are other reasonably popular ones too since then. And Quest 3 has been out for a while now. And again, just one of the popular options.

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.

a monitor keyboard and mouse costs more than 3500?

what the fuck are you going to do at work without a keyboard and mouse?

what

Imagine how many people you can pack in a small space. You only would need 2ft x 2ft space per person and you can put the entire company on a single floor!

/s

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’d buy one if it were reasonably priced.

Not trying to be pedantic, but did you mean 2023?

Buying Apple products is like buying permanent training wheels for bicycles. There are safeguards in place. The average consumer needs those safeguards. They are gullible, ignorant of technology, and they don't want to learn.

That said, Apple does do it right, at the cost of high prices and less control. Apple dumbs down their products for their consumers, and it works.

I hate what the company stands for, but they do have brilliant marketing and make beautiful products.

Every successful mega corp is a marketing company. Just look at video games where the marketing budget is the same as the development budget.

How do I learn to be brave like you?

bad ass man 👞 ♂️

Okay.

Seconded. Few other companies can come close to the global, societal damage Apple has committed.

VR is actually really fun for gaming, but you don't need a $3500 headset for that.

For a high end enterprise geared headset that functions as its own standalone device and doesn’t require any connection to any other computer to work, this isn’t even expensive.

This isn’t meant to compete with something like a Quest. It’s meant to compete with something like the Varjo Aero, which goes from $5-10k.

For a company deciding on implementing AR/VR, the cost to get a Quest Pro for $800 plus a $2500 workstation to power it, vs a $3500 Vision Pro that doesn’t need a workstation, it’s pretty comparable.

Microsoft's HoloLens 2 does less than Apple's Pro Vision and it costs the same. Is it really that overpriced? And the cost goes way way up from there.

it proves unequivocally that Apple fanboys are the most rabid idiots in existence.

Maybe you should look inward before making silly comments like these.

Honestly, I don't even need half of the things that it does to justify the price, for me - just give me a dual 4k, 100 hz displays and a display port connector and I'll gladly shell out 3k to play vr video games on it.

If these sellout, as some predict, it proves unequivocally that Apple fanboys are the most rabid idiots in existence.

looks like you value money much higher than some others do - interpret that however you will.