The entire situation was stupid. It was certainly an interesting product but it was far too expensive for any normal person to actually buy, so there was basically no apps for it, as what's the point in developing an app for a platform no one owns? No one got one because there was no use for it, because there were no apps. Without a good app ecosystem there was no reason to justify the cost of buying one.
Exactly the same thing happened to Microsoft and the windows phone. You've got to make the cost of entry low enough that the developers see the point in developing applications for your platform. Once you've established a market then you go Pro, but releasing the pro version first was doomed from the start.
This was the Pro so my guess is the cheaper (lol by how much though) non pro version that they referenced before will be next. However Apple failed to prioritize VR fundamentals
Gaming
Porn
Multimedia
Productivity
Just seems like they went for the bottom two niche categories for VR with a device that is out of the average users price point.
Also external battery being required... Like wow. This should have had another year or two of R&D to get VR gaming apps ready on launch. VR is a gaming platform first and foremost... When you don't have games nor any focus towards games, people will look elsewhere (To Meta)
And this issue is not exclusive to Apple, meta attempted to hone in on these two niche categories as well with the Quest Pro at a price that was far from acceptable to average casual customers.... And it too is now out of production.
What they should have done is just made it nothing more than a headset that streams data from your other Apple devices like a Macbook or iMac or whatever. Then it wouldn't need the crazy processing power, it wouldn't need the stupid dangling battery, and it wouldn't need to be wildly expensive. But obviously those concepts go against everything that Apple is.
The external battery thing is absolutely ridiculous. I'm not an Apple fan and would not buy their products, but I can appreciate how devices like the iPod, iPhone and AirPods really did have extremely appealing design and a nice balance between performance and features and battery life and usability.
But the headset? Looks like they developed the entire thing, realized at the last minute they couldn't power it, and tried to convince people to walk around with a weird cable and battery pouch everywhere by using their tried and true "show happy white people in a commercial doing the thing, so people will feel like the thing is normal and cool and desirable" and that completely did not work.
It felt like an over engineered dev kit that they had decided to just slap on shelves for no real reason, even though anyone with half a brain could see that it was never going to work.
Oh and randomly decided that it was only going to be available on sale in the US. Because everyone knows Europeans, South Americans, the Chinese, Australians and kiwis can't make apps.
It’s definitely a premium product. I got to use one and it feels very solid and complete. VR is already a limited market though, Apple VR even more so.
I don't think the price is the biggest problem. Although that's certainly part of it, Apple sells lots of insanely priced shit successfully.
The problem is VR itself. Like yeah, it's very cool for a few days or weeks but like...then you get bored with it and realize it has no practical purpose.
The best use case for it is gaming but that was very clearly not their intended primary purpose, based on their advertising. They wanted it to replace your computer. But no one wants to use a computer that way or walk around with this giant thing strapped to their face.
It's just one of those things tech companies seem to be trying to force down your throat despite very little actual interest from consumers for decades.
Yeah they make pricy stuff, but there is usually a solid use case in exchange for the price. Even if gaming were the killer app, Apple wouldn’t have anything exceptional in the Vision Pro.
The good thing is that companies are still trying to find a killer app. Virtual workspaces convinced me to get a new headset and that was a big feature of the Vision Pro. However, that wasn’t worth $3500 USD plus the price of buying a Mac.
That was another downside of the Vision Pro. You got the best features if you had a Mac to go with it.
It's a bit difficult to find a use for hardware when nobody has made any software for it. The software for VR is pretty limited even on other platforms, but Apple's was even more limited.
Yes, their hardware for the Vision Pro is literally the best a headset can have right now. They should have considered other options to make lesser models for the plebs but they have their “premium brand” mindset and didn’t consider it. I think the Vision Pro is a great product but Apple severely misjudged the market and further limited it by timing it into their own limited share of desktops.
I'm sure it's an amazing piece of technology. Even from the bad video reviews I saw it was still pretty cool. But I always asked myself the same thing and that's "is that it? What else can it do?" It just seemed like if you owned the biggest and best TV in the world but you can only watch movies from the 70's.
Not really. Meta has been dominating the market lately, it seems like people really only care about the price. And with the quality of the Quest 3, AVP was doomed from the start.
Who cares about the market? Nobody who matters wants to buy hardware that's locked to a walled garden that will inevitably be rendered useless as soon as it stops being profitable.
Or just some kind of displaylink thing so you can use it to AR any kind of monitor input without it being Mac only. Instead of buying monitors you just buy one of those and you'd have unlimited monitors.
By allow I think they meant first party support to some degree. I don't want to have to use an iPad cluge with potential latency issues to use my $3.5k vr headset. It needs to be able to connect directly to a PC and play directly from Steam VR with no latency.
Also no, I hadn't heard of ALVR. Very cool.
Still latency is an issue there, not to mention re-encoding the already demanding rendering task of highres high frame rate VR.
There's still no use case for these things (VR headsets in general). Every type of work that could possibly benefit from having a head-mounted computer display is much easier to do without a kilo of electronics strapped to your head, and just using a nearby flat display of some sort.
It will be used for virtual eyes when min wage jobs are replaced by a guy driving a robot sitting in a room full of other vr workers for a few cents an hour in some remote part of the world.
And we have great FPV headsets already so there's no need for more expensive ones really. Negligible returns at this point. My goggles from 4 years ago compare very closely with every new pair released. And I know every in and out to them already I don't want to change. Batteries last all day, resolution and reception is high and good quality. Dropped em a thousand times they still work fine.
When they break completely ill buy a new pair. But there's no world changing tech out there for FPV goggles in the past few years to make me want to upgrade.