I left the headline like the original, but I see this as a massive win for Apple. The device is ridiculously expensive, isn’t even on sale yet and already has 150 apps specifically designed for that.
If Google did this, it wouldn’t even get 150 dedicated apps even years after launch (and the guaranteed demise of it) and even if it was something super cheap like being made of fucking cardboard.
This is something that as an Android user I envy a lot from the Apple ecosystem.
Apple: this is a new feature => devs implement them in their apps the very next day even if it launches officially in 6 months.
Google: this is a new feature => devs ignore it, apps start to support it after 5-6 Android versions
I feel like I’m the only person in this room feeling like it’s kinda dystopian! Do you really want to see those devices become the norm?
With the father filming his children and all that shit we saw in the ad? Let’s live in the present, not through the camera of a device made by mega-corporation.
I think people who are into it can be into it and people who aren’t don’t have to be. Every innovation had detractors lamenting it. And many of those innovations miss the mark and never take off.
Dystopian seems to really overstate it. I’m not rushing out to buy one but I’m not ruling it out eventually if I find a good use case. Probably not filming my kids but maybe there’s something. Some kind of mixed reality LARP game maybe.
As a developer I’m so excited that’s true, but that’s ridiculous the way they portray it as a normal thing to wear it in public lol it’s so eerie
Yeah but that’s just marketing bullshit, just like how in real life, (normal and attractive) people don’t pull out a Nintendo Switch and pass around joycons to play Mario Kart on the phablet-sized screen at trendy rooftop cocktail parties.
What would you call wearing some chunky headphones while walking down the street?
A couple decades ago, only freaks did that.
Nowadays it’s so popular, people don’t even take them off when entering a shop, or going to the doctor (source: went to the doctor yesterday, sat next to a couple people with chunky headphones isolating themselves from the real world).
I think of the marketing as a bunch of nerds who want it to exist for niche reasons trying to find a way to appeal to normies because who is going to spend that much money to watch a dragon set fire to New York or have CGI bad guys lurking around corners only to pop out to be shot or going to comicon to have the amazing cosplays somehow enhanced even further with animation.
I feel like it’s inherently a non-mass market device trying desperately for mass-market appeal because nerds can’t afford $10k to stomp around the city as a giant mech in the hope they run into another one and have a duel.
But let’s be more real. How cool would it be to look around and see other users with a tag cloud and you instantly know you can talk to that person about Star Wars or anime or football or dating? How much easier would it be to make small talk or even friends?
There’s a lot of potential in such a device if it takes off. But I don’t know if the devices are mature enough yet. And achieving mass-market appeal is a whole other hurdle and if it can’t get past that the rest is moot.
Obviously I wouldn’t want to see Apple be the only game in town. There has to be a minimum of two significant players to drive innovation, but someone has to create the market first. Apple might be able to do that.
The headline makes it sound like a bad thing, but that’s more than plenty for launch if they are distinct apps that represent a variety of use cases. Frankly, it’s a lot more than I would expect for a new product like this. Sure, there’s VR and AR available now, but Apple has a track record of rolling together existing tech in a package that’s more accessible and often more useful. You can throw a few things out there to showcase what’s possible, but you also have to wait and see how consumers actually want to use it. They will find use cases the creators didn’t think of or were unsure about. Then the floodgates can really open up in terms of apps. I really wouldn’t be surprised to see people wearing these things out in public.
A $3500 headset is not accessible.
I really wouldn’t be surprised to see people wearing these things out in public.
You know it is corded, right?
As much as I enjoy hating on Apple, their track record popularising niche technology is admittedly pretty good. They made mp3 players mainstream, then everyone else scrambled to catch up. They made smartphones mainstream, then everyone scrambled to catch up. I wouldn’t be surprised if they managed to pull off the same thing with VR/AR. Just don’t mention the Newton.
How do they expect developers to make apps for it without actually having it available? This is the dev-kit. Yes, they fake it in software so you can do the basics on a MacBook. But that’s not really testing. The device in your hands is testing.
I recognize that it’s expensive. Being an early adopter isn’t cheap. But it’s sincerely priced insanely aggressively. The resolution is a huge difference from everything else available. It’s the difference between 10 seconds of text making your eyes bleed and actually being able to work on a screen with text. You can’t get just that for meaningfully less than the Vision Pro.
The passthrough, same deal. Your alternatives are higher latency while also massively compromising the image quality just to get something passed through at all. And that’s before the fact that it has a genuinely powerful SoC in the mix, and high enough quality cameras and processing to be controlled fully with gestures.
There’s a reason all the tech enthusiast “media”, who have their hands on a lot of these devices regularly, talk about the rest like they’re not anything special, but had their minds blown by the Vision Pro. It’s a huge step. And, because of their great development tools and relationships with big players, there will be a richer ecosystem than any of the others. Solo developers already could, and have, made real apps with ARKit for phones. They’ll make real apps for Vision Pro, too.
Other platforms are “more open”, but nobody democratizes app development like Apple. I understand the complaints about the arbitrary limitations they place, and don’t like all of them, either, but the bottom line is that they really do make it perfectly reasonable for a single dev or small team to get something high quality published and support themselves on, and all of that vibrant ecosystem is going to add a lot of value to Apple headsets.
Just not day one. Because people need hardware to develop for.
It’s not 150 unique apps. The article says:
It’s not just Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube that don’t have apps for Apple’s Vision Pro at launch.(…) As of this weekend, the AR/VR device’s App Store has just 150+ apps that were updated for the Vision Pro explicitly
You can watch Netflix on the Vision Pro in a browser but they didn’t create a specific app for it like for example for iOS. 150 other apps were updated to run on the device. We’re not talking about apps that run only on Vision Pro, just apps that have specific Vision Pro version. It’s like if when Apple released the iPad only 150 apps were tested, maybe slightly adapted and marked in AppStore as iPad compatible.
150 is nothing. There are millions of apps in the AppStore, all (if not all, most) of them could be updated to run on the VisionPro and developers of only 150 bothered to do it. That’s terrible result.
150 apps that has been explicitly updated to support a device that’s so expensive that’s guaranteed that nobody would actually buy it is a lot. And it’s not even on sale yet!
For comparison look at the Microsoft hololens. Similar concept and similar price, announced 8 years ago, can only dream of having 150 useful apps. If i go on the hololens store page it says “Showing 1 - 90 of 321 items” and you can see that are mostly demos or proof of concepts.
8 years after the launch has just over double the apps for a device that will launch next month
Most of those millions of apps are crap that hasn’t been updated in years, and they don’t have millions of users (not the kind of users who would by a Vision Pro at launch, anyway). I haven’t read the list but I’m betting the 150 that are here are much more popular and useful for this platform – the kinds of apps that would actively benefit from this technology and that the users actually want and will use.
the kinds of apps that would actively benefit from this technology and that the users actually want and will use.
Pre-installed apps optimized for Vision Pro:
App Store Encounter Dinosaurs Files Freeform Keynote Mail Messages Mindfulness Music Notes Photos Safari Settings Tips TVHere’s a full list of third-party apps confirmed for VisionOS so far:
Disney+ Microsoft Excel Microsoft Word Microsoft Teams Zoom WebEx Adobe Lightroom Unity-based apps and games (titles TBC) Sky GuideYeah, because when I use Safari, Notes and Word what I REALLY need is augmenter reality.
because when I use Safari, Notes and Word what I REALLY need is augmenter reality
You may not realize it, but you actually want AR for everything: pick up some coffee, read some news, take some notes, write them into a document… while still sipping your coffee, and no computers in sight.
AR is not the tiny dancing characters you see through your phone’s camera, that’s a silly gimmick. AR is the equivalent of picking a bunch of sheets of paper, and having them display the different apps, except without any paper, or taking any physical space, or buying more devices to fill your workspace.
read some news, take some notes, write them into a document… while still sipping your coffee,
Because I cannot sip at my coffee while looking at my monitor? What a strange idea.
As strange as looking at your monitor, instead of buying a newspaper that you can take to the bathroom then reuse it when you’re done.
Having monitors, screens, and other displays scattered around, will be as backwards as the newspaper thing. Why even buy a monitor, when you have all the virtual monitors you might ever want, right there on your head?
Sure as long as ‘all the virtual monitors you might ever want’ is exactly one monitor. You do know that Vision Pro can only simulate one display when working with a Mac? We’re talking about specific device not some imaginary thing Apple will release 10 years from now. Jesus, Mac fanboys are just the worst…
We’re talking about specific device
I was talking about AR, not a specific device.
Jesus, Mac fanboys are just the worst…
Right… thanks, but no thanks.
So what number of apps is it?
“Only 150+” provides zero information regarding quantity
Well it does say
n >= 150. But the phrasing makes it sound like it is trying to imply that this is a small number.Exactly. The statement doesn’t validate in the sense check, making the >= 150 back into a maybe because I’m uncertain if it makes sense at all.
Apple vision will be a very good product …in a few years, after it’s much cheaper and more capable. But as of today, you can get an oculus quest which does a large percent of the same stuff for literally 10% of the price
And support Facebook while you’re at it! 😣
I know Apple isn’t much better, but Oculus selling out to Zuck instantly guaranteed I would never buy their products.
It’s a double-edged sword.
Oculus’ vision was to bring VR to the mainstream. They really didn’t have the cash to make that happen on their own. They were using leftover parts from the mobile and tablet industry to hack together some headsets. It was a good proof of concept, but that was it.
With Meta’s backing they put VR on the map. Others jumped in on it. Without them the Vive probably wouldn’t have happened, nor would WMR. Then the transition to self-contained VR, the Quest but also others like the Pico, the Pimax Crystal and now the Vision pro. I know PCVR is pretty dead now but to me it was more of a transitory phase (and I still use it a lot but wirelessly now). VR was never going to be mainstream if you needed a powerful PC to do it and with all the cable mess.
I don’t think these would have happened without the meta investment. I think it was good for the industry as a whole. However yeah, for consumer privacy it’s not great that it was Meta that did the investment and not someone else (except Google or Amazon which would have been just as bad)
I don’t really view it as a sellout and I was one of the earliest kickstarter backers. Serious money was needed to make it fly.
Very good take, thank you for the insight! You’re more than likely right; they need the money, and it was the best offer (if ill advised …). Industry got kick-started (pun intended), and there was much rejoicing.
It’s half a kilo strapped to the front of your head. There’s lighter products out there right now that can do similar things. I don’t see this first iteration as anything revolutionary.
