I was super interested in the Vision Pro when it was first released. Then I found out they went with an app model and the device could only display a single MacOS window. There went my dream of surrounding myself with a bunch of vim windows and terminals.
If they'd focused on maximizing the device's usefulness instead of its revenue stream, maybe things would have worked out better.
My sentiments exactly. This would be such an easy purchase to justify if it weren't just a toy-- no other VR headset touts to display text so crisply. But instead, their only market demographic are people who really enjoy going to theaters alone.
I'm very eagerly looking forward to Valve's headset coming out.
There are three problems with AVP: cost, cost and cost.
It is priced to be a pack-in with seats of Dassault 3DEXPERIENCE, but Meta's experience has been that the VR consumer is price sensitive which is why they followed up the MQ3 with the cost-reduced MQ3S.
I think Apple is looking at this the way they look at AirPods (something you stick in your ears to modify and augment your hearing) which is good and monitors, which is bad. Apple's always sold a tiny number of monitors with astronomical margins which looked like a good business because they didn't have to invest in product innovation to make them the way they do for the AVP -- and they didn't need software developers to invest in product innovation for their monitors, but the AVP absolutely requires it. And if they aren't shipping enough units, who is going to make software for it?
On top of the three problems of any AR/VR tech: UX, UX and UX.
I'm honestly not sure if Apple Vision would fare much better if they had a device that costs $100. Like, sure, they'll sell more units that way. But how many of those units would end up collecting dust?
Playing Beat Saber on the MQ3 I meet people who are enthusiastic about VR, who share immersive content (pano video shot with https://www.kandaovr.com/qoocam-3) and there are plenty of games in the store... compared to other gaming platforms where I meet a lot of younger people, I find there are a lot of older and retired people using VR, which is not what Meta is looking for for a Facebook replacement.
My take is the MQ3 is pretty good for UX. I regularly use my image sorter and RSS reader in a web browser with a huge number of windows open, bringing my click targets up to the WCAG AAA standards made them very usable in this environment. The Apple Magic Keyboard pairs perfectly, as does a mouse. The controller work great for games and other immersive applications.
I'd say though that my game backlog on the MQ3 is long as is my game backlog in Steam, and there is just a huge amount of competition from flat content so I don't play as many VR games as I could.
Survivorship bias. You don't tend to meet people who played Beat Saber 2 times and put the headset on the shelf forever.
The metrics are brutal, for Quest 3 and for every other headset. Meta worked hard to bring the costs down and improve the UX, and it still isn't enough. They wanted "the next smartphone" and fell so short it's not even funny.
If the AVP were cheaper, I think you'd have a lot more people willing to use them together. The social features are useless if nobody owns one or wants to use one.
You'd also have more of a critical mass of people with accessories. A used market for lenses and accessories, people with spare batteries about, etc.
Not to mention an app ecosystem. For every person like me lamenting what could be, there are a dozen people with more mainstream desires, like Instagram 3D or Temple Run 3D or whatnot.
i’m afraid i’ll look back and regret that i didn’t capture 3d memories of parents and grandparents when it was technically feasible because of a few dollars…
Well, there are stereo cameras… The digital ones came and went with 3D TVs though so you have to go to eBay. I am enjoying the stereo cameras I have accumulated though.
It eats batteries but you can get a charger and more batteries the way you would have a few mirrorless generations ago.
My trouble is not really having a system to show these to people, red/green anglyohs sometimes work fret but aren’t consistent, there doesn’t seem to be an ‘instagram’ for sharing stereo photos, it ought to be easy to make a WebXR application to show stereograms but I haven’t seen a fully realized one and found texture memory limits are a bitch in the MQ3 so my first attempt to make one got stuck.
I've taken to (tediously) printing stereogram cards for the better 3D photos.
I wrote this to take the .MPO files (a common file format on the earlier commercial digital stereo cameras) and convert them to print-ready stereograms: https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/Stereographer
I’ve heard the latency is still a pretty major issue. I’d love to use one for sim racing but the latency complaints make it a non-starter. If that’s changed or anyone is using it for sim racing please let me know.
Sim racing has been default better in VR for the last few years IMO if you have decent spec computer that can sustain good frame rates. Especially since the release of the Quest 3 with its really nice lenses (huge "sweet spot"), 110 degree FoV and 25 PPD for 500 bucks. The ability to look into a corner the way you do on an actual track, by turning your head and looking towards the apex etc, is just a complete game changer. I don't think anyone in the sim racing community really feels latency is an issue anymore on modern hardware.
The biggest issues left in VR sim racing are still arguably comfort and weight in longer races, but even that is getting solved now with really compact new headsets like the Big Screen Beyond 2 etc.
Yea, ALVR is interesting, I have yet to try it out. I suspect latency is a real issue though, wish I could try it with DCS before shelling out $3500 : )
Yes, and it's one of the best headsets for Linux :) But this is a tethered headset and the text rendering isn't good enough to justify one over a monitor (reportedly-- I haven't bought one yet). Especially because it's tethered.
But Valve is reliably rumored to be releasing an untethered successor within the next year for a third of the cost of the AVP. The appeal is having a dozen monitors anywhere.
You can in fact already do this (have Mac windows show up as separate floating windows in VisionOS instead of all being on the single MacOS window) using a third party tool called Ensemble:
The point is that this should absolutely be capable of being a power-computing extension for Mac, but instead it’s been relegated to a $3k personal theater that runs apps for some reason
I'm not really following through your reasoning. How is breaking the usefulness helping the revenue stream?
Assuming you're an engineer, have you thought about what handing over a "window" from one computer to another actually entails? CRIU can do checkpoint/restore at container/process level - but you actually want it to run on both, no? So you need to split off just the I/O, but at the OS-level per window.
Apple has been doing a lot of work in this direction and they have stuff that actually work (like video calls and to some extent windows. These are processes running on different OS-es with a matrix of hundreds of devices.
It's not something you vibe code over the weekend.
the revenue-driven decision was choosing to make the OS more like iOS, locked down with an app store, rather than macos, which allows third-party applications, browsing the filesystem, dropping into a terminal, etc. with built-in first-party support.
instead of making a computer in an AR form-factor, they made an iPad in an AR form-factor.
Sending multiple windows over screensharing actually seems easier than sending the desktop to me - because you only look at one window at once, the rest don't have to update at full frame rate, or at all.
And it's easier and more power-efficient (because of hardware video encoding) to use screen sharing instead of sending drawing commands etc.
That’s cool. It would work for the mirror display functionality, but handover is more like CRIU in the sense that it becomes a process on the target host. Moreover headphones are also switching. So it seems a bit more involved than either.
For stateless processes, probably, but there are non-trivial problems reconciling state - think of your IDE / vim along with maybe a debugging session of another process. You need a lot of things in place to enable this use case for productivity goals. This is not an uncommon scenario for the current audience (I use AVP almost exclusively for work and think many users are engineers).
There may be simplifications to this, but I suspect it eventually lands in a distributed system problem involving state and strong consistency semantics. I’ve done this for most of my engineering career and all I can say is that they are fun problems to work on because they are some of the most difficult ones :)
I use AVP every day for work. I spend 8+ hours a day wearing the thing.
It's amazing the screen real estate you get when you share your Mac screen. It's terrible that it's only one screen, but with good enough window (pun intended) management app, you can tile the windows/app inside this giant curved floating screen. That works for me because I always preferred using a single screen.
It's possible to share a single desktop/window, but it's not officially supported. Sometimes the screen sharing bugs out and, instead of gigantic curved screen, I get a tiny small app/window. If someone is interested in looking into this, this happens (sometimes) when, instead of starting the screen sharing from AVP, you share (mirror) the screen from Mac display/mirroring settings.
Another comment mentions how useful it is because it's integrated with Apple's ecosystem. I mean of course it is...Apple makes it.
I do wonder if that person had ever tried any of the myriad of VR device available a decade before beforehand and I do wonder how popular Apple's product would be if other companies were given the opportunity to integrate with the OS on the same level that Apple can (I feel like Apple is breaking anti-competitive laws constantly but nobody really cares about making them open up).
I think I may be the commenter you're referring to, and yes, I have used many different VR devices over the years. I've owned at least 3 other headsets and used 5.
My point in saying the usefulness of it being tied to the ecosystem was more of a negative one than a positive one if it wasn't clear. It is personally useful for me because I have a lot of Apple products at home (though I also have PC and linux stuff too), but I wish my primary use-cases for it were more platform agnostic.
I'm also very in support of aggressive anti-trust legislation and it's probably my biggest point of contention with Apple.
Despite all that, I still like the Vision Pro and think it's an incredible piece of tech that blows every other headset I've tried out of the water for the things I like to do.
> I do wonder if that person had ever tried any of the myriad of VR device available a decade before beforehand and I do wonder how popular Apple's product would be if other companies were given the opportunity to integrate with the OS on the same level that Apple can
Microsoft had and still has this opportunity, they even have game console and much of game developers to bootstrap VR/AR ecosystem.
> (I feel like Apple is breaking anti-competitive laws constantly but nobody really cares about making them open up).
That's not what we want at all. I should be able to slap a "Sync" button while wearing the Vision and every single window/app currently running on my Macbook Pro should show up as a completely independent spatially manipulable display within the virtual environment. That way I still get all the power of my dedicated Mac with the freedom of VR.
Even before it came out, I naturally assumed it was going to be able to do this. Major flub IMHO. Well that and the completely superfluous frontfacing screen for your "virtual avatar". Because the Vision wasn't already expensive enough...
It would be nice if Apple allowed people to choose how Mac virtual display windows were shown. I have a Vision Pro and I rather like the way it's implemented. From a UX perspective, I can't imagine trying to deal with hundreds of windows in AR space. The Vision Pro UI is good, but I'm nowhere near as fast as with a keyboard and mouse.
They want the individual windows from the Mac to be manoeuvrable. Currently it works like a virtual display - you can't move windows around space like you can with visionOS apps.
> Then I found out they went with an app model and the device could only display a single MacOS window.
There was this program called Immersed for Quest and some other VR headsets (apparently Apple's one too?) that ages ago was quite brilliant: I could connect my laptop or PC and have as many virtual desktops in addition to the real ones displayed around me. Even on my Quest 2, until the strain set in, it was cool to just kinda tune out the room around me and be in a black void surrounded by just the screens of whatever I'm working on.
Sadly, in one update they randomly removed it as a "legacy feature nobody uses", which ruined the program for me, and Virtual Desktop for the Quest also has limited screens you can display, so I can't even do all 4 of my physical ones, nor virtual ones - despite it having worked previously in the other program.
For a little bit, it was a really cool mode of working, but sadly I only got glimpses of it and would need more capable hardware like AVP for that in the first place (Quest 2 very much had its limitations).
I went to an apple store, saw a vision pro and asked if I could try it on. They said you had to schedule an appointment, then they would take you through a supervised viewing or whatever.
This gave me the impression it wasn't ready for general use, and they would have to control your impression of the thing while selling you on it.
I know that VR is hard, and AR is much harder, but this made me think apple still hasn't cracked it.
As to single app - I figure the thing has to be hard real-time to do things without giving you a headache or nausea/vomiting. that probably doesn't leave room for a lot of sharing of resources.
In the end, I think this is a iphone 1.0 type device, and only continued development with deep pockets will make it viable, eventually.
The appointment is fairly hands off. The employee checks your prescription, installs the right lenses and helps you have a good fit, possibly trying other lenses if you’re having issues.
There isn’t any prep I saw that they would have to do before they could except a walk-in.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I think emulating a physical screen in a virtual field of view is the wrong way to do this. Why introduce off-axis viewing and all the other unnecessary weirdnesses? What if the entire field of view were the screen, with head and eye movement as navigation? I guess make the windows transparent so it's less disorienting, and it would at least initially be overwhelming, but past that it could be quite transformative.
I actually bought one thinking I could buy a vision pro instead of a new computer, but alas, the vision pro (despite being a powerful computer) is not usable as a work computer
I own Vision Pro. They work with Macos pretty well when sharing the whole screen, and I think that their technology is potentially capable to share one specific app -- with facetime you can do just that -- but so far Vision Pro is unable of that. That's a shame.
Within the bounds of that big ol 8k window, yes, but the applications themselves can't be extracted and positioned separately.
My workaround for this is using applications that work comfortably in a safari window (like vscode) and you can have as many safari windows free floating as you want
Apple is not in the business of selling productivity software. Even their desktops/MacOS segment is an insignificant historical afterthought by now.
To a first approximation, Apple is a manufacturer of locked-down handheld entertainment appliances whose primary function is to psychologically condition children into siphoning off money from their inattentive parents. There's no reason to suspect their vision for the AVP to diverge significantly from this user story.
I'm sure you felt very clever writing that zinger about children and parents, but unless the majority of Apple devices are sold to/for children -- which I would bet is extremely not true -- it's obviously wrong.
In app purchases from (crappy) games is top revenue source in App Store. Anecdotally, I’d be shocked if the majority of that wasn’t from kids using their parents’ phones.
You have deftly avoided attempting to refute the actual argument here, which is that >90% of Apple's revenue comes from their walled garden, and they have no desire to pivot back towards catering to the small and dwindling niche of power users.
Well, excuse me for refuting something you actually wrote rather than the thing you would have preferred me to focus on.
When you say something like "whose primary function is to psychologically condition children into siphoning off money from their inattentive parents", it's rhetorically effective. It paints a vivid picture. It encourages your readers to have a certain attitude towards the company you're talking about.
In other words, that bit of what you wrote was load-bearing. It served a purpose for you. That means that it isn't exempt from criticism. We should reject conversational norms according to which it's OK to throw in these little barbs but not OK to object when someone points out that what you're saying is flatly false.
"My goat-fucking opponent wants to raise your taxes and use the revenue to subsidize tobacco companies. You should vote against him." "Excuse me, I am absolutely not a goat-fucker. How dare you?" "Look how he avoids the central argument about his policies!"
As to the "actual argument": no, actually, that clearly isn't your actual argument, or at least if it is then your argument is unsound.
You can't get from "Macs are <10% of Apple's revenue"[1] to any prediction about what Apple will do with the Vision Pro. For that, you need to (1) classify it as "like an iPhone or iPad" rather than "like a Mac" -- which I agree is a reasonable classification, though you haven't bothered to argue for it at all and it is at least a bit debatable -- and then (2) look at what sort of thing Apple does with its iPhones and iPads. This bit you have done, kinda ... and this bit is exactly the bit where you said something obviously false. "whose primary function is to psychologically condition children into siphoning off money from their inattentive parents", remember? That is, or claims to be, a description of what sort of thing Apple want their devices to do. It's exactly the sort of thing that's directly relevant to supporting what you say about what features we should expect them to give the Vision Pro and its software. And, once again, it's plainly false.
[1] Perfectly true, though "an insignificant historical afterthought" is obviously false -- once again, you're festooning what you say is your "actual argument" with little untruths that make the "actual argument" feel stronger, and I wish you wouldn't -- and, also "historical afterthought" is kinda nonsensical, no? Being a historical relic and being an afterthought are opposite and incompatible varieties of insignificance.
There absolutely is an argument to be made along the lines that the VP is kinda like an iPad, and despite their impressive hardware capabilities iPads are designed for entertainment much more than for getting useful work done, and so we should also expect the VP's software to pass up opportunities to make the device useful for serious purposes in favour of making it an entertainment-consumption device. You could totally have done that. It would have been pretty similar to what you wrote. It would have been rather a persuasive argument. But it amused you to go way the hell over the top and say that Apple's non-Mac devices are mostly intended to manipulate children into wasting their parents' money and, once again, that's obviously not true and you put it right where the core of your "actual argument" should have been.
I'm aware that I'm making rather a big deal of a small lie. But this sort of thing is everywhere in online discourse at the moment, and I am getting extremely fed up of it. It's never enough to make a reasonable argument; it's always necessary to throw in all these playing-to-the-gallery jabs, which no doubt get you a bunch of likes and retweets and other forms of Meaningless Internet Points. It's yet another form of the optimizing-for-engagement that is eating our societies alive, and the HN crowd is supposed to be smarter than that, and I wish we would all collectively Do Better, damn it.
There's plenty of hardware that is as capable as a MacBook pro or more capable, depending on the application. If you're a software dev, the MacBook pro is pretty anemic compared to what AMD and Intel can offer desktop side.
> Personally I find a Mac to be a better development environment than Windows
This is both true and completely irrelevant, because the point of the above comment is that Apple is not in the business of catering to this use case.
Look at the annual revenues: $225 billion from iPhone/iPad, $100 billion from "services" (which Apple mostly characterizes as "app store stuff"), $40 billion from accessories (watch, airpods, etc), $30 billion from desktops. The Mac segment comes out to 7.9% of their overall revenue. And this number is shrinking in both the absolute and relative sense, as "services" continues to grow and as Mac units shipped peaked in 2022.
This is by design of course. The only major platform that requires a specific minor platform from the same vendor to target, at least that I know of. Apple knows how to make money.
> You can't build iPhone or iPad apps on iPhones or iPads yet, so a decent chunk of that revenue currently relies on the Mac as well.
This is both entirely true and still manages to miss the point. Yes, Apple keeps the Mac around exclusively to accommodate the creation of iOS apps. No, they are not financially incentivized to create new categories of hardware that cater toward productivity when instead they could lock them down and milk that cow for all it's worth via the app store tax.
That word right there means that we can both be correct, because I personally find MacOS to be frustrating for Dev compared to every other alternative. Great for creativity, but not so much for productivity.
I've used Macbooks for dev pretty much my whole career and I do think that they're some of the _best_ laptops available for dev.
But the caveat to my statement is that _everything_ added to their ecosystem to business reasons is useless and counterproductive. For example I can plug my Android phone into a Windows machine (two different companies inb4 someone uses flawed logic) and it just works. If I plug my Android phone into my Macbook it doesn't work at all...but an iPhone does! ;)
They only very recently got decent-ish Window management, basic snapping that Linux/Windows has had for at least a decade or longer. And even then their implementation is "pretty" but slow to respond. It's like just expand and snap the fucking window for fuck's sake.
In terms of the "development environment" they enjoy having had the OS built on top of FreeBSD (which yes, they have contributed to - bet Apple management hated that).
To me it's a machine that gets stuff done; they could literally strip the thing down to the bare minimum, removing all of the "magical wonderful Apple stuff with cutesy fancy sounding names" and I couldn't give a shit.
Well that's because Windows is very, very bad software. Nobody actually likes it, they use it because they need to for some bespoke barely functional application. It's Stockholm syndrome.
And also virtually every film editor, colourist and videographer. Oh and also every illustrator and graphic designer. And a host of other professions where having a clean UI, colour accuracy, on a reliable machine that rarely if ever crashes is essential rather than a preference.
As a film maker and editor I'm enormously more productive on my dual screen (used) M1 Max Studio machine than I was on a variety of PC setups with high end GPUs. Even just the missing overhead of not having to keep graphic drives and constant Windows updates is great. Reliable renders were never a thing on Windows. The time lost doing things again because window had some strange colour issue, render crash, font issue and on and on was ludicrous.
The idea of having to use Windows for daily productivity sends a shiver down my spine.
I don't agree with the OP, but you gotta admit.. it used to feel like Apple was more dedicated to this market when they could keep interesting Pro desktop kit evolving on an acceptable pace.
I don't know... I agree that they're no longer innovative in terms of UI and original categories of devices. But the M1 chips have been enormously innovative in terms of performance per watt. One reason essentially every 'creative' (bar 3d designers) uses Macs is that unplugged they run as fast as plugged in. There's literally no PC laptop you can build or buy with integrated graphics powerful enough to compete - while on the move and away from power. Perhaps the new AMD Strix Halo devices will change this, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Their Pro desktop/laptop hardware is the best it's ever been as long as it fits your use case (ie not adding a bunch of PCI-E cards or third party GPUs).
Every company I've worked at in the last 15-20 years has run fully on Mac. First it was the designers, then the devs, and now everyone. I used Windows for years and have some experience with various Linux distros, but if I joined a company that made me use either of those full-time I'd immediately start looking for another job.
Yeah this would honestly be incredible and actually deserving of the "spatial computing" moniker.
I would love to be able to have a dedicated spatial location for each part of my Django app: look over here for the CSS, step here for the views, scroll through the logs over here...
1) It's been doable for years and yet AR/VR doesn't take off
2) It will only ever be a hyper niche use case of an already hyper niche market. People do not want a giant screen glued to their face.
Have you actually tried "working" in VR? It is awful and pointless and zero percent of my work is limited by the size of my screen FFS. Are you one of those people that keep 100 terminal windows open with random TOPS and log watchers but never actually uses them? Those people always seem to have lots of monitors. They don't actually seem more productive though.
I even downgraded from two external monitors to one because all the extra monitor was doing was making me hurt my neck from looking back and forth.
A 30 inch monitor with 1440p resolution can do everything you want from django and is like $200
I don't know if it's satisfactorily available anywhere yet though, right? Most VR headsets aren't great at text but yeah definitely agree with you about not wanting to wear any current iteration for any length of time. I can't seem to find a long term comfortable and secure fit for my Quest which is part of why I don't use it a whole lot.
And no I haven't tried working in VR. I do actually just work with one monitor and only have a few terminal tabs running at any one time, but honestly do think there are so many improvements I could make to my workflow before even a perfect VR solution would be worth considering.
Any monitor recs? My current one has started flickering and it's slowly driving me insane
If you really want to work in VR, you probably need one of the more specialized and expensive headsets. I've tried watching movies in my Index and it was functional, but there's no way it could legibly render text at a comfortable size. For what it's worth, because it might matter, I wear corrective lenses, so maybe I don't have the best optical setup.
Pimax and Bigscreen I think work hard for that market? Bigscreen has those neat goggles which I'd like to try. Rumors are that Valve is building another headset, with better specs. That might put pressure on that market.
For monitors, I must confess I am somewhat wrong. My 32inch (or something) LG monitor might have been $400, not $200. But I used a giant TV for years thinking I didn't need "nice" monitors and I was so wrong. 1440p and over 120hz refresh rate are so worth it, even for work tasks. When I bought it a couple years ago, the caveats were that it's a VA panel, so it has really bad ghosting. It's noticeable in games, but somehow has not ruined my experience. The other types of panels have their own drawbacks I think. OLED is the best non-compromise for image quality but then you will have to keep burn in at bay.
I like my LG monitor. My girlfriend's ASUS monitor is nice. I hear nice things about BenQ, but you're better off with review sites than my anecdotes.
My window management "trick" is that no window is full screen, and every window is overlapped such that there's always a sliver of the "under" window I can click even if that window is otherwise not in view. I also make significant use of alt-tab. I think people who use the multiple desktop feature of modern windows and mac have a much better system. One desktop per "Task" I think works really well.
It’s more the idea of always-everywhere computing. Where you can pull up a notepad window in a meeting to take notes. Where you can take those notes back to your desk. Where there can be a sign-up sheet posted to the door for group editing.
If they'd focused on maximizing the device's usefulness instead of its revenue stream, maybe things would have worked out better.