Apple Vision Pro units returned as folks just can't see themselves using it The 14-day return-for-full-refund-no-questions-asked deadline for early adopters of Apple’s Vision Pro “spatial computing” headgear is approaching, and some buyers are openly sharing their decision to return the $3,499 device. Pre-orders for Vision Pro began on January 19 and the machines went on sale to all-comers from …
"Did anyone actually ever figure what Apple Watches are actually good for?"
Slurping up all that bio-metric data to send back to the mothership. Certainly did not take long for the bloom to be off the AR rose, usually them Apple moron fan boys are more than happy to toss the dollars at Apple and not say a word about it.
Yep. It means I can go out without a phone or wallet/cards (purse/bag/pockets) and still be a functioning contactable member of society if required. It’s very likely the most useful shiny I’ve ever been given (and I’d likely not have bought it for myself as I originally thought it just another shiny, I was wrong).
Well, like any other smart watch the benefits are:
* Hardly ever need to take the phone out for texts, emails, etc, just glance at the watch. Can even reply with the watch if needed.
* Believe it or not, it can be useful to just glance at your wrist to find out the current time and maybe how much time is left before sunset.
* Phone never makes any noise to annoy everyone around me, the watch just vibrates.
* It's impossible to miss a call/text with the watch vibrations - though of course you can turn that off when you want to, and I only have it buzz for people on the whitelist.
* Replaced my alarm clock - again, can't miss the watch buzzing.
* If you accidentally drop/leave your phone, the watch will warn you. This has saved me twice.
* Smooths a lot of interactions - for instance it's super simple to just use Shazam to ID a song by tapping the watch twice rather than pulling out the phone, unlocking it, swiping to find the app, running the app. Also makes for a great conversation piece at times.
* I find the fitness tracking to be endlessly useful when I go for my walks, hikes, or bike rides. Turns out my pulse rate tells me a lot. And of course actual distance traveled, speed, steps, and altitude changes are really useful. And with the watch you don't even need to bring the phone (though I usually do).
* When biking, voice commands to the watch can be very useful. I have actually gotten myself lost in a new area and just hold down the fob and say 'navigate to [x]' and off it goes with turn by turn instructions.
* Makes paying for things super easy - just tap the watch, no need for hauling a card out of your wallet (which only old people carry now) or phone.
* Works while swimming too, forget using your phone there.
The only thing here that /only/ the watch can do is the fitness tracking - without a smartwatch I'd have to use a fitness band, which is basically a cut down smartwatch. Everything else can of course be done more clumsily without the watch. But it just makes everything faster, easier, less friction, and isn't that the entire dream of tech? Hell you don't /need/ a smartphone, it just makes things much easier. And the watch makes them easier still.
Of course until you've actually experienced all this you can't even imagine how much faster and easier it is doing many things with the watch instead of the phone so there doesn't seem to be a killer feature. I got my first smart watch (Moto 360) just for the texts on my wrist (and the custom faces). The rest I found out later.
Whilst you have done a great job of selling the Apple Watch, there are still a few fundamental flaws that until they are corrected will make the Watch a bit twatish.
Firstly, the cost is stupid. Nearly £800 for top of the range. Yes there is an SE model with a smaller screen that is viable, but that leads to the next MASSIVE problem: battery life sucks
SE is 17 hours at £250. The model up is better with power saving mode but is at least £100 more and still only about 70 hours. The £800 model has a few days but that leads to the final problem: fat an ugly
The only Apple Watch that is even close to being usable on the wrist and not feeling like a massive Rolex watch from the 1970s is the SE with the smaller screen. The top of the line model is so fat it is embarrassing.
SE model with small screen and 3 days battery at £250 is the sweet spot.
Finally, you mention being able to use it without the iPhone, but that is and extra £100 for celluar and when it is switched on you get 3 hours battery life on the SE. on the othr 2 models it cuts battery life by a fifth.
The technology just isnt there at the moment.
Sarusa raises a few interesting use cases, and I am not one of the downvoters, but there is one point that got me thinking:
I find the fitness tracking to be endlessly useful when I go for my walks, hikes, or bike rides. Turns out my pulse rate tells me a lot. And of course actual distance traveled, speed, steps, and altitude changes are really useful.
This fetishization of the information is rather baffling.
Why is it necessary to track, measure and aggregate such minutiae of the day to day life? Besides Apple, its partners and Cthulhu knows who else, getting all the data, now people is also building their little big-data repositories about themselves... what for?
I recognize it can be useful for proffessional atletes, and perhaps for peeople with specific medical conditions. But what is there for the average joe?
This is an honest question, not simply a critique on Apple or the commentard above
In general, having some form of digital record is helpful for most people to give them the impetus to exercise a certain amount and to keep doing it. It's not the decimal place accuracy itself, just the fact that it is there. So instead of saying you went for a walk, you went 10km in a shorter time than last week and didn't feel as sore when you got back.
Most people don't like exercising, and they need something to give them a prod. Digital devices do that. That's just how humans often are.
You don't have to spend daft money on it though. There are cheaper options. Some people just feel the need to use Apple gear to define to the world their position in the food chain. Insecurity, arrogance, peacock syndrome etc.
I find the digital readout on my exercise bike useful, as I do 10km a day. I can judge my fitness by how long it takes. It came with the exercise bike and a couple of AA cells last the year. When I go out I pop my £5 Casio on. I really don't give two shits about other peoples' opinions of me from seeing my watch, my clothes (I live in jeans) or my shoes. I also use a PAYG feature phone just to complete the picture.
I wonder what you base your assertion on. My understanding is that a social context (may or not be competitive) is the key driver for most people to do some exercise: go for a walk, ride, swim gym class with a friend. Gameification tends to become relevant for those who do exercise and I do collect some data on the things I do, but again the relevance tends to correlate strongly with whether your friends do. As for any medical benefits: the advice for those who don't do enough exercise is rountinely: little and often.
However, the big issue, is who else has access to that data? My weight is between me and scales only. My bike computer is as dumb as they get, but at least it shows me the time.
It would be rather nice to know, when I'm walking up a hill,, whether the angina-like paiin is caused by cardiac issues or is simply massive wind.
I'm going to pause for breather anyway but knowing which disorder was then currently bugging me would be reassuring.
However, if it is angina caused by "issues" I'd probably find out fairly soon anyway so spending a couple of thousand on a watch and a phone to
differentiate between the two doesn't seem ....... efficient.
My usual work-around is: don't walk up hills. :)
"This is an honest question, not simply a critique on Apple or the commentard above"
The word you are looking for is that abortion of a word/concept, "gameification". Marketing have created a competitive spirit to exercise and enough people have fallen for it that they now feel the need to tell others how well they are doing so they can feel good about being better than others. Even if it's just people in the office telling others how many steps their pedometer app/watch/phone/fitness band has recorded so far today.
I appreciate your honest question, and honest answer - I am a person who responds very well to numbers and gamification.
Before I got my iWatch I was really 'eh' about fitness, ugh, I could go for a walk, but I could play a game for an hour so why bother?
Once I got the iWatch (anything similar like a Fitbit or android health tracker would work too), I became a health monster. This was a conscious decision, I kind of knew this would happen. Now I can see 'oh, I walked 8 km today and burned 1500 kcal'. And, being a gamer, I escalated. I went from being hardly able to walk 2 km (uphill, admittedly) to now being able to walk 20 km at 10 minutes/km and hike up 400m - just because every single day I wanted to exceed or at least meet my previous records.
I am now absolutely super healthy. My blood pressure is amazing, my VO2 is amazing, I can outwalk or outbike almost all the people I know. And it's all because I fetishized the information.
YMMV, obviously.
All good points, but you don't need an Apple watch to do 99% of those things... I use a Garmin watch mainly for sport but it's very handy for messages, alarms, weather, paying, health stats etc etc. The battery lasts a week or more...
As for `Why track your walks or health stats` - it's interesting... Have you ever watched a documentary, read a newspaper or article or absorbed any information not strictly related to your survival? Why is that any different?
> As for `Why track your walks or health stats` - it's interesting... Have you ever watched a documentary, read a newspaper or article or absorbed any information not strictly related to your survival? Why is that any different?
Because none of those other activities are totally self-obsessed?
And if you can only glean from a documentary, newspaper or article[1] the same level of interest as knowing that your walk today was within 10% of your walk yesterday then I'm astounded that you even got this far through this article and its comments; lie down, your head must feeling full to bursting.
[1] excepting those headlined "number 7 will astound you"
Me, too. I prefer proper mechanical watches, but I had open heart surgery recently and, being a keen cyclist, wanted to monitor my heart rate - and ignore it when it got in the danger zone.
Amazing battery life, but the hands sometimes make up their own time. Denied by Garmin.
Still prefer mechanical and only use for cycling.
Believe it or not, it can be useful to just glance at your wrist to find out the current time
I believe this. My $20 Timex has this feature too. As do a couple of watches I bought for almost nothing at garage sales and the like.
and maybe how much time is left before sunset.
I can do that without a watch, to sufficient precision for any purpose I've ever cared about. It's called "experience".
The watch is awesome - in my opinion, just saying.
I'm an apple fan, but my phone is a iPhone 11 and my watch is a v7 I think - someone gave it to me - so I'm not exactly rushing out to buy the latest releases.
The watch has some lovely features, great integration to the rest of the apple, well, ecosystem, and it's great to be able to make calls and make payments anywhere / anytime without my phone or wallet. Super useful when running if something goes wrong.
I trust apple with my data right now, but I'm aware a change of CEO could change everything. Like when Google suddenly stopped not being evil.
Did anyone actually ever figure what Apple Watches are actually good for?
Been an iPhone user since 2009, just bought my first Apple Watch (the SE 2) a couple months ago. I tried a couple cheaper off brand watches but they were not reliable - one would show my heart rate up until about 130 bpm then it would show it at 65 and incrementing up. Obviously it was only registering every other beat when it sped up. The other developed a problem where half the touchscreen went dead after the first time I wore it while sweating (and not even that heavily) So I decided to suck it up and get the Apple one for $170 on a pre Christmas deal.
The reason I got it is that despite being in better shape than probably 95% of men my age I was diagnosed with hypertension last fall and put on a calcium channel blocker - I can thank my parents for lousy genes as far as cardiovascular health goes I guess! While the watch can't track blood pressure I figured it would be a good idea to track my heart rate during workouts to see how it is going and see if I get any afib warnings (so far, so good, plus I have an Omron blood pressure reader that can do a four lead EKG to diagnose both afib and vfib but obviously only during the times when I'm measuring)
I figured it would be a good idea to track my heart health over time, to add to the daily blood pressure readings from the Omron device. The $130 Omron and $170 watch are pretty cheap compared to the cost of a heart attack - not that either will prevent it but if I'm tracking changes I have a better chance of alerting my doctors before problems ensue. I'm mostly only wearing the watch during workouts, though occasionally I've worn it overnight just to see what my heart rate is doing while I'm sleeping.
I will say at the gym where I work out (which is a university gym so it is mostly people under 25) at least half are wearing a smartwatch of some type. Pretty sure they're mostly Apple Watches, at least they almost always are when I see their screens (you can't tell brand by sight as easily as you can phones) so I'm behind the curve on that front at least where I live.
I'm an Apple user (Mac, iPhone, AppleTVs, Homepods) but I never really got on with the Apple Watch. I could have lived with most of its annoyances but what killed it for me was the poor battery life.
I'm now on a Garmin Instinct, which does everything I need, integrates well into the iOS ecosystem and which I only need to charge every two weeks.
Fall detection and emergency notifications are a literal lifesaver. I know this from personal, recent and extremely mortality-confronting experience. Speaking for myself, from now on I will never be without my Apple Watch - or some other wearable that provides the same service with the same reliability.
And you can already do that with a phone/tablet/laptop. Maybe a VR headset would be a better overall experience, but at the same time trying to deal with something like that when you're already crammed into a metal tube like chickens on an industrial farm, just doesn't seem worth the effort. Plus you make yourself a prime target for anyone on the plane who may be interested in swiping your new shiny once you get out of the plane. On balance, not sure it's really worth it. Maybe if they ever get VR headsets that are no more intrusive than a pair of safety goggles or something, but just thinking about the kink in your neck you'd likely have after watching a movie in a plane seat makes me want to reach for the tylenol.
The last few times I flew, I could do that with the, um, plane itself. There was a screen in the back of the seat in front of me. The "entertainment" options on flights may not be great, or even good, but they're far more varied and convenient than what we had when I was younger — and we mostly managed to survive those. Why, sometimes fewer than 5% of the passengers perished from boredom, even on a long flight!
Even if I didn't VR utterly unappealing, I don't think I'd want to use it while in motion. That seems like it might be unsettling.
(I prefer to read on flights, myself.)
The problem here is that there are a number of glasses on the market already (eg Rokid Max, XREAL Air) that provide phone mirroring to a wearable display; working with Android and iOS. They typically cost less than $500 for a sub-200g headset with high quality OLED screens, maybe some speakers and... that's basically it.
So if, like me, all you would really use the Vision Pro for is watching movies, you've just overpaid by $3,000.
I'm surprised the terms don't include conditions that void the "no questions asked" return policy if you make public that you will be returning the product or disparage it or make negative public comments about it in any way, making it only returnable for exchange in the event of a defect.
Those devices all have to be registered to valid Apple ID accounts, and I imagine a large percentage of them use those email addresses online, and I can certainly imagine a company like Apple actually going through the effort of tracking that kind of thing down when it's a low-hanging fruit (HA!) that they can delegate to automated systems. "Your refund will be processed within 7 to 10 business days while we investigate."
> Am I correct in assuming that it doesn’t even work as a regular VR kit, ie allow me to play Elite Dangerous that I have on my PC?
Correct. Nor can you even use game controllers with the AVP. That is deliberate.
>If it can’t do regular VR then IMO it will lose a lot of interest from people who actually already use VR headsets.
Again, you are correct, and again that's intentional. Apple don't want the gamer market. The gamer market will eventually choose cheaper commodity hardware anyway, and in the meantime the presence of gamers would muddy Apple's messaging that Mixed Reality can be used for productivity and collaboration.
Apple don't mind you playing Candy Crush on an iPhone, Civ VI on an iPad or Death Stranding on a MacBook, but Apple never marketed those devices as being primarily for games.
I know that it is not the Apple Way but Apple should have massively subsidised the first batch as a sweetener to get as large an initial roll-out as possible. Say USD500 a pop.
With Apple's massive reserves, they could easily pay for it on the interest they earn from their reserves alone and still have money left over for wheels of a new computer.
And secondly, how hard would it have been to have written a few apps to demonstrate the awesomeness of AR?
Link up with Boeing or Airbus and have an app that shows all of the parts & part numbers of, say, a fuselage listed in front of you as you look at it, along with possible diagnostics, numbers of spares in local warehouse?
Or an app for a surgeon that lists detailed anatomy of a patient opened up for surgery along with possible noteworthy points about what is on screen?
Or an app that shows you, step by step iFixit-style how to repair, say, a bike, a dishwasher and the like?
Or an app that shows you how to cook an elaborate meal along with hints, suggestions and instructions while you are doing it'
Or an app that explains how to solve, say, the maths problem in front of you using a variety of different ways?
Or an app for farmers looking to buy cattle at a cattle mart: display details of the animal in front of you, possible illnesses or injuries not apparently visible, estimated weight and so on?
There is no end of possibilities that AR can't make better.
These would all make for great ads as well thus killing two birds with one stone.
Think of it as being inside a useful YouTube video and it's showing you what to do in real time.
The trouble is that all of those "killer apps" are "twenty years away".
They all require "AI" far exceeding the capabilities of today's LLMs and image recognition systems.
They're sci-fi, to put it mildly.
(And of course, surgery requires a sterile field)
The nearest Apple got is the ability to tag an object with a timer overlay. Useful in theory, but in practice the places where you have multiple overlapping timers are places where you cannot wear a headset.
And of course, most people simply cannot stand a headset for longer than an hour or so, greatly limiting the utility.
Removing a headset for five minutes every half an hour to take a screen break is a lot more involved than simply looking away.
"The trouble is that all of those "killer apps" are "twenty years away"."
Some are right here, right now. Watch Marques Brownlee's review of the Vision Pro, and look for the bit where he has a lifesize 3D rendering of a Formula 1 car in his office; with infographic callouts and floating blueprints. The Vision Pro is capable of a LOT of sci-fi things, today. The question is whether they can be translated into actual use cases rather than interesting curiosities.
"The question is whether they can be translated into actual use cases rather than interesting curiosities."
That's the critical bit. A Demo is not a killer app. What can be done with a VR/AR headset that can't be done as well, or well enough, more cheaply on a screen?
That's not "as you look at it" - overlaid on a real one.
That's simply an alternative way of viewing an existing 3D model, which was demoed way back at the dawn of VR headsets (1990s?)
Certainly useful for some people, but not a "killer app" when the Quest 2 is equally capable.
True - I misunderstood the original point.
Having said that, Apple has already demo'd Object Identification, and to a lesser extent has integrated it into iOS and iPadOS. It has also demonstrated some incredible object locking skills in VisionOS, where tiles apps and info windows are tethered to real-life objects. It's not a great leap of imagination to combine these two concepts; they can do it now, it just needs to be actually done.
Most of @deadlockvictim's example use-cases have nothing to do with LLMs.
It is a bit surprising that Apple have been weak on the software front... I was expecting a more radical 'Spatial Desktop Replacement' to make the case for organising documents and ideas spatially, like mathematicians do on a giant blackboard. A little bit Minority Report, a little of Tony Stark's workshop, but mostly like a low tech pin board of interconnected photos and notes.
I was also expecting a few more 3td party apps to be highlighted at the AVP's launch.
However, it is likely Apple see this Mk I product as being most useful in the hands of developers to create compelling applications for the MK II.
Or an app for farmers looking to buy cattle at a cattle mart: display details of the animal in front of you, possible illnesses or injuries not apparently visible, estimated weight and so on?
Oh sweet summer child, another city boy who thinks there is WiFi, or even a prosaic cell signal, everywhere just like in New York City or Chicago. The rural corner of the Midwest I reside in there are large stretches (not hilly or mountainous, just flat land) where a cell phone is utterly useless. This is especially since 5G became the law of the land, time was I could get a 2G cell signal everywhere but those days are sadly past. Unless one lives like a caged laying hen, the telcos don't find us cost effective.
If you are in the UK or EU, the cattle should all be chipped so you can scan it for it's UUID and possibly other data. But then you can do that from a phone with NFC and, of course, if your at the cattle market, odds are you in or on the edge of a town so likely do have a signal for an internet connection. But anyone buying cattle already knows the breed just by looking at it can probably give a very good estimate of weight, health etc because you don't spend that kind of money unless you know what you are doing.
When they're going for the consumer market, a lot of those apps aren't worth the effort of Apple writing them. Someone else writing them, sure, but not for Apple to do the work before launch as an advertisement. For example:
"Link up with Boeing or Airbus and have an app that shows all of the parts & part numbers of, say, a fuselage listed in front of you as you look at it, along with possible diagnostics, numbers of spares in local warehouse?"
To the typical user, this is something they'll think about for about ten seconds: "Cool, an aircraft mechanic is using these", then ignore. It could be useful to the aircraft maintenance industry, but there's no reason for Apple to write that instead of providing encouragement and support to that industry to do it.
"Or an app for a surgeon that lists detailed anatomy of a patient opened up for surgery along with possible noteworthy points about what is on screen?"
I don't think that's going to work with current technology. It isn't a part that has a deterministic appearance which can be identified quickly. And if anything goes wrong, the press will be a lot worse than any benefit from advertising it in the first place.
"Or an app that shows you, step by step iFixit-style how to repair, say, a bike, a dishwasher and the like?"
If they could get this one, that would actually be a great advertisement. The trouble is that they can't, nobody can, and I think you know that. They don't have the software to identify automatically which model of bicycle I have when that model could easily be decades old from any country and then identify the problem with it from a glance, then automatically provide me a useful solution when one might not exist. They don't have anywhere near the staff necessary to manually accumulate that data either. There is a reason why there are only iFixit guides for the most common devices. If you bought a cheap phone instead of a flagship, you likely have to do the dismantling yourself to figure out what's in there and whether you can fix it.
"Or an app that shows you how to cook an elaborate meal along with hints, suggestions and instructions while you are doing it'"
I suppose that one is a bit more realistic, but it's not really any more than a video that starts and stops. Watching you do it and determining whether you've made mistakes is trickier and not very useful, since anyone who wants to do this can probably follow along with a video unless they're intentionally trying to test the error recognition system.
"Or an app that explains how to solve, say, the maths problem in front of you using a variety of different ways?"
Why do they need this? There are already programs out there for teaching and solving mathematics and they don't really benefit from AR.
"Or an app for farmers looking to buy cattle at a cattle mart: display details of the animal in front of you, [...]"
Again, something a small set of users would use and everyone else wouldn't care about, and in order to build it, they would need to get access to all that data. Every place with livestock displayed would need to put those details somewhere the app could get it and tag things so the equipment could pick it up. I'm sure there are multiple competing databases where some of that is stored while some others simply write it down or have someone tell you with words. Apple trying to produce an iTunes livestock store and get everyone to use it doesn't seem worth it.
My wife had to go for one week without an Apple watch when we traded the old one in for credit and ordered a new one from web store. She was totally missing the watch. She used it to beep her iPhone all the time at home. Once during the week with no watch, she could not find her iPhone for half a day. She's a yoga instructor and had to borrow my Apple Watch just for the timer app for holding her students' yoga poses. Overall, once you've had the Watch, it becomes very difficult to live without it.
I challenge you @sabroni to lay your hands on a calculator in the next five minutes.
Oh you've found one? Then well done you. However, the point stands: Things we don't use very often tend to hide in the back of drawers.
I've got a stop and alarm watch right here on my wrist - don't need to scrabble in the back of a drawer for one. I can't remember exactly what it cost. It must have been more than a tenner but it's a cheap Casio.
> I've got a stop and alarm watch right here on my wrist
That's the point - many of us use our phones as stop watches or calculators. As a consequence, a disused dedicated calculator can hide itself without us noticing.
I too like the honest functionality of a Casio watch, timer set to 0:4:30, but timers are quicker to set on a phone. I don't use a smart speaker, but some friends find them useful in the kitchen for setting timers when their hands are covered in food.
My point is that I put the watch on when I get up and it stays there, weighting the square root of damn-all on my wrist, until I go to bed - and even then it's on the bedside table. And I don't think it's had a battery changed since I got it several years ago.
But the phone is, comparatively, a big lump to carry about, quite often with a flat battery when I need it. And I locate it, assuming it still has a charge and is within earshot, not from the watch but by ringing it from one of the DECT landline extensions.
I’ve the opposite ‘problem’ - if it’s not got knives and forks, or clothes in it, there’s an excellent chance any randomly selected drawer in my place will have a couple of pencils, a tape measure and a calculator. I still do spend quite a bit of time hunting for my favourite ones.
At one point we had a power cut that lasted about 2 hours at night, the next day Mrs G when shopping and for a few years afterwards you could find wax candles and lighters in every drawer - still haven’t used any of them.
The thing I should sprinkle in every draw - elastic bands - never lay my hands on one quickly.
"just for the timer app for holding her students' yoga poses."
If you do something often enough, you very quickly learn to quite accurately estimate time +/- a few seconds, especially short periods. There are many things people used to be able to do well through practice and experience which most are no longer able to do because the rely on tech to replace experience and even memory.
History repeats itself, albeit rather more quickly this time. Instead of crowing about massive sales, then hearing a year later that nobody is buying any more and people are just meh about it, we now have massive sales, and a growing number of people who are meh and return it during the grace period.
Bad sign for the future of the product.
I'll confess. Though I wasn't posting here at the time, I was unimpressed when the iPad was released. Admittedly, I'm still not that impressed and don't use one myself, but I expected that others would not either and they do. Tablets are still not for me, but I've been shown that there are people for which they are the preferred option.
I still though the iPad was too small until they finally joined the mainstream and started making them up to the larger sizes everyone else was making. Having said that, I can't see a use case for spending the premium on an iPad for me because I don't have the rest of the eco-system that would make it more useful. My brother, on the other hand swears by his iPad because he has Apple laptop and iphone and I will grant that they all work together pretty seamlessly. Android tablets in general don't interoperate so well, but I imagine you'd get a better experience if you went for, say Samsung laptop, phone and tablet, but that can cost up into similar regions as Apple these days.
As with all expensive new Apple products, I'm sure that there's a significant amount of Day 1 buyers who purchase with an intent to try it and likely return it, rather than intending to keep it. Some people take the approach of why book an appointment and then go to an Apple Store for a 30-minute demo when you can have it delivered free to your own home, use it as much as you want for 2 weeks and return it, all at no cost if you pay by credit card?
Especially since the most attention-craving YouTubers can get themselves some attention by wearing one, and then get more attention by vocally returning it. In other news, bears...
People will see the AVP, observe it's limitations, make predictions about what the MK III or IV product will be like, knowing that the price will drop by then. The primary functions of this MK I AVP is to communicate a road map and to show Apple's commitment, whilst giving 3rd party devs something to play with.
"The primary functions of this MK I AVP is to communicate a road map and to show Apple's commitment, whilst giving 3rd party devs something to play with."
I'd agree with this. I'm not convinced this was ever designed to be a mass market product. It's more of a tech demo at this point and shows the direction Apple are going. It's going to be many years before this is anything useful.
Until the headset is more like wearing a pair of glasses, I can't see it taking off. Perhaps if we get to the point where we have very high res, truly transparent screens, then it might be possible to make something for the mass market. Having cameras that project the outside world onto screens in front of your eyes is never going to be small enough to be practical and headaches / eye strain is always going to be an issue until you're just viewing the outside world directly though the screen.
It sure is interesting tech though, but it's years away from being practical in my opinion.
Loving how all the fashionistas who rushed out to buy one just can't bring themselves to criticise their almighty fruit god, despite being bored already with their new shiny. Never mind, if Apple continue down this road of trying "shit ideas, done slightly better" they'll be releasing the Apple doorbell in about 6 months time and they can all get excited about that.
$3,500 plus tax is an eye-watering price. Most places have Sales tax or VAT. I'd expect it to be €3500 plus VAT here.
Might make your eyes water even if a present!
For that I can get a 65" 4K HDR screen, paper-like colour screen 11" Android tablet with pen (128 G + 256 G SD Card), decent laptop (SSD + HDD) and an 8" eink with note taking, new glasses, new coffee machine and still have change.
"[The Vision Pro is] clearly the future. It works like magic. But the physical tradeoffs are just not worth it for me right now," Ortolani said of his experience. "I actually went back to the store for a whole second [fitting] session … thought it helped but it wasn't enough."
I'm not sure an experience like that would see me describing something as "working like magic", unless by "magic" you mean like one of those cheap tricks you get in christmas crackers... Having to undergo even one fitting session just to be able to use a VR headset, let alone then thinking that it was reasonable to traipse back to the store to give it a second chance, suggests there's something not entirely right about the design of this one.
Unsurprised at the feedback, the idea that wearing your monitor on your head will improve things isn't enough for the majority of use cases.
What I'd like to see is some of the technologies used moved into markets where having information directly at hand is critical.
For example, A&E, being able to call (with prior consent) someone's medical records, their current observations, and intelligent warnings about someone's condition could offer a big help.
Another area would be car windscreens, merging in some of the self driving car's sensors into a HUD to improve road and hazard visibility, particularly at night when the glare of oncoming headlights can make it difficult.
AR and VR technologies definitely need to stop and think about the use cases before they release and develop the hardware, it's not enough to release hardware and hope someone invests time into it
VP - niche product in a niche market.
I sold my Quest 3 on eBay after 2 months - and that has an absolute TON of content available.
VR gaming is still fairly niche, but heck, the Vision Pro effectively becomes a niche product within a niche market - it's only the Apple Hype Machine that is driving sales, which will soon dwindle.
For my tuppence, the Quest gave me rapid headaches until I got my "VR Legs", but sadly often resulted in all-day headaches the next day - classic eye-strain.
Tried everything - four different straps, different glasses prescriptions etc.
But heck, I got my fun out of it - once I'd played Half-Life Alyx, every other game I tried paled by comparison, so there was no point keeping the device.
I searched on every forum on internet and eventually end up fixing this by changing the speed and distance units displayed on your Apple Watch by adjusting the settings within the Workout app. Here's how:-
1. Open the Settings app on your Apple Watch.
2. Scroll down and tap on Workout.
3. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the Workout settings menu.
4. Tap on Units of Measure.
5. You'll see two options: Miles (mi) and Kilometers (km). Choose the unit you prefer for both speed and distance.
More effective instruction below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHUZKOwcKdg&ab_channel=TheGeekPage
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