Apple hopes to convince people to buy its $3,500 Vision Pro headset using free 25-minute in-store demos::undefined
Oh. My. Goodness.
$3,500?!? HAHAHAHAHAHA
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.
It should be marketed as a dev kit, but they’re marketing it for consumers
Well, why not capture some consumers at the same time?
This very article says that Apple is pushing it onto “walk-in” consumers.
So?
They need to build hype, and if that means they are pushing a demo on walk-ins,then I don’t have an issue with it as long as they accept a “No thank you” from the customer.
Did they say this or is this your pet theory? I don’t feel like that is necessarily the best strategy, since people won’t develop for it, when there’s no users and no users will appear when no one develops an ecosystem for this thing…
This isn’t really a “pet” theory — just economics. VR represents an entirely new product line, and with Apple’s expansion into services, a whole new way to value-add to those services and entire ecosystem; capturing more recurring revenue. This price point is based on new manufacturing costs at a much smaller scale than their other product lines.
It’s Apple, so it’ll never be “cheap”, but it can’t remain at this price point and stave off competition for long. Within 3 years they’ll either drop the price and introduce a pro version, or release an SE version, that’ll still probably be around $2000-2500 — but bringing it within reach of the people who’d normally buy “pro” devices.
This is interesting because you’re correct that this is almost certainly a dev kit that they’re making people pay for.
However: this is very unlike Apple to do if it’s true. We ask ourselves, “What is the enthusiast or middle class user able to afford for good VR?” And as we’ve seen, consumer headsets are aimed at less than $1000.
So the plan is for Apple to put out an amazing headset with the best materials and best screen and eye tracking and all this, only for them to wait some years before releasing a worse version of this that still costs over $1000? I can’t see how Apple would get beneath this price point. And I can’t see how they’d justify themselves.
So your average consumer isn’t using this anytime soon. Did they just make a weird toy line for the rich?
At best this may help scaling up production of the necessary components (in particular the displays)
Did they just make a weird toy line for the rich?
Well it is Apple, they sell status more than anything else.
You have to start somewhere. The iPhone was a game changer so it took of instantly. Something like an AR/VR headset is still pretty niche even today about 10 years after VR really became a thing.
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.
If I can lie on my couch while typing away on my custom virtual workspace it might be worth it but the resolution requirements make that unlikely any time soon
This thing is overpriced but there’s no way Apple ships it if they don’t have the pixel density to render text in a way that doesn’t make your eyes bleed. It’s being marketed as a work device, after all.
Yah but my dream setup is something that mimic 2/3 monitors sitting on a desk (or some VR-optimized version of that). In the real world those monitors are each 1080p+ and sitting in full view so the whole “scene” you’re looking at has many more pixels than just what is on all the monitors combined. If you scale that scene down to 4K resolution then the text on those monitors would likely be blurry or unreadable.
Obviously there are other ways to make a 4K resolution usable by zooming way in but that’s much less “screen” real estate than what a real workspace offers.
Also it’s too heavy to wear comfortably for long sessions
Drone pilot?
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!
The battery pack is literally just USB c.
Not impossible, just impossible to afford
Have you heard of the Apple Cheesegrater?
Shit I’ve bought MacBooks for work that cost as much as that headset, and my current laptop costs about as much as this.
$3500 is nothing for a computer, let alone a prosumery AR/VR heatset with a computer built in.
deleted by creator
My work PC costs twice that. There’s Apples influence has nothing to do with my Thinkpad.
I’ve worked on workstations that cost as much as a nice car. Apples pricing only comes close because they charge so much for storage. When you’re working with triple digit gigabytes of ram machines it ain’t cheap.
Apple makes by far the best laptop out there. No machine comes close when it comes to performance and battery life. Intel has a decent performance per watt under load, but under light non idle loads it’s not even close. My Thinkpad is incapable of getting decent battery life. Lenovos 10 hour battery life is a damn lie. I get 30 minutes to 3 hours at best. Our work MacBook pros easily get 10+ doing the exact same workload. AMD gets close, but they’re falling down the same trap Intel has been for the last 10 years.
deleted by creator
And I thought Apple consumers were out-of-touch!
A lot of tech, including computers, commonly cost that much for a long time. It’s not a totally outrageous for consumer tech.
deleted by creator
They could have made it stream wirelessly from your MacBook
yeah, no. People really don’t understand how much bandwidth you actually need to stream even normal 4k 60hz video, let alone something like this. For reference, when I was figuring out how to dump my pc in the basement and have the monitor in my office, I had to run 12-strand fiber cables to do it.
Parsec?
I’ve tried several remote desktop apps but the compression artefacts very quickly give me a headache. So I splurged for MTP cables and the display port dongles, and it works like a dream. Also, MTP connectors are pure fibre porn.
deleted by creator
you need about 20 gigabits per second for 4k 60hz. Or more, for higher resolutions and refresh rate - which vision pro has, compared to ~6 gigabits per second, that you need for your quest pro’s resolution. That’s why they make these.
And having compressed video streaming to a VR device sounds like my worst nightmare.
Wifi 7 has a peak rate of 40 Gbps.
Maybe it does, and it still would (probably) not be enough for two 4k 90hz displays that this has.
And is nowhere in any consumer product today. How is it relevant to this discussion?
deleted by creator
take a deep breath and realize; if you cannot afford this, you are not rich enough to be part of apples target audience.
no matter how much you want to tell yourself that you are.
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.
It certainly is a big beta test product. I see it like the Tesla Roadster.
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
Why would I want Facebook apps?
I think what was meant here is that it won’t run apps designed for the Oculus Quest lineup (which is based on Android), not the actual Facebook application
iOS doesn’t run android apps. I don’t think many people will care. Most apps can be ported.
The apple vision pro doesn’t have motion controllers like the quest line of headsets, so apps would have to be redesigned for hand tracking instead.
Also, apple said recently that devs have to cannot describe their apps using the words VR, AR, or XR on any platform it is on, they have to be called spacial computing apps, so anything with VR in the title like VRChat can’t get ported without a full rebrand.
Is 25 minutes a long enough in-store demo test time to have a $3500 wank?
Well it’s indicative about the amount of content you’ll have for it when you buy it.
The bigger question is what will you do with the other 24 minutes?
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.
Half of the US can’t afford a $1000 emergency. $3500 for a toy seems steep in that context.
That’s what credit card debt is for!
deleted by creator
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.
Oh hey, it’s that time again. Copy-pasting from the last time around…
—
Because the price is always the main topic, I’m gonna drop a link to an AR/VR expert contextualizing the Vision Pro price within the current (well, 7 months ago) market:
Apple Just Beat the “BEST VR Headset In the WORLD”… and did it 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)_/¯
For $3500 it better be good. But I doubt the value is added linearly since you get a pretty decent vr headset for under $800
Totally agree.
Relatedly, I think people would be surprised how little the Apple Tax really is when accounting for specs and performance. That said I’m sure the margin is quite a bit higher on this device than an mbp. It’s very clearly not positioned for consumers but for businesses and bleeding edge enthusiasts
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.
I mean, it may not make a difference to you, but it makes a difference to people who are into Ferraris and Lamborghinis.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Apple Just Beat the “BEST VR Headset In the WORLD”… and did it cheaper.
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Good bot, Piperman! Feddit Rocks and Youtube… nots…
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.
All it has to do is impress people enough that they hear about the 500 dollar headsets that are almost as good. Or the 250 dollar headsets that are almost as good as those. As long as they don’t go as low as the 50 dollar headsets that are not as good relatively as being worth 50 dollars compared to the other headsets.
By getting it in the hands of a bunch of influencers, it’ll do what Apple devices always do, make stuff look like a good idea for normal people to use too, not just nerds. Just to show normal people, who have probably had limited or bad experiences with VR, that there is “a” price point that solves almost all their problems with it.
Most will balk at the price, but have their perspective changed anyway. And some of them will look into or passively hear about other cheaper options. And then practically priced headsets will gain more marketshare and software will be worth the financial investment to make. It’s unfortunately not a quick process, and it’s only one part of that same process. But it’s a pretty important part.
VR software has already been in a pretty good place for a few years, but it can always use “more and better”, as with any software ecosystem.
From an accessibility point of view, museum at home sounds amazing!
Oh yeah like I wanna get head lice from the snot-nosed kid some mom dumped there so she could go get some Starbucks in peace.
Honestly, I just want to experience it for 25 minutes and then I think I would be good. My Valve Index does enough for me for gaming, and I am not wearing a headset all day to work.
The price is always the joke, but this is aimed at commercial buyers right? Not consumers
Oh boy, you’ve got a lot to learn about apple consumers
Careful there, that’s about the amount of time it takes to realize that it’s just a gimmick that has no use in your personal life, and very narrow industrial application. They might actually lose potential buyers rather than gain some.
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.
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 read your whole comment and didn’t find even a single sentence that made VR appealing to me. Much less the idea of spending over 8 hours a day with a VR headset on.
ADD: In other topics, are you perchance interested on buying a 3D TV? I have a sale for you…
Can you expand on your use case and setup? I have an OG vive and really enjoyed it while I had space for it but haven’t kept up with the meta after moving to a smaller place. I’m very curious what headset you are using for this long and what you are doing with it and why you decided on this workflow.
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.
Jesus. Y’all actually need to believe that about people who own a particular phone or computer hu?
I work in the tech industry with support engineers. This is the smartest group I’ve ever worked with and we support a ton of services, more than the typical SE supports - everything from databases to networking to load balancers to virtual machines.
We all own iPhones.
It’s okay to own an Android. You don’t have to justify it by making up a story for yourself about how all people who buy Apple products are mindless drones.
Being an engineer and being smart are not synonyms. I’ve met quite a few dumb engineers in my life. Fine engineers, quite shit at making any non specifically engineering related decisions. Just the implication that choosing Apple is the smart choice is plainly a disingenuous argument. Every choice is an exercise in compromise, and choice of smartphone OS vendor is no different.
Remember that doctors used to prescribe tobacco and taking up smoking. Authority doesn’t automatically means someone is always right on everything.
Being an engineer and being smart are not synonyms.
The fact that I mentioned those two things separately should indicate to you that I believe they don’t always go together. I mentioned it and called out the specific services we support to counter the claim that only “non-tech” people buy iPhones. That’s complete and utter bullshit.
Just the implication that choosing Apple is the smart choice is plainly a disingenuous argument
Good thing I didn’t say that then, hu? I said the smart group of guys I work with all chose iPhones. YOU read into that and came out with “smart people ONLY choose iPhones”.
You’re just adding your voice to the original person I responded to. Neither of you seem to be capable of just being happy with your purchase. You must believe that iPhone users are stupid. Does it make you feel better or something?
Id buy it right now if it was maybe $500.
Spatial computing is the future.
I don’t need 3 screens. I need a pair of spectacles.
Screens have always been the bottleneck. The phone tablet monitor tv.
Glasses can do entire field of vision.
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.
It uses foveated rendering, so yeah it is effectively close to looking at a hidpi display across your entire field of vision, in a sphere around you. And you can use it effectively as a virtual monitor with a Mac, but you really have to design for the interface for a good experience
Then it’s not spatial. Maybe they will bring that to the table.
That’s what we need. I agree if it’s a downgrade from your Mac.
It’s an upgrade from my Thinkpad.
But price is the issue.
Once devs get it. They can improve.
Can’t wait to see people wearing those around the office. Thinking about it. if you remove the desk, monitors, keyboard, mouse and just sit down bunch of programmers next to each other with those goggles it can actually be cheaper for the company to run an office even at 3.5k per headset.
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
Did you even read what they said? Read it again, they were talking about tables and monitors as well.
Also I may need to point out they were making a joke about cramming more people into a smaller space.
Clearly you don’t know what an office desk costs…
Laptops run around $1k. Desks are… $1200, tops? Unless you’re doing the mahogany lawyer desk thing. Keyboard and mouse are less than $100 for the set.
And we also generally don’t need to replace our desks every 3-5 years, because they can no longer support the hardware sitting on them.
The tech bro kit MacBook Pro can easily get to $3k.
So just don’t purchase overpriced Crapple products. Problem solved.
- two monitors and desk separators. So instead of spending $2000 per employee you spend $3500 but cram 3 where you used to fit only 1. Also, you can put windows with nice view and office decor in the VR so the office can now be in a basement with blank walls. You would save tons of money on real estate.
So instead of spending $2000 per employee you spend $3500 but cram 3 where you used to fit only 1
How many departments have you managed in your life?
Many but I’m not hiring now, sorry.
Windows/Linux based high end laptops are a grand or so, an entry level MacBook can easily be $1500-2000.
25 min of VR-Porn nice
Is this VR or AR or both? And how robust is the actual software support?
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…
If its amazing like revolutionary amazing it would change my mind, if it’s just a vr headset nope.
It’s a mixed reality headset that works. Still too expensive for consumers.
I wholeheartedly believe that Apple is a marketing company more than a tech company.
I hate what the company stands for, but they do have brilliant marketing and make beautiful products.
