Apple Vision Pro

Apple Other Apple hardware
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Expected to be introduced at WWDC on June 5, 2023, Apple’s first VR, AR, MR headset is likely to be an expensive ($3000+) developer kit, much like the Apple Silicon Mac mini nearly three years ago. Word is that it’ll be called the Apple Reality Pro Headset. It seems it will be running RealityOS.

June 6 Edit: nope, it’s Vision Pro and VisionOS. Nobody guessed that.

Cue the inevitable heckling from the peanut gallery about reality distortion.

Ahem. Anyway, MacWorld has an overview of what it’s all about, what we can expect:

Dave2D has a thoughtful video about it:

After watching, I thought to myself that maybe Stage Manager is how it is because it will work quite well in an AR environment. The folks at Apple have been planning this for many years, after all.

Regardless, it should be interesting to at last see Apple’s take on VR/AR/MR/whathaveyou and this is a topic for discussing it.

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First contribution to the possibilities list:

  • It’ll have cameras, so we’ll be able to go back to pen and paper. The headset will record and do OCR quietly in the background, adding to whatever app/notebook is active or designated for the purpose.

  • Ditto with art, physical canvases and sketchpads and paints and brushes coming back into fashion. Or more likely project virtual imagery on the canvas as you virtually paint using virtual brush, adding it all to virtual Photoshop for further manipulation. Many possibilities.

It could happen.

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What’s most intriguing for me is that they are making an OS specific to it, RealityOS.

That should mean a truly optimized OS experience in theory anyway and also maybe why Apple is relatively late to do this

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Sheesh, I thought that kind of price was just for the developer kit. That’s actually the retail price for 2024, huh? Well, it’s gonna be a long time until I get one. If ever.

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I balked at the price too, but then I remember Apple sells $5000 monitors. So this is probably just a “mid-range” pro display for them. :wink: But that was why I was curious what your own price premium for the Vision Pro would be, considering most other VR headsets are less than $500.

I think I’d go $2000 tops (x3 premium) assuming perfect execution for the visual fidelity, and ability to use as wireless display for non-Apple devices.

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Yeah , I was expecting something between fifteen hundred and two thousand dollars. That might be doable, but twice that? I don’t see that happening for me. Perhaps after two or three years they’ll be able to come out with something more reasonable.

Besides, the main attraction for me is the virtual displays and the XREAL display glasses provide that. Vision Pro will have substantially better virtual display capability, and that’s great, but I’m not currently fired up about AR. That might change if they start doing something really interesting with it. Animoji AR conferencing or FaceTime isn’t it.

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Why?

That’s my question - most of the demos were watching videos and multiple monitors in the air - do you really need a $3000 device to replicate three monitors floating in the air.

PLUS - how much more compelling was this demo than Hololens in 2016?

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Just watched the Vision Pro video on YT. A little surprised about the battery solution. A cord with the battery in your pocket? Seems a tad in-Appleish, why not a pocket on the stretchy headband?

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I don’t care about any of this. I want to know what Microsoft Office is going to do on Apple’s VR goggles…???

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Blink twice and the word you look at will correct its spelling?

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But do it three times and you might end up in Kansas Dorothy…

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It’s fine, Magic Leap do it.

Turns out Apple doesn’t run on magic. Batteries are big and heavy.

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Together with Tim the Tin man, Phil the Lion with no heart and the Strauss man.

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Anyway, I will not be participating in this silliness.

I can appreciate it will be polished and extremely well built, but 3 and a half f-ing grand to wear electronic ski goggles.

There aren’t even controllers to go with it.

Yeah, nah.

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Fast forward ten years - will the Vision Pro look like

image
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Or

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MAYBE what’s missing is wireless power

image

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I missed the Apple keynote due to work commitments, but reading this morning and talking to a couple of peers that are engaged with Apple on this the overall vibe they got was that this was very much a version 1 device that will be fairly rapid iteration.

Additionally there was also a sense that in order to make it successful in the long term Apple had reached the limits of what they could do on their own and thus need to developers to fully flesh it out.

Additionally according to our supply chain sources, despite the eye popping price, at least initially Apple is at best breaking even on the first models. And to support that, the hardware is multiple orders of magnitude more powerful across the board than anything released to date.

In other words, they may be following the original iPhone model where Apple didn’t make a unit level profit until the release of the iPhone 3g

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I decided to consolidate many of the new posts on the Apple’s newly announced headset (and renamed the topic title to the official name).

Discussion was starting to get fragmented across multiple threads, and we know how things rapidly spiral off-tangent on this forum. :wink:

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A nagging doubt about Vision Pro became clearer after reading this Reddit comment:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Xreal/comments/1429yr6/comment/jn45k8f/

The Apple Vision Pro could also very well be Tim Cook’s “Newton” moment.

The Apple Newton was a GREAT product. Had the absolute best handwriting recognition of its day. You could do so much with it. You could even host a web server on it. I still have my Newton 2100, which I still use for some retro time hypercard fun. The Newton was an amazing and innovative device.

The trouble was, the Newton was ridiculously expensive. On release, it was $2,495 USD, (That’s about $5500 USD in today’s money), and while it was a marvel of technology…nobody really wanted a super expensive PDA when they could pick up a palm pilot for significantly less money.

Does any of this sound familiar? Any of this beginning to ring a bell?

Just because it’s an amazing technical achievement and the price is not much more than the cost to make them doesn’t mean it’s going to succeed. Even if it’s Apple.

Also, I’m not sold on AR/VR being the inevitable future everyone thinks it is. Like all those pundits and industry experts in the publishing field who insisted that ebooks with multimedia were the inevitable goal and outcome. Because reading was boring. Fifteen years later we see how very wrong they were.

Or how about the reemergence of 3D movies every decade, give or take, that get attention then die off. The latest included 3D TVs which were all the rage. I’m not sure if you can even buy a TV today with that capability.

Virtual shopping, remember that? You might need to be an oldster to recall it in the 90s. It resurfaced shortly after the millennium in “Web 2.0” hype then died the death once again. AR/VR includes it. As if people inevitably, innately would prefer to virtually walk the aisles of a virtual brick & mortar store and peruse things on shelves, pick them up and rotate them in their hands, and leisurely and virtually continue walking onward in search of what they’re looking for. In reality people will prefer to shop on Amazon.com in 2D.

But I’m just an old fool with senile ramblings. Probably. :face_with_diagonal_mouth:

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The thing is, the Newton was on the verge of success when Apple killed it off — in particular, the U.S. Marines had had a very successful trial and were about to place an order, but Jobs didn’t want to be a defense contractor (because selling NeXT Cubes to the NSA had worked out so well) and killing it off got his company out of that, and let him get rid of styluses, and kill off one of Sculley’s pet projects, all w/ one stone.

The iPhone arguably was a touch-based Newton sans stylus (and of course, Apple now offers one — they just haven’t brought it to their phone yet) — it kills me that my Kindle Scribe feels so limited in comparison to my Newton — I’d give a lot for someone to revisit all of this and make something more useful than the Remarkable, but which isn’t fully in the “not-quite-general computing device” segment which an Android device portends.

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