Early impressions sound like Apple may have actually pulled this off. Here’s what The Verge had to say:
Was all this made better by the wildly superior Vision Pro hardware? Without question. But was it made more compelling? I don’t know, and I’m not sure I can know with just a short time wearing the headset. I do know that wearing this thing felt oddly lonely. How do you watch a movie with other people in a Vision Pro? What if you want to collaborate with people in the room with you and people on FaceTime? What does it mean that Apple wants you to wear a headset at your child’s birthday party? There are just more questions than answers here, and some of those questions get at the very nature of what it means for our lives to be literally mediated by screens.
I definitely agree with that. I’d like to try this but I don’t know if I’d ever want one.
Yea, but is the fundamental product or form-factor something that will ever work? Goggles on the face have a huge wierdness and creepy factor. Watching the promo video I was struck by how much Apple must have realised that there is no getting around that if you want a quality/compelliing VR/AR experience and basically completely went with it.
So my bet is that they might have some moderate success over the long term with this product, and maybe even somewhat “iphone” the market by being the quality leader. But they risk it being a flop, at least in terms of ROI, simply because it’s not a good product idea and never was. But I’m old enough now that my opinion isn’t really trust worthy regarding younger folk.
I feel the same way. It seems crazy to me that people would wear this thing out in public. The idea of wearing it to record important moments with friends and family is a little gross to me as well. I also think the price is simply way to high. But I’m also a little further out of step with mainstream consumer culture than I once was.
There’s definitely truth to “Apple people will buy anything Apple makes”, though this will really put that to the test at this price. I also think most of the truly unique functionality it provides will get boring over time. A lot of this stuff can be accomplished without wearing goggles.
My biggest question is if adoption will be too slow to encourage software development. I think they’ll need to drastically lower the price to get enough people to buy it that software development makes financial sense.
Only few years ago, if you wore headphones out in public, you were a sociopath. Now, it’s normal (an sad)
I think that’s been normal a bit longer than a few years but I see your point
Yea. The thing is clearly still at prototyping stages, and they’re probably paying close attention to what developers want to and can do with it.
I think they’ll remember their iphone experience where it took a few models for it to really get going, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see them persevere (thus, no doubt, the price).
After having sat with it for a while, I feel like I can see where they’re coming from. They’re going for the best most intuitive UI between the user and the “spatial computer”. I think they’re banking on that experience being novel, good and compelling or even addictive enough that people will want to use it. We shall see I guess.
The photos thing isn’t their killer app for it and I think they know that. It wouldn’t have been hard to implement I suspect, as it’s essentially just recording the pass-through video. It’s the gestures, pass-through, eye-tracking, video quality and the spatial OS that they’ve worked on. And I wouldn’t be surprised now if there’s something there. Not for everyone, and definitely not all the time, but maybe something. Or it’ll be an awful flop.
Yeah I think something like this will eventually be pretty mainstream. AR seems like the future in a lot of ways. This is just an early step.
I just edited the post to include a quote from The Verge on exactly this (the…odd, almost dystopian nature of these headsets), and I agree completely.
Reminds me a lot of Google Glass, which was a failure, and it was considered too unnerving while being much less intrusive.
If it does flop, I’d be curious if they’re not concerned about it hurting their brand then they lost money. I don’t follow apple very closely, but I don’t remember the last really failed product
I would have no problem using it… if I was alone.
I have a feeling that these tools make sense under specific circumstances. For example, a doctor could use AR to help them diagnose an issue or operate. Similarly an operator of specialised equipment could use it to enhance their perception. Pilots in fighter jets use something like this already, the do not have a screen in the cockpit, they use their helmet. But those tools are not consumer oriented, they are business oriented and Apple does not have a footprint there.