Posted by mfiguiere 4 days ago
This is why it always frustrating to read any negative news on companies like Apple or Tesla. They have some annoyingly sycophantic fanbase that always wants to downplay and misdirect any bad news.
If Microsoft made some AR glasses that sat unsold and they suspended production, no one would show up to say "actually, it is not being discontinued, nothing to see here". Nor should they.
But those are not white-knighted by a fanbase that always feel like they need to protect the multi-billion dollar company from negativity.
Using myself as an example, there are companies I like. I happen to like Nintendo for example. I still call a failed product a failure (e.g.: Wii U), and sometimes I even dislike their successful products (I always hated N64 for that retarded controller).
Why Apple "fanbase" abandon all critical thinking is baffling.
No one thought a $3500 device was going to be mainstream when we see people complaining about phones being above $1k.
The fact that the first one came out with the "Pro" name made this even more clear.
Headlines like this make it seem like it "failed" in some way that is only because we are putting expectations on this to match other Apple products but this is just like the other "Hobby" projects that apple used to classify products like the Apple TV.
The market for AR/VR is incredibly early (if it manages to take off at all) and the technology just isnt there yet. But while we wait for the hardware to catch up why not start working on an idealized vision of what it could work like with its own caveats. I would much rather this than the xreal's and similar headsets way over promising (borderline lying in their marketing) and severely under delivering.
Misleading FUD from Macrumors trying to get clicks.
Apple certainly hasn’t helped themselves here by burning so much developer goodwill over the last few years. They may be marketing it as a “Pro” device currently but one of the biggest selling points seems to be immersive video, and Netflix and YouTube both saying no to developing an app for it is not a good look.
On the indie side, in just the last few days I’ve seen multiple Mastodon posts from developers regretting building a visionOS app [0] or considering preventing running their existing iPad apps on visionOS. [1][2]
[0] https://mastodon.social/@harshil/113350016890131979
Never had sound on, have disabled more and more notifications, steadily fewer and fewer complications until I finally just use the the silly Snoopy watch face instead.
What I do love it for is all the health tracking, and that I have about a decade of data on myself now. Really just activity level and resting heart rate primarily.
I'm at the point that I'd be similar (or, maybe more?) for a display-less slim Apple Fitness Band loaded with all the sensors of the Apple Watch.. and then go back to my analog wristwatch.
Apple Watch is a status symbol in the same way Airpods and iPhones are. You're paying partially to be seen wearing them. The same is not true for Vision Pro or any headset. You'll just look like a Alamy stock image that comes up in an image search for 'technology'.
Anecdotally, when I go to a restaurant, the server is often wearing an Apple Watch.
I cannot extrapolate what that would look like for AVP...
It needs very high-res video streams which basically no internet provider/CDN can offer at scale. 40Mbps+ HEVC just isn't scalable. So the only content is whatever can be downloaded to the device itself. A few games? A cool screensaver experience? It's all cool, but mostly novelty tech.
You can stream even a 1080p movie to it and it will look fine, because it is playing in "physical" space, not filling your view completely. It is like watching a floating television or movie screen.
Nobody can stream 2x 4K to my Apple VR headset. I can barely get a single 4K stream to my TV!
Not for bandwidth reasons, but for latency reasons. A 20ms delay (RTT) between your head moving and the camera moving is a one-way ticket to hurl city.
If you did not mean that, please reread my original comment again.
But by RTT, I mean the additional latency induced by going to a central server over the internet and back. You've also got latency from input->sensor, sensor->packet, [packet-flight-time], frame-gen-time, [response-packet-flight-time], response-packet->decoded-video, and signal->display-update.
You simply should not put the video feed any further away from your headset than a computer on your desk. Even then, a wired connection gives much better results, because the experience is consistently timed.