I'll have to second this. It's not even on Apple's homepage! I hadn't heard it mentioned for months before today. It had its niche share of users who actually found it useful, but apart from them it seems that the world is not ready for spatial computing (or maybe current spatial computing isn't ready for people, who knows?).
I'm hoping the new Valve headset will be like, 60% of what the Apple vision is. My boss got the Apple vision on launch day and it is really premier hardware, visuals that are almost exactly like seeing the thing you're looking at in real life, and the hand sensing / interactivity was the best I have experienced, even though it still had flaws.
But being tied to Apple's ecosystem, not being really useful for PC connection, and the fact that at least at the time developers were not making any groundbreaking apps for it all makes it a failure in my book.
If Valve can get 60% of that and be wirelessly PC tied for VR gaming then even if they charge $1800 for their headset it will likely be worth it.
I have a vision pro (obtained on day 1 for development purposes), and have given demos of it to a number of non enthusiast/non techie people.
All of them immediately hate that it’s bulky, it’s heavy, it messes with your hair,
messes with your makeup, doesn’t play well with your glasses, it feels hot and sweaty. Everyone wants to take it off after 5-10 minutes at most, and never asks to try it again (even tho the more impressive 3D content does get a “that’s kinda cool” acknowledgment).
The headset form factor is just a complete dud, and it’s 100% clear that Apple knew that but pushed it anyway to show that they were doing “something”.
Exactly. More expensive than a high end desktop or laptop while having less useful software than an iPad. No thanks.
If it were around the $500 point I’d pick one up in a heartbeat. Maybe even $1000. But $3500 is nuts for how little they’re offering. It seems like a toy for the ultra rich.
I assumed the price would eventually come down. But it seems like they’ll just cancel the project entirely. Pity.
I’m assuming Vision Pro is viewed as what the Newton was to the iPhone. It will provide some useful insight way ahead of its time but the mainstream push will only happen after a number of manufacturing breakthroughs happen allowing for a comfortable daily driver UX. Optics and battery tech will need multiple generational leaps to get to a lightweight goggle / sunglasses form factor with Apple-tier visuals, tracking, and battery life…
Magic Leap 2 and HoloLens 2 proved that we still haven't cracked the code on AR/XR. Similar price point, plenty of feasible enterprise use cases for folks willing to pony up money to hire Unity or Unreal devs. And I'm sure there are enough of them tired of being flogged to death by the gaming industry. But they both went splat.
It's going to take a revolution on miniaturization AND component pricing for XR to be feasible even for enterprise use cases, it seems.
It has incrementally improved, and gotten cheaper, to the point that I now see them everywhere. When they first came out, they were pretty expensive. Remember the $17,000 gold Watch (which is now obsolete)? The ceramic ones were over a couple of grand.
But the dream of selling Watch apps seems to have died. I think most folks just use the built-in apps.
The $17,000 Apple Watch was a (rather silly) attempt to compete in the high end watch space. However, they also launched the base "Sport" model at US$349.
Not really anything like the watch, the existence of a stupidly expensive "luxury" version doesn't change the fact that the normal one started at $350.
I think the current rumor is that development of a cheaper XR headset has been shelved in favor of working on something to compete with Meta's AI glasses.
