https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/01/apple-vision-pro-available-in-the-us-on-february-2/
Apple Vision Pro will be available beginning Friday, February 2, at all U.S. Apple Store locations and the U.S. Apple Store online.
I honestly doubt this will take off, but it'll be interesting as a tech demo for what AR/VR can be at the highest end.
Apple Vision Pro will be available starting at $3,499 (U.S.) with 256GB of storage. Pre-orders for Apple Vision Pro will begin on Friday, January 19, at 5 a.m. PST, with availability beginning Friday, February 2.
So 256GB for all those movies and games you'll want to play on that long plane ride they keep showing as a way you'll definitely use these.
I'm in the Apple ecosystem pretty hard, but we'll really just have to see what rich folks do with this thing.
How many movies do you actually need to store on the device itself? Apple has been all in on streaming stuff so you'd only ever need to actually download stuff when you're planning on going offline.
That said for it's price that's hilariously small storage, but simultaneously peak Apple.
Does it matter? Download a few movies for an 8 hour flight. Not a big deal on any device.
Also I still think this product is horrendously overpriced but it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
And, you'll want it full quality if you are gonna be watching in 3D. Since compression messes with the depth in 3D movies by not compressing the left eye and right eye view both the same as they should be to look right. It doesn't know or take into account what the other eye is currently supposed to see. It treats both sides as individual flat pictures, and only makes sure they make sense with the frame before and after.
Until someone makes a whole new compression algorithm with 3D in mind, it'll dramatically lower the quality of the depth compared to how much it lowers the quality of the video.
Also 4k is not nearly good enough for VR. You need a lot more clarity. I know it because... reasons.
4k is low for 360 or 180 degree content. But it's still fine for virtual flat content.
The current generation of headsets are the first ones where 4k content is just as legible on a virtual screen as it is in real life. There are less physical pixels, but with the "temporal antialiasing" that comes from the subtle movements of your head frame to frame, a 4k screen looks just as clear in VR as it does in real life on a Quest 3 or equivalent.
But yes, for stuff that takes up your whole field of view, especially on a poorly optimized viewing program not specifically using the proper software layers system specifically tailored to each headset for the best clarity. 8k still isn't "enough", but it's the best that can be easily done so far for longer or streaming video.
Either the program for viewing those videos needs to be properly optimized, or we just have to put up with drawbacks for now. Even properly optimized video players for VR have other drawbacks. Like they can only play files you have on hand, not streaming. But the videoplayer built into Virtual Desktop can at least give an example of how much nicer those other video players could look if they put in the effort.
This is going to be an interesting launch. There's been rumours about low production volumes so availability may get pushed back much further than February. Which will make judging the initial impressions harder when there are so few devices in peoples hands (or on heads).
I'm also a bit surprised by the lack of build up from Apple. There's been no push on whatever third party apps are going to be ready for this. The Apple Watch had two dedicated events in the lead up to launch. Even the press release seems a bit basic, most of the imagery seems to be reused from the first events press materials.
This is the biggest product introduction since the iPhone but it's being handled rather quietly.
I feel like this is the version they'll put in the goodie bags for celebs at the Oscars to let them create a bunch of buzz. And then next year there will be a version that only costs $2000 or something - still expensive but less out of reach for mortal humans.
They’d have to drop it significantly for most people to buy. If I had a spare $2k I’d upgrade my Mac.
The anti-consumer apple BS aside. The lack of PC support or support for any real GPU that has a chance at running Games in full resolution, makes this dean on arrival for most people using VR.
Apple is pushing productivity as the main application for Vision Pro, to the point they don't even call it VR but spatial computing instead. I don't think gaming is really for a focus for them at the moment, instead they want to try and tap into other markets who aren't using VR currently.
they don’t even call it VR but spatial computing instead.
I was under the impression these were meant to be AR glasses, not VR glasses? Either way, I'm not really sure who their target demographic is supposed to be at that price point.
It can be both, the device isn't transparent at all and the user can control how much of the real world they are seeing at any time. It's all cameras that create the AR effect. Applications can be anything from a floating window in the real world or a full VR immersion.
I wouldn't consider it AR because it's still a fully virtual environment the user is interacting with, granted it's built convincingly from the camera feeds. If the lens were a clear passthrough into the real world+layering virtual elements over it then I think it falls under AR.
It's mostly semantics though. The line between AR and VR has been fuzzy since we started shoving camera passthrough on devices.
Wow, your comment is the first time it's been made clear to me that this thing isn't actually see-through and that's just a screen on the outside. I thought it was essentially a sleeker looking Hololens. I've had the wrong impression of this thing the entire time, and now I'm much less impressed by it.
Lol, yeah, and what's crazy to me is they have the inner eye tracking cams projecting the user's expressions back to that outer screen. Incredibly complicated implementation soaking up precious compute cycles, for no real reason or benefit. Normal Apple things. I think the outer screen goes dark if the user goes into "full VR" mode to watch a movie or whatever
Imagine getting written up by your supervisor because you dared to look away from your monitor take your VR headset off to give your eyes a break
they don't even call it VR but spatial computing instead.
Ugh. Apple marketing with their need to create words for existing tech is just so damned pretentious.
I mean this thing barely has Mac support, why would it have PC support? It’s basically its own computer you put on your head.
It just seems like a slap in the face to say buy one and then also need to buy another headset if you want to fire up a game with friends who don't own this headset or want to play something more serious than the apple arcade offers. Apple could have easily made this possible but that would require them to give users the ability to interface with non apple hardware and that's a bridge too far for them.
It’s no more a slap in the face than having to get an Xbox to play with your Xbox-owning friends when you have a Switch.
Being that a developer can implement cross play between Xbox and switch, Is Nintendo the bad guy for not “interfacing” with an Xbox?
Well, it's more of a slap in the face in the sense that it costs ten times the price and has no content right now (which will change, I'm sure)
Ten times the price as what though? There simply isn’t another product to compare it to. It is basically an M2 powered laptop you strap to your head with industry-leading displays.
When a similar headset comes out with a Snapdragon Elite X inside then there will be a pint of comparison.
Except most of the time developers do implement cross play and in this case Apple is the hardware developer and the software developer with no one else to point the finger at. You could also buy every console twice for the cost of the AVP so yeah it's more of a slap in the face.
You are basically saying it’s Nintendo’s fault for not putting Smash Bros on Xbox because Nintendo is the software and hardware developer.
I mean, yeah?
You’re too angry at Apple to make a salient point aside from the fact this product is expensive.
Honestly have no idea how we are talking about smash bros and Nintendo. The point is that it's a locked down headset and for the price you would think it could at least check the boxes of its predecessors. Price is one thing but to forego support for existing open source VR standards is another.
Your original point is that it's a slap in the face that you can't play VR games with your friends. So I used an analogy of it being a slap in the face that you can't play Smash Bros with an Xbox owner.
The Vision Pro is a full computer strapped to your head, it doesn't plug into anything but a power source, but it will have an app store, and it's up to developers to put their games on the store. People on iPhone can play Roblox, Genshin Impact, Minecraft, and a few other games crossplatform, so the precedent is there.
It's a really interesting product but unless you're a trust fund kid you basically can't afford it.
The apple strategy usually is to make a stupidly expensive product that everyone laughs at (remember the wheels for the tower computer), and then the actual product they expect people to buy.
They seem to have forgotten the second bit, but I'm wondering if something's going to come out in 6 months called just the Apple Vision
I have the equivalent of a trust fund and I'm not stupid enough to buy this for $3.5K.
Go get yourself a BigScreen VR for $1K, and then a fuckin' full top of the line prebuilt with the remaining $2.5K.
You can get VR working for a lot less than 2.5k which is my point really. Sure you can spend that much money if you want, but there's no requirement to.
Isn't this like 2.5k? There's plenty of adults who can afford this without a "trust fund"
You're making it sound like it's 25k
Really curious what this year will hold for this device. Even more curious to see the price tag and features on Gen 2
I don't really get the point of all this. Sci-Fi movies are trying go convince us for a very long time that interacting with a computer by standing and waving your hands around is the future but for me it just looks tiring. I prefer my keyboard and mouse. We'll see how many people Apple can convince. Maybe they are right and you just have to use it to believe it...
I think exercise apps might be a prime application for something like this, things like Beat Saber (or even SuperHot VR of all games). As a package designer, I'm kind of salivating at the prospect of being able to use something like this to see things in 3D as I'm working on it (should an app like that even become available), but it would still never completely replace a flat screen for serious work (plus the Apple headset just uses hand gestures for everything).
Otherwise, yeah, I'm not too hopeful about this thing's prospects, unless developers knock it out of the park with some killer apps for it. $3500 for a 1st-gen, Apple-only headset is just a bit too much for me. I paid ~$1000 for a Valve VR Headset and even that seemed astronomical at the time, but it works with nearly everything else, so it doesn't even feel like I'm in a walled garden. With this Apple headset, you're limited to Apple's store and that's it, I'm not sure that I would trust trying to jailbreak a $3500 piece of equipment and possibly brick it.
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.
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.
With dwindling iPhone sales (it's not for a lack of market share, but smartphone purchases are down as people aren't refreshing their phones every year anymore), Apple needs to find the next accessory akin to Apple Watch that will further line their pockets. I mean, the stock price can't just remain stagnant, right?
And those people weren't wrong at the time. The iPod wasn't successful in its first few generations. It didn't become successful until several generations later after they changed a bunch of the problems with it. One of the aspects that makes Apple so successful is that they're willing to stick with a new product for many years while they keep working on figuring out what the device needs to become a good product.
It was successful immediately because there literally wasn’t any other player in the world that had its capacity and physical size.
Everything else lacked mass market appeal because it couldn’t hold enough songs or couldn’t fit in your pocket.
Not to mention the vast majority of the population didn’t know how to pirate music, and most music stores were shit compare to iTunes(and that is not a great endorsement).
The only huge barrier to adoption was the initial FireWire only model, but I’d be willing to bet even with that restriction they sold more units in the first year than any other model of music player.
Whether or not it was successful initially isn't a matter of opinion, it's matter of fact. Compared to other personal music players on the market, the number of ipods was not high for the first several generations.
How very truthiness of you. Are you a Republican? Go to this linked webpage and search for "Sales of iPod by Year" and you'll see that the first couple of years of ipod sales are relatively very small
Wow I had no idea (or didn't remember) those even existed. I thought it came out around 2005 when the nano was released.
Yeah that's it exactly. When it finally exploded, it EXPLODED, but for the first few years it had relatively very low sales. But Apple stuck with it and kept fixing the major flaws that it initially shipped with, and once enough flaws were fixed it went gangbusters seemingly overnight.
Same with the apple headset. It has some major flaws, as people have rightly pointed out, and as a result it's not gonna be a huge seller at first. But Apple will likely stick with it and keep improving the flaws and eventually it might be another iPod level success. Or it might be another failure like the touchbar era laptops. Time will tell.
They are lucky that no one decided to compete with them. They have some features that aren't otherwise to market yet. So their price is less obviously bloated. If other headsets had been positioned to directly compete, they would have been able to do so at the 2000$ price range.
Overall, any new company entering the market is good news. VR is finally ready for normal people. Quest 3 basically crossed the line to being worth recommending as a virtual monitor alone, not to mention all it's other capability.
So at this point, more exposure of what VR is now can only be a good thing. All it's missing now is being considered a normal thing to do. The more "normal" companies making VR headsets, the better. As long as their headsets don't suck. Cuz even if I wouldn't want to use it anyway, it getting bad press still affects the rest of VR.
I don't care if it's over priced, as long as it doesn't end up having any glaring issues. People lamenting that it's too expensive are at least still interested, and can be redirected to a more reasonable headset. And even if only influencers end up having the apple headset, as long as they like it, it's a net positive for the whole community.
Oh.
So you can expect at least three revisions of this before they inevitably release one with optional controllers for when you need any amount of precision. And you'll need a Apple Vision Pro 4 to be able to use them.
They've already promoted the idea of connecting a dualsense controller for playing games.
That doesn't sound like it would work, except for very basic PSVR1 style games, where again they were hobbled by poor controller setups, where you could pick between several options that were awful in different ways. The Oculus Touch controllers were so much better for literally everything, and at this point are over 7 years old.
I mean, they can be fun too, Astrobot is pretty neat. You just can't compare them to a full fat experience like Half Life: Alyx.
4K per eye is great resolution, more than anyone really needs, but they're going to be relying a lot on woolly hand gestures, and as such is going to struggle even for simple games like Beat Saber.
There's an argument they're not going for gamers here, which is fair enough, but answering emails while having my glasses pressed into my nose isn't something I'm particularly interested in.
I had a look. I'm not immediately convinced it's as revolutionary as the iPhone. It's a fancier Quest but the battery is in your pocket rather than on the front of your face. Guessing the internals are similar spec to a regular high end iPhone or iPad.
It will almost certainly feel a lot slicker than the Quest, which isn't hard because the Quest feels like several layers of jank sellotaped together, but I don't think it's $3000 slicker.
Saw an article that claimed there were issues in a demo, but they weren't allowed to film and that Apple reckoned that would all be fixed before release. Smart money would be on those issues being present at launch.
I’m an early adopter and probably Apple’s target audience. I sure as hell don’t have the cash on hand to buy it and I’d consider financing it but - I have such a bad taste in my mouth from the AR/VR concepts over the years. The Quest was a flop for me. The XReal Air too.
They’re fun, for a bit, then they sit in a corner. I could see it being useful on my work from home days but outside of that, my phone is the most compelling partner to my Mac.
Given Apple's track record i wouldn't bet against it succeeding, but... I don't get it. My oculus that cost 350 does 95% of what the apple device does but costs literally 10 times more.
It's really not. Apple are going for productivity. Try reading text all day on your Oculus and see how that goes.
This thing isn’t for me, but the screens alone make it worlds superior to any Oculus ever made.
Does yours have _creepy stalking eyes _ on the front? I thought so. Clearly the killer feature that justifies the extra 2000 bucks
Do your research. This has been possible with Oculus for some time: https://imgur.com/Kfmt88E
I feel like Apple is taking a different approach to VR than other companies, making it a more mobile device than competitors.
I can't wait for this to be released all the fan boys to spend a fortune on it and make apple even more billions in profit for a product that isn't going to be worth it.
But at least it will help with vr and ar. I really think this could be the last bit of momentum needed to get it moving and I'm excited for that future.
I don't see mass adoption at this price point. What's the point?
I really don't see the productivity sell. I do see it as functional entertainment to get more use out of an 800 square foot apartment in NYC. If my partner and I disagree on something entertainment wise I can throw them on. That's about it..
The point of this isn't mass adoption. It's to get developers to start developing for it. I'm sure within a couple of years they'll release a non pro version for like a 1500 and people will be all over it
Yes we are saying the same thing, mass adoption that was for this moment in time at that price point.
Lower the price point and it will be more common, essentially when it's no different than the price of a laptop.
I don't see mass adoption at this price point.
VR isn't doing well already. With this price point it's going to fail real fast.
They will perfect this tech over the next few years, then put in mind-treading tech too, and sell it to you for 5 bucks. Don't mind the mind-reading tech, it's only there to make the product better, I promise.
