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Apple Vision Pro Could Take Four Generations to Reach 'Ideal Form'

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/02/11/apple-vision-pro-fourth-generation-ideal/

Realizing the Apple Vision Pro headset's "ideal form" could take four successive generations of the device, some people in Apple's...

Apple Vision Pro Could Take Four Generations to Reach 'Ideal Form'::Realizing the Apple Vision Pro headset's "ideal form" could take four successive generations of the device, some people in Apple's...

37 comments

Bdtrngl

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So it's a gimmick for rich and/or stupid people, which we knew anyways.

DJDarren

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That’s one way to view it.

On the other hand, it’s a first product in a new line for Apple who have an idealised notion of what they want it to achieve, but realise the technological limitations that exist before significant R&D is carried out. The first gen of any tech sucks in comparison to what comes later.

JiveTurkey

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I think the marketing for this thing misleads people on the technical limitations.

DJDarren

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Yeah, it’s weird because I distinctly remember them touting it as a dev kit at the launch event last year, yet there’s nothing at all about that on the website now.

Lmaydev

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Yeah just like smart phones.

ViscloReader

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Yes and no, smartphone where affordable for more people than the vision pro. Also they solved real problem. In the case of the apple iphone, it was a combination of a lot of tools into one small device so that was nice. The apple vision is just a different VR headset marketed as 10x the price of a meta headset.

Lmaydev

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They weren't originally and they didn't solve a problem. They added unneeded features to a communication device.

hightime

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I think that was the iPad.

qwertyqwertyqwerty

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Cars didn’t “solve a real problem” at first either.

takeda

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I find it fascinating how much advertising they pushed on release.

I am not an apple person so I had no idea about it, but on that day I saw it in a there different places. First two I understand: Lemmy post, an ad on some website, but most amazing one was on my kid's YouTube, started playing Marques Brownlee review after alphablocks episode. Like WTF? I don't watch anything about Apple, don't watch his reviews, but somewhat YouTube though that it was most relevant video for the content that was watched.

RGB3x3

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That has nothing to do with Apple. Marques Brownlee pulls millions of viewers, and YouTube doesn't suggest based on your watch history anymore, they suggest based on what keeps people watching.

And I don't think I remember hardly any videos where Marques is sponsored by the company who makes the product he's reviewing.

Pohl

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It sounds like they solved some problems with mixed reality stuff that nobody else has been able to solve. Getting pass through to be perfect is a pretty big deal if you care about this stuff. It also sounds like the UI they designed is very good.

The price is completely outrageous, this thing is not going anywhere if they cannot get it down to 1k ish. And let’s be real, nobody really wants to be in a headset. And the culture is not going to accept people in headsets they way they did phones.

I guess hats off to them for making the best headset device on the market. But, I still think the headset market is a dead end.

Ucalegon

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I think it's more of a "willing to put in a consumer product" issue than that they're unsolved issues. Other brands don't have the automatic sales that a product with an Apple logo has at whatever price, even for a "Pro" product that can be more expensive. Meta just can't sell a $3500 headset no matter how good were to be.

Shadywack

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Well said, and agreed. The headset market is a dead end for anything beyond niche. Their price point is ironically appropriate given the lack of mass appeal, so they have to go with a mind numbingly high ARPU to make that business unit work for them. Culturally such a product is a non starter, especially as people read about the isolating effects tech has had lately. The fever dream of the "Metaverse" is now mocked widely.

Things like the auto IPD are like a dream come true though, and then using the eye tracking as a mechanism for driving the UI/UX. That shit was fiction just ten years ago in Iron Man. I could just imagine how cool it would be to navigate the menus in a game like Elite Dangerous with something like that, but the engineering needed to develop that is a non starter for the lack of install base, not to mention the financial condition of companies that are not established like Apple is, app developers, etc.

JiveTurkey

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I don't think they had any other choice than to make the eye tracking great. They don't make GPU hardware and the hardware they do make can't possibly handle the processing power its resolution requires. Other headsets have understood this limitation and weren't trying to design an OS. Again apple has no choice here. They don't have desktop machines to provide input to the headset and they are way too far up their own ass to allow input from a PC.

JiveTurkey

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I think if other companies threw price limitations out the window like apple did they could have easily made something similar. Also the fact that you still need another headset to play the best parts of what VR already has is ridiculous. It's $3500 TV with no inputs.

xenomor

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I’m pretty sure that ‘ideal form’ here is a pair of regular-ish glasses. That ain’t happening in four generations unless you’re going to be real creative about what a generation is. It certainly isn’t four years away, like the analogies to iPhones and Apple Watches implies. That’s going to require an absolutely wild amount of innovation to achieve. And, even if that happens, such new technology is going to take many further generations to become remotely affordable enough to be priced for anything like mainstream adoption. Pile all that on top of the lingering curiosities about what problems this interface model actually solves, and the cultural shifts that will be required to get people comfortable to accept pervasive face cameras in social settings, and you’ve got a product line that has niche appeal written all over it for at least another decade or two.

gedaliyah

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What a stupid headline. That's true of every product. The iPhone 4 was the first good one. The same is probably true of the telephone. This is just an excuse for Apple to get more ink.

anlumo

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iPhone 4, the one famous for “you’re holding it wrong”?

gedaliyah

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I mean the iPhone 4, the one famous for the first significant display upgrade, the first front-facing camera, and the first one with facetime. I'm no Apple fanboy - in fact I've never owned one. But it was the first modern smartphone. The original iPhone launched without an app store. First generation products are always overpriced and experimental. They are always missing core features (imagine buying a phone with no front camera today). It takes a few generations.

anlumo

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I generally agree, but I'm saying that it still had some early adopter issues.

btw, I had an iPhone 4 and used it for a long time.

Etterra

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Please don't give Apple an excuse to shout about this not being their final form.

BmeBenji

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“Early Access Hardware” is a new one lol

bruhduh

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Economy slowly becomes "early access live service" everything, rent, healthcare, software, hardware, cars (bmw, mercedes, tesla subscription precedent) "you won't own anything and be happy", i kinda feel vibes of demiurge's "happy farm"

SkybreakerEngineer

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As an Apple product, does it become semi-perfect if it absorbs Android 17?

bassomitron

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Took me a sec to get the reference, lol. One day Perfect Cell is going to show up wearing one of the future iterations of these ski googles and declare humanity unfit to have such tech.

SkybreakerEngineer

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P is for Priceless, the tech on all your faces...

witty_username

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Yeah just like the ipod and iphone. Oh wait

Rooki

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Yeah like the iphone 15 or is it the up to date one currently? I dont know anymore with that yearly rerelease. And if i know apple, the next gen would cost 6k instead of "just" 3.5k because its apple, it goes up never down on next release.

bassomitron

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the next gen would cost 6k instead of "just" 3.5k because its apple, it goes up never down on next release.

Not to be annoying, but their phones haven't always been on an upward trajectory, price wise.

https://www.androidauthority.com/iphone-price-history-3221497/

First-generation iPhone (2007)

First-gen iPhone original starting MSRP: $499

Inflation-adjusted first-gen iPhone price: $733

iPhone 3G (2008)

iPhone 3G original starting MSRP: $199

Inflation-adjusted iPhone 3G price: $281

Etc etc. The price doesn't actually dramatically rise again until the iPhone 7, surprisingly enough. I want to say that's when all flagship phones began charging around $800 for their entry level versions.

Rooki

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The thing is, you compare old apple ( real chads, good inovation for CHEAP as advertised ) to new apple ( greedy *ss corpos that want to double the prices if they could ).

DJDarren

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You could argue that the 5th gen iPod Classic was when it really hit its stride.

Sure, it had been wildly successful until that point, but I have a 4th gen, and as beautiful as it is, it sucks next to my 5th gen. The refresh rate on the screen is atrocious, and it refuses to charge via USB. Meanwhile my 5G has a lovely colour screen and works with USB without a trouble.

Railison

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My hunch about this product category is they want to build a headset that will give immersive experiences like games and other 3D apps… but they can’t build that product with the current tech so they’re positioning it around GPU-light tasks like videos and productivity apps.

JiveTurkey

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I thought the same thing. Apple doesn't make GPUs, VR gaming at the crazy resolution this headset uses is going to take a high end desktop GPU but Apple's desktop line up also doesn't have the GPU power it needs and also doesn't support installing discrete GPUs. This headset has no possibility of being used on a PC so a lot of work went into finding ways to limit the GPU workload.

echo64

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Okay, but given several other companies, they already made this exact product.

umbrella

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then why release it?

Rustmilian

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Same image : 1000001125