I think a lens worth looking at that suggests this is a misstep is:
Apple has only ever convinced people to bring a new device with them once, with the iPod.
They realized that a wallet sized device that could playback your entire music collection would be a huge hit, and convinced people to effectively carry around a second wallet (plus headphones). This was the first and only time they convinced people to carry around a new device on a daily basis, and it was relatively easy since jeans had two front pockets anyways.
Around the same time, cell phones started also filling the role of second wallet, for a period, some of us even carried around 3 wallet sized devices. Then the iPhone just combined two of them (eventually all 3 kinda).
Macbooks / laptops, are basically just the equivalent of textbooks in our bookbag, iPads are just a fancier version of that book that can also work with a pencil. Apple Watch just replaced our regular watches. No other Apple product (or anyone else’s for that matter) have convinced us to carry a wholly new form factor of device around with us.
The Vision Pro replaces … nothing … like the iPod it’s a wholly new device to carry with you, but unlike the iPod the form factor is not a natural extension or replacement of an existing form factor. The closest they come is glasses, and this is what I think Google Glass got right, they aimed at a form factor that could be worn like glasses all day without too much distinction, whereas the vision pro is more like a pair of heavy ski goggles. It’s a hard and uncomfortable ask to get people to wear it in almost any scenario.
Even the iPod was entering an already established market (consider the Sony Walkman).
Although that is interesting… I found some stats and 385 million walkmans were sold over 30 years. About 10. Million per year. Another report claims 51 million VR headsets in the last 5 years or about 10 million per year… (I started this comment planing to be negative, but now I wonder if Apple is not hitting the market at just the right time…)
Why in the world do you think this is supposed to be a mobile product? Just because it can run on a battery doesn’t mean they intend for consumers to wear it around town.
My impression is that it’s for use in the home and/or office. I wouldn’t walk around town with anything worth thousands of dollars out on display and I think most people are similarly minded.
What purpose does a MacBook serve that an office from the 1980’s wasn’t equipped to handle?
AR devices in an office serve the same purpose as existing tools, but there are ways that they can improve efficiency, which is all the justification office tech needs. Shit, my monitor costs 2/3 the price of the Vision Pro, and an ideal piece of AR hardware would be immeasurably better. Meetings in virtual space would negate how much meetings suck remotely. Having unlimited screen real estate would make a huge difference in my line of work. Also, being able to use any area in my home or out of it with as much screen real estate as I want would be huge.
I’m not saying that the Vision Pro does all of those things, but it does some of them, and I’m 100% okay with it being the thing that introduces the benefit of AR to those without imagination.
Shit, my monitor costs 2/3 the price of the Vision Pro
Two professional 27" 4k dell monitors cost ~$800 combined. You overpaid like a mf if you spend $2000 on a monitor.
and an ideal piece of AR hardware would be immeasurably better
Let me know when someone announces one.
Meetings in virtual space would negate how much meetings suck remotely
Lol, citation needed.
Having unlimited screen real estate would make a huge difference in my line of work.
Agreed, as long as using those screens didn’t require wearing a pair of ski goggles that will die after 2 hours.
Also, being able to use any area in my home or out of it with as much screen real estate as I want would be huge.
An understandable point… I would argue that it’s a much better practice for your mental health to have a dedicated space that you work to create a clear mental separation between home and work but it may work if that space is virtual.
and I’m 100% okay with it being the thing that introduces the benefit of AR to those without imagination.
Those benefits don’t take imagination they just take having seen a sci Fi movie in the past 20 years.
Two professional 27" 4k dell monitors cost ~$800 combined. You overpaid like a mf if you spend $2000 on a monitor.
Sorry, but you don’t understand the needs of the market that we’re talking about if you think that a pair of ~$400 dell monitors is equivalent to a high-end display. The difference between $800 and $2500 amounts to a few days’ worth of production for my workstation, which is very easily worth the huge difference in color accuracy, screen real estate, and not having a bezel run down the middle of your workspace over the 3-5 years that it’s used.
blah blah blah
I already said that I’m talking about the Vision Pro as a first step in the direction of a fully-realized AR workstation. As it currently stands, it’s got some really cool tech that’s going to be a lot of fun for the guinea pig early adopters that fund the development of the tech I’m personally interested in.
Dude the last thing I needed for my “talking to an idiot online” bingo card was “Dude the last thing I needed for my “talking to an idiot online” bingo card was “(ignores point) aPpLe fAnBoY””
Hell if I know, I don’t even know what all it can do. There are probably dozens of things it can do that all kinds of laptops can’t do though.
I don’t use 3D modeling for my work but I can see how a 3D stereoscopic display could be highly useful for scientific research, as those have been part of the high end Nvidia Quadro GPU feature set intended for scientific research for many years already. Those would be coupled with a 3D monitor, and that kit of 3D monitor and Quadro GPU probably already cost more than the Apple Vision does.
Basically I assume it can do all the 3D VR and AR stuff that laptops can’t do in general. Whoever needs that for their office work might buy it, but I don’t need one.
I used to be a professional 3D modeller at an architecture firm, we bought the Oculus Rift, we bought HoloLens, we bought almost every single VR headset that came on the market, and you know what they got used for? Basically nothing. Some marketing stuff and occasionally we would use them to walk a client through a design, though 99% of the time this was just done on a normal monitor or TV.
It’s not easier or faster to 3D model in 3D than it is in 2D, since the human brain can’t enter 3 different dimensional constraints at the same time. The only real benefit of VR is that it’s better conveying a sense of scale and presence. But that’s at the cost of having to wear a sweaty bulky headset with limited battery life or a long cord, having to pay for an even more powerful computer than normal to be able to render everything, waiting for CAD companies to rewrite their software and come up with usable 3D interfaces, and not being able to share the experience with anyone and see the same stuff like you do on a monitor.
Even In a business like architecture that you would think would be ideally suited to this, there’s still almost no real benefit compared to a traditional monitor setup. Quite frankly the biggest real world benefit is just that if you’re in an open plan office you could shut out your coworkers, but again, at the expense of wearing ski goggles and headphones all day.
They’ve only (in this century) produced a new product people take with them once, iPod. Except for the iPhone. MacBook Air. iPad. Apple Watch. AirPods.
You clearly didn’t understand the same point that everyone else did. Maybe reflect on that rather than assume you’re the only one able to do percentages.
It’s not about the product, but the kind of device. Before the iPod, people didn’t really carry around computer like devices with them in the pockets, did they?
Maybe you’ve heard of this device that plays music on tiny headphones, great for listening while walking. It was called a Walkman. Came out in 1979. By the time the iPod came out, there were plenty of digital music players; I carried a Rio Volt (CD-ROM full of MP3s), but the Nomad was the one CmdrTaco compared iPod to.
Many people carried Palm Pilots, Newtons, cell phones, pagers, portable games (GameBoy, Game Gear, Lynx), film & digital cameras. I used to carry so many gadgets. Sharp/Tandy PC-3 was a great little calculator/computer, so was HP-35s.
Apple’s done an amazing job of making vastly better versions (eventually, in some cases; I waited for gen 3 iPod with USB), and folding multiple things into a device, and competing with themselves. So now most of those devices are gone, and we just carry an iPhone (or lame knockoff). I have a bunch of portable game devices, which live on my desk because why carry them? iPad rolled over the MacBook for portable computing. And now Vision Pro is going to roll over that (in a couple versions, probably).
The “one-hit wonder” assertion just requires someone to have lived a cave since 2006.
Yes. It’s Apple’s second most profitable platform. If I go out to a café (which admittedly was before pandemic), half the people have one, much more than laptops now. In business, it’s a super common way to take around documents, presentations, etc. The kids really love them.
I’ve been in love with it since launch, it’s a magic book.
I think a lens worth looking at that suggests this is a misstep is:
Apple has only ever convinced people to bring a new device with them once, with the iPod.
They realized that a wallet sized device that could playback your entire music collection would be a huge hit, and convinced people to effectively carry around a second wallet (plus headphones). This was the first and only time they convinced people to carry around a new device on a daily basis, and it was relatively easy since jeans had two front pockets anyways.
Around the same time, cell phones started also filling the role of second wallet, for a period, some of us even carried around 3 wallet sized devices. Then the iPhone just combined two of them (eventually all 3 kinda).
Macbooks / laptops, are basically just the equivalent of textbooks in our bookbag, iPads are just a fancier version of that book that can also work with a pencil. Apple Watch just replaced our regular watches. No other Apple product (or anyone else’s for that matter) have convinced us to carry a wholly new form factor of device around with us.
Even the iPod was entering an already established market (consider the Sony Walkman).
Although that is interesting… I found some stats and 385 million walkmans were sold over 30 years. About 10. Million per year. Another report claims 51 million VR headsets in the last 5 years or about 10 million per year… (I started this comment planing to be negative, but now I wonder if Apple is not hitting the market at just the right time…)
Why in the world do you think this is supposed to be a mobile product? Just because it can run on a battery doesn’t mean they intend for consumers to wear it around town.
My impression is that it’s for use in the home and/or office. I wouldn’t walk around town with anything worth thousands of dollars out on display and I think most people are similarly minded.
What purpose does it serve in an office that your MacBook doesn’t?
What purpose does a MacBook serve that an office from the 1980’s wasn’t equipped to handle?
AR devices in an office serve the same purpose as existing tools, but there are ways that they can improve efficiency, which is all the justification office tech needs. Shit, my monitor costs 2/3 the price of the Vision Pro, and an ideal piece of AR hardware would be immeasurably better. Meetings in virtual space would negate how much meetings suck remotely. Having unlimited screen real estate would make a huge difference in my line of work. Also, being able to use any area in my home or out of it with as much screen real estate as I want would be huge.
I’m not saying that the Vision Pro does all of those things, but it does some of them, and I’m 100% okay with it being the thing that introduces the benefit of AR to those without imagination.
Two professional 27" 4k dell monitors cost ~$800 combined. You overpaid like a mf if you spend $2000 on a monitor.
Let me know when someone announces one.
Lol, citation needed.
Agreed, as long as using those screens didn’t require wearing a pair of ski goggles that will die after 2 hours.
An understandable point… I would argue that it’s a much better practice for your mental health to have a dedicated space that you work to create a clear mental separation between home and work but it may work if that space is virtual.
Those benefits don’t take imagination they just take having seen a sci Fi movie in the past 20 years.
Sorry, but you don’t understand the needs of the market that we’re talking about if you think that a pair of ~$400 dell monitors is equivalent to a high-end display. The difference between $800 and $2500 amounts to a few days’ worth of production for my workstation, which is very easily worth the huge difference in color accuracy, screen real estate, and not having a bezel run down the middle of your workspace over the 3-5 years that it’s used.
I already said that I’m talking about the Vision Pro as a first step in the direction of a fully-realized AR workstation. As it currently stands, it’s got some really cool tech that’s going to be a lot of fun for the guinea pig early adopters that fund the development of the tech I’m personally interested in.
Dude the last thing I needed for my “talking to an idiot online” bingo card was “(ignores point) aPpLe fAnBoY”
Dude the last thing I needed for my “talking to an idiot online” bingo card was “Dude the last thing I needed for my “talking to an idiot online” bingo card was “(ignores point) aPpLe fAnBoY””
Hell if I know, I don’t even know what all it can do. There are probably dozens of things it can do that all kinds of laptops can’t do though.
I don’t use 3D modeling for my work but I can see how a 3D stereoscopic display could be highly useful for scientific research, as those have been part of the high end Nvidia Quadro GPU feature set intended for scientific research for many years already. Those would be coupled with a 3D monitor, and that kit of 3D monitor and Quadro GPU probably already cost more than the Apple Vision does.
Basically I assume it can do all the 3D VR and AR stuff that laptops can’t do in general. Whoever needs that for their office work might buy it, but I don’t need one.
I used to be a professional 3D modeller at an architecture firm, we bought the Oculus Rift, we bought HoloLens, we bought almost every single VR headset that came on the market, and you know what they got used for? Basically nothing. Some marketing stuff and occasionally we would use them to walk a client through a design, though 99% of the time this was just done on a normal monitor or TV.
It’s not easier or faster to 3D model in 3D than it is in 2D, since the human brain can’t enter 3 different dimensional constraints at the same time. The only real benefit of VR is that it’s better conveying a sense of scale and presence. But that’s at the cost of having to wear a sweaty bulky headset with limited battery life or a long cord, having to pay for an even more powerful computer than normal to be able to render everything, waiting for CAD companies to rewrite their software and come up with usable 3D interfaces, and not being able to share the experience with anyone and see the same stuff like you do on a monitor.
Even In a business like architecture that you would think would be ideally suited to this, there’s still almost no real benefit compared to a traditional monitor setup. Quite frankly the biggest real world benefit is just that if you’re in an open plan office you could shut out your coworkers, but again, at the expense of wearing ski goggles and headphones all day.
They’ve only (in this century) produced a new product people take with them once, iPod. Except for the iPhone. MacBook Air. iPad. Apple Watch. AirPods.
So you’re 16% correct, and falling.
You clearly didn’t understand the same point that everyone else did. Maybe reflect on that rather than assume you’re the only one able to do percentages.
It’s not about the product, but the kind of device. Before the iPod, people didn’t really carry around computer like devices with them in the pockets, did they?
Maybe you’ve heard of this device that plays music on tiny headphones, great for listening while walking. It was called a Walkman. Came out in 1979. By the time the iPod came out, there were plenty of digital music players; I carried a Rio Volt (CD-ROM full of MP3s), but the Nomad was the one CmdrTaco compared iPod to.
Many people carried Palm Pilots, Newtons, cell phones, pagers, portable games (GameBoy, Game Gear, Lynx), film & digital cameras. I used to carry so many gadgets. Sharp/Tandy PC-3 was a great little calculator/computer, so was HP-35s.
Apple’s done an amazing job of making vastly better versions (eventually, in some cases; I waited for gen 3 iPod with USB), and folding multiple things into a device, and competing with themselves. So now most of those devices are gone, and we just carry an iPhone (or lame knockoff). I have a bunch of portable game devices, which live on my desk because why carry them? iPad rolled over the MacBook for portable computing. And now Vision Pro is going to roll over that (in a couple versions, probably).
The “one-hit wonder” assertion just requires someone to have lived a cave since 2006.
Genuinely curious, do real people actually use ipads?
Yes. It’s Apple’s second most profitable platform. If I go out to a café (which admittedly was before pandemic), half the people have one, much more than laptops now. In business, it’s a super common way to take around documents, presentations, etc. The kids really love them.
I’ve been in love with it since launch, it’s a magic book.