shit’s too expensive.
As others have pointed out:
- It’s still pretty early. Many devs might not be very far along.
- There aren’t many locations. You have to travel to California, London, etc
Yeah, because California is famously a dev desert.
Or maybe it’s because nobody sees any point in such an expensive gadget without a clear purpose or use case?
I feel like Apple caters to itself, both with its business practices and with its own forays into what they call innovation.
Who are you aiming at with this product right now in this economy?
- Young to Middle Aged
- Middle Wage to Wealthy Customers
( Those who are starting to go into adulthood trying to learn how to make ends meet or those that are the powerful minority of this difficult economic scale we all live on)
How do you expect developers to make reasonable margins on this when the product is prohibitively expensive? Let’s be honest: it’s almost $4k (starting at prices are not realistic).
Any developer going into this is basically a guinea pig
Apple is notorious for cannibalizing development ideas and making their own “iSteal Version” of the app.
Is it a cool product? Maybe? Do we NEED THIS NOW?
No, NOT AT ALL.
Does it sound like a shiny new carrot for its investors and shareholders? ABSOLUTELY.
Developers are still trying to figure out what this is, and they are not making that easy or appealing at the moment.
Building stuff now is just a foothold for the mass market version. But supporting Vision Pro doesn’t mean that has to be your whole app. The vast majority of the code can be shared with phone/ipad/mac apps.
The problem is that getting developers to invest in the platform now is critical to make the mass market version viable. Nobody is going to rush to buy even a cheaper headset if all they can run is floating iPad apps.
Potential customers need to be sold on viable use cases for the headset, and those won’t appear without a lot of developer support.
All it takes is one killer app.
I think you’re under estimating their partnership with Disney. They have an obscene amount of entertainment IP and millions of people willing to spend thousands on experiences on their own. Add in Apple’s expansion into sports and ESPN’s massive amount of sports coverage and that’s another big potential audience. They’re making a push into 3D capture, which is very different than just putting a TV in a wall.
I think you’re underestimating the appeal of floating iPad apps, too, though. Hearing it won’t sell systems, but demoing it will. This is the device the entire market has been waiting for. Everything else has serious compromises that the Vision pro doesn’t. The resolution and passthrough latency are game changers.
I think you’re overestimating the tech. We’ve had these features in VR already for the better part of a decade; sports, tv, games, floating apps.
The problem is two-fold:
The tech apple is developing is way too expensive for their target demographic.
VR is a novelty like 3D movies.
I say this as someone who owned the original HTC Vive and subsequently a Oculus Rift (and 3D tv and projectors).
If VR is going to be mainstream, it’s going to be because Sony or Microsoft push it through their console market.
TL;DR
It’s going to take a lot more than a great App to sell their multi-thousand-dollar VR experience.
VR and AR are not the same thing.
We haven’t had sports. We’ve recently had a very small handful of bad options from a company that has no production capability or experience in Facebook, which also had the flaw that most enthusiasts avoid them like the plague because of how repulsive their spyware is.
Floating screens don’t work without sufficient resolution. The text must be clean to function. This is the first genuine option with resolution that’s functional.
Games have been massively limited by either being tethered or being on laughably bad hardware. An untethered headset with actual rendering capacity is an entirely new ball game.
The vision pro is not the mass market version. It’s an enthusiast device and dev kit. But expecting it to fail because Apple waited until it was possible to make a product that doesn’t suck doesn’t make sense. It’s far and away more than anything that currently exists, with many features nothing else has come close to. There’s nothing else out there with full quality passthrough, let alone with almost no latency. There’s nothing else out there with the resolution. There’s nothing else out there with the untethered performance capacity. There’s nothing else out there for content with anything near the expertise or range of content Disney has behind it. And there’s no one else out there capable of popularizing tech like Apple. Do you know how many more iPhones Apple sells than any console manufacturer does consoles? How many more iPads? How many more MacBooks? How many more Apple Watches? Apple doing something makes it mainstream.
I love your enthusiasm and optimism, but I think it may be overwhelming your objectivity.
You seem to think this new Apple device is going to be a smash success. What’s your timeline for Apple to develop it sufficiently to be a success like you’re expecting it to be? 1 year? 3 years? 5-10? What is your yard stick for it to be considered successful?
I appreciate that you believe that because Apple sells a lot of devices that their devices are mainstream. You may not have heard but Linux has just surpassed MacOS in terms of the number of people gaming on the platform, largely attributed to Steam/Valve and their Steam Deck/Proton software.
Valve has been heavily involved in the development of VR headset technology from the beginning. We’re not there yet. I applaud Apple’s efforts and their development of VR/AR is only going to benefit the market.
Don’t misunderstand; I want them to succeed in this new endeavor, I just don’t think they will.
It won’t be 1 year. I’ve said repeatedly that this is a devkit. In 5 years, when they’ve had time to get the mass market version out there, there will be at least 10s of millions of apple headsets in the wild.
Apple makes as much money on gaming as Valve does. They’re also not new to AR. They launched ARKit in 2017 and it’s both powerful and easy to use; it’s just not massive due to the limited value of AR on a phone.
The fact that it’s Apple is a big part of the fact that it’s going to be successful. Except Facebook’s obscenely incompetent attempts after the entire planet already knew that they were cancer, nobody has seriously invested in popularizing VR, let alone AR. Valve made it viable, but they haven’t marketed it.
The bigger part is that the hardware, up until today, is fucking awful. It’s possible to get past that and still have an enjoyable experience, but the displays are shit and the lack of resolution is extremely high strain on your eyes over time. Vision Pro is the first hardware out there that is actually good. I named a whole stack of features that you can’t get anywhere else, and probably won’t be able to for a couple years. It’s a genuine giant leap forward in hardware.
VR is only a novelty in the context that the current tech isn’t fully mature. They’re presently too big, not comfortable enough, and the image quality/graphics isn’t there yet. Further, the AR/MR side of the equation is even less mature than VR itself.
Whenever the above issues are properly resolved, these devices will 100% not be a novelty. And they will be resolved in time.
I absolutely agree that AR/VR are still in their infancy. And every effort at further developing the technology is fantastic, if we want it to become widely adopted. Unfortunately I don’t see multi-thousand-dollar headsets becoming mainstream.
Unfortunately I don’t see multi-thousand-dollar headsets becoming mainstream.
Yeah I’ll agree there. And I think that’s presently a function of how immature the tech is and how expensive it is to make anything that feels like it’s even approaching what a mature product could be.
If they can solve for this stuff and then get the price down on the tech, things will change a lot and this stuff definitely will not be a novelty. Home desktop computers were a novelty and quite expensive when they came out too but over time that’s changed.
I just don’t think the comparison to something like 3D TV is fair in this case.
All it takes is one killer app.
I think it still takes more than that. Half Life Alyx was that “one killer app” for VR gaming, and yeah it made waves, but there was no staying power. VR is still a very niche market in gaming.
One killer app can pull enthusiasts in, but it will need strong followthrough to keep interest strong.
I don’t really think it was. It’s something compelling to a small niche of Valve fans, but it isn’t something to draw a casual audience. And the hardware has to be sufficient and wasn’t close.
They’re partnering with Disney. If they have a Star Wars ship and an Encanto house (or whatever recent one) for people to explore, in actual high quality (because the main limitation for VR so far is that the hardware wasn’t close to good enough for anyone who’s not an enthusiast), plus support for floating your MacBook screen and phone/tablet apps, that’s going to move a lot of units. If they do it with Apple’s huge marketing behind it, it’s going to move more.
Not this version. The second cheaper version after they’ve been hearing about it from early adopters and can walk into an Apple Store and demo it, though. Apple is very good at getting people to see their stuff how they do.
Not drawing many YET. Your app needs to be somewhat far along in development in order to need real world testing. Even Marco Arment, who makes a podcast app, has said his app is not ready yet.
Ah yes, podcasts. That thing famous for its popularity in VR/AR
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It’s a whole new OS in a new product category. You’re assuming what apps will be popular in visionOS, but since Apple is trying to make this a desktop computing platform, readers and podcast apps will be part of that platform.
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The podcast app isn’t the point when the issue is why developers aren’t signing up for early spots now and instead pushing appointments to later.
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I agree with you that “time in the oven” is wise and needed. I think putting a bit more effort into making it easier to develop would help. At the moment, it sounds like those development kits have their own challenges to entry for most devs. I also think the rate of purchase or adoption will definitely take some time.
It takes some time to become familiar with new APIs etc. But with a new product category such as AR/VR/spatial computing with so many new paradigms I would think that getting real hands on experience early is vital.
Otherwise developers end up wasting a lot of time creating concepts that ultimately don’t work well in real world use. The visionOS simulator is no substitute for actually wearing a headset.
The fact that developers aren’t grabbing every chance to get hands on with the hardware doesn’t sound great to me. I suppose the main question is is that because Apple are not handling developer access well enough (I’ve seen a lot of complaints about the limited locations of the labs), or is it because developers are not interested in the platform.
I wonder if a lot of it is also just tech fatigue. It might just be me, but I’m more interested in getting better versions of things we already have explored thoroughly. Better software. Better repairability. Better longevity. When I saw the whole Vision Pro announcement my thoughts were… “Huh neat”. And that’s it. It takes a lot more than “huh neat” for me to even consider it at this point. And obviously the price point. I don’t think I know a single person who thinks this is worth it. There is no way I could even come close to affording this especially at launch. None of this helps the tech fatigue. I mean hell I wish my microwave had less tech than it does, and I already select it based on how little touchscreen and weird buttons it has. And it’s spreadding. The amount of touch based controls in cars scare the crap out of me. Think about how much this stuff distracts you. Or observe someone who’s driving one of these things. Beep boop here, some notification there, and perfectly reasonable options for a normal car to have locked behind some kind of paywall… And now they’re coming for my fridge. And my oven. I mean I could also just be getting older. There’s that. And I’m not even in my 30s 😭
Was eading up on the use cases for this, one of the big ones is mixed or augmented reality. But they don’t give developers access to the cameras yet. There isn’t really much you can do with it outsode of games like the Oculus but they aren’t marketing it as such.
They’re not giving direct access to the cameras, but developers don’t need that raw data. Developers still have access to the data the cameras see. The choice to do this probably stems from a security perspective. This way there’s no possible malicious app or site that can actually record you in an intimate environment like your home. It’s the same way ARkit has worked for years on the iphones and ipads.
That’s a very good point re: privacy. ARKit does work really well for scene detection like the room shapes, plane detection stuff etc but I was mostly thinking about the VisionKit stuff too (not the VisionOS ones) wheee you want to be smart about things. E.g. if you want to be able to detect text in mixed reality (like real time translation) or if you want to recognize objects not just by their shape.
It is going to be a privacy nightmare I agree but it is also severely limiting the possibilities of the software right now
