224 points and not single positive comment in the comments, sigh.
I think this is awesome, as the Quest Pro is almost on par with the features of the Vision Pro (except Lidar), e.g. hand & eye tracking + color passthrough. Sure, these might be not of the same quality (especially when it comes to passthrough), but this allows people to verify their experiences/concepts for the Vision Pro before they actually get their hands on one.
I don't think that Meta, nor Apple will have a problem with this tbh. Maybe because of the assets/icons used in the HUD, but those can easily be replaced if needed.
This is a great idea even if the hardware was quite different. I honestly can't imagine developing for visionOS armed only with a simulator. And since Apple afaik doesn't have a hardware devkit, this sounds miles better.
This is like fancy VNC. Apple doesn't have any problem with VNC, in fact they explicitly support it.
I think Apple can feel fairly safe that the experience will always be so hacky and low quality that it's not going to be a threat to Vision Pro. In the meantime it helps developers get a head start developing for Vision Pro which is only good for Apple.
If you imagine a scenario where this works well enough that it's a viable alternative to actually buying a Vision Pro for development ... I can forsee it being a problem for them in terms of (a) direct sales - I could easily see shops fitting out their dev team for 1/4 the cost with Quest Pros instead of Vision Pros but more importantly (b) concern that it will lead to crappy apps being developed. That is, devs using non-Apple hardware will naturally curtail what they build to things that actually work in the dev hardware they are using. That means advanced features of the real Vision Pro won't get properly supported (or omitted altogether).
Of course, that is still miles away from where this is now. But it seems tantalising that it could possibly go there.
I don't think in the short term Apple will budge: neither the Vision Pro nor the dev toolkit are available, so lack of apps is probably a larger issue than some apps not utilizing the Vision Pro to its fullest extent.
Agree. According to rumors, Apple’s yield on the Vision is only 20%, meaning that out of every 100 coming from the factory only 20 are good enough to meet Apple standards. There are doubts that they can even meet their 400k quota
They have three trillion reasons to protect their IP from appearing on the lenses of a Meta Quest or an HTC Vive. All it takes is for the wrong person to post on Threads or Twitter and a pontificator to bloviate into the wrong podcast and it all winds up on a Bloomberg terminal. AAPL has a lot riding on this.
They can charge a premium because they never sacrificed quality in any systemic way (obviously you can comment with your pet issues but the bottom line is that Apple has kept the quality bar very high for decades). That trust is earned and they charge accordingly.
Some immediately jump to Harvard MBA teachings that caused such widespread lack of quality, or capitalism, whatever. In my opinion a deep focus on quality is rare in any business. It is very hard to scale and keep in a business’s DNA. One reason small businesses continue to be formed and attract customers (beyond “buy local” pandering) is that solid small businesses are run by dictators that create an entity that is an extension of themselves, sacrificing nothing. Therefore they can charge a premium. Extending that to large companies is very difficult and requires solving an incentives and reputation puzzle to make each layer of the organization focus on quality.
I patronize businesses that maintain their quality and I pay for it. Life is too short and I have too much spare cash not to. Apple achieves such standards. You may have to upgrade hardware every few years but that’s part of the price.
It’s the “longtermism” mindset that goes against the grain of human behavior. Eating well, working out, maintaining friendships, putting in consistent effort - the fundamentals of quality. These are values that are hard and I try and notice it when anyone does it - people or businesses.
> the Quest Pro is almost on par with the features of the Vision Pro (except Lidar)
I find this questionable given the reviews people have given Vision Pro. I have used quest pro, and it is pretty good as a high end gaming style headset but nowhere near the experience people describe from Vision Pro.
There is also a free to download Vision Pro UI panel simulator made by Nova, who have an excellent UI dev package on the Unity Asset Store. The demo is for the Quest Pro and source code with APK is on GitHub.
I was extremely impressed at how well this demo functioned on my Quest Pro. Obviously I haven’t used the Apple HMD, but I was able to easily eye-select nearly every UI element in the demo (resize boxes were a bit wonky) and could even do the whole “pinch with hand in lap” thing from the Apple reveal.
Surprisingly enough, I came away preferring where Meta is going with the whole “Direct Touch” thing (Quest users should have it under the Experimental tab in Settings). Lack of physical feedback (when using hand tracking only) is definitely an issue, but treating the virtual displays like physical touchscreens actually isn’t too bad. It’s definitely my preferred control scheme when I’m not using the controllers.
I can even sorta type at a reasonable enough speed for emails/instant messaging - though nowhere near good enough for coding. Essentially you input text like a Boomer on an iPad (ie: slow one finger pecking) but at twice the speed because you can use two hands.
This strikes me as a very strange opinion, especially now when Threads has 100M users 5 days out and is expected to support ActivityPub. In any case: since the beginning, pointing and laughing at Mastodon (a single AP implementation) was always like saying "Yahoo Mail will never win the electronic messages war!!" - it misses the point, like, entirely.
If anyone insists on forcing me to run myself into penury and put myself in legal jeopardy, just to support my competitors, then I would close up shop.
However, Apple has a wee bit more clout than I do. I suspect that it would not happen.
Apple's setup is basically "you can only cook pancakes made in an Apple mixing bowl on an Apple skillet" and Apple controls 63% of the skillet market in America. I have other mixing bowls that work perfectly fine for making pancakes, Apple is using its monopoly power to force people into buying their mixing bowls.
As an engineer; I want homogeneity, interoperability and lower cost/effort to ship features. We can see that the market also wants this and that's probably why everything is now an Electron app.
As a consumer; I want an affordable, high quality product that supports all of the software/games I like to use.
The task of getting my MacBook to run Linux and play video games is massive on the part of Apple. I understand that interplay is intricate, complex and expensive to implement so it's not fair to force Apple to implement anything they don't want to - for instance have the government declare Vulcan a mandatory standard for all OSes.
As someone who values the freedom we have to innovate, I don't know what the right way to convince everyone to play nicely together is but ultimately it's about stimulating competition to drive innovation.
The current environment stifles innovation, either through ring fencing developers/users or adding a storefront/marketplace tax to distributing a product, killing new products before they get off the ground.
The Apple Silicon hardware is remarkable, but outside of web browsing, basic web development and video editing - it's artificially limited in it's capabilities.
Windows is a dumpster fire, holding onto market share due to its mammoth support for software and Microsoft won't improve Windows unless there is competition.
Perhaps the solution is not to force "platform" companies to build anything, but instead think of software like we did old school repairable hardware and implement regulations that require vendors to offer the equivalent of schematics.
Perhaps regulations that require platform developers to distribute their software/drivers under permissive open source licenses such that people can implement competing platforms. That way no one is compelled to do anything but if a disruptor (like say, SteamOS or Asahi) wants to compete, they can freely build a better product without needing to reverse engineer APIs and worry about getting sued.
Perhaps OS vendors be regulated such that they must offer a means for third party software to be run. That way developers could distribute for platforms through their own marketing efforts and the value proposition for OS marketplaces/app stores is a better ROI - rather than being "the only option"
Perhaps hardware should be regulated such that it's "jail-breakable". That way disruptors could offer competing platforms that are compatible with the original (like the ROMs available on some Android devices, or Ubuntu OS or something).
...Or maybe that would disincentivize the giants from building anything because there's nothing other than investing in innovation that would protect them from losing market share
I'm not advocating to open source all the things under GPL or something - feel free to keep Photoshop, Word and The Witcher 3 closed source - we just need some kind of balance that lets me, as a consumer, have choices so that the giants can fight it out and build the best products.
> As an engineer; I want homogeneity, interoperability and lower cost/effort to ship features.
And as an engineer you should know that the best products never come from a committee or standardization. Bluetooth is a shit show. Apple’s implementation on top of Bluetooth is remarkable.
> We can see that the market also wants this and that's probably why everything is now an Electron app.
Do you really want to cite Electron apps as an example of how great interoperability is?
> As someone who values the freedom we have to innovate, I don't know what the right way to convince everyone to play nicely together is but ultimately it's about stimulating competition to drive innovation.
You have all of the freedom you want. You can buy a PinePhone and a Framework laptop.
> The Apple Silicon hardware is remarkable, but outside of web browsing, basic web development and video editing - it's artificially limited in it's capabilities.
Yet millions of people use Macs for development of Android and iOS apps, music and video editing, basic productivity, etc.
> Perhaps OS vendors be regulated such that they must offer a means for third party software to be run. That way developers could distribute for platforms through their own marketing efforts and the value proposition for OS marketplaces/app stores is a better ROI - rather than being "the only option"
Or alternatively, people can use their own free will and choose a more “open” alternative.
> And as an engineer you should know that the best products never come from a committee or standardization.
That's literally my argument, lol
> Do you really want to cite Electron apps as an example of how great interoperability is?
Never said it was good, only that it's an example of the market driven need for platform interoperability of software.
My point was actually that Electron is bad and the fact that platform providers don't play well together is the reason why we, as consumers, must suffer Electron apps.
> Or alternatively, people can use their own free will and choose a more “open” alternative.
The idea is to stimulate competition, open or otherwise, to give consumers more choice and make startups/disruptors more likely to succeed. For instance, try install Uber on a PinePhone.
For example - it shouldn't require a multi-billion dollar company investing at a loss, risking lawsuits, to disrupt the gaming market away from Windows (Steam Deck).
> The Apple Silicon hardware is remarkable, but outside of web browsing, basic web development and video editing - it's artificially limited in it's capabilities.
- Gaming
- Containerisation
- Nested Virtualization
- CI/CD workflows building for MacOS and iOS targets
- CI/CD workflows running automated browser testing for Safari
Which could be remedied without regulations by Apple collaborating with existing projects attempting to make these things possible, something Apple refuses to do.
A lot of HN skews quite shockingly authoritarian, tho usually in a “no MY authority is the best, not <insert major one>” contraryism, and you’ll see a TON of alt-right talking points pop up.
Shouldn’t be a shock tho: HN skews American-style “libertarian” (just look how gooey it went over Andrew Yang & his nonsense) which is “very right wing but also likes weed” in practice.
You’ll also see a lot of semi-disguised Andrew Tate & Jordan Peterson nonsense if you spend enough time in the comments
Not everyone is like that of course, but it’s there. Very there.
Good luck at tearing apart things I can point to VOLUMINOUS real world examples of. Because, while Libertarians can talk a good game, their actual actions demonstrate what they are very clearly.
Your denial of reality to defend your ideology being one example itself. Face it: you’re just feeling emotional that your pet faith isn’t respected.
> It surprises me how willing much of the technical HN crowd is wanting the government to have more power.
They already have a monopoly on use of physical force and detention. There is no 'more power' to give them.
You are confusing 'enacting legislation' with 'giving power'. And anti-trust regulation would cover anti-competitive behavior (if we ever enforced it), so no legislation has to be enacted. It is only a matter of determining if it anti-competitive, which it appears not to be.
Rest easy, there are more impactful things to worry about than government overreach into the practices of huge society-shaping entities which are larger than most other nation's governments.
Note: When will a corporation become big enough that we concede that without the monopoly on force and detention it is a de-facto government? At that point can the libertarians give up the 'hands off corporate affairs' schtick?
There is nothing more dangerous than government power. The government has a monopoly on legalized violence.
> Note: When will a corporation become big enough that we concede that without the monopoly on force and detention it is a de-facto government? At that point can the libertarians give up the 'hands off corporate affairs' schtick
There is absolutely no BigTech company that I can’t use my own free will not to use.
Very few governments in the world have an absolute monopoly on violence. Most countries allow some private ownership of weapons, have self defense laws and/or have private security companies. Many countries also allow private mercenary forces that can operate outside their borders.
People like to assume that governments and corporations are inherently incompatible, but that’s just not true. A government is just whichever organization(s) has the most power within a geographical region and a company can very easily become the de facto government in an area if its power is unchecked.
From a contemporary perspective there are plenty of examples of large multinationals effectively controlling and directing smaller, less wealthy governments. Even in big countries with strong governments, the influence of large corporations on what laws get passed and how they are enforced can become significant.
The cool thing about BigTech these days is even if you don't use them, they still know about you, or you use them indirectly via other products and cloud services. They have their fingers in every proverbial pie.
Of course there isn't anything more dangerous than the government. That is the whole point of a monopoly on force and detention. If done properly it is used to keep people from harming others.
Also, the cell phone in your pocket broadcasts your location a few times a second, and the corporations with that data love working with the government.
Well, you aren't forced to live in a house or use a toilet or buy your food. If your conditions are 'forced' then I guess the bar is pretty damn low, but everyone I know wants to operate in modern society and to do that one requires the use of services run by large quasi-monopolistic corporations.
Do you think anyone is convinced by your simplistic rhetorical device?
Let's some questions which don't lead immediately to your 'thought-terminating cliche':
What does having a monolith contribute to society both in terms of value and innovation?
Are there examples where this ended up being beneficial?
Is it a good idea to allow the logical conclusion of free market capitalism be one monopolistic entity which has stifled or bought all competition? What do you think there is to gain by doing such a thing?
But the simulator is designed to help you test your app, just like iOS apps that require touch/gestures/low battery/etc. can be tested on a macOS machine. If I were Apple, I wouldn’t voel their building tools that run on Quest in order to test your Vision app. What would be the point? It seems like such an opportunity cost that’s better spent on other things.
You think testing VR apps in a simulator on a laptop is more indicative of the final experience than another VR headset that almost has feature parity?
I imagine you'd probably still want to use the simulator to ensure your code will run on the actual Apple hardware, but for verifying actual UX/behaviour I'd take the Quest Pro over that any day.
I think Apple will disagree with that “almost has feature parity” claim.
I have not used or even seen neither product, so I wouldn’t know whether they’re right, but do not rule that out, either. For example, the video resolution on Apple’s product is so much higher that it may cross a threshold w.r.t. user experience.
Also, if they did come out with a Quest-based simulator, I think it would be very bad for their marketing.
I would expect ‘the internet’ to say “it’s a Quest, but with a much higher price tag”. How would they go on from there to selling these devices?
> Neither does a Mac, yet it's the only device that's allowed to develop for the headset.
I'm willing to bet that you can develop a prototype for an app in Unreal Engine right now, and I'm willing to bet that Unreal Engine will be ported to Vision OS and that you can get that code running on there pretty quickly after release.
I don't see how this is very much different from how it'd be to develop Windows or Xbox applications. I might use be able to develop some core code with .NET core, or even a full game using cross-platform tools like Unreal or Unity.. but if I'm actually shipping a product I can't expect to get far without using Microsofts officially supported toolchain.
I'd say it's reasonable to be annoyed that you're not allowed to run Mac OS on non-apple hardware. But it's not reasonable to be annoyed that Apple isn't spending millions on officially supporting an SDK for their devices on other OS's, just for a very small niche set of users.
"RUMOR: Why Meta removed the Depth Sensor at the last minute
It allowed you to see people without clothes. It was not it's purpose, but during testing: someone noticed that by using the sensor someone could develop “creeper apps”
Ah yeah you’re right. Apologies for the mixup. However that link isn’t very good at explaining either, since it doesn’t describe Apple’s TrueDepth tech for the “depth sensor” which is a generic term for many technologies, whereas TrueDepth is specific.
Is this stereoscopic? I don't see any mention in the readme or demo video link but based on the description of hooking the compositor, unless it's translating rapidly for left/right eyes or the simulator gives left+right textures in real time, this would be monoscopic right?
It's not like anyone who wants to develop for the Vision Pro is going to get a Meta Pro and decide they don't care about the Vision Pro. Also it opens the door to people who already have Meta Pros who want to develop/port apps to the Vision Pro.
If I was serious about developing for the Vision Pro I'd eat the difference between a Meta Pro now and then selling it after the Vision Pro ships.
but what’s the upside still? They’ll have developer units available this month supposedly so availability isn’t the big barrier.
It’s like saying they should enable iOS development on windows. It doesn’t make brand sense to do it. The slight upside of a few devs who won’t buy a Mac isn’t worth the deterioration of brand prestige by pushing people to multiple platforms.
Also there’s a not insignificant cost associated with maintaining tooling on multiple platforms when they rely so significantly on the vertical stack
I guess it really depends on who gets the developer devices. I have a feeling they will be more locked down than the Arm mac developer units (which they gave to almost anyone). If they are stingy then it’d make some more sense to allow lessor hardware to be used by everyone else but I totally see you point. I forgot about the dev units since I had assumed when they were announced that it would be very hard to get one. You make a good point.
I think by limiting the simulator to an obviously non-realistic output, they avoid the uncanny valley and unrealistic-judgement of using their operating system in lower-speced hardware.
Meta can't shut this down. Sideloading has been a feature of the Quest since the start, stopping this would represent a paradigm shift for developers of the platform.
> The project reinforces the idea that the Quest products are of low quality (evidenced by comments here).
They are. That's why they cost $400 (game console territory) instead of $3,500 (OLED TV or iMac territory).
"Comments here" will tell you the Quest is a failed product after 20 million units sold. The people on this website have never been representative of the market at-large.
You still do need to make an account and give them a phone number/credit card to get into developer mode and enable adb. They'd be dumb to, but stopping people is entirely within their ability.
Really wish sideloading was a thing you could do on your own/offline like most other android devices.
> "Comments here" will tell you the Quest is a failed product after 20 million units sold. The people on this website have never been representative of the market at-large.
It's amazing how many people miss this crucial point. Apple and Meta share a high level ambition – to dominate the next wave of computing platform -- but that's pretty much the only similarity between them.
If you look at Quest and Vision Pro and think about the constraints placed on the teams building them it seems like:
1. Apple's teams are given the constraint of producing an amazing user experience in terms of screens, gesture control, etc. Price flexes upwards to deliver this.
2. Meta's teams are given the constraint of achieving a mass market price, and the quality of the product flexes down to achieve this.
Apple's position makes sense to me. They are no longer an underdog[^1] and can fast follow anyone who has a more compelling vision for AR/VR which launches before they get theirs out the door.
Meta needed to get this going before Apple for obvious reasons. That's why, for example, of the 20 million units you referred to as being sold, 5 million of them (!) had safety recall notices because the fabric of one of the components caused such serious skin irritation that some number of users were hospitalised.
Meta can move fast and break things (& people), but Apple can't do that any more. (No judgement of either company.)
That all makes sense… but the bit I can't fathom is why Facebook didn't take the approach of building from the high end down? I don't know of any complex consumer electronics or hardware companies which don't take the approach of launching massively expensive "pro" hardware which is the beachhead for driving down price over time. E.g. autofocus in cameras began life on the giant cameras which sports photographers used to use, but over time it became cheap enough to manufacture that all cameras shipped with it.
Do you think Meta genuinely thought they were just a few years away from delivering a mass market-ready device (for playing BeatSabre and talking to cartoon versions of your friends)?
My guess is that Meta saw themselves as being curators of the best bits of the existing AR/VR proposition: tie all the best bits of the existing field of hardware and software companies and put them into a package at a $400 price point. Just iterate on the existing ideas a bit and focus on getting the price down.
Apple seems to have looked at the existing ideas around UX (input and screen quality especially) and scope (what do I use this for?) and decided that there needed to be dramatically different (better, in Apple's view) solutions.
Given Meta's internal rhetoric about Quest not retaining users, I'd say Apple was wise to approach this from first principles. But I really don't know what Meta has been working on for so long?
If I think back to the original iPhone launch, it made literally every other phone on the market look preposterously antiquated (to the point that RIM execs famously believed it was "impossible" for Apple to actually be delivering the phone they demoed). Vision Pro does that to the Vive Pro gathering dust in my cupboard, but I'll need to use one to say for sure whether it does the same to the Quest 3. My hunch is that the disparity isn't as huge as it was with cell phones, but it doesn't seem like Facebook can simply ignore Vision Pro and continue with their current product roadmap: I would bet on Apple (a hardware company with a lot of scale advantages) figuring out how to make the baseline experience achieved with Vision Pro cheaper for a consumer device much faster and more easily than Facebook will figure out how to achieve that same baseline experience starting from their $400 price point.
Wdyt?
[^1]: Inside Apple around the time iTV / Apple TV was introduced, it was characterised as a "foot in the door": Steve Jobs kept calling it a "hobby" in public, and the strategy changed around a lot. Since then they've introduced several products which have either seen strategy shift over time (iPadOS multi tasking…) or which were known to be a "foot in the door" (Apple Watch), but they don't acknowledge them as such, they just pretend that the plan all along was for Apple Watch to be a fitness tracker, and that they did not in fact spend 30 minutes of the keynote talking about sending digital heartbeats to each other as if it was the most meaningful thing ever.
>That all makes sense… but the bit I can't fathom is why Facebook didn't take the approach of building from the high end down? I don't know of any complex consumer electronics or hardware companies which don't take the approach of launching massively expensive "pro" hardware which is the beachhead for driving down price over time.
The entire PC 'revolution' and Intel/x86 dominance was based on going from the lower end up. ARM later entered the picture again going from the low end up. Both strategies are viable depending on the business in question.
A great point! I guess I don't really consider processor design/fabbing to be consumer electronics/hardware. The eventual customer is a consumer, but that consumer (IMO) is a customer of an OEM like Dell.
The entire 'microcomputer' consumer business started from the low end and eventually displaced mainframes from everywhere but some financial institutions. Apple itself started from the low end (Apple I and II computers).
> That all makes sense… but the bit I can't fathom is why Facebook didn't take the approach of building from the high end down?
High end VR already existed. There were dozens of Windows headsets that lifted the performance ceiling far beyond what the Quest or even the Reality Pro will ever be capable of. The harder challenge is pushing in the other direction - building a minimum viable product that doesn't suck and can make it to mass market. Meta has proven they can do that, Apple cannot. You're right to highlight that the pressure is on them to do better, but maybe they should have considered that before announcing a headset this early. Apple's history is rife with visionary products that were too early and too expensive: the Lisa, the Newton, the 12" Macbook, the list goes on. I won't chide them for their ambition, but that won't save them from their fated failure.
Imagine if Steve Jobs' "phone, iPod, and internet communicator" moment culminated in a product that cost more than all 3 of those things combined. That's what the Vision Pro's announcement felt like.
> but it doesn't seem like Facebook can simply ignore Vision Pro and continue with their current product roadmap: I would bet on Apple (a hardware company with a lot of scale advantages) figuring out how to make the baseline experience achieved with Vision Pro cheaper for a consumer device much faster and more easily than Facebook will figure out how to achieve that same baseline experience starting from their $400 price point.
I guess I just fundamentally disagree. The high-end market for VR is not desirable yet, and there's no indication it ever will be. Low-end VR sells like hotcakes though, and Apple will struggle with that more than Meta will with retina graphics or eye tracking. If the leaked BOM for Reality Pro is real, Apple would need to cut costs by 8x to maintain their current margins and beat Meta in pricing. That's ludicrous; meeting Apple at their price point is comparatively trivial.
It will ultimately depend on where market forces lie. I think most people will see the Vision Pro as redundant if they already own an iPhone though.
> There were dozens of Windows headsets that lifted the performance ceiling […]
Wow, I didn't know that! I thought there were probably some super high end ones (I used one a few years ago which basically required that I strap a tower PC to my back to experience a Star Wars VR thing in a shopping mall…), but didn't know there was stuff in-market which is meaningfully better than the Vision Pro (assuming you mean screens, tracking, pass through)?
> Imagine if Steve Jobs' "phone, iPod, and internet communicator" moment culminated in a product that cost more than all 3 of those things combined. That's what the Vision Pro's announcement felt like.
The original iPhone was $600 on a 2-year contract at a time when nearly everyone got a free phone on renewal. The ROKR E1 (2005's attempt at a Motorola & Apple iPod phone collaboration) was $250 on a 2yr contract.[^1]
Remember Steve Ballmer's reaction to iPhone? "Five hundred dollars! Fully subsidized with a plan! I said that is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn't appeal to business guys […]"
Vision Pro might be more disproportionately expensive, but iPhone was absolutely a lot more expensive than a combined phone and iPod (I think Jobs even referred to this in the keynote to soften the $599 price point: "So what would it cost to buy all of these devices separately?").
I think the critical difference between then and now is that the sheer utility of cell phones meant that unit shipments were rocketing year after year despite the crappy experience. Here there's a crappy experience in the market but not the kind of hyper growth we saw with cell phones in the mid-00s.
> Low-end VR sells like hotcakes though, and Apple will struggle with that more than Meta with retina graphics or eye tracking.
They do sell a lot of Quest units, but that seems to be a function of the price point ($400-ish) rather than the experience. E.g. did you see the comments[^2] from Meta on user retention? Valve's former head of VR put MAUs at <10% of the install base.
People have, to date, bought it, tried it, and stopped using it. To me that sounds like Meta has a price point which is not a barrier to entry (because people are buying the device), but not the much, much harder consideration of "actually build a product people love".
So my bet would be that Apple -- a company which is preoccupied with trying to build products consumers genuinely love (or which builds products which people are brainwashed into loving, if you believe the HN conspiracy theorists) -- can figure out how to reduce the ASP of a Vision headset to $999 faster than Meta can figure out how to create a resonant user experience at their existing price point.
Is there anything about the task of creating a compelling user experience with hardware/software and combining huge scale efficiencies and expertise in manufacturing and supply chain to lower cost over time which makes you think Meta has an advantage over Apple?
I guess you could argue that Meta's apps are compelling user experiences, but they aren't a general purpose computing platform, which is what Zuck seems to want to create (?).
> but didn't know there was stuff in-market which is meaningfully better than the Vision Pro (assuming you mean screens, tracking, pass through)?
I know you're being facetious, but you owe yourself an investigation into how far they've come. Pimax 8k, PSVR, Quest Pro... Apple's headset isn't exactly pushing anything we haven't seen before. I was talking about the literal performance ceiling, a-la available compute.
> So my bet would be that Apple -- a company which is preoccupied with trying to build products consumers genuinely love (or which builds products which people are brainwashed into loving, if you believe the HN conspiracy theorists) -- can figure out how to reduce the ASP of a Vision headset to $999 faster than Meta can figure out how to create a resonant user experience at their existing price point.
That's a bet I would take you on, but it's full of moving goalposts (eg. "resonant user experience").
If the Vision Pro is Apple's new rough baseline for VR user experiences, it will take time and iteration to lower it to the sub-$1000 price point. Time for the processes to mature and yield better with cheaper costs, but also iteration on an already-expensive concept that needs enormous re-engineering efforts to have the same margins at $3500 as it does at $999. At Vision Pro margins this hypothetical headset would have a ~$400 BOM and likely diminished specs from Vision Pro. From the offset, M1/M2 is off the table - they're too expensive and unnecessary for the majority of baseline uses. They would need another SOC, more like a reworked iPhone/iPad chip with doubled GPU resources. The glass and aluminum design would need to get downgraded to cheaper materials, and the displays would need to be lower resolution to both accommodate a lower price point and a lower performance target.
It's possible. It will just take a long time for suppliers to develop and for Apple to improve their own processes. In that time, Meta's goal is just to improve eye tracking, push higher resolutions and expand the current multitasking options. It doesn't seem that unrealistic to me, given the current state of Oculus software and how far the Quest Pro got as a $1500 headset.
> Is there anything about the task of creating a compelling user experience with hardware/software and combining huge scale efficiencies and expertise in manufacturing and supply chain to lower cost over time which makes you think Meta has an advantage over Apple?
Apparently none of that stuff has been a roadblock to producing 10 million+ of them at an affordable price. The software experience has been pretty great for me, almost "Switch-like" for the price. I think that has the potential to keep selling - I think Apple's idea will really only be popular among a smaller group of users. If they surpass Meta's install base before 2030, it will be a bona-fide miracle.
That'd be a little tricky and probably have undesirable collateral damage. The Oculus side of this is a general-purpose streaming VR app called ALVR that's mainly designed to stream desktop VR apps running under SteamVR (which Oculus do dislike enought that it has to be sideloaded, but there's not really a clean way to do the same with the desktop Oculus runtime). This also means that in theory you should be able to stream to other headsets like the Pico or even an Android phone used Cardboard-style, though the set up and compatibility on that last option is a bit of a pain.
Very curious what the limits on performance would be for it. Could it ultimately offer a way to run Vision OS apps in a realistic way without having the hardware? Quest 3 could make a super compelling package for it (admittedly, not having the eye tracking is a big problem).
I guess we can't really know yet how Apple will handle it, but does seem unlikely that Apple will allow the simulator to install arbitrary apps from the app store.
I assume though it has to run the things developers are compiling themselves (that is the whole point of it!) so things that are shared that way would be transferrable.
For wireless VR stuff, it's usually 25-40ms range. I believe the encoder hardware is the bottleneck at this point. New Quest 3 is supposed to have better hardware accelerators.
There's also the specifics of how this is grabbing the simulator output and copies it out to the ALVR server. So possibly another frame or two of lag is introduced.
I'm talking desktop screen to VR eye, with desktop streaming. So yes, that, plus simulator latency. I would think input latency should be pretty small.
Quest 3 will (hopefully) allow for higher bitrates and maybe AV1 support but I don’t see it having a huge impact on overall wireless latency. Decode time on the old SoC is only a few ms with h264 and really the only thing h265 brings to the table on a bandwidth unconstrained local network is 10bit color.
It's 2023, there is probably a clause in the Developer Agreement that prevents streaming the materials provided under it to computers that aren't enrolled in the Developer Program.
What you are supposing is that they might choose not to enforce that until their own headset is shipping in volume. If anything, they are building a case against this person while at the same time analyzing their suitability to park their ass in a chair in Cupertino...then it will go to an exec who will decide the person's fate.
> And the Copyright Act doesn’t give creators, like Apple, a monopoly over transformative inventions that enable research into their product. Cf. Patton, 769 F.3d at 1276 (“The goal of copyright is to stimulate the creation of new works, not to furnish copyright holders with control over all markets.”).
If Corellium can livestream a virtualized version of iOS on non-Apple hardware, I'd wager Joe Shmoe can livestream an official dev envrionment to their VR client.
If you accept the Developer Agreement and receive protected materials under it, you cannot redistribute, publish or stream it because of case law, sorry.
I know it’s confusing because of all the little unethical assholes who hack apart every beta release and post about it on blogs run by morbidly obese grifter-enthusiasts, but it is actually quite simple —Apple can and does pick and choose who to enforce its agreements on, just as you may.
LLVM was Open Source and supported GNU from the get-go, it didn't make sense to remove support after Apple bought up the core contributors. Clang is indeed an Apple original, but developing it without support for multiple platforms would be paramount to removing features supported in the underlying compiler.
If either LLVM or Clang tried removing multiplatform support or totally relicensed itself, it would divide the community and make life hard for Apple. They could probably make WebKit a fully proprietary browser engine by rewriting the KHTML stuff, but what would they gain by removing features from an Open Source product they developed?
I believe Zig is capable of this in a primitive way, and they got there by piggy-backing on LLVM development that Apple has contributed to.
There's absolutely nothing Apple is doing to prevent you from developing on iOS from Windows or Linux. Much of the open source development they're doing is making it easier in theory. But in practice, there's just not enough people willing and interesting in putting in the work to set it up. Most iOS developers would just rather use the official tools. And why should Apple put in lots of extra work just to let people develop from other platforms? That's just never going to happen.
Where do you get the idea that most iOS devs prefer Apple? It's not true for any other type of development so are you arguing that Apple fans self sort to iOS devs?
I would love to use Linux build machines but the xcode requirements make it a non-starter...and its not for lack of effort.
I don't know, considering that the only reason you can't compile an application targetting MacOS from your Linux CI/CD is a license that disallows the use of certain MacOS libraries from being used outside of MacOS - combined with Apple's history of aggressively ring-fencing their users, it's understandable that engineers would feel that it's deliberate.
If you copy those libraries illegally to Linux, you can build for MacOS from Linux - so either Apple feels indifferent towards engineers building for MacOS or they want everyone to buy a Mac and compile release software locally.
What worse is Apple doesn't provide any server-specific hardware/software for automation - so it really does feel like Apple expects people to build release software on MacBook Pros or something.
Build servers are a thing, and using a mac as a build node is hilariously complicated and unstable when compared to linux. When my developers push to git the android app is built & tested & uploaded to the store automatically. We also have this working for iOS but it requires a mac in a closet that needs manual maintenance every month or so when apple breaks something again. The linux servers are generally hands-off. Also, android builds are about 10x faster because they run on a machine with 128gb ram and a big cpu which isn't even possible with a mac (and even if it was, I'm sure apple would charge an insane amount for it).
And guess what happens when you depend on non public APIs that implement the specifications on any of those operating systems when you either upgrade your OS or you try to move to another Unix variant.
//They are famous for protecting their walled garden and hostility towards cross platform development tools.
Trying to deconstruct this to understand better.
2 possibilities.
1. Supporting cross platform development tools is actually in Apple's interest/business and they are being stupid not to support them. But so far it doesn't seem like they are losing anything by not supporting it going by their financials.
2. Supporting cross platform development tools is not in their interest - in which case they are doing the right thing by doing what's good for their business.
You are thinking in terms of what is good for their business, when the GP was discussing in terms of what is good for everyone else.
The fact that Apple has been successful in keeping a good reputation despite nickle-and-diming all developers working with their platform is only a badge of honor in the marketing world.
How long until a slasher film features teens sitting around VR gaming while, unbeknownst to them in their tidy VR living room, Freddy Krueger is having a field day.
That jump-scare when the one teen lifts up their headset to see Freddy inches away.
Reminds me of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. A hacker is able to obscure their face in public by overlaying a logo into every onlookers' passthrough feed.
We all here dabble in technology(doesn't matter which one) so possibility of being some brainwashed meat puppet taking part of some covert war between powers that be is more likely. And there are fates that are even worse(think what was in that ship on international waters). GitS is a nightmare and cyberpunk for a reason.
I assume you're mostly joking, but honestly that's a really good insight into how something like Vision Pro might appeal to people.
Your environment is super important to your mental/emotional state. If you can jump into different virtual environments for work or relaxation, that'd surely help your brain switch context and focus.
I've heard a ton of chat from Apple fans about how most people don't have rooms or work spaces with three meters of empty space in front of them, contrary to Apple's product demos. Environments like Mount Hood sound like a gimmick, but they're probably going to be a huge part of what makes this device work.
> Your environment is super important to your mental/emotional state. If you can jump into different virtual environments for work or relaxation, that'd surely help your brain switch context and focus.
Absolutely crucial observation and one that unfortunately either gets ignored or is attached to negative dystopic connotations like “live in the pod”.
This past winter was particularly gloomy here in the Pacific Northwest (which is saying a lot). One of the most impactful strategies I used for dealing with seasonal affective disorder was to sit under a red lamp, put an oscillating fan on low, and load up a hyper-realistic photogrammetry “nature tours” app called Brink XR[1].
Being able to have a modern Calgon Moment with a virtual stretch-out-and-relax in a cloudless Arches National Park did absolute wonders for my overall mood after dealing with yet another miserable day of cold rain with no end in sight.
Fake/relaxation environment that stretches out to infinity with nothing to focus on may be a somewhat usable workaround for vergence-accommodation conflict. I suspect that's also why all the demos have all the windows equidistant and there's no depth to the UIs, and why camera passthrough imagery is frequently shown blurred out (so you don't try to focus on it).
Honestly, this makes sense to me. One of the reasons people don't tidy is getting overwhelmed. Either at an emotional layer, because they see everything. Or at a visual layer, because they stop seeing anything. If you could trim it back to first visualizing the room as clean and then showing them one activity (e.g., see only dishes, so you can focus on collecting those), you might help people retrain.
Actual people actually report actually feeling overwhelmed. They describe the experiences as I describe them. Blogs give strategies to deal with these specific feelings.
Is it possible that learning some particular skill will help with that? Surely! Are there other reasons that people might also not clean, ones related to not learning something? Also yes. But that's no reason to show up and be aggressively contrary. Some people's experiences are different than yours and you don't have to leap in to deny that just because it's different for you.
Still not entirely sure how the people on here seem to largely continue to support companies like Apple. I get it - they have the high-paying jobs, they make shiny toys, they have slick marketing and symbolism, caring about things like privacy, freedom, education, empowering people, etc, seems oh so very naff - but at the same time, technologically aware people know what Apple are doing.
Right? Or not? Is the argument just - oh, but the stuff is cool, so... whatever?
Not attempting to flame here, I genuinely am curious on the take people have that permits them ethically to continue buying Apple stuff and fan-person-ing over it. I know not everyone is, but it seems really very common, even on here amongst the technically literate. Maybe especially on here?
They make good products that people like to use, so people pay them money to use those products.
There are definitely things to disagree with Apple about, and the crowd here leans towards those values a lot more than the general consumer market.
But a lot of the ethical issues can be debated about basically any technology product not soldered and coded by your own two hands in your garage (and even that solution has ethical quandaries from an accessibility standpoint).
Personally I give Apple money and they give me high-quality, stable tools that let me get my work done in a way that feels nice. The alternatives all have most of the same moral issues (made in China using who knows what labor and material sourcing), but I like the Apple ones so I use them. I don’t see the huge conflict there.
What are you referring to? I’m a power user that buys lots of apple products.
- Best products for what I need: every MacBook since the fat ones in the early 2000s has been solid and living up to abuse. iPhones do not need me to fiddle with configuration or customization, just works (it’s not just a meme, it’s important to people without time), gets software updates for a _long_ time, and works very well in the ecosystem. The iPad Pro is the best tablet I’ve used, ever.
- iMessage is a solid messaging system and FaceTime has the best A/V quality of all the other apps I’ve tried.
- the ecosystem works seamlessly with each other and I can onboard my non techy aging parents into new devices and usage patterns without much trouble
- Apple Home and secure video are a joy to use and it doesn’t feel like you’re using it just because you’re already in the ecosystem
- I do most of my work over plain SSH and tmux/vim, for which iTerm is a great terminal emulator. For the occasional GUI app, the macOS looks fantastic ootb and requires minimal fiddling around to get right. I’ve been there and done Linux ricing and I’m glad I don’t have to anymore. Just dwm/i3 on my workstation works for me.
Now one of the most important things
- Apple support is the best. I’ve broken my phones, laptops, etc. and I’ve never had a bad experience in the Apple Store and I’ve been in an out with a replacement or fix in a few hours tops in multiple countries.
Many people, at some point, begin to truly grok the fact that nobody but themselves exist in their specific life context. That what matters to them— what they value, can be so different.
The moment you can liberate yourself from the “it seems really very common” trap, so much about, well, everything, begins making more sense.
Are you talking about gatekeeping what software I can run on my own device? If so, yes, that's one reason why I don't buy Apple products, generally speaking. I would love to use an iPad Pro as a VSCode machine just as one can do on a Mac but in a much slimmer package, but no, Apple doesn't want me compiling my own software for some reason, so I'm stuck with a laptop.
Same with the Vision headset, it is absurd that the only way to do real software work on it is to literally stream a Mac display onto the device. At that point, why not use the Mac itself?
The Mac screen that's mirrored to the Vision Pro is not 360 degrees and immersive either, it's just...a screen. It would be cool to see stuff like files and connections in 3D space, but it's nerfed pretty hard all so that Apple can keep that sweet 30% fee.
I'm not an Apple fanboi, I generally dislike their stuff, but I am also going to give credit where credit is due because that's what any fair person should do.
Apple makes stuff that will work, that will satisfy the common man, that will (or at least should) have quality meriting their price.
Apple's products are good, and that is an objective fact separate from whether I personally like their stuff or not.
The MacBook Air 15" that I bought 2 weeks ago, is the first laptop that I like using since... my 2012 MacBook Pro 15". I used that 2012 laptop 11 years(!) without any issues. It still does, but 8GB was becoming a problem.
In those 11 years, I've also used quite a bit of expensive workstation class corporate Windows laptops from Dell, HP, and Lenovo, and none of them had or have a usable trackpads or something like magsafe. And don't get me started about the fan on my current Dell that starts screaming at random when it's sitting idle on my desk, or comes out of my backpack screaming hot because nobody but Apple seems to be capable of getting power management right.
The laptop is definitely shiny, but the only one that doesn't feel like a toy.
Your perceptions are wrong from a consumer point of view. They don’t make shiny toys (well they do but that’s not the point)
They make extremely frictionless ecosystems. Everyone on HN loves to tinker I would wager, but that is never going to be your average consumer. Apple knows that.
That is why Linux will never become mainstream, the friction of using it (from installing to daily driving it) is INSANE . No one can use it outside of a select few. Same with Android. Lots of idiosyncrasies when you start digging deeper. I wanted to use Samsung version of Airdrop today. It was a disaster trying to get a picture over to another device.
That’s where Apple shines. Get that and you might make a dent in Apples market share.
For your Airdrop example, my iPhone has just as many silly UX idiosyncrasies as any Android phone. For example, recently I needed to translate the text in an image on my iPhone and there is no way to do it(from what I know) other than paying for a dedicated app and giving it Photo permissions. On my Pixel (and any Android phone) the same thing can be done by long pressing the image in my web browser -> Share -> Google Lens -> Done.
IMHO, phone OSes are mature enough nowadays that both options can achieve the same things and whether you prefer one UX over the other depends on what you "grew up with".
> I needed to translate the text in an image on my iPhone and there is no way to do it(from what I know) other than paying for a dedicated app and giving it Photo permissions
Save Image => highlight text in the saved image from the native Photos app => click "Translate". No third-party apps involved. All done locally too, no need for internet connection even (after the image is saved, ofc).
For my usecase saving the image would make it more annoying since I would then have to go through every image afterwards and delete it.
Also, I like that the translation is done offline but in my experience the iOS image translation does a much poorer job at OCR-ing East Asian languages than Google Lens.
In apps using the native UI framework (UIKit), text in images is automatically locally OCR’d and is selectable. Apps built in third party toolkits like Flutter won’t have this, but that can be worked around by taking a screenshot and selecting the text in Photos.
Lens can be used by going to images.google.com or the official Google app. Nothing is stopping the same share sheet flow you mentioned from being possible but for some reason Google hasn’t added a share sheet extension to their iOS app.
Your usage is already in the intermediary stage of interfacing. Still is a bit cherry picking, I stand by the overall assessment that Apple products are greatly frictionless and easy to use, and work together. Anecdotally, older relatives need a lot less help, almost none with their iPads.
For the low end iPhone and iPad have a super simple interaction model. My grandma uses both, and she’s 88. If it breaks she can take it to the Apple Store and they’ll fix it or help her. No one else comes close to them in this regard.
From a tech perspective owning the full stack from silicon / hardware / OS / service allows them to make things no one else can. Can anyone else make vision Pro right now? Even at the $3.5k I’m not sure they could.
The marketing / distortion field thing is bs in my opinion, when apple release a shitty product it fails, when it’s good it does well. Look at Ping, Apple Watch Edition, and to a lesser extent Siri and homepod.
> Is the argument just - oh, but the stuff is cool, so... whatever?
Do you find it that strange that "company makes things people like to pay money for"?
I'm unsure which "objective" ethical framework disallows Apple products but allows any other consumer tech device. Apple does very well at some things, average at some others, and very poorly at other things, which isn't particuarly insightful. Whether you would like to spend money on an Apple product depends on how you value each of these things, and you can't be surprised that other people might prioritise different things than you.
I bet you never took a vow of poverty or decided not to use tech. Do you use computers? Do you own a phone? Do you spend all of your time feeding starving children?
I am going to assume that this is not just a troll so I will take the time to answer your question.
> technologically aware people know what Apple are doing
Yes, I do. I have over 30 years designing chips and computing systems (not an Apple employee). The Apple Silicon Macbook Pro I am typing on has great performance and I never think about battery life any more and I never hear a fan. I've owned a lot of laptops and nothing has ever come close in build quality, design, and performance/watt.
Apple has over 2 billion active devices in service. Two possibilities: We are all suffering some massive delusion, or your criteria for evaluating quality and engineering need to be adjusted.
Please name another large company that cares more about privacy, freedom, education, empowering people, the environment, diversity, etc. than Apple. They are from perfect, but they keep investing in the quest to do better. What specific ethics issues are you so concerned about?
Please answer a question for me. How come so few people who are into open source operating systems seem to be unable to understand that the vast majority of the world doesn't want to deal with all of that stuff? I think it is great that some folks enjoy the configuring, tweaking, writing their own services, setting up their shells, arguing about vi vs emacs, etc. That's really cool and I am happy that is available for those users. However, don't condemn me if I have other priorities.
It is super simple. Apple makes products. If people like the products they will buy them. If people can't do what they need to do with the product and don't enjoy using it, they won't buy it again. If you are right, Apple will soon die and your problem will be solved. If you are wrong, their unprecedented growth will continue.
> permits them ethically to continue buying Apple stuff
you need to be more specific about what your ethical objection is.
I avoid the iOS ecosystem because I see it as a monopolistic lockin that restricts fundamental freedoms. It is hostile to its user's interests by taking those freedoms and achieves it by exploiting their lack of technical understanding of what they are giving up.
> if only people knew what they were giving up by using closed sourced mobile devices they would all be using PinePhones
not what I'm saying. It's not about closed vs open source but closed vs open platforms.
I think if people understood the real level of control Apple actually has over their lives by completely controlling every bit of software their phone is allowed to execute .... at least some of them would probably look to at least keep their options open. Of course, as long as Apple behaves benevolently, nobody will really notice this. But being a corporation controlled by money and shareholders, even if staying benevolent is a promise Apple wants to make it actually isn't one they can guarantee to keep.
I hope no touch continues to be an option even if Apple adds touchscreens to MacBooks.
When buying a PC laptops I look specifically for models that have a no touch version, because unintentional touches triggering things is annoying and for some reason, in my experience large touch screens almost always either lack antiglare coating or if they have it, it’s so weak that they’re practically mirrors. The antiglare coating on current MacBooks is quite good and I wouldn’t want to trade that for touch… same goes for my matte PC laptop.
I sincerely appreciate the replies but can't respond to them all.
I was tempted not to reply, because I feel we'd be talking past each other. This article here illustrates my point better than I could, and coming across it prompted me to put aside my misgivings and reply at least this once:
Many of the arguments put forward in response to my initial post are probably fairly consistent inside a world where what capitalists call "competition" and "success" are the sole arbiters of right and wrong. I don't think that world has any place in any sane discussion on ethics. You could argue that ethical discussions are nonsense, then, I suppose, if you want, but you'd have to argue it and stand behind it.
In a world where ethics means something, Apple is a terrible company. They don't care about freedom, education, empowering people, software freedom, the right to repair, sharing, etc. Neither could they; they care about selling products, cutting costs, dominating their competitors, and so on. They're as cut-throat and ruthless and relentless as any company their size must be.
They're good at advertising and making well-integrated, pretty prisons.
And again, just to be clear, I've made no comment here or in the OP about whether their products work, or are powerful, or about whether it's easy to get your granny set-up on them. These things are beside the point.
I'm not playing the blame-game either, you can all buy/not buy whatever you want. I genuinely was interested to hear how technically literate people who are aware of things like the already ongoing climate collapse can keep buying new products from megacorporations producing tons of new fast-gadgets every year.
What is the justification? What I'm mostly hearing is: we like the gadgets, they work well, it's real nice not having to explain anything to Grandma, and we couldn't care less or at least would much prefer to ignore the obvious ethical issues of supporting massive, wasteful, anti-competitive monopoly-like structures.
It's a harder argument to make, but for me personally the worst thing Apple (and Microsoft, etc etc) have probably done over the longer term is disempower people. They've turned all these things - email, browsers, searching, messaging, calling, storing data, etc etc - into mystical black-boxes that work thanks to the benign good graces of some super-nerd off up in a cave or a cloud somewhere.
It's a hard argument because the ignoramus doesn't know what it's like to be a power user, and power users can't remember what it was like to be powerless. What does it do to the spirit of curiosity and playfulness to constantly be computing in fear? Fear you might break something, or lose something, or that the metaphors that you never really got in the first-place might come crumbling down at any moment?
Here's an experiment for you to try in your own entourage: whenever the opportunity presents itself, ask the people around you - especially young people, adolescents - basic computer questions. Stuff like: what browser do you use, do you know any others, what's your operating system called, what does a search engine do, what's a URL, what is an "app", where do they come from, do you know at what moment you're officially 'in' your desktop, etc.
In summary, Apple depends on the ignorance and disempowerment of the masses, as well as being on the front line of a never-ending ecocidal hunt for "newness" which is actually grotesque given the finite nature of the Earth's ecosystems.
Inside of our current culture where "might makes right", this surely sounds bonkers, but from outside that framework, supporting Apple (and other tech behemoths feeding us garbage content, spying on us, obfuscating reality, censoring people, making addictive services, etc) looks similarly incomprehensible, let me assure you.
Cheers again to all the people who took the time to reply initially.
I think this is awesome, as the Quest Pro is almost on par with the features of the Vision Pro (except Lidar), e.g. hand & eye tracking + color passthrough. Sure, these might be not of the same quality (especially when it comes to passthrough), but this allows people to verify their experiences/concepts for the Vision Pro before they actually get their hands on one.
I don't think that Meta, nor Apple will have a problem with this tbh. Maybe because of the assets/icons used in the HUD, but those can easily be replaced if needed.