[etempleton]

I think given the amount of tech and at least presented level of quality of experience (which I do not doubt) the price is fine. I think the problem is it is $3,500 in search of a problem to solve.

A camcorder has a clear use case. It let you make home movies.

They failed to articulate the use case in a compelling way and every scenario I can think of is extremely hampered by the 2 hour battery life.

Business is out. Everyone outside Silicon Valley that can afford this thing will be rejected if they show up with a weird uncanny valley avatar to a meeting.

Travel sounds good, but 2 hours really limits it. You better have a seat charger and even then it must be pulling down how many watts? Will seat chargers on planes have enough sustained power to do more than prolong battery life?

Watching movies at home? Sure. If you are alone and you are plugged in.

What else? Weird VR computing and web browsing? The friction of putting on the headset is too much to make up for however good that experience is.

[symic]

I think this headset has a clear use case. For one, it’s a way better recording device than what currently exists. With the headset appearing transparent it will not be too much of barrier to interacting with what you are recording. One can record the birthday party while interacting with the party in a way very similar to how you would if you had no device. Recoding a birthday party using a phone is much more dystopian in my opinion than using this headset.

Another use case is getting rid of monitors and freeing up space on a desk. I imagine in the future I’ll have a sever in a closet and the headset will allow me to get rid of my TV, keyboard, mouse, monitor, laptop, and Apple TV. My wife and I can each put on a headset and have customized picture/sound while synchronously watching the same show. She likes the TV to be a lot louder than I do.

I will be able to play board games with friends across the country and it will be as if we are all in the same room interacting with the game board. This thing would be great for online teaching or tech support.

[etempleton]

Is it a better recording device? Do we know that? Everyone is going to hate the person that is wearing that thing during a birthday party. I remember how obnoxious camcorders were because they were so big and obtrusive. This feels worse.

Maybe this replaces monitors, but a lot of people work on their computer 8-10 hours a day. What does 8-10 hours with a headset on feel like? What do other people in your organization think of the uncanny valley avatar?

It doesn’t replace TV. You have to have a headset per person. And each headset costs 3X a good 55 inch tv? And each person needs to be plugged in to make that work. If someone comes over you have to say bring your own headset.

And the final example is a use case that will basically never happen. It is hard to get friends to coordinate over a normal game on Xbox or PlayStation.

I love Apple but this is just not a mass market device.

[symic]

As stated, it does replace TVs for my household. Two headsets would replace two TVs, 2 sound bars, 1 monitor. When friends come over we play board games or hangout. I don’t watch movies with friends at my place. We talk about shows we’ve seen but we don’t watch together. When people come over it’s about interacting with them.

We will see whose vision for the future is correct. I don’t think your view is broad enough to see possibilities for how things can change and evolve. The criticisms I’ve read about the headset make me think of Ballmer laughing about the $500 phone or when he discounted the iPad and when he talked about Apple making a laptop without a DVD player. I remember people saying the iPad was just a giant iPhone.

This thing might flop but I hope it doesn’t because I’d love to get rid of TVs, sound bars, etc.

[etempleton]

I hope it is awesome. I really do. I just have trouble seeing it become a mass market hit in the way I didn’t with any of the recent Apple device launches. I was on the optimist side for all of those. I project they sell 1-3 million per year, maybe more if they drop the price closer to $2,000. Ever breaking 5 million units sold per year will be tough.

My reaction to each previous Apple launch for context:

iPhone: "That is it. That is the future of all phones." iPad: "I don't know if it is for me, but they are going to sell a ton of those and it is going to replace the need for a laptop for a lot of people." Watch: "I want one, but I don't know I can justify it until it operates more independently from the phone."

Anecdote: My spouse said absolutely not when shown. Had a visceral negative reaction.

[allenu]

> For one, it’s a way better recording device than what currently exists. > Another use case is getting rid of monitors and freeing up space on a desk. > I will be able to play board games with friends across the country

These don't feel like strong arguments for regular people, honestly. Is anyone clamoring for better recording of their kids' birthday parties? People can play board games online already. Is the uptake not great for that simply because you can't see a virtual avatar of your friends? I have a single monitor on my desk and I personally am not hurting that it's using up desk space. It's just not a real pain point.

All of the use cases Apple presented in their promos are undeniably neat, but nothing jumped out as something that solves a real problem I have. Maybe I'm not their target market, though.

[symic]

I like Ford’s statement: If I asked people what they wanted they’d have said faster horses.

Before the iPhone people had phones and iPods and laptops. Nobody was clamoring for a small portable computer beyond what Blackberry provided. Nobody was clamoring for online gameplay before the internet.

[allenu]

> Nobody was clamoring for a small portable computer beyond what Blackberry provided. Nobody was clamoring for online gameplay before the internet.

No offense, but I don't think these are accurate. When Doom came out in the early '90s, it famously offered network gameplay via modem. I remember when the first Warcraft came out, playing it with friends over a modem. Multiplayer gaming over the internet was clearly the next step (playing with random people around the world is huge compared with just playing with people you know).

Also, when the Blackberry came out, I do remember PDAs being a big thing at the time, so there was already a market for portable devices and people clearly liked having portable digital electronics, and one that allowed you to go online and view the web with desktop quality was a major benefit.

My main view of Vision Pro is that it doesn't provide revolutionary functionality since so much of what it's offering already exists in ubiquitous fashion today with all of our smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc. It's providing a new way to interface with apps, sure, but we're not going from a world of no ubiquitous tech to ubiquitous tech/internet like we did with smartphones. I think for this to be successful, Apple really needs to show value that is so beyond what we can do already, otherwise it'll remain a novelty for tech enthusiasts who enjoy trying out new experiences.

Going from a horse to a car is a huge leap since you can now move faster or further than you ever could. It opens up the world to you. Going from looking at a phone in my hand to looking through goggles at virtual screens doesn't feel to me like a huge leap in day to day functionality.

[symic]

The internet existed in the 90s so referencing Doom is not apt as it pertains to my statement that before the internet no one clamored for online gameplay. There was a market for PDAs at the time of Blackberry and no one was clamoring for something much better. And the market for small portable computers is now orders of magnitude larger after the iPhone than the market for PDAs was ever going to be with Blackberry type devices. No one clamored for a device without a keyboard.

Great products don’t have to answer a need people think they have. They can create the need.

[retSava]

It isn't transparent. It shows a digital rendering of you on the OLED screen facing outwards. And to me, it reeks of "Glasshole" yet again. It would be like someone having sunglasses inside, "can you please remove them when we're talking?".

[symic]

I said, appearing transparent. Presumably, it’s been tested and Apple has found it’s not a repeat of the glasshole experience. Clearly they’ve put a lot of time and effort to make it so that interacting with someone wearing the headset isn’t too weird or unpleasant. They may have missed the mark. We’ll see.

[bennyelv]

That first bit sounds like a very hot take to me - the headset quite literally blocks and intercepts the standard human signals for attention and emotional response and then tries to recreate them on an OLED screen with a CGI model.

I can't see how that's better than filming on a phone, where although the eyes are looking at what's going on on the screen, their response is still clearly visible in the raw form.

[techdragon]

A very expensive OLED… I’d be willing to bet the one piece front glass element costs Apple several hundred dollars each… and where anyone else would use standard lenses and optical windows over the tracking cameras, visual cameras, and LiDAR systems… because Apple were making the EyeSight feature a big part of the industrial design, they had to make it “come together”… they had to waste hundreds on a pointlessly rounded piece of ludicrously over complicated glass…

I made the joke that Apple probably put more time and money into the optical engineering and design of this overpriced ski goggles style one piece optical assembly than the cost of designing a space telescope (excluding mega projects like Hubble & JWST aside, of course) …

[symic]

A person recording on a phone is not participating in the event. They are, for the most part, observing. Others may be able to see their expressions and whatnot but they are generally not interacting with the person doing the filming. It remains to be seen if people are willing to interact with someone wearing, what will appear to be, ski goggles. Apple may not have solved the issue but they clearly spent a vast amount of money/time/effort to make it so that interacting with someone wearing the headset isn’t too weird. We will see if they got it right or close enough to right.

[SoullessSilent]

How far fetchedis the idea that facial expressions on the model could be manipulated to look negative/positive when the user is talking about something the software creators have different opinions on?