[Freedom2]

The Vision Pro has been a massive disappointment for me and my colleagues. I was ready for the flood of Hacker News articles praising its capabilities as well as tips and tricks, including "look what I did today with it!". This discourse was promised to me by many regular HN commenters and I can't believe we're at a state where the general feeling is that the Vision Pro doesn't live up to the HN hype.

[zmmmmm]

HN has always seemed ambivalent to me. There's a crowd of enthusiasts for it but a surprisingly strong contingent of sceptics (about VR in general, but also specifically this device).

My take is however that yes at this point, Vision OS has failed to hit the aspirational goal of launching XR into the mainstream. There's no App store gold rush, after the initial couple of weeks of hype most people forgot it exists, and I'm truly surprised that Apple seems to have even fumbled the ball on content. That seemed like the easy part to me, but no new environments, nothing new to watch, the Apps hitting the store are mostly toys and really zero things that haven't been done before or fully explored on other devices. Nobody is raving about watching sports on it. etc etc.

What I really hoped was that the novel features of the Vision Pro would kick off a new wave of creativity in terms of what is possible. When I saw people pulling 3D objects out of web pages and onto their desk it really seemed like this could be a true start of something.

The one upside I think is that the slightly anemic launch is probably going to bias Apple to be more open and less controlling than they would otherwise. I hope so.

[kredd]

My guess is, there’s a significant chunk of people who tried Quest or some other VR device that’s close, so AVP is not the first to the market device. Expectations have been set, comparisons are inevitable, and I would say a lot of use cases have been explored already. Sure, you can probably do things in a more refined way in AVP, and some cool VisionOS specific stuff, but it’s generally within the same realm as other VR devices.

Apple will have an uphill battle until they show experiences that cannot be replicated in other devices, rather than “you can do X here as well, maybe slightly better”.

I held off from ordering for the same reason — bought Quest, tried it for a week, still sitting in my shelves since last year. Every advertised thing for AVP I can already do on my phone or laptop, without the need to strap on/off an object onto my face.

I really hope they come up with cool stuff and make it more comfortable to wear, but until then, I don’t think it’ll gain a mainstream adoption.

[RockRobotRock]

I like to think there's some level of self-awareness on HN. You can be excited about it as a tech nerd (with salary to afford such an expensive device), while recognizing that it's not going to attract the average person.