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Apple has suspended work on the second-generation Vision Pro headset to singularly focus on a cheaper model
That seems very reasonable and like what they probably should’ve been doing all along.
I still don’t understand who the pro was actually for. Everyone who had one said exactly the same thing about it which was they couldn’t understand how to use it productively for anything.
IMHO, it’s a fancy dev kit.
The kind of people who would go around driving a Cybertruck with a Vision Pro on their faces and an humane pin strapped on.
For one glorious moment of misreading there I thought there was a humane pin strap on.
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Note that suspends != cancelled and it’s just the “Pro”, with a cheaper model allegedly in the works.
We’ll see where a cheaper model lands in terms of price, but it’s very clear now that $3500+ isn’t really the price range where most people buy something out of curiosity. Because let’s face it: the Vision (Pro) still lacks a “killer app” for the masses.
That’s the important bit that everybody is missing:
Apple has suspended work on the second-generation Vision Pro headset to singularly focus on a cheaper model
Clicking through to the paywalled article, the headlines reads as follows:
Apple Suspends Work on Next Vision Pro, Focused on Releasing Cheaper Model in Late 2025.
I am as unoptimistic on the future of VR as everybody else here, but can we please leave the nuance in? Apple are not turning the key on VR, at least not yet, they are simply doing the predicable thing that everybody said their would: Release a VR headset that isn’t targeted at developers only.
My impression of the Vision Pro was that it was built and priced for developers to buy and expense and then build VR apps with it. That way when the consumer version comes out there’s stuff in the app store.
Have they built apps for it yet? I was going to get one but then it was stupidly expensive, was only available in the US, and would require a Mac for development not just for code compiling. To like many I didn’t bother with it. Even if I could have imported it.
Companies have been pushing VR so long now. I’ll say that I think the tech is cool and the idea is cool, but I will literally never use them.
I can’t wear them while working as I am in meetings 99% of the time.
I would not wear them in my free time, as I do not want to disassociate from my wife and cats.
I love VR. So I use it for gaming maybe once a week, for 1-2 hours, usually as an activity with my SO so we can switch who’s playing each “round” depending on the game. That’s the maximum I find fun instead of tiring. I can’t see using it for long periods or for work, that sounds like a nightmare.
My issue is, aside from gaming, I’m not interacting with the content or data in any meaningful, improved way.
VR for real life is just a series of flat two dimensional screens, usually with a novelty background of a waterfall.
Yeah, I think it could be useful for CAD or 3D art (with proper software) but I can’t think of many other jobs where it would be all that helpful.
I demoed a system that let you input construction plans and walk around/ interact with ar wires/plumbing/walls once. But it was so cumbersome to implement it was more like a neat tech demo.
Maybe once the tech is small enough to fit inside safety glasses…
This is just a price to function issue.
If the price was 0 everyone would have one.
But the cost of it is way too high for what it is. Price and weight etc will come down. Uses will increase.
Have one != Use one. I own two and stopped using them ages ago. All of them are too clunky and I realized I’m generally too lazy to want to interact with stuff in VR vs my more comfortable media consumption on a TV and a couch.
Maybe if they were super lightweight and I could legitimately do real exercise with them they’d be useful, but as is they’re too hot, too uncomfortable and too limited.
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I don’t think the cost is too high at all. But I also don’t think it’s a consumer device right now. It’s a dev kit with none of the cost savings of production at scale.
It’s absolutely phenomenal for gaming or vr “experiences” (basically movies made specifically for vr). But the corpos are really hellbent on making everyone use it for meetings for some fucking reason. Which is truly the lamest, most unnecessary use of this tech.
I would only use VR in racing, flight sim, or space sim games. probably once a couple of months after the initial excitement.
That’s a good point. I’d have loved this for elite dangerous.
I have found my headset useful for work, when working from home and I don’t do camera on meetings anyway.
At home it’s pretty nice, and since my ears are open I can actually talk, so my wife actually prefers it over me wearing headphones. But all things in moderation, I wouldn’t wear it constantly.
Despite being a huge fan of the concept, I still couldn’t go for Apple’s headset, it’s heavy, it’s expensive, and lack of controllers are all deal breakers. The Quest 3 is lighter, has good controllers, and is more affordable. It may not have the displays as nice as Vision, but that doesn’t make up for the rest of the stuff.
Aren’t the meetings pushed as one of the basic function of these? But I guess it only makes sense if most of the participants use them and software has the support.
yeah the software they developed only works between Vision owners… perfect for meetings between all your millionaire friends I guess
If most people have them? Ok, I’ll tell all my clients to get a pair 😂
The current iterations have far more potential than the past.
But the hardware is stil too power inefficiënt and the display pixel density is expensive to produce.
Bro, just one more year. Let them come up with just another pair of goggles bro, trust me bro, one more year and we will be in VR future bro.
I’m still waiting for:
- good Linux support, including apps/games
- not too expensive - $500-ish
- relatively privacy-friendly, so anything Meta is out
Valve Index is close, but it’s expensive and Linux content is very limited. Bigscreen VR Headsets looks interesting since it seems more comfortable than Index, just as privacy-friendly, and should work on Linux, but it’s still a little expensive ($1k) and there aren’t many Linux VR apps AFAIK. I might get it though, still deciding.
In the year 2000…
Quest 3 adoption is super high compared to where quest 1 or 2 were at years ago, the apple vision pro wasn’t meant to create mass adoption anyway, not at that price point.
To do:
Cheaper headset
Actual controllers
Make it work with PCs
- Don’t make it out of a solid chunk of aluminium and glass so it weighs a ton and has nothing to balance it out on the back.
Apple: nah
I still don’t understand how Windows got the PC name. A Mac is also a personal computer…
Also, apple isn’t going to make it work with other OSs any more than they have their other products, not sure why you’d even list that.
In case you are wanting the history. IBM actually coined the term PC with their IBM Personal Computers
At the time most computing platforms were incompatible. Software written for a commodore computer wouldn’t work with an apple computer wouldn’t work with an IBM PC.
The IBM PC was popular enough though that people started building “pc compatible” machines. A very popular configuration for this was intel chips with Microsoft DOS. While these machines started out as “pc compatible” after a while the IBM PC wasn’t a big deal anymore so saying “we are compatible with a machine released in 1981” just slowly morphed into “it’s a PC” as shorthand for “intel chipset with Microsoft OS”
Now why didn’t apple get the pc moniker? At the time when the IBM PC launched apple was actively building and selling their own computers and weren’t interested in making them IBM PC clones so they never went out and marketed themselves as “pc compatible” because for the most part they were not.
Thanks for attending my Ted talk
Thanks for the history, very interesting! I still hate how the term is used today and refuse to use it.
Nowadays I mostly think of it in regards to how much control you have over the hardware. If you can Ship of Theseus your way to a completely different machine with completely different specs, that’s a PC to me. If you’re stuck with what you paid for, then it’s something else. A Mac Mini is not a PC in my book, but a Hackintosh is even though it’s the same OS and general hardware architecture.
But that’s just how I use the term.
I still struggle to read personal computer and not think of any phone, laptop, etc as a PC. Hell, a calculator is a rudementary PC.
I watched a YouTuber telling something like:
“I cannot believe Apple’s biggest premium VR tech wants to change the world… And they are advertising it with… Fucking spreadsheets”
I am paraphrasing ofc, but the meaning was that this could have been a pretty good toy for everyone, but they are trying to sell it as a work-buddy thingy, yeah seeing those spreadsheets focus was kinda dystopian (like in Ready Player One where they are caged doing work or something hah), watching movies in crazy sites yeah, that was what would have sell it more for me, and other ppl, if it wasn’t crazily expensive.
It’s not for gaming and it’s not for porn… what were they thinking?
If it fails it is totally on them.
Is this the virtual boy of Apple? A product that never really made no sense to anybody and was never really supported?
I was hoping they’d get the price down to something sane. It looks like it could be a cool tool for CAD. Of course there won’t be any input available from a non-Apple computer so I still wouldn’t want one.
I desperately want a virtual desktop environment for plain ass computing. Give me infinite windows for my spreadsheet and IDE and that’s all I need!
you can do this with the quest 3 i think
I’ve heard the quest 3 is awesome and does almost everything the Vision does. Not sure I can justify the price to myself yet.
i am using a quest 2 for productivity and ebooks but the resolution is so low that my desktops need to be 1280x720 or I can’t read them. it will be nice to upgrade when i get the chance.
I’ve heard the resolution is good enough to watch movies on too. Not sure if that is true, but that would be a selling point for me.
oh yea, watching movies is incredible. that’s the other thing im using it for
Without a Meta account tho? I’ve got hard blockers on price or shenanigans (or both) for every headset I know of.
Not sure what having an account has to do with anything. I get the objection on the grounds of Meta being a shit company and it’s perfectly reasonable, but having to make an account specifically for the device (and possibly nothing else - you don’t have to link it to facebook or anything) doesn’t magically give them any more power over you.
Yeah, I would genuinely use one for the virtual screen capabilities to do my normal Salesforce-and-Slack job, if not for the price.
In the article it says they’re cancelling the “pro” version to focus on producing a cheaper version. So it sounds like you might get what you want, although “cheaper” will still likely be very expensive, and your point about compatibility with non-Apple devices still holds.
At least the VirtualBoy sold enough to not make it a waste of time?
It did?
No.
At 770,000 sold, it is Nintendo’s lowest-selling standalone console and the only one to have less than one million units sold, seconded by the Wii U’s 13.6 million units.
The Wii U was seen as a complete and utter sales flop. The Wii U outsold the VirtualBoy 18:1.
it was cool though
Why does this feel like another “voice assistant” that we’re supposed to talk to all day?
If we worked from home, maaaayyybe voice control could be a thing once it’s 100%? But Boss Man wants us back at work. Are we really going to be a open-office with everyone talking to their computer like some sort of crypto bro boiler room?
It’s sorta like the “video phone” that everyone was dying to have for decades. We finally got it and everyone went “meh”. A few grandparents use it to talk to their grandkids. Hell, most of the current generations don’t even use phones anymore.
It’s one more technology that’s being pushed out before it’s baked and will likely be only really useful in niche applications. Really fucking good for those niche applications, but just too expensive and awkward for anyone else.
The video phone is now facetime, skype, zoom, google meet etc…
Yeah, FaceTime. But how often do people use it in practice?
Good point about Zoom. Business clearly like Zoom for meetings, but big business is still hammering BTO hard. Will Zoom be marginalized when they finally force in-person meetings?
Also, the last few companies I worked for that did Zoom meetings, everyone kept their cameras off.
There are some demographics where its usage is extremely common. I’ve come across multiple people who are on FaceTime calls while in public. Just walking around on video and speaker, talking to someone else. I can’t conceive of using it this way, but in some social circles it’s totally normalized.
This page has some interesting quotes. Reading through, it sounds like it’s hovering at or below the top 5 most common video chat tools. There’s a lot of bias towards quotes about 2020 usage so that’s obviously skewed, but that year at least 9-25% of various demographics were cited using FaceTime daily.
I use FaceTime 2-3 times a year to talk to my nephew, and maybe 3-5 times a year to screen share or show my mum things. But I do use Teams video calls literally 5 days a week (I try to avoid the video part when I can, but there are a few in leadership who really push for it. My company is never doing RTO, so I’ll accept a bit of video calling for the sake of permanent WFH!).
My kid and his friends use FaceTime instead of calling and will often be on it for hours while gaming. It’s much easier than a call for 3+ people. We are in the US but I imagine they use whatsapp or whatever the same way other places.
I work for a smaller org (less than 50 ppl) and we are generally required to have cameras on in meetings.
It’s not every day for everyone, but I used video calling every day to talk to my foreign spouse, and to talk to my little brothers when I was overseas. It’s pretty amazing overall.
I don’t know why everyone is so negative. The gameplan seems pretty clear to me.
- Make expensive fancy product. This is effectively a “devkit” that companies can use to start experimenting with AR software.
- Make lower cost product. There are now a few decent apps available and early adopters will be willing to buy it to be one the leading edge.
- Now there is a bigger market, leading more companies to be willing to develop apps.
Apple is hoping that this is enough to break the chicken-and-egg cycle. Enough to get a few powerful apps such that more regular consumers will be willing to buy which again increases the addressable market which makes it more attractive to companies.
Basically sounds like the Tesla game plan, which was super effective: roadster (which is purely a toy for the rich) and a little later the Model S (practical EV), and then introduce an affordable model.
This implies that eventually people will strap rusty boxes to their head though, so grain of salt with the analogy…
Yep that’s exactly why they had started the 2 then changed their mind lol. Alllll part of the plan
It’s all 5D chess, just like Elon.
They did something similar with Apple Watch and Apple TV and Home Pod and jt worked out well enough for them.
HomePod is still mid. But people really sleep on how terrible the first Apple Watch was, and how AppleTV is a media juggernaut now.
Apple should make a virtual headset you can buy in META, then put it on when you are already in a VR setting, except now you can use Apple services with it!
That way it would have zero production cost, be absolutely as useless as it already is, and can be just as overpriced.
It seems like the perfect Apple scheme.
If you can continue with vapid schemes that ensure endless shareholder value I’ll follow you anywhere senpaisano
I’m not sure why they tried this.
‘We made a VR games headset, but replaced the games with office related programs, like calenders and notepads’
Did any of them ever use an Oculus Quest? Like, why did they try this? Is this Apple’s Google Glass moment? Did they really think that if you pay enough youtubers to wear it in public, normal people would magically go into car-level debt to emulate them?
In fact, I’ll go as far as to say this campaign and price point was a bigger mistake, and a louder failure than Google Glasses.
I don’t know how far things have come since the aptly named Acer AH101-D8EY, but that was the last time I tried to be “productive” in VR and it was absolutely not working.
My guess was that they knew gaming was niche and were willing to invest less in this headset and more in spreading the widespread idea that “Spatial Computing” is the next paradigm for work.
I VR a decent amount, and I really do like it a lot for watching TV and YouTube, and am toying with using it a bit for work-from-home where the shift in environment is surprisingly helpful.
It’s just limited. Streaming apps aren’t very good, there’s no great source for 3D movies (which are great, when Bigscreen had them anyways), they’re still a bit too hot and heavy for long-term use, the game library isn’t very broad and there haven’t been many killer app games/products that distinct it from other modalities, and it’s going to need a critical amount of adoption to get used in remote meetings.
I really do think it’s huge for given a sense of remote presence, and I’d love to research how VR presence affects remote collaboration, but there are so many factors keeping it tough to buy into.
They did try, though, and I think they’re on the right track. Facial capture for remote presence and hybrid meetings, extending the monitors to give more privacy and flexibility to laptops, strong AR to reduce the need to take the headset off - but they’re first selling the idea, and then maybe there will be a break. I’ll admit the industry is moving much slower than I’d anticipated back in 2012 when I was starting VR research.
The only thing I could see myself using it for, is being in bed and watching a movie. I can do that with ar glasses for 300$.
you can get a giant 4K TV for $500 (1/7 the Vision price)
basically one TV for every room in your house
I myself use a 9 US$ gooseneck phone holder that gives me a great tv watching experience in bed. Came across it as a lemmy recommendation and it’s improved the quality of my life much more than some high end gadgets.
BUT THE SHAREHOLDERS!!!
The price immediately put this product into the grave. They should take out all the useless features like the eye passthrough, or the bizarre face scanning, if it’ll only ever be used for calls. If this were to be used in a gaming scenario, sort of like what the PSVR2 does, that’d be a whole different conversation
The front screen is what no one wants in a cheaper version. Don’t cut back on sound and cameras ffs
