Apple hopes to convince people to buy its $3,500 Vision Pro headset using free 25-minute in-store demos::undefined
Oh. My. Goodness.
$3,500?!? HAHAHAHAHAHA
It is not meant for the end consumer at this stage, it is a tech demo and development kit.
The real consumer variant will probably be released in a year or two.
Did they say this or is this your pet theory? I don’t feel like that is necessarily the best strategy, since people won’t develop for it, when there’s no users and no users will appear when no one develops an ecosystem for this thing…
This isn’t really a “pet” theory — just economics. VR represents an entirely new product line, and with Apple’s expansion into services, a whole new way to value-add to those services and entire ecosystem; capturing more recurring revenue. This price point is based on new manufacturing costs at a much smaller scale than their other product lines.
It’s Apple, so it’ll never be “cheap”, but it can’t remain at this price point and stave off competition for long. Within 3 years they’ll either drop the price and introduce a pro version, or release an SE version, that’ll still probably be around $2000-2500 — but bringing it within reach of the people who’d normally buy “pro” devices.
You have to start somewhere. The iPhone was a game changer so it took of instantly. Something like an AR/VR headset is still pretty niche even today about 10 years after VR really became a thing.
It should be marketed as a dev kit, but they’re marketing it for consumers
Well, why not capture some consumers at the same time?
This very article says that Apple is pushing it onto “walk-in” consumers.
So?
They need to build hype, and if that means they are pushing a demo on walk-ins,then I don’t have an issue with it as long as they accept a “No thank you” from the customer.
I’d buy it if it was the kind of tool that earned me $5000… but it’s still really hard to justify the business use case for VR these days.
If I can lie on my couch while typing away on my custom virtual workspace it might be worth it but the resolution requirements make that unlikely any time soon
This thing is overpriced but there’s no way Apple ships it if they don’t have the pixel density to render text in a way that doesn’t make your eyes bleed. It’s being marketed as a work device, after all.
Drone pilot?
It also has basically no battery life and once that mostly useless battery becomes completely useless you are never unplugging that thing from the wall because you bet Apple made that battery impossible to replace!
The battery pack is literally just USB c.
Not impossible, just impossible to afford
And I thought Apple consumers were out-of-touch!
Have you heard of the Apple Cheesegrater?
Shit I’ve bought MacBooks for work that cost as much as that headset, and my current laptop costs about as much as this.
$3500 is nothing for a computer, let alone a prosumery AR/VR heatset with a computer built in.
$3500 is nothing for a computer, let alone a prosumery AR/VR heatset with a computer built in.
It’s absolutely bonkers. The problem is you’ve been brainwashed by Apple into paying such high prices.
My work PC costs twice that. There’s Apples influence has nothing to do with my Thinkpad.
I’ve worked on workstations that cost as much as a nice car. Apples pricing only comes close because they charge so much for storage. When you’re working with triple digit gigabytes of ram machines it ain’t cheap.
Apple makes by far the best laptop out there. No machine comes close when it comes to performance and battery life. Intel has a decent performance per watt under load, but under light non idle loads it’s not even close. My Thinkpad is incapable of getting decent battery life. Lenovos 10 hour battery life is a damn lie. I get 30 minutes to 3 hours at best. Our work MacBook pros easily get 10+ doing the exact same workload. AMD gets close, but they’re falling down the same trap Intel has been for the last 10 years.
My work PC costs twice that. There’s Apples influence has nothing to do with my Thinkpad.
Please show me your $7k Thinkpad.
When you’re working with triple digit gigabytes of ram machines it ain’t cheap.
It’s a lot cheaper if it’s not made by Apple. Even the 8GB models are insanely expensive.
Apple makes by far the best laptop out there.
That may be but they’re still not worth remotely what they’re charging, and the vast majority of people buying them don’t need them. They just buy into the ecosystem.
Also cloud computing is a thing. If there’s ever anything I need a bunch of power for I run it remotely from my desktop at home or on a cloud VM. And my mediocre desktop will blow the M9 Super Max Ultra Megacruncher out of the water for most tasks.
Only because it’s an Apple product. They could have made it stream wirelessly from your MacBook, and make it smaller and lighter, but then you wouldn’t have to pay another $3000 for the onboard processors.
They could have made it stream wirelessly from your MacBook
yeah, no. People really don’t understand how much bandwidth you actually need to stream even normal 4k 60hz video, let alone something like this. For reference, when I was figuring out how to dump my pc in the basement and have my monitor in my office, I had to run 12-strand fiber cables to do it.
Yeah, no. Done it with WiFi 6, no problem. Meta has had Air Link for years. Works fine. You don’t understand how much bandwidth you actually need.
you need about 20 gigabits per second for 4k 60hz. Or more, for higher resolutions and refresh rate - which vision pro has, compared to ~6 gigabits per second, that you need for your quest pro’s resolution. That’s why they make these.
And having compressed video streaming to a VR device sounds like my worst nightmare.
Parsec?
take a deep breath and realize; if you cannot afford this, you are not rich enough to be part of apples target audience.
no matter how much you want to tell yourself that you are.
I didn’t know apple target audiance was a total of 400.000 people which is the total amount the’ll make of these.
Seriously this is a proof of concept for rich kids children to be test users. I doubt it will visible move the needle on their profits.
You have some strange ideas, do android users enjoy being the “target audience” of google?
I am loyal to no brand, own a mix of devices and boycot some. Love tech, fuck capitalism.
It certainly is a big beta test product. I see it like the Tesla Roadster.
Second hand my dude
But the biggest issue is it wont run facebook oculus apps
iOS doesn’t run android apps. I don’t think many people will care. Most apps can be ported.
Why would I want Facebook apps?
I think what was meant here is that it won’t run apps designed for the Oculus Quest lineup (which is based on Android), not the actual Facebook application
Isn’t that kind of like saying that if you can’t afford 2024 MB S63 AMG then you’re not in Mercedes Benzs’ target audience? I bet the profit Apple makes from selling iPhones dwarfs the earnings from selling these goggles even if they’re successful.
Half of the US can’t afford a $1000 emergency. $3500 for a toy seems steep in that context.
That’s what credit card debt is for!
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Half of the US is over a hundred million people. The rumours are Apple has supply constraints that will limit global sales to about a million devices for now.
This can’t possibly be a mass market device - it’s just not possible right now to manufacture that many. The tiny screens are 3,400 DPI and 5000 nits (that’s about 10x brighter than a typical TV or computer screen). It’s going to be a while before tech like that can be mass produced.
They named it Vision “Pro” which in Apple marketing speak basically means “the really expensive one”. Their “Pro” desktop PC tower has a baseline price of $7k and fully upgraded it comes in at almost $13k which is actually cheaper than they were when they used Intel Xeons a couple years ago (those could hit something like $80k).
There will probably be a non-pro equivalent one day, which will be far cheaper.
Oh hey, it’s that time again. Copy-pasting from the last time around…
—
Because the price is always the main topic, I’m gonna drop a link to an AR/VR expert contextualizing the Vision Pro price within the current (well, 7 months ago) market:
Apple Just Beat the “BEST VR Headset In the WORLD”… and did it cheaper.
Norm from Tested on yt had good things to say after his hands-on with the headset iirc a while back. This is just the price of a flagship VR device ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For $3500 it better be good. But I doubt the value is added linearly since you get a pretty decent vr headset for under $800
Totally agree.
Relatedly, I think people would be surprised how little the Apple Tax really is when accounting for specs and performance. That said I’m sure the margin is quite a bit higher on this device than an mbp. It’s very clearly not positioned for consumers but for businesses and bleeding edge enthusiasts
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Apple Just Beat the “BEST VR Headset In the WORLD”… and did it cheaper.
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Is 25 minutes a long enough in-store demo test time to have a $3500 wank?
The bigger question is what will you do with the other 24 minutes?
Id buy it right now if it was maybe $500.
Spatial computing is the future.
I don’t need 3 screens. I need a pair of spectacles.
Screens have always been the bottleneck. The phone tablet monitor tv.
Glasses can do entire field of vision.
It doesn’t even do spatial computing well. It can simulate a single 4k display and that’s it. You can have some other apps floating around you, but not much.
If I could simulate 8 4k displays all around me, or freely float my full blown Mac OS programs and resize them to infinity then I’d be cool with this. But I’ve got more screen in front of me right now than the vision could ever hope to do. And Apples “apps” are far too gimped to be useful. Notes and email are cool, but not much else.
Then it’s not spatial. Maybe they will bring that to the table.
That’s what we need. I agree if it’s a downgrade from your Mac.
It’s an upgrade from my Thinkpad.
But price is the issue.
Once devs get it. They can improve.
It uses foveated rendering, so yeah it is effectively close to looking at a hidpi display across your entire field of vision, in a sphere around you. And you can use it effectively as a virtual monitor with a Mac, but you really have to design for the interface for a good experience
The price is always the joke, but this is aimed at commercial buyers right? Not consumers
Oh boy, you’ve got a lot to learn about apple consumers
Its an apple product, I don’t feel like wasting money on overpriced closed source garbage
It’s Apple. I expected nothing less than the most ridiculously priced products to be produced by them. So the figure is eye watering but expected. If these sellout, as some predict, it proves unequivocally that Apple fanboys are the most rabid idiots in existence.
For a high end enterprise geared headset that functions as its own standalone device and doesn’t require any connection to any other computer to work, this isn’t even expensive.
This isn’t meant to compete with something like a Quest. It’s meant to compete with something like the Varjo Aero, which goes from $5-10k.
For a company deciding on implementing AR/VR, the cost to get a Quest Pro for $800 plus a $2500 workstation to power it, vs a $3500 Vision Pro that doesn’t need a workstation, it’s pretty comparable.
For a high end enterprise geared headset
That Apple wants to sell to John, Martha and their 2.5 children.
Company sells goods to consumers, more at 11.
There’s always people out there that want to be on the bleeding edge. People spend $2000+ on just a 4090 card, or $2000 on a stupid folding phone that breaks from a grain of sand.
People even pay +$2K for concert tickets…
Where 2.5 children? There, or here?
Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 does less than Apple’s Pro Vision and it costs the same. Is it really that overpriced? And the cost goes way way up from there.
it proves unequivocally that Apple fanboys are the most rabid idiots in existence.
Maybe you should look inward before making silly comments like these.
Honestly, I don’t even need half of the things that it does to justify the price, for me - just give me a dual 4k, 100 hz displays and a display port connector and I’ll gladly shell out 3k to play vr video games on it.
If these sellout, as some predict, it proves unequivocally that Apple fanboys are the most rabid idiots in existence.
looks like you value money much higher than some others do - interpret that however you will.
A $2k CAD phone I can justify if it’s going to hold me in good stead over the next 6 years and have another 6 full OS upgrades straight from the manufacturer. My iPhone X held up great for 6 years, and only started struggling in 2023.
A $3,500 USD fashion accessory? What are they smoking, and can I have some?
Not trying to be pedantic, but did you mean 2023?
Lawl no worries about pedantry; my iPhone XS has no signs of slowing down.
Whoops. Yes, thanks.
That’s a no from me dawg
Is this VR or AR or both? And how robust is the actual software support?
To give a non-snarky answer, it does AR with external cameras and an incredibly low lag such that those who have tried it have said makes it almost natural (the resolution apparently isn’t perfect, but there is no discernible input lag when looking around which happens on other similar devices). But you can dial up the opacity to wind up in a fully VR environment. So, it is in fact, both.
Your question about software is a big one. Apple is advertising 1M apps available at launch (good) but these are iPad apps, which can run on Vision OS without any modifications by the developers (not so good). That does not mean it will be a good experience. I was listening to a podcast today where a developer clearly stated that after getting a chance to try their app on device at a lab, they totally stopped development because they missed the mark completely with their imagination and the simulator on how it should work. You’ll still be able to run their iPad app, but until they get their hands on their own hardware to iterate more rapidly, they’re giving up.
All that to say it’s unclear how many apps will be natively designed to work with it on launch, and if these will be any good.
Thankfully I don’t live in the US so I am immune to this particular reality distortion field. For now…
Technology used to be more about solving a problem or making something difficult easier. This thing has no real use beyond “neat”. But that Apple logo holds some very powerful magic for certain people.
Technology used to be more about solving a problem or making something difficult easier. This thing has no real use beyond “neat”.
I guess you haven’t been following the video game industry for the last half a century?
No I have. Creating a product then finding a use is the very definition of cart before horse-ing. Marketing does most of the heavy lifting for getting people excited about crap they don’t need, and Apple is the king of marketing.
It replaces all your monitors for your workstation in a single portable device. That alone is worth it for a lot of people.
It replaced 1 single 4k Monitor. It can’t do more than that.
If you say so.
If it’s anything like my other VR headsets the novelty wears off in 10… this runs dangerously close to not getting to the bottom of my cupboard with all the other shithouse headsets
And I thought buying an iPhone was crazy…
Buying Apple products is like buying permanent training wheels for bicycles. There are safeguards in place. The average consumer needs those safeguards. They are gullible, ignorant of technology, and they don’t want to learn.
That said, Apple does do it right, at the cost of high prices and less control. Apple dumbs down their products for their consumers, and it works.
Making comments like this is a huge self-own. There are MacBook users whose software powers a good portion of your daily life.
As a household with multiple severs, a PiHole, and four self-built desktops… and iPhones, and iPad, and an ancient MacBook, you couldn’t be more correct. That person’s comment is insane.
I understand limiting application source to the official one by default. Heck, even on Linux systems the default is always to have just the official repositories enabled, with the exception of Flatpak which is quite sandboxed. And who else Apple would trust to bare the default source than Apple themselfs?
But user must be able to choose otherwise if wants, period.
