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There’s No Dancing Around It: Apple’s Vision Pro Was An Ugly Dud
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this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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I went and did the Apple demo. I was there for something else at the time, and they had an opening, so I jumped on it. I highly recommend doing the demo, it’s honestly really freaking impressive. I’m not positive what the killer app is for it yet, or if this is just a step in long term AR/MR, but what they’ve done is really impressive. Yes, it’s expensive as hell, and my suspicion is that long term the displays will be replaced with a waveguide (Stanford’s looks pretty good at this point), so it won’t need the external-facing display, but they’ve got the head and hand-tracking in a good spot, as well as the gestures needed for it.
Maybe, the killer app will be the overlay itself, where it uses a camera/location/audio to see what’s going on and present more context. Looking at a menu? Okay, I’ve had this and this and liked it, but their X I’m not a fan of. I need Y from the grocery store, where is it on the shelves… more than anything, I think that they saw what Google glass could become capable of, and thought that the phone as it is now (screen, etc) was going to become obsolete at some point, and they were terrified of losing that race.
For the specs of what it is and what else is out there, it's actually a really good price.
People like to compare it to the cheapest headsets out there, but it has specs that beat the highest end headsets out there and it's cheaper than those.
When the Apple Vision pro came out, the closest device sporting similar specs would be the Varjo XR-3 which was only available to Enterprise users. It cost $7k plus a $1500 yearly subscription, plus you needed a powerful computer to run it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REo1ugX5GSI
Basically, hardware wise, it's good, but for it's actual uses it's not worth the $3500.
It's got good hardware, but there's nothing being done with that hardware. The pricepoint kept there from being any broad dev support, so its basically a gimmicky paperweight that costs $3500. At least Microsoft will directly work with industry partners for Hololens development, but there's nothing like that with Apple to help pave over the notoriously rough super-early adoption era.
Yeah, I’ve seen where doctors are using it for surgery and I see all sorts of parallels to the portable computing movement of the 90s, which were about having tablets instead of a ton of manuals, and some of the AR/MR where it shows them where everything goes while looking at the part in question.
The article I've seen is one instance in Brazil (article in Brazilian Portuguese) for laparoscopic surgery, which makes a lot of sense. I don't know how it compare to other displays, however, or if using a VR set rather than a monitor offers advantages, or if the Vision Pro did anything new or better. The same article mentions that doctors had done the same thing with a HoloLens VR headset some years before.
Several others, though a couple seem to be about a POC.