I was so excited about the Vision and desperate to get one.
Finally my company has bought one for testing and I’m honestly not sure what to even use it for.
Maybe a big screen Mac? Is that it?
I think Apple has fallen into the same dead end they did with Apple TV: no controller = no games.
Both Apple TV and Vision Pro could have been filled with games from indie devs. But it’s impossible to play most games with a pinch or the worst TV control ever created.
I wonder how much of it can be blamed on the Vision Pro being nothing more than a big wobbly iPod Touch, instead of a real computer.
For me, a Vision Pro would have been fantastically useful if it was a little bit more like MacOS (or Android), and shipped with a native, real terminal that I could run things on. $3500 is suddenly a lot easier to swallow if I could think about it like 20 monitors to run terminals on.
The better analogy is that it's the Apple TV interface for your face. All the buttons are ginormous, the options are barebones, the information density is crap.
> I was so excited about the Vision and desperate to get one. Finally my company has bought one for testing and I’m honestly not sure what to even use it for.
I'm not really sure why anyone would want to use an Apple TV for games, instead of a dedicated console. AFAICT the killer app for Apple TV is airplay. I haven't seen a co-working space conference room TV without an Apple TV attached for years.
I mean, I guess privacy is the other feature. I use an AppleTV at home to bypass all the smart TV nonsense. I know Apple can't be trusted, but I trust it more than a TV manufacturer who tries to shove ads down my throat the moment I connect their TV to the internet.
I refuse to use anything Apple so can't speak for the Apple TV, but I see it as pretty comparable to the Google TV (aka Chromecast w/ Google TV) products, just more open, flexible, compatible, and affordable.
I use Google TV for games on occasion. It has excellent controller support and works great for lightweight games that run fine on the stick. For anything heavier, the Steam Link app is the go-to. I can run the games on my bigass Linux PC and stream them to the TV. I routinely do this for Hogwart's Legacy for example.
Now that said, lately I've been just hooking up my Steam Deck to the TV and using that. Less friction and less bugs by avoiding the Steam Link app. And the Steam Deck is pretty close to a console (certainly much closer than it is to an Apple/Google TV), so perhaps I've just proven your point :-D
> Bundling a controller would increase the cost for everyone to satisfy a minority of gamers.
Apple doesn't have to increase the cost. The leaked BOM suggests that Apple makes a sizable margin on Vision Pro, even if each controller cost $500 they could give them away in-box and still make more money per-unit than the Quest headset. It's not about cost.
> So instead they support all PS5, Xbox, BT etc controllers.
Those are not 6DOF controllers, they are class-compliant USB devices that every single computer really ought to support. If Apple supported OpenXR then they would likely also have the software to support other controllers, but apparently that's a touchy subject in this thread.
Apple probably "makes money" on each unit, but I would imagine the development costs of the Vision Pro were astronomical. With that in mind they might not even be recuperating the costs with their sizable margin.
