This indicates to me that the Apple Vision and visionOS product line and OS are not canceled internally and that Apple is still committed to its future.
While the Apple Vision Pro itself is not a good or successful product, progress in display technology will enable Apple to build a more attractive consumer product, in the form of light, comfortable and unobtrusive AR glasses.
In this line of thinking — not just focusing on the flopped AVP but looking at the product line on the long term - I think it makes sense for this OS to be added to Godot.
I do think the concern for who will carry the maintenance burden is valid. In my experience, Apple hasn’t been the most responsive company when it comes to obscure bugs or issues with their API (e.g. with Cocoa). I would be wary of depending on continued support from a large tech company that can change its goals at any time.
> While the Apple Vision Pro itself is not a good ... product
I must admit I'm baffled by this reaction to the first model:
* It's clearly far more impressive technologically than any competitor.
* The price point clearly indicates it wasn't aimed at the general consumer, which is normal for such a massive technological leap compared to their other recent consumer stuff (e.g. the apple watch).
* They got loads of feedback
* Nobody who is this critical seems to articulate what success would have looked like.
> in the form of light, comfortable and unobtrusive AR glasses.
This just seems like a fantasy. I don't understand why people expect this is possible. Battery alone precludes this. Even just streaming video back and forth is going to be too power-hungry for serious use with lightweight glasses.
The Vision Pro could easily have been successful if they'd invested an additional 10% of it's R&D budget into software development, and released a suite of tools that actually leveraged what the platform was capable of.
It's incredibly impressive tech but just not worth it if all there is to do is to have ipad apps floating in the air around me.
It does a lot more than iPad apps. Coexisting 3-D volumetric apps with 2D app is quite innovative and not even an android XR will be able to do that in its first release. What’s software development tools do you think it’s missing?
Honestly yes. It's by far the highest quality implementation of 3D TV or 3D Film I have ever viewed. Avatar 2 and IMAX films in particular are stupendous. I really don't have an adjective to describe how much better stereo content in the VisionPro is over every other display device or theater.
Exactly. 3D TV wasn’t a bad idea. It was just pushed a bit too hard too soon. There’s a reason 3D movies are still popular in theaters; people genuinely enjoy them and are willing to pay at least some premium for them.
Frankly, I’d much rather have a 3D TV than a “smart” TV.
The fact that the AVP gives you fully isolated video streams for each eye is what makes it kickass compared to any glasses-filtering based display. It's perfect stereo.
What sets it apart from things like Meta Quest is Apple's best-in-class video rental / stream / purchase infrastructure all going back to the original iTunes.
And then you have apps like Disney Plus that fully support it.
Same reaction. The vision pro is clearly a great headset. The biggest thing restraining it has been the ability to program for it. If Apple will not let 3rd party devs access the primitives needed to create game engine support then Apple needs to lend that support. Here they are
The biggest thing restraining it is the ergonomics and form factor. No one wants face PCs. Imagine how women, who are half the population, and who spend 0.5T dollars a year on hair and makeup products, are going to deal with smashing a 1.5 pound PC into their faces and held in place with straps around their head and hair. SJ would have smothered that thing in the crib the second his team had no answer for how a product that excludes half the population at the get go could possibly be successful. Can you imagine iPhone shipping in a form factor that required women redo their hair and makeup after every single use?
1. That's an anecdote, but you know that. I'm going to guess that the wife of someone on this forum is nerdier than average.
2. Even if you WANT a face PC, that doesn't mean you'll love using it and keep it once the honeymoon wears off. Supposedly over half of VR headset owners use their device less than once per month.
I used to want a headset. I bought a Valve Index. Everything about the device was fantastic. The games were fantastic. But then I sold it about 6 months later because, meh, it's just not something that was practical and usable frequently enough.
So right now we have basically ideal headsets Meta Quest 3/3S which are excellent, dirt cheap, lightweight, and have a large software catalog but they still struggle to retain users and grow the market.
The Vision Pro hasn't even resolved motion sickness for 100% of users. You can love it and still be forced to discontinue use one by something you can't control about your own body.
> So right now we have basically ideal headsets Meta Quest 3/3S
Cmon, it has shitty hardware and shittier software. The only thing going for it is price and a game catalogue they've basically purchased. Which is admittedly a formidable combo, but it's clear nobody wants it. There's no leverage to make them actually cater to the consumer.
I would say cost is the hardest part to swallow—hence why I think it's ludicrous to even vaguely suggest it's aimed at general consumers. But i suppose it's difficult to tease these things apart.
> Battery alone precludes this. Even just streaming video back and forth is going to be too power-hungry for serious use with lightweight glasses.
I know this is obvious, but the battery doesn't have to go in the glasses. When the glasses are just a wireless monitor, it opens up all sorts of possibilities for belttop computers. Obviously, the glasses still need some power, but the battery can be very small, comparatively. Put the weight and heat into something with a mobile phone form factor.
Apple Watch -> $250
iPhone 16 Pro Max -> $1200
iVirt -> $2400
iVirt LTE -> $3200
iGlass -> $600
Now you can charge $3000 for you VR kit, but claim it only costs $2400. Plus people shell out $600 for the glasses even though they don't have the CPU. They just want to look like they do. Or they buy multiple pairs for different locations or as backups or whatever. The profit on the glasses could be huge. Especially if they could replace the Apple Watch for some people.
Googling "belttop" just shows belts. To what are you referring? Are you suggesting wiring the glasses to some battery stored elsewhere? Sure you can do that, but I thought people these days hated wires (in spite of an objectively superior interface to wireless). But you certainly can't power streaming for it (for more than say an hour) with the battery you can actually store in glasses.
I've never even heard of an iVert.
> Plus people shell out $600 for the glasses
I want to sell these people a bridge. Pray tell me where I can find them because their money is absolutely begging to be taken for a pittance. Who the fuck is paying $600 for $5 of plastic?
Edit: i realize i only addressed part of your comment. I think I get that you're trying to convey an iVert as an apple product, right?
> Now you can charge $3000 for you VR kit, but claim it only costs $2400. Plus people shell out $600 for the glasses even though they don't have the CPU. They just want to look like they do. Or they buy multiple pairs for different locations or as backups or whatever. The profit on the glasses could be huge. Especially if they could replace the Apple Watch for some people.
Do we have evidence they aren't subsidizing this? If you can't look at production cost this speculation seems useless. And to claim that $2400 is any more within the realm of affordability is insane. If they actually wanted normal people to bite they'd have priced it at ~$700. This is for rich people and reviewers only.
Oh this is definitely for rich people only. I thought that was a given. Who else spends $1200 on a laptop every two years? Who else spends $300 on a watch? We're looking for people who spend $200-500 on sunglasses--the non-electronic kind.
You ask where to find these people? Visit your closest Apple store. Or a rodeo arena. Or a Tesla charging lot. Or a Whole Foods market. The United States is crawling with these people.
It is a technological tour de force and an amazing demo of what's possible and what is soon to come. But if we define a "good product" to mean a commercially successful one, then it isn't very successful. Still, I'm hoping it won't be killed and that it will continue to evolve and become successful eventually.
> But if we define a "good product" to mean a commercially successful one
Why would we define a "good product" as a "successful product"? These are 2 different things. There are many ways to define a "good product" (is it useful? is it well made? is it innovative?), success is something else. All combinations of good-bad / successful-unsuccessful are possible.
Thats a very naive understanding of success. Youre telling the soap maker on etsy doesnt have a successful product because she doesnt sell a million units a day? Youre telling me that Rolls Royce Aerospace isn't successful because they only 100 aircraft engines a year?
That soap maker didn't spend $10B in R&D figuring out how to make the soap. Your retort makes zero sense. Apple's worst products sold tens of millions of units in their first couple of years while Vision Pro sold about 370K units in year 1 and well into year 2 still has plenty of inventory sitting on warehouse shelves to cover all of 2025 demand. It literally bombed in the market. It's an abject failure of a product that couldn't be called a success in any way beyond a great prototype and some excellent demoware. It's a flop and a joke.
It didn’t bomb in the market. It was priced for supply constraints. They basically tied Meta on all headset revenue in its first year (450k units and $1.4 billion). visionOS is a triumph and foundation for the next decade of computing, and the entire product line of Apple is adapting to its look and feel. The entire XR / VR industry is changing their strategy to respond to visionOS , particularly Meta horizon OS which has incorporated numerous improvements that were directly inspired by Apple. And plenty of Apple products sold a lot less than 10 million annually to this day.
Applying this to apple is beyond comprehension... What do you mean by using such a term? Apple is likely the richest single entity to have every existed, outside of perhaps the US economy as a whole. This single vr product line made apple more money than either of us will make in a lifetime. So hopefully i'm mistaken and you can educate me as to what the word means.
But hopefully you meant "objective". Which is still stupid, but is at least a familiar and manageable form of stupidity.
I assume the GP means "successful in the market" by "successful product". They're distinguishing between something that might be successful otherwise and something that is successful as a product.
>* It's clearly far more impressive technologically than any competitor.
Technology hardly makes a product.
>The price point clearly indicates it wasn't aimed at the general consumer,
You don't put your CEO on the cover of Vanity Fair and devote half your retail space and staff to it if it's not for the general consumer.
>* They got loads of feedback
Not as much as they hoped. They hoped to have 500K units in the wild in the first year and ramp up for the second year to a meaningful production run but that never happened because demand fell off a cliff once the fanboys got theirs and so the feedback is very, very limited and mostly negative or untrustworthy.
>* Nobody who is this critical seems to articulate what success would have looked like.
Apple scale scales. Meet or break Watch's first 2 year sales maybe? Watch, derided as a failure in the first year actually sold about ~20M units across both year 1 and year 2. Vision Pro will sell fewer than 500K units across year 1 and 2. 500K units!! One doesn't need to define success when failure is so easily defined here.
>Even just streaming video back and forth is going to be too power-hungry for serious use with lightweight glasses.
Spectacles will be entirely different technology stacks. See the Meta Orion prototype for example. You are correct, battery is an issue. Even bigger though is heat. Can't let things get smartphone hot on your face or it's game over. Anyway, expect low-res, narrow field of view, 2D overlays, more like your car's HUD than the immersive experience of goggles. But at least spectacles have a chance where goggles clearly do not, as demonstrated at both the high end and low end by Apple and Meta.
They had about 450 K units in the wild in the first year. They will sell around 600 K units of the first version until the second one is released later this year. This was on a potential production target of 900 K units. So it’s not exactly a failure so much as an underperform due to them over pricing it for supply constraints.
VisionOS is clearly a triumph and the basis of UX for their entire product line. The scepticism is gonna age like those who were sceptical about the original Mac and Windows. Vision Pro isn’t even all that expensive by historical standards.
I believe there's going to be a lot more investment if no other reason than Tim Cook seems to care deeply about it (and beating Zuckerberg).
Strategically it make sense. The only real threat to the iPhone which Apple makes all their money from, is a new form factor that replaces phones. Maybe glasses/goggles will never replace phones, but spending billions a year to make sure that you win the glasses market just in case they do is very cheap insurance.
>> "Tim cares about nothing else," an insider with knowledge of the matter told Gurman. "It’s the only thing he’s really spending his time on from a product development standpoint."
>> he's looking to beat Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg — who shares an obsession with AR and VR headsets — to market.
Is Tim Cook a product person now?
Does Apple care about being first now (instead of being best)?
Before the Vision Pro release we heard similar reporting from Gurman (1) (and recall the skepticism about Gurman's reporting: 2)
Yet here we are. After a decade of promoting AR (3) Tim Apple released a headset of which "the weirder things about visionOS (and the Vision Pro itself, really) is that there’s not a lot of true AR in the mix" (4)
Cook took all of the top Vision Pro talent and put them to work on Siri. Those who didn't go are either working on the spectacles (no relationship at all to the tech in the goggles) or they're working to clear out the pipleline of goggles work that's already close to finished that they can deploy along with a new model that uses mostly the same components as the first which lets them make their supply chain whole after they ended production well short of what they promised their component makers. Rather than leave their supply chain high and dry and their developers disappointed with early cancellation, they'll make one more go of it to buy themselves the time to progress on spectacles (again, totally unrelated tech) so Cook can claim that goggles evolved into spectacles rather than admit that goggles bombed and they're retrenching around spectacles and that entirely different tech stack and approach, for which zero of the goggles investment by Apple or 3rd party developers will transfer.
You’re covering this board with statements of rumor, personal opinion and conjecture, as if they were statements of fact and getting the rumours wrong consistently. The Vision Pro leader, Mike Rockwell, runs both visionOS and Siri/AI. Many of his lieutenants are working on Siri, while many are staying on visionOS. The architectural approach and UX of visionOS is infecting the entire software group.
Goggles have not bombed, and are not going away for at least a decade. Apple will not be abandoning visionOS for spectacles, I know you keep repeating this, but it’s false.
The first "cancelled" reporting was Gurman saying that they'd moved on to spectacles which is true, much of the talent was reassigned to other projects including AR spectacles.
The next reports said Vision Pro was over but a Vision "lite" was on the way to give it one more go.
The next reports said the Vision Pro chip and ship minor spec bump plus a lighter cheaper version.
The next reports said Vision, unclear pro or lite, plus tethered goggles (PCVR for Mac, probably like the Beyond 2 but shiny and metal.)
The reports after that said most of the top talent from the Vision Pro teams has moved to Siri to rescue it and AI.
So, we've got most of the talent moved to spectacles and Siri, and a tethered device and an all-in-one device on the table.
Those are mostly likely last ditch attempts at rescuing the massive R&D investment and equally important, a chance to make their supply chain whole after ending production short of what Apple promised them. We'll see the next products integrate nearly all of the components of the first and that'll clear the decks for their suppliers so they're not left high and dry as well as letting their devs get one more crack at things and ship the VisionOS 3.0 stuff they've been hard at work on this last year.
Making your devs and supply chain happy is hardly a drop in the bucket cost wise compared to the investment already made so that's what they're doing.
They'll try a cheaper version of the immersive all-in-ones and a PCVR version that strips out the PC they've spent 10 years and $10B integrating to see if a display peripheral for $2K will beat an all-in-one face PC at $4K (but that won't give Cook the new platform he was hoping to own and monetize, just another accessory for SJ's creations.)
The core idea is solid. At this point it just needs to be lighter, have better battery, and a much lower price. With further refinement and increased economies of scale these issues could potentially be fixed.
Nearly all of the reviews I’ve read say that it’s a good user experience overall, but it’s not worth the price.
It doesn't need a battery at all. Just have it connect directly to a Mac to use as a virtual Mac display. It's what I use my Vision Pro for as its primary use case, to have an ultra-wide monitor in front of me without taking up any physical space. I use it for hours every day as my primary programming platform.
I really have no other use case, and don't need the VR/AR features. The virtual ultra-wide display of the latest VisonOS updates, which has the area of 2 4k monitors, is just amazing for coding. It's an incredible user experience and worth every penny for the Vision Pro for that alone.
Throwing away some of the AR/VR features and using it as a virtual display only would make it lighter and smaller. I could use something that doesn't block me from taking a drink while I code, for example. I couldn't care less about video games as well.
Apple (and Meta) didn't want a great PC accessory, they wanted new platforms they could own and monetize. They spent 10 years, both of them, integrating the whole PC inside the goggles because the display only approach had little value to them. Apple may try a PCVR headset, probably similar to the Beyond 2 but with glass and aluminum instead of plastic, as "big Mac display" is the only value any decent number of Vision Pro users get from their devices and Apple's got plenty of unused component supply and supply chain lined up already, but goggles are likely a dead form factor.
Man, I don't even bother using the ultra-wide monitor on my desk. The screen on my laptop can already display orders of magnitude far more information than I can easily process at one time. Even with contexts where I'm comfortable managing windows/buffers manually (e.g. emacs) there's simply too much space to easily manage. What do you do with all that space? Is it just pulling up every possible resources at once so you don't need to bother doing anything more than moving your eyes to switch contexts? How often are you switching contexts?
I find the extra space useful over just a laptop screen for coding - I can have a simulator to one side, and a coding window open with a good amount of space for metadata sidebars, along with a window or two for code documentation.
Where it really shines though is for photo review and editing. There it is spectacular to have so much space for image review even with a good number of adjustment controls up.
The other thing the screen is great is for use on a plane. No-one can see what you are working on, but it's also a kindness to others since your laptop screen is totally dark. It was really nice working on an international flight with the AVP and a laptop.
I appreciate the insight. I definitely understand why you might prefer this, especially with the in flight example and the photo editing. The one example I came up with internally was video editing/viewing, which seems to align quite well.
And yet I have people constantly telling me how they have four monitors set ups and still not enough screen real estate… and this is why they don’t like the Vision Pro, which can only give you one big ultra wide max.
I've yet to meet someone with strong preference for screen real estate that could back it up with productivity. Sometimes people just want stimulation.
Edit: i have no gripe with these people, I just simply don't buy that they're more productive. We all need our comforts. Mine is music.
There's nothing really to "throw away" that would make it slighter and smaller whilst still keeping your desired feature set.
The reality is that you're using the VR/AR features in one specific way - not that you're not using VR/AR
It's possible a slightly weaker CPU or GPU could be used but I don't think so and in any case the effects of that would be on cost not on weight. And I don't think the difference would be significant.
The external display being the EyeSight thing? I agree there. That's an expensive boondoggle that will probably be missing in the next iteration in any case.
I don't think you can get rid of cameras without reducing the gesture tracking fidelity. That's the reason the Vision Pro has so many cameras.
> M2 CPU subsystem
Not clear on what this means without looking up the spec sheet. Do you mean "use a slower CPU" or something else? If the former - it won't help that much with size or weight.
Sounds like you're really looking for something like the Bigscreen Beyond?
Congratulations, you just reinvented a decade old discontinued Microsoft products, Windows MR and HoloLens, which ended up being subsidization program for SteamVR and a pure tech demo.
Did not know HoloLens had 23megapixel displays to show high resolution text for coding. It must have been really useful back then with such a high resolution display that you could use for coding all day.
People really need to understand that its the details that make a product viable, not the concept.
HoloLens 2 had higher pixel density than AVP at 2K horizontal resolution at 43deg HFOV. So yeah, you just didn't know HoloLens had 23megapixel displays to show high resolution text for coding, nearly a decade ago.
The problem was the same as today. Dead numb market response to non-SteamVR VR/MR/AR/XR headsets.
Sure, but that PPD number is what prevents me from using these headsets as a primary display replacement. I personally don't need a virtual display that fills 100 degrees of my vision and would happily sacrifice FOV for something usable.
This is from someone who has spent hundreds of hours coding in VR, which currently requires big font sizes and screens that take up massive FOV, which I find very uncomfortable for extended periods.
Also two decades of headset display products that have existed the entire time VR has been a thing of pop culture interest, and yet has never been a product the masses give a fuck about.
The masses don't consume everything on their phones because they care about screen size or fidelity. Sure, they will buy phones with bigger and better screens than other phones, but if they want to do something on a big screen they will use their 60 inch 4k TV
In fact, the masses basically don't do computer stuff at all anymore.
No, it's not. The form factor cannot possibly shrink enough in size and weight or gain enough input ergonomics to make the gorgeous outputs worth it. Not gonna happen for goggles, ever. People won't smash a PC into their faces for no use cases beyond what their laptops and smartphones amply provide for. You think women who spend half a trillion dollars a year and an average of an hour a day on their hair and makeup are going to smash any kind of PC, no matter how small and light, into their faces requiring they redo their hair and makeup after every use? Really?
Spatial computing is to interact with and manipulate 3D space—blending the physical and digital worlds. It enables users to understand, interpret, and respond to the geometry, position, and movement of real-world environments.
I fail to see that as a future mode of user/computer interaction that competes with or augments mobile/laptop computer usage in any meaningful way.
Even movie watching, the most successful application of visionOS / Vision Pro, has limited use because it forces a solitary experience. While it can be useful (eg on a plane or in bed while your SO sleeps), you also already carry your phone and earbuds with you so it isn’t a compelling enough use case. Nobody is creating games for vision either and it I think it’s unlikely to become a favored general computing device or mode.
I can probably say more succinctly: spatial computing appears to be a classic case of a solution looking for a problem.
Prior art by Microsoft (HoloLens) and Google (Glass) are interesting because they occupied very different positions on the spatial computing spectrum, but in both cases they surfaced headwinds like the fact that people are unlikely to put glasses or headsets on the face/head juts in order to “compute”.
If there was a path to direct neural input or contact lens delivery, now we might be talking, but even then, you’ve solved the physical impediments but still don’t have a compelling general purpose computing use case.
Some would argue an addictive use case like porn can tip the scales, but I’m doubtful and, besides, I think we can be sure that Apple would never position themselves to depend on porn to advance their business interests.
It seems safe to predict that within 3 — 5 years Apple gives up on this vision. They might come back to it in the future but I think they’re more alarmed by the other computer interaction paradigm that is getting a lot more traction: GenAI/LLM, which subverts the need for a rich visual display and fits and extends all our other computing models more elegantly.
I think you're looking at the command line and saying a mouse is a solution looking for a problem.
Its not just about manipulating objects spatially. You could do that on a desktop screen with a wii-mote. The other aspect of the form factor is that its an always on, omni-present display, with awareness of the user's surroundings.
This unlocks the ability for apps to be locked to specific locations and contexts, to overlay information on the world, and to, as you stated, manipulate them in a spatial way.
Once the UX itself isn't an uncomfortable hassle, the use cases are really very easy to imagine.
I think it's not actually that bad a situation, to me I think we're just at matters of degree. To explain:
It's not that people can't see that it might be super nice to have an experience kind of like the AVP for a few already-known problems:
1. As an alternative to a big, heavy, non-portable display(s) or a bulky laptop for people who can't always just work at a desk.
2. As an alternative to a TV
3. Fun gaming applications. For instance, MarioKart Home Circuit is a neat game that uses physical karts with cameras, which you play on the TV, but imagine how cool it would be if kids could run around the house and the neighborhood with friends in AR racing karts that only you can see.
1 and 2 are already perfectly there, and obviously a very small number of games that take advantage of VR exist, but they're not that ambitious.
The issue though is that nobody wants those 'problems' solved badly enough to (A) pay $3500+ plus tax for it, nor (B) wants to wear a very heavy and awkward-looking helmet with poor battery life.
The promise is there. If a device can be made that is far lighter, can fold to fit in a coat pocket, with better battery life, and costing $1000, that could go a long way to being something people would find well worth the effort of carrying around and worth the cost. If everybody has one and it's comfortable and light, watching movies on it together, either on an awesome AR screen with atmospheric effects, or in a VR movie theater could be a fun experience rather than look like an absurd antisocial nerd thing.
All this will require investment and improvement of the tech, and will require a healthy developer ecosystem, but with those pieces I'd give the idea itself a good shot. We'll see if Apple is willing or able to do either one. If not them, someone else might.
as an avp hobby dev i dont disagree with your prediction. its a product i want and think is good, but im sure most people dont want and think is bad.
i somewhat agree with your solution looking for a problem statement but i think a potential application for spatial computing is data collection and presentation. think of how many businesses depend on filling out forms to report on the state of a physical object/equipment. a spatial component where that form now has a ___location in space and the scene with the object can be reconstructed for review is valuable for businesses. to clarify, this is a case for spatial computing, not the avp. the avp is nowhere near rugged enough to do the job safely and one day the data collection is best handled by drones
GenAI/LLM slop subverts the need for a rich visual display. WTF. Please explain How does a statistic based lossy compression technique with high error rates does that?
It’s telling that the best use case Facebook could come up with for its AI YouTube commercial spam is “give me conversion starters” lol.
Spatial computing of iPad apps floating in the air with an even worse, low information rate input method?
Neat concept, kneecapped at birth by sandboxing requirements, App Store rules, and Apples desire to own all of the innovation that could happen on the platform.
Siri on visionOS is actually quite refreshing for its speech to text, it is almost entirely on device and very low latency, with much more accuracy than you see on iOS. The combination of a keyboard, trackpad, Siri, hand and eye tracking is incredibly high information rate input for me and it’s what I use for most of the day for the past eight months or so.
I also wished it was more Mac air than iPad but the remote wide curved desktop feature is VERY nice. It seems to me the next logical step is remote individual app display/controls.
Sadly the Adtech scumbags can’t help themselves from trying to steal all the data they can, just see how they ignore robots.Txt, download phone address/numbers lists, download the outlook data file until measures were added to stop that, paying game publishers to include libraries loaded with phone home calls, and ignoring do not track because $$$ > ethics. Heck even Nvidia video drivers phone home with collected metrics.
Sandboxed operating systems based on bsd jails(iOS), flat pack and snaps (Linux), and chromeOS are a first step at stopping this unethical behavior. The good old days of trusting software from large companies not to install data harvesting spyware are long gone.
Not if it was 90% done and you want to clear the decks of nearly completed work before moving on. It's absolutely common to ship stuff to make third party suppliers and partners whole even when you've decided not to continue investing in a product. Keeping partners happy is critical to the smooth functioning supply chain Cook built and which gives Apple most of their success today.
A big feature like this will be at most 20-30% done when you open a PR, because the rest of the work is in collaboration to suit upstream which will as always require notable changes and rewrites.
Spending manweeks to manmonths on new upstream work that won't see any practical use until half to a whole year later, after getting legal to work things out, is a significant investment in new development.
This has nothing to do with suppliers or partners. They are not dumb enough to measure a product roadmap in number of random PRs, but will look at first party software and hardware roadmap.
Sure you can. That said, I'm not sure what Apple's usual style is and it might be pretty out of character (or not) to drop support shortly after an MR.
No you can't. Upstreaming a large feature like this requires at the very least allocating a number of manweeks to the upstreaming process, and that's without accounting for actually writing the feature in the first place. Making a PR and not following up would be worse PR (heh) than doing nothing, which is also costly.
If they had dumped a tarball or a fork somewhere with a hacked up PoC it could have looked like they just dumped what they had, but even that requires approvals and time from legal, and so someone has to decide its worth investing in.
(I have no interest in speculating about the Vision lineup itself, just commentating on open source contributions.)
You really don't understand how much money Apple's sunk on this and how little comparatively it takes to wind down operations in a way that makes partners and suppliers happy. Keeping a couple small teams going, even with entirely new versions shipping, to keep your supply chain whole and your partners coming back for future products is cheap and easy and very likely what Apple's doing now that most of the top talent was moved to spectacles and Siri. Letting your OS and partner software teams clear their pipelines is absolutely common at Apple and elsewhere. Denying that is silly.
They could also throw money out their window, light it on fire, let their employees do whatever they want instead of regular Apple work, etc.
A lot of managers (and legal) have to approve and allocate significant budget to bad ideas. Companies generally try to avoid doing bad ideas that are a net negative.
This is precisely what they're doing, shipping everything that was mostly already cooked, clearing out the pipleline for their own developers and for third parties, particularly the supply chain they left high and dry when they ended Vision Pro production early, but also their own OS devs and the ones working with third party software and content sponsorships.
They've already moved all the top talent and the next thing looks like a PCVR device that guts the PC from Vision Pro and maybe a chip and ship bump or even a cheaper model with sub-premium materials and lower fidelity optical stack.
What ever is going on, it's clearly not the priority it was and most people paying close attention see a steep decline in the viability of goggles at Apple. That form factor was a flop, as the ergonomics simply didn't align with the use cases for most normal people.
Unfortunately the price tag is too high for me, and since I'm based in the Netherlands, I did not manage to schedule a demo. However, what makes a good product is subjective and you're right that in many ways it is a good product.
From what I can see, the hardware and software quality are high, and the user experience is greatly simplified in contrast to something like Meta Quest, which' UX is often rough and clunky.
My main argument for saying it's not a good product, is that the form factor is not where it should be for mass consumer appeal.
Another subjective and personal pet peeve is that it's not possible to create an AR experience using custom rendering logic with Metal. One has to use RealityKit. Only a fully immersive experience (VR) can be created with Metal. (This might have changed since it came out and I'm happy to be proven wrong, then I'll definitely buy one). I understand the reasoning behind locking this down, but I would love to experiment with writing AR 3D modeling software for visionOS.
Yeah - I thought it was a good product, just a way-too-expensive-to-ever-gain-popular-support, completely useless one since no developer wants to support a new Apple platform knowing how brutally Apple treats developers with their in-app-purchase nonsense, and Apple itself sure isn't doing anything to put any wood behind the arrow.
If Apple cared, they'd drop the money to get, say, immersive courtside experience at every NBA and NFL game for a subscription fee. New long-form immersive content, not these silly 5-10 minute videos they drop every month or two.
It's a great product. But Apple's not serious enough about it. Someone who can deliver at least one of "normal people can buy it" or "a ton of incredibly compelling content exists" will own this market, eventually. It probably won't be Apple.
" just a way-too-expensive-to-ever-gain-popular-support"
You assumed that models would stay that price forever???
"how brutally Apple treats developers with their in-app-purchase nonsense"
How is 15% brutal to have access to a market base of hundreds of millions of customers who can click to purchase without entering a credit card.
"Apple itself sure isn't doing anything to put any wood behind the arrow"
Of all the dumb things you said, this may possibly be the dumbest - though to be sure the other two items are incredibly stupid.
Apple has put a TON of effort into the Vision Pro. They have continued to produce high quality immersive content. They have obviously continued to work on new versions. They have recently put on an entire developer day program on producing immersive content (programmatic and video related). They have greatly improved the Mac mirroring features and added other good UI updates on a pretty continuous basis since launch.
Apple is doing all they can to move the platform forward, it just takes time to reduce costs. It's a platform well worth looking into supporting since Apple is obviously fully committed to it moving forward.
> You assumed that models would stay that price forever??
Apple didn't bother to try to keep the cost down on this version, and for Apple, cost plus the margins they demand dictated the high price.
> "How is 15% brutal to have access"
Okay, first of all, 30%. We're not talking indie devs with <1MM in revenue that can get the 15% deal for a little while. The kind of developers they need to make huge killer apps are ones like Epic, Blizzard, etc. And entertainment firms like Netflix, the ones Apple insists on soaking for 30% of revenue across the board, and those firms have voted with their feet and aren't embracing any Apple platforms. I don't care, I'm not and will never develop for Apple's various "stores" -- take your argument up with the developers who hate them. Nobody wants to give Apple another market to throw their considerable weight around in.
> "They have continued to produce high quality immersive content. They have obviously continued to work on new versions. They have recently put on an entire developer day program on producing immersive content (programmatic and video related)."
Big deal. There isn't enough content that even many big Apple fans who love the product in theory mostly don't use them and admit they were a poor investment. A couple silly 10 minute shorts a month isn't enough to justify it. If they cared, they'd put serious money - of which they have plenty - behind selling a device (any device!) at a compelling price even at a subpar margin. See gaming consoles. Or they'd do what it takes to get developers and content companies to produce content. That means sucking it up and offering better terms than they have on other platforms (or doing sweetheart deals, say, Amazon can sell on the Kindle iOS app with a 5% commission in exchange for promising to produce a ton of immersive content on AVP.) Whatever it takes.
They're not serious (at the top level -- i am sure the person just in charge of AVP is serious, but Tim's not on board enough to support them).
Their priority is not selling a mass market low margin product. That is Meta‘s strategy, and they’ve lost nearly $100b because they think it’s the future of all computing. The thing is, Apple agrees. But they’re not the kind of company to burn that kind of capital.
Vision Pro was all about selling an enthusiast device that pushes the boundaries of XR technology into what they thought was appropriate baseline that would shift the market. They succeeded at that, the entire market is changing their strategy to respond to visionOS. visionOS has set the baseline for spatial computing so much that even horizon OS is copying it now. Apple takes the product line very seriously, they they’re just playing a different game than you want them to play.
I mean, I don't care what they do (other than as a shareholder, lol. But it's not a major part of my portfolio.)
I just do not think they have made an impact on the mass-market -- and at their market cap, anything short of mass-market should be considered a failure and a distraction from products that actually sell.
"Horizon OS copying them" is flattering I guess, but they're not copying all the stupid things about AVP: The heavy, expensive metal construction, the silly outer display, the stupid tethered proprietary battery, the $3500 price tag. I do have a Quest 3 though, which is vaguely fun, but was an impulse buy I only occasionally use.
I've never even tried the AVP, and while that seems like a disqualification of me as a judge of it, that's just the point: I'm a geek. If even I dismiss it as a useless and overpriced toy, it will never be mass market, because normal people need more of a justification than I do to adopt a gadget. It needs to do something amazing that people immediately see the value of. Which is why I cited courtside NBA games (not a 10-minute short btw) as an example.
If Apple's 'game' is to make a niche device with no important apps and about 5,000 MAUs then they're playing it great.
Book a demo at the Apple Store. It’s the kind of product that seems like an overpriced expensive toy until you actually experience it.
People who follow the XR industry know that most aspects of the AVP were very carefully considered engineering and design trade-offs, including the aluminum construction, which is arguably lighter than plastic for the nature of the headset design requiring a certain level of durability and recyclability. Tethered battery is also a very smart design decision, that I think we will see followed by other manufacturers. The outwardfacing display is necessary if the headset is to be integrated in the workplace or in a social environment, such as cafés or airplanes. In my experience, my family and coworkers appreciate it.
The battery being connected with a proprietary plug is a very smart decision? They couldn’t have used USB-C? Is this like Lightning? Because they admitted after 8 years of fighting it that usb-c made a lot more sense there too.
For me that part is just proof that they are determined, even after you spend $3.5k, to nickel and dime you: the only way to get increased battery life is either to buy additional hundred plus dollar (so, marked up 10x from their cost) batteries from Apple, or to daisy-chain the heavy battery to your own heavy battery (or to the darn wall.)
They did use USB-C, on the battery itself. You literally can use the headset, and most do, with it plugged in. The exception is when you’re doing room scale, immersive VR, or when you’re walking around the house or office,but that’s generally within the time life of the battery. The connecter on the headset itself is flat with a lock, so that the cord runs towards the back of your head and doesn’t disconnect by mistake. Similar to MagSafe, it is well designed. Last I checked, daisychaining batteries is exactly how the Meta Quest does it with the elite strap, and also how all iPhones and iPads work, so I’m not sure what the problem is.
Good means fit for purpose and a product your CEO pitched from the cover of Vanity Fair magazine and devoted half of his massive store real estate and staff to making successful that sells only about 350K units in the first year and projected to sell only about 150K units in its second year because even the huge number of in-store demos couldn't convince people to put PCs on their faces, is clearly not fit for purpose. If it was truly the future of PCs today as Tim Cook told us, it would not have flopped but the form factor and resulting ergonomics make it useful for little more than novelty experiences for a few nerds with more cash than most.
There are many definitions of “good.” But at the most fundamental, it is an amazing VR device. It excels for watching movies — the video quality is simply stunning. The immersive experiences from Apple are also jaw-dropping. So in terms of what the device IS, it’s a good product.
Is that good enough to break into mass appeal? Evidence says No
I had the HTC Vive quite a few years ago, using it a lot and constantly buying new games and experiences to try it out. It was a little annoying paying full whack for little 5-10min tech demos but was still encapsulated by it. Eventually got the wireless extension to avoid having to detangle the rope of a cable you were tethered to, but the base stations in the corner of the room were still annoying me cause you constantly had to re-calibrate it everytime someone nudged or moved them.
Left it for quite a few years and after seeing the reviews about the Quest 3, I bought that and was amazed by how simple it was to pickup and use and the fact that you didn't need a monster computer running it. You literally pick it up and get going. The Meta app store is filled with lots of VR Titles which aren't just tech demos and you can STILL hook it up to your computer and play a host of Steam games. The Quest 3 was like €500 and basically a full platform.
The Vision Pro got announced with a few improvements like higher resolution but it was an insane €3500... ok I was curious how much better it would be, since I was quite impressed by my Quest 3.
My friend had bought one, one of those people who loves to wear expensive watches and be seen in public having a lot of money. As with a lot of Apple products it's sometimes about being seen to have the latest thing and the Vision Pro was great for sitting in public, catching attention and showing people that you can afford a €3500 device.
He brings it on holiday and is passing it around the room, showing people the dinosaur tech demo and everyone is amazed at how brilliant it is. For all of those in amazement (including my friend) it was their very first experience getting into VR and I also went through the same feeling when I first got the HTC Vive.
He gives it to me and shows me the dinosaur tech demo and all I could really think was... how does this thing cost €3000 more than the Quest 3? I asked him: Where are the games? there are none. Can you hook it up to Steam? No... When the battery dies, can you swap it with another? No.
Unless I had bought my Quest 3 to compare them side-by-side I honestly could not feel that it was much better visually... the finger tracking to go through menus wasn't bad, but that was it.
I think the fact that Apple devices are generally in the thousands already: MBP can be like £3000, iPhone can be like £1k... it makes sense that they were able to sell them for the price of what they did, but for me it's just insanity.
Do they have a library of games yet? Do they have any VR Games yet? Someone said it wasn't priced for consumers and I guess that's fine, but again... why wouldn't you just buy a Quest 3 (unless you hate Facebook)?
you can't really use them for long durations of time because your face gets hot and sweaty, from my experience. It doesn't feel good to have something stuck to your face.
Also, the resolution still isn't good enough to see small text IMO.
>progress in display technology will enable Apple to build a more attractive consumer product, in the form of light, comfortable and unobtrusive AR glasses.
Except the Vision Pro displays have zero to do with the technology they'll use in spectacles. Spectacles are an entirely different tech stack. See the Orion demo for an example and you'll see that 100% of the R&D spent on goggles is tossed on the bonfire when considering spectacles.
While the Apple Vision Pro itself is not a good or successful product, progress in display technology will enable Apple to build a more attractive consumer product, in the form of light, comfortable and unobtrusive AR glasses.
In this line of thinking — not just focusing on the flopped AVP but looking at the product line on the long term - I think it makes sense for this OS to be added to Godot.
I do think the concern for who will carry the maintenance burden is valid. In my experience, Apple hasn’t been the most responsive company when it comes to obscure bugs or issues with their API (e.g. with Cocoa). I would be wary of depending on continued support from a large tech company that can change its goals at any time.
All that being said, this is exciting!