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I think a lens worth looking at that suggests this is a misstep is:
Apple has only ever convinced people to bring a new device with them once, with the iPod.
They realized that a wallet sized device that could playback your entire music collection would be a huge hit, and convinced people to effectively carry around a second wallet (plus headphones). This was the first and only time they convinced people to carry around a new device on a daily basis, and it was relatively easy since jeans had two front pockets anyways.
Around the same time, cell phones started also filling the role of second wallet, for a period, some of us even carried around 3 wallet sized devices. Then the iPhone just combined two of them (eventually all 3 kinda).
Macbooks / laptops, are basically just the equivalent of textbooks in our bookbag, iPads are just a fancier version of that book that can also work with a pencil. Apple Watch just replaced our regular watches. No other Apple product (or anyone else's for that matter) have convinced us to carry a wholly new form factor of device around with us.
wait… why would you want to carry it with you??
Why do you carry your laptop with you?
What is the purpose of the Vision Pro? Is it just a VR Headset? Then sure, it sits at home like your video game console. But paying $3500 for that is insane when you could buy a Quest and a gaming PC.
Or is it a work focused AR device like Apple is pitching, in which case, it should go everywhere your Macbook does, at home, at the office, on trips, etc. Hard to imagine people wanting to lug a bulky headset with them for those purposes.
I'm also getting at the idea that the true revolutionary moment for AR will be when we can use them and carry them with us everywhere, like watches / phones / wallets / glasses. Unlike the iPod / iPhone / Apple Wallet, Apple is releasing this well before that point.
If the AR floating windows/screens work as they advertise, then it replaces 1-2-3 screens, in whatever configuration you want them in. You connect it into a gaming PC and use the augmented floating windows as virtual monitors. Then use a mouse or whatever, it's more about the windows.
Later you want to see a movie. Minimise all your virtual monitors and deploy a big ass monitor to watch it in a big screen, without moving from you comfy gaming setup.
I'll wait until third party apps implement this feature and the price gets at least halved. I'm the only one I've seen that has mentioned this use case but I honestly feel like it has potential.
Yes, I understand this dream, I just also understand how far away we are from this. Wearing a VR headset like this is sweaty and uncomfortable, and you're not going to do it for nearly as long as you might look at a monitor and TV. The weight would need to be at least like 1/4 what it is to feasibly be comfortable to wear for 8+ hours a day.
Right but how much does a screen cost these days? (I guess the apple ones are still absurdly expensive, are they still charging $1000 for a monitor stand?)
Also I doubt that these things work anywhere like that. The resolution is nowhere near good enough. Also I've worn the quest and your face gets sweaty pretty quickly. The weight on the front of your head is very noticeable, and they give you headaches after a while if you don't get sick first. They can be fun for the right types of gameplay but that's it.
Also, SV doesn't really care about VR gaming. What they really care about is AR, and they care about it because they want to put advertisements like everywhere. Every building: Ads all over it, Every wall in your house: Ads everywhere. Every interaction with your loved ones: Ads. This is the future they dream about, but it sucks and they have never come up with any real reason for us to put their face huggers on.
And it only supports mirroring one screen from your Apple device... Kinda useless.
A heads up display that could overlay useful information onto the world around you would be amazing.
The problem is that the apple vision is huge and bulky. They need to shrink it down to the size of big nerd eyeglasses. Microsoft did the same thing with their whatever it was called. I played with it a few times at different tech demos. It was garbage from the start because it was heavy, uncomfortable, and the refresh rate was intolerably slow. Apple's is a slight improvement in a few categories but it still completely misses the point of what AR should be.
I agree with almost everything you said except that the Hololens was pretty remarkable for the time and magical when I got to use it at work, tiny FOV and crappy refresh rate regardless. Walking around a normal cluttered open plan office, watching youtube in a web browser as it followed me, then pinning it to a wall, walking elsewhere and pinning some of our architectural models to tables and stuff, and then walking back around the building and them all still being exactly where I put them was a pretty wild experience. The Quest 3's AR stuff still doesn't feel quite as magical due to the distortion, lack of peripheral vision, and noticeable ski goggle feeling, nor does the world tracking seem quite as good (though I still think it's impressive for a $500 consumer device).
The Hololens is also entirely limited by it's choice of using transparent displays but that's also what makes it safe to use in industrial and now military settings.
That's not what Apple wants it to be or is advertising it as at all. They don't expect people to be wearing it all the time when they're out doing things.
It's meant to be a supplement to laptops/desktops, then eventually a replacement (I don't think headsets will ever fully replace traditional computers though).
It's first and foremost a VR headset with really good AR and video passthrough. They're not glasses. Apple just doesn't want you to think that it's VR because they've decided they always have to be "special."
Honestly I kind of agree with op's submission. Apple just didn't have a real plan for what they wanted it to be. It sits in an awkward niche between AR and VR and it sucks at both as a result.