The road to high fashion! 
Thatās entirely possible. I was wearing a dress shirt and sweat pants on a zoom call last week. And I bear a strong resemblance to Jean-Luc Picard, from the eyebrows up.
2 Likes
What a coincidence! I was wearing a dress shirt and no pants on a zoom call last week.
(Just kidding!)
1 Like
Productivity: I suspect that this is the Achilles heel. If it was a āproductiveā environment for coding, design, writing that was superior to two 27" monitors, a keyboard, a mouse and possibly a stylus working with a Mac Studio then I would be all in. I would tolerate wearing the headset for as long as my neck could handle the weight. If I could get two hours of productive work done at a time, that would cross the threshold for me.
Entertainment: I sense this is where the Vision Pro is going to start out despite the keynote which showed a lot of productivity āusesā. Personally, I am less interested in entertainment. Sports that were enabled as Vision Pro inputs look cool but this is going to require a lot of infrastructure (cameras everywhere) and complex software to realize its potential. A lot of up front costs and a very limited market of people willing to spend $3500 on their end.
But the keynotes and minimal ānewsā that has come out about this device have not talked much about the limitations of input. I think this is going to be a BIG problem unless or until Apple is able to get more hardware integrated with the product. āLooking aroundā as a substitute for moving a cursor and ātapping your fingersā as a substitute for a click are fantastic and apparently impressive. But I suspect that this will only really work for ālimitedā input, not two hours of work.
The reliability and ease of clicking a mouse and the precision of moving a mouse cursor is really hard to beat. There is no wait, however short, to get feedback that the system knows what you are looking at and is ready to accept a finger ātapā. I suspect that tapping thumb and index finger is harder over time than clicking on a mouse. I think that the Vision Pro will cause mental fatigue and finger fatigue after 15 minutes of work.
It is telling that the virtual keyboard did not get introduced until this now late date and it does not seem to be that great an experience. This is a big problem.
Presumably, there will come to be a way that users who are reliable touch typists can use a physical keyboard. But there are a lot of us who are not reliable touch typists and will need some visual feedback as to where are fingers are on a keyboard. I would think that there would be some way to integrate physical keyboard hardware into the Vision Pro experience. But it probably would require dedicated hardware and complex software to make this work. And I suspect that eventually, there will have to be a way to integrate a mouse (and stylus) in with the Vision Pro world. That will require lots of software and hardware to integrate the output across all the virtual screens. It doesnāt seem to be something that is impossible. It just does not seem easy or just around the corner and so far Apple seems to imply that look and tap are going to be the input.
What I want to know, before I invest, is the screen real estate and the coolness and the ability to move away from your desk actually worth it. Are you going to be able to āworkā for two hours?
So I imagine that the Vision Pro as a stellar productivity tool where the user is providing a stream of input is going to take a while. Currently, the mouse and keyboard provide a lot of input relatively easily and most productive computer tasks rely on the user continuously providing this input for prolonged periods of time.
Perhaps on a plane, you would be reduced to having no hardware input and could live with it. But for most work, we need to quickly provide lots of input.
Humans are easy to underestimate. I would have not guessed that people would get so good at tapping their iPhones to quickly write text with their thumbs. We shall see.
1 Like
Apple has already announced that Vision Pro supports the Magic Keyboard and trackpad.
with support for Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad, users can create the perfect workspace
Given the mixed-reality nature of the device, I donāt see any reason youād have to be a touch typist to use a hardware keyboard.
1 Like
Given the mixed-reality nature of the device, I donāt see any reason youād have to be a touch typist to use a hardware keyboard.
I hope this will be smooth as your eye transitions back and forth quickly to looking at things in the virtual scene and your hands on the keyboard.
This kind of info should become available soon after the device reaches the public but I have seen little on what this interaction is actually like. I would have thought that Apple would have been showing this in their demos.
Maybe I lack imagination, but I canāt think of a use case for me. So, I will pass and wait and see how others use it.
I would hope that Apple would quickly support other keyboards, mice, and trackpads. Some people love the feel of their peripherals, many others not so much, and itās something a lot of users are understandably very particular about. And theyāve never had much selection. Thereās no ergonomic keyboard in their line, for example.
I suspect it supports any Bluetooth keyboard. Probably any Bluetooth mouse too.
2 Likes
1Password is going to enable the iPad app for it. That makes me happy.
2 Likes
No
Thatās good news, especially since the virtual keyboard doesnāt sound like a great experience. Apple Vision Pro Virtual Keyboard Blasted As 'Complete Write-Off' - MacRumors
If I had the $, Iād get one in a New York minute! It boggles my mind to think of how it could be used for higher education, just for starters. Although I would want to wait until they have some of the kinks worked out.
This was a good conversation about the Vision Pro. Sandwich has a rare perspective on design and spoke for about half of it (just mentioning that if you were frustrated by Gruber talking for 80% of his last appearance on TTS.)
Same thing folks said about the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. Each is now the defining product of itās category. Itās extremely rare that Apple throws itself behind a product like this and sees it fail. In fact, I donāt think itās happened in more than 20 years.
Well, maybe the Mac Pro.
I donāt think this is unusual at this point. Apple do WWDC and the Fall event lately and seem to have been shying away from doing events for a single product or purpose (no more school-centric events for example). Event fatigue is a real thing and doing an event to repeat the list of features you already covered would likely have been more of an own goal than anything.
They released a bunch of videos instead, which seems like the direction theyāve been starting to move for a while.
How do you distract several thousand employees in completely different teams who arenāt even involved in the project? I know some of you folks work for large businesses and know that this argument makes no sense.
Does your bank forget about savings accounts when they launch a new mortgage product?
Honestly hard to imagine a future with folks walking around in offices to get their work done. Remote work is both less expensive and more productive.
I think this is the most honest and reasonable criticism in the thread so far 
I have a feeling this feature will be quietly pushed asside in future iterations. Anyone remember Digital Touch? Itās still there if you know where to go digging for it, despite being a headline feature of the Series 0.
I think this is the same problem as when people complain that iPads arenāt MacBook replacements.
I guarantee you itās going to be an excellent productivity tool. The mistake is always in assuming āproductivity for meā. If productivity for you is increased by having a couple of large screens then no, the Vision Pro isnāt going to make much of a difference for you. Developers arenāt the target of every productivity innovation (and I say this as a Software Engineer).
For folks that work in professions that focus on 3D workspaces or 3D representation and design, however, itās probably an amazing productivity tool, no? Less so when you just want a couple of 2D rectangles to stare at.
At the end of last year Google finally killed of Google Glass, presumably because it underperformed financially. It was revolutionary in the manufacturing industry, however, despite being a huge flop with software developers.
Only if youāre doing certain types of work.
The Vision Pro is not trying to replace the tools you have, and if the tools you have are better, thatās not a flaw of the Vision Pro, itās a fault in your tool selection.
No, just for your work. I guarantee your work is not most work, or representative of most work.
Iāve set asside the budget for it but Iām still a little undecided.
I didnāt regret getting the Series 0 Apple Watch even though the Series 1/2 were such a huge improvement. The thing this time is that the device is 5-6x the price, and much more of a big deal financially to upgrade. Itās also unlikely in my mind that Apple will pursue a yearly update on a device of this cost that is so niche. It works for MacBook Pros because people will keep them for years and just want the current up to date tech available when they do upgrade. The Vision Pro wonāt ship the units for this to be a sustainable approach and is likely to be more like iPads, that people upgrade in 3-5 years.
So if Iām right it becomes a toss-up between waiting for an improved gen 2 which may not land for a year or more, or jump onboard and enjoy having this cool new toy now knowing that Iāll probably skip the generation that actually makes it accessible and valuable to more people.
I donāt give a rodentās posterior about it being a good work device because I wonāt be using it for work. I probably could, and it would probably be fine with a Keyboard and Mouse/Trackpad. Itās just not a format I see being super relevant to writing complex SQL queries or C# code.
I do think it could be really cool for a lot of collaboration tools, such as Freeform, or MIRO, hell even Azure Devops. Anything that benefits from interactive visualisation.
What I am kinda looking forward to trying out is Baldurās Gate 3 running on my MacBook but being displayed on a room-spanning 4K virtual screen.
A lot of people have stated āI donāt see what use case I have for it.ā
For me thatās the wrong question. Iām far more interested in what use cases I can create.
1 Like
I can see the AVP being a successful consumption device once Apple cuts the weight in half and the price to $1000 or so. And possibly a productivity device when it can be shared with multiple users. The big question is how long will that take?
It would be foolish to discount Apple when it comes to breaking out in a new product category, but it would also be foolish to assume theyāre always going to win. Nothing lasts forever, and theyāre not gods.
I donāt know yet whether the AVP is going to lead to something equivalent to the iPhone or fizzle out or end up somewhere in the middle as a niche product.
And Iām okay with waiting to see how it all plays out.
The thing this time is that the device is 5-6x the price, and much more of a big deal financially to upgrade.
The first iPhone launched at $499, and a year and a half later, the much better second version was released at $199, which was a 60% reduction in price.
Something similar may not happen with the AVP, but it seems possible. This is an equally radical departure from what Apple has previously made.
The same canāt be said about the iPad and Apple Watch, which are really just variations of the iPhoneās touch screen optimized for tablet and wrist-worn use.
I think we really do need to think of the AVP as a computer, rather than as a device like an iPad.
My first two Macs, a PowerBook 180 and a loaded Wallstreet both cost more.
I hope to buy one; not sure it would work with my vision problems. When I can get a new glasses prescription, I will look closely at whether or not it would work for me. I have very little space, and no desk, Multiple virtual screens, with large text, would be super.
I have some questions about the sharpness/legibility of the text, but if I can read it, it would make reading and writing much easier for me.
I also suspect I would be able to actually see TV shows and movies.
1 Like
Yeah, for a while, every time I bought a new computer I said to myself, there goes another four thousand bucks.
Exactly. I have a lot of use cases based on my husbandās original patents on AR from 1995. Weād brainstorm uses but I have even more now. And Iāve already got about 60 in my Obsidian notes that are new ones plus expansion on the original patent idea ones.