this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
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Apple employees outnumbered customers at Vision Pro launch in San Francisco's Union Square::Apple’s new Vision Pro headset drew a sparse but eager crowd to San Francisco’s Union Square on Friday, for pickups and demos.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Just like a Ferrari stealership.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Apple died with Steve Jobs. Maybe Tim Cook should try carrot juice, because I haven’t seen any real vision from Apple since then.

Every year it’s just small improvement over product lines that already exist. Sure I appreciate to have widget on my screen now but where are the iPods, iPhone, MacBooks of today ? I mean revolutionary product that gave people lots of confidence into tech.

By now I would have think Apple would be already deep into artificial intelligence but no.

About the Vision Pro, what would Jobs (who refused to have stylus on iPad because it’s cumbersome) think of it ? Heavy, battery doesn’t last and you got a fucking wire constantly connecting the helmet to the battery ??

Honestly I don’t get it, it’s like headless chickens running in circle at Apple headquarters.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The M series chips are fucking incredible, that’s all I’ve got though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Yeah the switch to arm chip can be seen as big in some ways but it doesn’t feel like a complete new product.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The Vision Pro is literally a new product line that has multiple innovations over current competitors.

Artificial intelligence is such a buzzword these days it's tough to determine what your meaning is here. Apple uses machine learning all over the place.

As far as actual artificial intelligence - machine consciousness akin to a human mind - how would you know? Apple doesn't make a habit of announcing their ventures before their marketable.

Without their respective batteries, the weight of the Meta Quest Pro is 522 grams. The Vision Pro is 532.

The three batteries in the power pack are 3000mah each. Again, not sure if the complaint here is overall capacity, or that the headset is power inefficient. These could be valid if they'd implemented recharging in a worse manner, but it can be charged while in use by either another battery bank or an electrical socket.

Ignoring the contradiction on Steve Jobs, yes he was persistent in his vision, but he also understood the physical limits of technology. A stylus at the time of the original iPad would not have been a slim, precision tool. Look at the Wacom CTH661 - bit cumbersome if you ask me.

There are criticisms to be made of the Vision Pro, and certainly of Apple, but you've made none of them here.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

All of that is subjective, to me it really doesn’t feel like the revolutionary product that Apple used to deliver during jobs but I can understand how someone would see it different.

Personally beyond every physical criticism on the product, I just look at the wow factor. When the iPhone released, almost everyone understood how its the new shit and everything else is obsolete. Same for iPods. I don’t feel like Vision Pro made the other headset obsolete.

Beside about the stylus for iPad, I’m convinced it was not the size the issue but that jobs wanted people to interact with tech in the most natural possible way, aka finger.

It was his vision, for the better and the worst, but at least it gives a direction. Cook bought some time by slowly offering stuffs that jobs vision forbade, like a stylus, keyboard for iPad, bigger and bigger iPhone and new variants, customization on iOS, and so on. But by doing that he slowly killed jobs vision and Apple is left nowadays without anything else but desire for greed.

The Vision Pro looks just like another corporation product, nothing revolutionary.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Quick recap:

  • new product line
  • machine learning
  • secretive development process
  • unit weight vs competition
  • battery capacities
  • decade old product form factors

You can't label any of that subjective and go on to say it's all about the wow factor. As if there could be anything more subjective.

Cheers for the laugh though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Oh come on, don’t flex on battery capacity and unit weight. This is stupid, anyone with Apple ressource can make an oculus quest with bigger battery, better display and lighter. That’s not what made Apple so wealthy, original iPhone was way heavier than other phone and had shity screen resolution, it didn’t even have a keyboard… yet they are all dead or heavily copied on iPhone.

And wtf does secret development process and new product line got to do with its success ? New garbage get developed daily and goes right to the trash when it doesn’t sell.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Well sure they could've made a larger battery and whatnot else, but it's not like the Vision Pro is some slightly polished Oculus. The tech allowing for 12ms visual pass though is impressive enough without any of the other things they developed for it.

While your point about Apple's tremendous resources has truth to it, I'd argue that even had they committed their entire cash reserve to the development of the AVP, it would still involve more people using the device than just the engineers designing the thing.

At some point diminishing returns mean you can't refine much further. I think the regular release of barely improved smartphones is evidence of that. Eventually when the goal of a pair of glasses - or hell, even contact lenses - is reached, this first generation Vision Pro will be one of many milestones we look and wonder how we ever had something so bulky and awkward looking.

Oh and the point I had made about the secretive development processes was to counter the previous comment regarding Apple 'not being deep into artificial intelligence'. No one outside of Apple really knows what they're doing. They've been tight lipped about underway ventures since Jobs returned to the company all those years ago.

As I noticed I'm typing a reply to a several day old comment, I'll leave a couple quotes Tim Cook made recently:

As we look ahead, we will continue to invest in… technologies that will shape the future. That includes artificial intelligence, where we continue to spend a tremendous amount of time and effort, and we’re excited to share the details of our ongoing work in that space later this year.

In terms of generative AI… we have a lot of work going on internally, as I’ve alluded to before. Our M.O., if you will, has always been to do work and then talk about work and not to get out in front of ourselves. And so we’re going to hold that to this as well. But we’ve got some things that we’re incredibly excited about that we’ll be talking about later this year.

If you read all this, I'm surprised. I'm surprised I bothered to type it out. Cheers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Yeah I actually did read it and I guess we'll see how it goes, if the apple vision pro become an absolute success and apple suddenly release ai driven feature but I still doubt it despise what cook can say.

There were rumors about apple headset many years ago, today there is nothing about apple and ai. They can work on it but it doesn't mean it will lead to something, research and innovation can be money and time sink when it's not driven by a global vision but instead rely on itself.

Beside one would think they would start by slowly including ai in their iphone first to see how it goes but even that there is not a single glimpse of it.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago

I went to my local Apple Store yesterday morning and saw one person leaving with an Apple Vision Pro and maybe a few people inside trying it out. It wasn’t crowded at all. It seemed like the store was pretty overcrowded with employees, though.

On the bright side, I was able to get in and out with my purchase really fast!

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