I got an oculus quest 2, was blown away by it for 1-2 hours, but never really picked it up again. The games were fun but very shallow, and never tried any practical uses.
Would love to use VR for working on a plane. Currently use a laptop, but my neck sometimes gets sore from looking down. VR has the potential to 10x the screen real estate and prevent having to look at down at an acute angle.
That said, it's AMAZING as a home theater replacement, other than an issue with internal reflections in the optics. So in dark scenes it gets a bit annoying.
If I lived in an apartment, I would absolutely use it in place of a large TV that eats up a lot of my space. Especially coupled with the airpods MAX and spatial audio. Watching a 4k 3d movie in it is mind-blowing. Most 3d you've ever seen was really 50% of 1080p, so it's a whole new world. Some of the Apple original content is also great. The thing with the submarine is amazing.
Personally I already have a full sized home theater, so I just use that. However, I'm willing to bet that in 5 years when it's time to upgrade the home theater I'll probably just be turning it into a library with some seats I can use a VR headset from. Who knows, maybe it will be a descendant of the AVP.
Does Vision Pro have any apps for a virtual theater where you can watch video online in a VR space with other people? I've used Bigscreen for that once or twice with a Quest, and it struck me as something that would be a cool feature if I knew more people with VR headsets.
I believe you when you say that it could replace the experience for yourself, but, at least for me, hosting with my home theater is the main driver for improving it.
That said, I entertain less than I watch movies alone. It's probably not worth giving up an entire room in my house for the handful of times per year that I actually entertain. My home theater is mostly just about my quest for perfection when enjoying the films that I love. If/when I can get that out of a headset... cool.
Ideally it will have real Dolby Vision/Atmos and all of the other things high end home theater equipment is expected to have, and right now the AVP doesn't. Between the reflection issues, lack of Dolby Vision, etc it's only like 80% of the way there.
This seems to literally be its only killer feature.
I was hoping apple would be able to figure out what nobody else has, an actual useful everyday use for AR. But still we are just given a personal theatre, or proof of concept toy 'experience' apps.
I immediately wonder how much of my carry-on allowance will be taken up by a VR headset. These things are still fairly clunky.
EDIT: I think people are misunderstanding me. I dont mean VR/AR will be dead, I maen that all devices will be normal size glasses and big chunky headsets wont exist any more.
Sadly I think you are vastly overestimating the rate of progress here. Quest 2 came out 5 years ago - in those 5 years we've shrunk headset volume by about half (mostly due to pancake lenses). We'll need to find another fundamental improvement in lens technology to shrink the next 50%
I'd say the biggest unsolved issue is the focus/depth of field issue...how to provide variable per pixel depth so that virtual objects can appear in a scene and be focussed on naturally (apparently called vergence–accommodation conflict) since most if not all displays have a fixed focus distance atm.
Meta doesn't try to force it on you the way Apple does, but you really have to or it will always be blurry. The screen has a sort of fixed focal point and if your vision isn't great at that distance EVERYTHING will be blurry instead of just the one range that's normally blurry for you.
You may not even realize you need glasses until you try it and everything is blurry.
i never got around to trying prescription inserts but i suspect they would be ideal
Keep in mind, that the Quest 3 has been discontinued in favour of the cheaper and inferior Quest 3S. It still has some good qualities, but the best one is no doubt the Quest 3.
Another thing is that to save on costs, they all ship with a very inadequate headband. For comfort, it is imperative to get another solution, either the (expensive) elite headstrap or a (cheaper) 3rd party one.
I've been considering a pair for myself after hearing good feedback from some friends, and seeing some good reviews online.
The latest versions have head tracking so the virtual screen remains "pinned" in your view.
They're also much smaller and easier to carry compared to a full VR headset, and they can plug into almost any device (laptop, tablet, phone) and just show up as an external monitor.
Don't get me wrong, they work as a monitor in a pinch on a plane when you need privacy it's just not going to ever replace a real monitor for you.
Apple being stingy with storage (and RAM) isn’t new, but the base $3.5k spec with only 256 GB is extreme.
EDIT: clarity
256GB is $3499; 512GB is $3699; 1TB is $3899. You're paying ~$200 for that storage.
Apple's SSDs are actually priced a bit silly though, but I think that's a different discussion. It was significantly cheaper/GB to upgrade my M4 Mac Mini's internal SSD via 3rd party despite the performance being the same (if not better) than 1st party.
Some further thoughts: two of the use cases AVP was pitched for are content consumption (streaming + offline) and spatial video/photo production. IMO the base storage should reflect that.
Given that AVP sales are struggling, I’m not sure why Apple isn’t trying to throw people a bone and offer a more reasonable amount of storage in the base config.
> but the base $3.5k spec with only 256 GB is extreme.
The plain meaning of this sentence is "I expect more than 256 GB of storage when paying $3.5K for a device". You can argue for or against that if you like (I don't give a shit, because I would not buy it at any price), but not against something they did not say.
I did not, no.
The parent poster's "EDIT: clarity" note should be a clue here.
Most people put phones in cases which makes heat dissipation much worse.
Nobody is saying you should be able to render some 3d models on an iPhone..
What I see is that non-serious users who only communicate and consume content use phones and tablets. Laptops and desktops are for work, non-trivial content creation, and serious gaming with high memory and GPU requirements. You’re not running “cargo build” or a VM with Docker or Cyberpunk 2077 on a phone.
Higher end phones almost have enough CPU but not enough GPU, RAM, storage, or heat dissipation.
But that's mostly email, SaaS, web meetings, and spreadsheets. Most people have never in their lives run "cargo build" or launched Cyberpunk 2077. The actual market for sustained high local CPU/GPU compute is pretty small compared to the market for minimal load with the occasional small burst, and the latter works pretty well with poor cooling solutions.
Apple is already offering apps that work on all devices on their stores. Look at every single Apple Arcade release as an example. That's their vision; every device has a specific UI, but apps can run on all of them separately.
They likely have enough talented developers to make iOS run Mac apps natively. But I assume they neither want to cannibalize their laptop market nor want to let people circumvent the 30% fee for the iOS App Store, which is not required for Mac software.
I'm very excited for stuff like smart glasses ever single Glass, meta's new stuff is awesome in terms of slimming things down but the real excitement is the wristband for input. Looks like we'll be solving the display/input problems soon enough.
They seemed resistant to the idea of a compute puck but I honestly think that's fine. I'd rather have a phone in my pocket that can be used for compute than bulkier glasses, though it is nice if future glasses can do very basic tasks unaided.
I hope that pretty soon I won't even need a laptop for out of hours tasks (but would still use one for the standard work day most likely).
Obviously there would be performance constraints but at least for your $3499 you'd be getting a Mac instead of just a Mac Monitor.
The math isn't how many people will buy Vision Pro M5, it's how many have nots can be created by putting it in the Vision Pro.
> With support for the PlayStation VR2 Sense controller, players get a new class of immersive games with high-performance motion tracking in six degrees of freedom, finger touch detection, and vibration support.
Previously they seemed to be committed to finger controls only.
> keep producing
Maybe it's just me, but if they keep producing it (regardless of what chip), doesn't that mean they haven't given up on it?
[1]: https://daringfireball.net/2024/10/vision_pro_bites_dog
Granted, I only see a VR headset like four times a year, but nobody I know bought a Vision Pro either, whereas I know a few dozen people with other headsets.
But yours, is especially an apples and oranges comparison.
The original iPhone was a flawed internet-less take on a thriving exploding market (mobile).
VR's market just not there.
If they'd focused on maximizing the device's usefulness instead of its revenue stream, maybe things would have worked out better.
To a first approximation, Apple is a manufacturer of locked-down handheld entertainment appliances whose primary function is to psychologically condition children into siphoning off money from their inattentive parents. There's no reason to suspect their vision for the AVP to diverge significantly from this user story.
I've not seen a professional desktop operating system show you adverts and click bait during worktime before and I am not impressed.
I'm taking it as an alarm bell that I should get out as soon as I can. For me and what I do, macOS or Linux are my platforms of choice.
Personally I find a Mac to be a better development environment than Windows even for Microsoft tech like the dotnet stack.
That word right there means that we can both be correct, because I personally find MacOS to be frustrating for Dev compared to every other alternative. Great for creativity, but not so much for productivity.
But the caveat to my statement is that _everything_ added to their ecosystem to business reasons is useless and counterproductive. For example I can plug my Android phone into a Windows machine (two different companies inb4 someone uses flawed logic) and it just works. If I plug my Android phone into my Macbook it doesn't work at all...but an iPhone does! ;)
They only very recently got decent-ish Window management, basic snapping that Linux/Windows has had for at least a decade or longer. And even then their implementation is "pretty" but slow to respond. It's like just expand and snap the fucking window for fuck's sake.
In terms of the "development environment" they enjoy having had the OS built on top of FreeBSD (which yes, they have contributed to - bet Apple management hated that).
To me it's a machine that gets stuff done; they could literally strip the thing down to the bare minimum, removing all of the "magical wonderful Apple stuff with cutesy fancy sounding names" and I couldn't give a shit.
"Retina" screen? Fuck offff Apple.
This is both true and completely irrelevant, because the point of the above comment is that Apple is not in the business of catering to this use case.
Look at the annual revenues: $225 billion from iPhone/iPad, $100 billion from "services" (which Apple mostly characterizes as "app store stuff"), $40 billion from accessories (watch, airpods, etc), $30 billion from desktops. The Mac segment comes out to 7.9% of their overall revenue. And this number is shrinking in both the absolute and relative sense, as "services" continues to grow and as Mac units shipped peaked in 2022.
Even without that, calling a $30B business an "insignificant historical afterthought" is a bit of an exaggeration, no?
As a film maker and editor I'm enormously more productive on my dual screen (used) M1 Max Studio machine than I was on a variety of PC setups with high end GPUs. Even just the missing overhead of not having to keep graphic drives and constant Windows updates is great. Reliable renders were never a thing on Windows. The time lost doing things again because window had some strange colour issue, render crash, font issue and on and on was ludicrous.
The idea of having to use Windows for daily productivity sends a shiver down my spine.
Software is definitely more debatable.
By what measure? As I understand it, more Macs sell now than in any other point in history.
That's just an hyper expensive huge screen.
Even before it came out, I naturally assumed it was going to be able to do this. Major flub IMHO. Well that and the completely superfluous frontfacing screen for your "virtual avatar". Because the Vision wasn't already expensive enough...
I'm very eagerly looking forward to Valve's headset coming out.
It is priced to be a pack-in with seats of Dassault 3DEXPERIENCE, but Meta's experience has been that the VR consumer is price sensitive which is why they followed up the MQ3 with the cost-reduced MQ3S.
I think Apple is looking at this the way they look at AirPods (something you stick in your ears to modify and augment your hearing) which is good and monitors, which is bad. Apple's always sold a tiny number of monitors with astronomical margins which looked like a good business because they didn't have to invest in product innovation to make them the way they do for the AVP -- and they didn't need software developers to invest in product innovation for their monitors, but the AVP absolutely requires it. And if they aren't shipping enough units, who is going to make software for it?
I'm honestly not sure if Apple Vision would fare much better if they had a device that costs $100. Like, sure, they'll sell more units that way. But how many of those units would end up collecting dust?
But Valve is reliably rumored to be releasing an untethered successor within the next year for a third of the cost of the AVP. The appeal is having a dozen monitors anywhere.
I would love to be able to have a dedicated spatial location for each part of my Django app: look over here for the CSS, step here for the views, scroll through the logs over here...
I do wonder if that person had ever tried any of the myriad of VR device available a decade before beforehand and I do wonder how popular Apple's product would be if other companies were given the opportunity to integrate with the OS on the same level that Apple can (I feel like Apple is breaking anti-competitive laws constantly but nobody really cares about making them open up).
There are quite a few others, even some with near or at 4k res per eye released before the Apple product. Even just the Pimax 8k being the world's first dual native 4k headset early 2019.
The problem with alternative sets is, as always, a software/ecosystem one which for gaming Valve helped massively by getting everyone onto one platform (SteamVR). It's tough to do similar with Apple as they lock everything down for "security" with the added benefit of preventing competitors from creating competing products. They're happy to interoperate with Wifi and Bluetooth standards etc, though (before someone claims that doing what they want with their platform is Apple's choice - the same people who grin when MS got hammered for anti-competition with IE Windows bundling, something Apple regularly escapes).
The latest version improves performance, display rendering, battery life, and comfort, while offering innovative features with visionOS 26 and all-new spatial apps and Apple Immersive content
Why?
I guess they are still making them, now with M5?
They definitely don't have a decade. The market gave them 14 years with iPhone (Newton was 1993?). But things move a bit faster now.
But seems like they do have a niche audience that likes it (and maybe can pass it as a business expense or something?) so they've sold a few.
[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2024/10/23/apple-may-stop-producin...
And one of them bought a fully-loaded Mac Pro, so they're not immune to the Apple Distortion Field.
Or did he do it again when the Mac Studio exists?
Still a very pricey machine.
I hope that they revisit the hardware at some point when novel tech enables a lot of weight reduction.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-01/apple-she...
While I could get one from Germany, when I did that with the Google Pixel I ran into a whole bunch of trouble when it needed to get repaired. Since Google required an address in Germany.
Price will go down in five years, once the tech mature la. For now this is a bit like how the Oculus DK1 was. An early device to explore what the overall vision is about, and figure out the apps.
How often do you use it?
I found this little piece of information interesting. Apparently the display on the Vision Pro has such high resolution that they reduce the detail of the rendering. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that reported before. It means that an even higher quality display is still far in the future, since the silicon to push that many pixels isn’t quite ready.
It never really leaves the house, and I get why a lot of people don't like it, but personally, it's one of the coolest pieces of tech I own and I get a ton of value out of it. The value is just tied to being integrated into the apple ecosystem more than it being a standalone device, which is a very Apple thing to do.
I have lots of criticisms too, but overall I really like it. Also converting photos to spatial photos and looking through old memories in 3D is truly incredible. Can't overstate how much I love that feature.
The thing I'm most excited about from this release is the backwards compatible Dual Knit Band, which I'm definitely buying.
There's something to this AR XR stuff but even with infinite resources the convenience just isn't there for all day use for me.
Apple M5 Chip
iambateman•1h ago
Apple would never make such a small deal about upgrading the chip in one of their products unless they thought that product was toast.
I wonder if they're just in full pivot mode to glasses.
lordleft•1h ago
stetrain•1h ago
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-01/apple-she...
ErneX•1h ago
stetrain•1h ago
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-introduces-the-...
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unveils-new-14-...
The real issue is that various rumors point to them cancelling or pushing back the plan for a new version of the headset that is cheaper and lighter in favor of working on the smart glasses.
Without a cheaper, lighter headset I don't think it's going to become a significant product for Apple.
jccalhoun•1h ago
iambateman•1h ago