There’s No Dancing Around It: Apple’s Vision Pro Was An Ugly Dud
from the words-are-but-wind dept
When Apple unveiled its AR/VR Vision Pro headset early last year the product was met with just an absolute ocean of tech press hype. You couldn’t spend thirty seconds online without reading about how the expensive ($3,500-$4,600 depending on accessories) headset was going to revolutionize every industry in existence or change absolutely everything. Seriously: everything.
Less than a year later there’s ongoing gossip that Apple ended production of the headset due to “weak demand and customer dissatisfaction.” The Information was the first to suggest as much last October, noting that weak sales had component makers scaling back part production as early as last Spring, as soon as it became clear this wasn’t, as it turns out, anywhere close to a technological revolution.
For most people the product either was too expensive, wasn’t comfortable to wear, made them throw up, or just didn’t have enough compelling software to justify continued usage:
“Apple sold fewer than 500,000 units of the Vision Pro since launch. While many returned the product after experiencing headaches, vision issues, neck pain, and motion sickness, even the people who kept it are reportedly not using it as much as Apple expected, largely due to the lack of compelling apps and games.”
When bankers and VCs took over Silicon Valley they created a chasm between marketing and reality, or set decoration and genuine innovation. A lot of these folks no longer care if a tech product is genuinely good or if it actually improves anything so long as you can convince people that it does. And with an increasingly feckless, access-obsessed, badly-run technology press, that’s often within reach.
Seriously, the gushing press coverage of Vision Pro was just fucking silly. A lot of unskeptical gibberish by outlets trying to kiss the ring for access. Words and phrases like “home run” and “revolutionary” were bandied around like confetti. Several key influencers claimed Vision Pro was as transformative as the original iPhone:
“I truly believe this is a landmark breakthrough like the 1984 Macintosh and the 2007 iPhone.”
A lot of people wanted to believe Apple had created another revolutionary miracle. Instead they built a dud. And it was pretty clearly a dud to those paying attention. That price tag was absolutely silly. Steve Jobs never would have approved that ugly ass battery pack and comically short battery life. Outside of some initial impressive gimmickry, there was little genuinely evolutionary, useful software.
But for a product to truly succeed it genuinely needs to improve things. VR and AR is also a challenge because computing size and battery life aren’t anywhere near where they need to be to offer the kind of transformative, inobtrusive experiences companies are promising. Most people still simply don’t like strapping plastic to their faces. A ton of people still can’t use VR without throwing up.
I don’t hate VR. I have three different major headsets. But the tech just isn’t cooked enough to warrant the kind of hype Meta or Apple VR products receive. Maybe someday, somebody will develop the perfect, seamless, almost magical experience that matches the hype in this field, but if I had to wager, when that product comes it won’t come from Apple or Meta (Apple and Meta will probably buy them, though).
Apple die hards generally got defensive when anyone suggested Vision Pro was a dud from the start. They’d usually say something about how “this was just a prototype” and “prototypes are supposed to be expensive,” and something actually useful might be coming down the road several years from now.
And that might actually be true. Maybe Apple turns around and leverages the lessons of this dud to create something actually useful and affordable. But that still doesn’t mean this wasn’t a wildly misrepresented dud from the start. And it also doesn’t excuse a technology press that repeatedly tripped over its own ass to deliver gushing praise for an undercooked product.
Filed Under: augmented reality, headset, innovation, virtual reality, vision pro, vr
Companies: apple
Comments on “There’s No Dancing Around It: Apple’s Vision Pro Was An Ugly Dud”
Most AR/VR (or XR, whatever the name) users feared that, once Apple would enter the market and then miserably fail, this would kill the AR/VR market because no other companies would be able to offer a better experience than Apple.
After that Google has failed with its Google Glass prototype, that Microsoft has failed with its Hololens entreprise device, and that Facebook has failed its “metaverse” thing, Apple add the final nail to the coffin of theses devices for the mass.
Replace ‘Apple’ with ‘Tesla’ and ‘Vision Pro’ with ‘Cybertruck’, and you essentially have the same story, complete with with the bit about it making people want to throw up.
Since I’ve seen this type of statement on BestNetTech before: I would like to point out: people can use the internet all the time and never have seen what ever little corner of the internet you frequent is raving about.
I don’t think I have ever heard of the device before (or if I have it was so brief and unmemorable it left no impression). And I am a software developer. That means I spend basically all day using a computer. And the amount of time I don’t have internet access is probably roughly equal to the amount of time I spend asleep.
Point being, like the world, the internet is a big wide place. And even Apple can’t get their spam into every corner of it.
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You’d have to be looking in the tiny obscure corner of the net where people talk aboutconsumer devices and companies put out press releases and marketing. And where everyone with experiences, questions, reviews, worship, and dissatisfaction with the above congregate.
i don’t live in those spaces either, but so what?
You can always nutpick to find people who will talk breathlessly about anything Apple does, but near as I can tell Apple itself never intended Vision Pro to be anything but a developer preview. It was announced at WWDC and never really mentioned outside of developer events. Maybe someday Apple will release an AR product they intend to be a success, but Vision Pro wasn’t it.
History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes
The Vision Pro joins HyperCard, the Newton and the Lisa as a flawed attempt to break through the ceiling of the current state of technology and UX and leapfrog to a higher level.
Apple did its best to solve the problems inherent with VR and mixed reality and create a consumer level device that, had it been more widely adopted, would have legitimately been world changing.
They didn’t quite pull it off, but I respect the attempt.
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Whose world, exactly, would’ve changed if an ultra-expensive VR helmet with no practical applicable use for anything other than gaming/entertainment had somehow been more widely adopted by a bunch of well-off people who don’t even really need a VR helmet?
Re: Re: world-changing
The world of those developers and others invested in the success of this product would have been much changed if there had been more sales. This would have been especially true if the sales did not result in returns when users found the experience unsettling.
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Every action anyone takes changes the world—in your example, the world would’ve changed into one in which Apple stockholders have slightly more money.
To say “change the world” is to say something that people will interpret as significant, without actually saying anything of substance. Just some marketing bullshit, in other words.
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Are you still upset that large tech corporations are free to do whatever they want and make the rules as they please? Well, now is the time to get up and support the movement to boycott BestNetTech. Even though the website professes to support free speech and digital rights, just about everyone has the impression that it favors the big business lobby and minimizes the effects technology monopolies have on their smaller competitors, users, and privacy. We help to strengthen these systems when we assist BestNetTech, whether we like it or not; systems which oppress and repress us. It’s about time we start asking more of the outlets we rely for news and knowledge. Get on board to defend the interests of the majority as opposed to the few that have the resources to influence the game. Say no to BestNetTech, and join in the call for a fairer digital community!
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Point out where in the article it says that large tech corporations shouldn’t be free to waste money doing stupid things.
Please do. You literally just have to not come and comment. It’s so simple. If you want to be more clever, you can block the domain. We will miss you severely, but we’ll have to find some way to manage without you.
The website doesn’t profess anything. It’s a publishing platform for the writers/editors.
By exercising their own free speech by writing articles about tech…
[Citation needed] You only speak for yourself, but even if you spoke for more people, it’s still a useless argumentum ad populum.
Well, then you should leave and stop “assisting.”
If you only get your news from BestNetTech, you’re going to miss everything they don’t choose to or have time to write about. That sounds like a you problem.
I would love to see you start this campaign. Show us how few people agree with you by starting a public forum on the topic.
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Frankly, it’s none of my business how large corps choose to waste their money in most circumstances. This is one of them.
There is no such “movement”, and no one cares.
[citation needed]
Ask them what? You don’t follow up with a question, and, as written, there is no reason to assume that the following sentence is a continuation of this one.
Again, you point to no evidence that BestNetTech isn’t already on board. At most, you simply disagree with them on how to do so or what those interests actually are.
How about you just go already.
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Vision Pro is here to stay
The biggest lack of foresight I have ever read. This is evidence of a journalist with no real understanding of the XR industry, what came before Vision Pro, and how in many ways it’s improved what has been industry stagnation for years, leading to more larger players coming back to spatial computing to show Apple who can do it better. Meta Quest and many others were very happy to sell them cheap nand loss lead, retrofitting mobile chipsets into HMDs, worrying that to make a high-spec product it would cost too much and so would turn people off. Apple looked at all of these issues and went all in on making the best it could with what is available at the limit of technology right now. All of this innovation came at a cost. It’s a hard or impossible purchase right now for the many, but components can only get cheaper as time goes on and future models grow in maturity. They will become more reasonably priced to make it accessible. By then, the Vision line should have a robust app store, full of stuff to use the product for. Remember the first iPhone had no app store at all. Apple Vision Pro is not without flaws. By no means has Apple refined the product to the point it has shed the stigmas that VR has suffered for years: bulky hardware, not overly comfortable for long periods of time, and the weight of the product requiring better distribution.
You can say it’s a flop, hot trash, garbage to grab clicks and either ragebait Apple fanboys or seek the adulation of the Apple haters. You are allowed an opinion as long as you have the knowledge of the industry Vision Pro is playing in and you are educated enough on what came before it.
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Hey, it’s the VP of Apple Marketing everybody!
Lemme stop you there. You don’t have the ability to allow or disallow someone to have an opinion.
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Let’s say I don’t have that knowledge. How the unholy rat fuck are you going to stop me from having an opinion about the Vision Pro?
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Dude, Steve Jobs isn’t going to come back to life no matter how much you try to suck him off.
Re: Re:
Dude! Necrophilia much?
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“You can say it’s a flop, hot trash, garbage to grab clicks and either ragebait Apple fanboys…”
It worked on you.
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Dude, the industry is still stagnating. There hasn’t been other larger players coming back to spatial computing since the Apple Vision Pro. Any improvement to the industry has been marginal, not revolutionary.
Also, you clearly have less understanding of the XR industry than the writer does.
And it worked out relatively well for them, all things considered. Those others you speak of were considered fairly successful, even if not as successful as shareholders and executives would prefer.
And, as a result, the product flopped. Make all the excuses you’d like; the fact is that the product was unsuccessful and didn’t result in massive changes to the industry as was promised.
Perhaps, though Apple has shown no intention of making a future model as of yet, and this doesn’t change the fact that it simply wasn’t successful.
You’re still ignoring the lack of demand for the product to begin with. The fact of the matter is that there simply isn’t as much demand for an AR headset as there is for a VR headset, and headsets in general don’t have as much demand as handheld devices or smart-home devices. The fact that it has to be worn on your face and is much bulkier than a pair of glasses or a pair of goggles alone make them not worth it for most users. Combined with the fact that such technology is pretty much inherently unusable by the significant portion of the population who get motion sickness from XR devices, and it’s easy to see that the price point was far from the only issue here.
They said the same for Google Stadia. How did that turn out, exactly? Also, there is no evidence that there will ever be a Vision line. You’re counting chickens before they hatch.
Yes, and? It was still wildly successful as a mobile phone, MP3 player, digital camera, and a device that can be used to browse the internet, features that were present in the first iPhone. The Vision Pro was not successful, and it would have needed a robust App Store to even be as successful as VR devices.
Basically, you’re comparing a device that was successful without an App Store due to the features it did have even without one to a device that failed and had a lackluster App Store despite being almost entirely dependent on apps in order to succeed.
Those aren’t “stigmas”. Those are just inconvenient truths. A stigma is purely reputations and sticks even when it is no longer the case (if it ever was) that the reputation is factually accurate. In this case, the Vision Pro was itself bulky hardware, not overly comfortable for long periods of time, and having poor weight distribution.
At any rate, you’re only proving the point of the article, which is that the Vision Pro, specifically, was over-hyped for what it actually was and how well it would sell.
I’m neither an Apple fanboy nor an Apple hater. I have had iPhones, iPods, and iPads (and still do own an iPhone that I use regularly), but I prefer Windows for laptops and desktop computers and other browsers. There are things I think Apple does or has done well, and there are things I think they don’t.
However, my opinion for Apple as a whole has nothing to do with my opinion of the Vision Pro. It is objectively a commercial flop, and my opinion is that it was a bad idea given the current state of technology and was overhyped. I personally know Apple fans who would agree with me on that.
You don’t get to decide who is or isn’t allowed to have an opinion. Everyone is allowed to have an opinion, even if that opinion is objectively nonsensical and counterfactual.
Moreover, the article demonstrates that they do, in fact, have knowledge of the industry and what came before the Vision Pro. They even point to facts about the industry and the history of XR devices as evidence for their conclusions here. That you disagree with their interpretation of those facts does not mean they lack knowledge of them.
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It’s amazing how everone’s take is valid excepting the article author’s take. lmao
Steve Jobs may not have approved the ugly battery pack, but you’re a damn fool if you think he wouldn’t have approved a foreshortened battery life.
Vr is only got a tiny minority it’s hard to use no compelling apps limited battery life
Meanwhile there’s great games on consoles and PC of course theres apple fanboys who like anything with an apple logo on it even if you like VR meta has a good VR headset
Smartphones took off when app stores appeared
In a few years there maybe a headset that’s got a great app and good battery life that’s comfortable to wear
Odd, I picked up my “dud” 2 weeks ago and love it. While there are not a lot of apps, the ultra wide display of my Mac screen is astonishing and super productive for my dev work. The immersive video blows my mond.
And yes, I purchased it to develop apps for it.
Watched VR since the 70's.
What are the common Faults?
Eyes are NOT the same, and a good focal point? Just a few points off and things get Dizzy.
Weight? Who wants to wear Extra weight on head and shoulders??
Re-write Every game to be compatible. Cant Just do simple tricks to Split the screen for viewing.
Then we can hit on HEAD size, Shape, And where the ears are mounted.
Long ago, the system used the Split screen view on any game, BUT mhz/FPS and power were the worst parts. <30 fps because Computers hadnt gotten past 60mhz. They figured they need at least 90mhz, and More 120mhz for each eye. But in that time? 120mhz would have cost your $1000+ for a Unit to see 3d on 256 colors. Now do that with 16-24 bit graphics, ?? Ram, and 90-120mhz sitting on your head? OR Cabled to you. wireless?? with all those signals going to your computer???
Fun times.
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Vision Pro headset dream
Apple 2110
What a dream. And once again, I was a droid. My boss, Andrew, said, grab your shit, we’re going to put down a rebellion. A rebellion, I asked, What, where? Well, it’s not a rebellion but more of a civil war because there are two sides. You might think that we would do this virtually, but no, almost all executives at Apple do everything F2F. This is because the glasses have an absolute ton of apps that will wrap whoever you are talking to in whatever body you want them to be in. And they have no idea. So you could be talking to your boss, trying to stifle your laughter, and your boss’s face is mapped onto a panda body. Or even worse, a Henti tentacle is trying to get in their mouth. Yeah, Apple gave up on PG around 2045.
Apple corporate was still in a ship, but the ship was on the moon. Apple owns 1/24 of the surface of the moon. You know that treaty that said every country in the world had a piece of the moon? Well, when a company comes to you and says, Want to swap your national debt for your piece of the moon, it turns out 24 out of 200+ countries said, Hell yeah! So we are on the ship in the upper right of the Sea of Tranquility. Apple moved here in 2082. Just after the Google-Apple wars started. It only takes a couple of VP assassinations to get the picture. Google acquired its own South American country and remember its mission statement used to say, do no evil? Well, now it’s more like, Yeah, we do evil.
An aside (Microsoft did not feature in this dream; I don’t know why. If it was the Cascadia fault, earthquake, and the following Seattle tsunami, I don’t know, but they were MIA)
I was working in software on one of the dev teams. We stepped outside and put on our shoes because his office is a shoeless space. Andrew was an Executive Vice President, and I was just a Manage-droid in the division of the coders of FootOs. As we put on our Apple shoes, they booted up and gave us the ready-to-go beep. Yeah, Apple was the ultimate wearable company. They gave up on the driverless car and soon after went in another direction, creating the Apple glasses, Apple shoes, and the Steve shirts. For the shoes, like every other product, you can start with a basic 2-motor pair, and then you can upgrade the firmware and the number of motors. So you’re basically wearing these tiny EVs wrapped around your feet. There are racing events using overclocked and overpowered ones, but most of us go with the standard 40 miles an hour four motor upgrade. Let me tell ya, on the moon’s gravity, it is hella fun. Forty miles an hour is dangerous, but these days, with your Apple helmet and the bodysuit, 40 miles an hour is pretty safe. Besides, you can get a broken femur fixed overnight.
Not even looking back, Andrew said we’ll take the spin to the OS section. Now, the moon ship was a lot like the Cupertino ship, but you could do things up here you couldn’t even dream of doing down on Earth, so “the spin” is a track on the upper side of the windows that goes all the way around the building and every 20° or so there a curved entrance and exit pathway. So you get up speed, you hit the curved entrance pathway, then like a bobsled, it takes you up to the track on the vertical windows, so you are honking around with centripetal force holding you against the windows. With a kick-ass view at your feet. Yeah, it is full-on nerd rollerball. So we go about 60° around the spin and angle off on the Number six down spin exit. We decelerate to inter-office speed, then come up to the doors of the FootOS group. No more badging in because our glasses ID us to the doors. After the horrible experience with the enormous headwear, Apple went the way of embedded eyewear, but a couple of corneal explosions ended that experiment. Nowadays, it is all glasses, either in the Trek Jordi style or the full-on black 90s nerd style. The advantage of the Apple shoes is that they are the CPU for your glasses. Apple could never figure out how to get enough battery power or CPU cycles in something that anyone would wear on their head, so the shoes are the CPU, and they are encrypted tight beamed to your glasses. This way, you have more than enough power to do damn near anything. These days, the glasses are running at about 10,000 apps, and the shoes are about 150.
The doors swish open, and we walk into the main cubicle section, which has about 65 cubes. Like he said, it looked like a Civil War. About 60% of the group was on the left side, and the rest were on the right. They were shouting at each other, cussing and swearing, and saying things I had no clue about. So Andrew walks up to the main wooden Apple table. It’s about 15 feet long, 300 lbs. He takes hold of it and throws it end over end against the wall. No big deal. This IS the moon, remember? (I should fill you in on the current physicality of the upper Apple management. Most of them are serious body modders as are a lot of humans these days. So you have these guys that look like Big Steve if Steve looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Oh, I forgot to mention there are almost no clothes worn on the ship except for the occasional Apple helmet and high-speed bodysuit. Think skintight and tiny.)
So. The desk shut everybody up. He said, What the fuck is wrong with you guys, so two of the leads came forward from each side, and it turns out that they were fighting about forking the OS into a left and right foot version. I could not believe it. Andrew said, Listen to me very carefully. There will be no forks. There will be no left and right OS. There will be one. One OS for the shoe. If I hear any more of this bullshit, that person will be leaving in a Google pod within an hour. The murmuring went silent. Now, I need to explain what a Google pod is. Anybody who was fired is put in a pod, and it is fired back at Earth, where presumably the person can be hired by Google. It is a single-person reentry vehicle that is very safe, and nobody has ever died. But trust me, you don’t want to leave the ship in a Google pod. Any family remaining behind is sent back in the standard fashion.
Andrew turned around and rolled out. I looked around and said, OK, everybody kiss and make up, get back to work. I don’t need to tell you that corporate will be deep-searching your emails looking for the words left foot and right foot, so you better have the context correct. There was some mumbling as one of the more impressive modders put the desk back. I looked at the forearm of my Steve Shirt, saw it was time for lunch, and thought café Mac pizza.