sorry but the vision pro is a bad product even conceptually that sucks ass
the entire fucking wwdc felt like it was written and performed by people who had literally never interacted with a human being in their life. it was actually so uncanny at places that I was starting to feel distinctly unnerved. the way they talked, they way they moved, the almost chatgpt like nature of how they were saying everything. it was ad copy extended to be a corporate personality, the kind of thing where it's the way people talk to each other in fucking meetings and shit being presented as "this is what humans do"
like yeah man, people just fucking LOVE customizing their lock screens. that's a thing people love. then there was the way they tried to fucking hype up fucking pdfs? or how literally the only game of note they could bring out when they said they were serious about gaming was literally four years old?
and this all sounds unrelated to the vision pro but it speaks to a fundamental issue that it has and possibly an explanation as to why the only place I've seen people act like it's a good idea that could possibly have any chance of having any effect even six years from now is here on cohost: it is fundamentally out of touch with 99.999% of people, with the 0.001% remaining being people who are interested in experimental tech. because I'm sorry but even for the people deep deep in the prosumer bullshit, this is a bad, pointless product
like this isn't a hololens competitor, despite what I've seen some people say. it really doesn't exist in that market at all. if it did, they wouldn't have brought out fuckin bob iger to talk about goddamn disney+. they wouldn't have made it so 99% of the shit they showed was things like facetime and doing some spreadsheet bullshit and watching star wars but you're IN star wars and this vague gesture towards 3d models being able to be viewed in your living room
if you remember hololens's announcement at all, you'll probably remember how it was presented almost the exact same way. they had a weird shitty minecraft demo, they showed people placing artificial windows in augmented reality, they gestured towards industry use cases, but generally speaking they focused less on that and more on what developers could do with it because it was a developer presentation
imagine that, apple. focusing on developers during a developer presentation instead of just saying "we have a new api"
and you might remember this too but hololens fucking tanked in that space! not because of fov issues or issues fundamental to transparent AR displays, but because it was an expensive piece of shit that really had no use case for the vast majority of people! because people don't want to put on a fuckin' magic hat with a two hour battery life to do things they can already do on their fucking computers and phones and tvs, all of which together probably cost dramatically less than $3500 (or $3000 for the hololens, back in 2016)
like I don't think people get this here, but the reason the iphone was such a paradigm shift when it launched wasn't just because apple was the one announcing it. that was a factor because apple back then had some real fuckin prime hype generation skills even for people outside their ecosystem, admittedly. but nah, the reason it took off was actually pretty simple if you remember what shit was like back then. for instance
- smartphones were almost always business focused machines
- even then, they weren't terribly friendly towards the average user
and those two were big features, but the thing that sold people on the iphone was way more than just that. the big shit was this
- it's the actual internet (not WAP, but actual sites!)
- it's a full media player with a widescreen display (apple was huge in the media player space, remember)
- it fits in your pocket
even at $500 with contract, it was about as expensive as some of the highest-end smartphones and did less overall due to its lack of an app store, with a focus on the idea of web apps and its lack of 3G support, but it was the way it merged things people actually used regularly like the internet and media players into a single device that was almost absurdly convenient. like 2007 was the year you could most easily say loads of people were really full-on reaching the point of being connected to the internet as a regular thing. everything was pushing online connectivity back then and the iphone was poised to really leap dick first into that space
but the vision pro has none of that. in fact, the vision pro does everything in a less convenient package. like, you have to 3d scan your own face so you can use facetime and have people actually see you? it has an external battery but still only gets two hours of battery life? it makes you look like a fucking tool? they had to find a way to solve the "people will think you're ignoring them shit" so it needs an oled display to show your eyes? the shit they tried to promote it with is all shit you already do on your computer and phone?
you have to wear the fucking thing on your head?
this is a bad product. it's a bad product that is trying to find problems to solve and, in its quest to do so, it had to come up with even more solutions to solve the problems it introduced in the first place. it's techwank. it's technologically interesting but also it's pretty clearly a company trying to make this idea of an absolutely nightmarish dystopian future seem palatable to people while having no idea what people want
and it's all that for fucking $3500
get real