Reveiws
Interesting reviews
Wait But Why, All My Thoughts After 40 Hours in the Vision Pro
I’m writing this on a 30-foot screen on top of a 10,000-foot mountain in Hawaii, at a table in an Austin coffee shop where I’m pretty sure other people are taking photos of me to send to their friends so they can all call me a piece of shit. In the last week, life has gotten weird.
It’s not just me. VR blows everyone away when they try it, but it seems to have a hard time hooking people for the long run. After a major wave of hype in the mid-2010s, VR receded into the land of subcultures.
Or are we some tipping point away from VR exploding into the stratosphere like the computer and smartphone?
The staff member guided me through a demo. And there it was: the holy shit moment.
But it was a holy shit moment with an asterisk. I had experienced full holy shit moments both in 1990 and in 2016 with VR, and these were the notable exceptions to the “holy shit moments are a surefire omen of an industry about to blow up” rule. Was this time different or would history repeat itself?
Joe Cieplinski, Vision
This is the best 1.0 Apple has ever shipped. It’s probably the best 1.0 _anyone_has ever shipped. Put it this way: visionOS already has Cut, Copy, and Paste. It has multiple window support. It has a file manager app. It has support for external keyboards and trackpads. It has full integration with iOS and macOS devices.
If I lived alone, I would have gotten rid of my TV the day after I picked up Vision Pro. It’s simply the best way to watch movies, shows, etc. Period. Hands down. Game over.
I say this carefully, because I don’t wish to offend. But if you haven’t used Vision Pro, you probably shouldn’t be writing about it.
I was trying figure out whether Vision Pro will end up replacing my iPad or my Mac, if either, and it’s clear now it’s the Mac whose days would be numbered.
If, like me, you see it as an entirely new way to be more productive when working, then the price is downright cheap. I paid less for Vision Pro than I did for my Apple Pro Display XDR, and I can use it while sitting on the couch.
The three biggest gripes people have with Vision Pro are price, size/weight, and battery life. These are three problems the tech world has been solving since the dawn of computing. Time will fix all three very easily. So it’s not a matter of whether Vision Pro will be successful. It’s just a matter of how long it takes for mass adoption. In a few short years, Spatial Computing will be a Fortune 100 company within Apple, just as Apple Watch is now.
Hugo Barra, former Head of Oculus at Meta
Very very good breakdown from a knowledgeable insider.
Vision Pro is an over-engineered “devkit” // Hardware bleeds genius & audacity but software story is disheartening // What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right // Why Meta could finally have its Android moment