So indirectly, Apple may be helping Meta start to pay back the $25 billion it’s spent so far building out the metaverse.
Yeah, the Quest 2 I have is seriously good device, and Meta is probably selling them at a loss. I prefer it to my much more expensive Valve Index. The Quest 3 is a significant upgrade. $499 is a steal.
That’s just idiotic clickbait based on a single reddit thread.
It looks like the issue is that, while visionOS does support the WebRX API, it is turned off by default. So you can’t just immediately go to a porn site (or any site that uses WebRX) and load up VR content in Safari. And I think the site needs to have hand tracking support because there are no controllers yet for AVP. So TL;DR you have to manually enable WebRX and the site has to have hand tracking support.
Now let’s get all the jokes about hand tracking and porn out of the way.
What makes it curious is that all of the uploaded pictures appear to show vertical hairline cracks in the same exact area above the nose bridge. All the affected Redditors say they didn’t do anything obvious to cause the cracks, like dropping the device or storing it improperly. Reddit user @dornbirn claims that they polished the front glass, placed the soft cover on, packed it away in the case, and woke up to see the crack the next morning. Most of the other affected Redditors also noted they either stored their Vision Pros in cases or placed the soft cover on.
Just mold lines.
phrase needs disambiguation
It’s a joke recalling the reports of mold lines in the G4 Cube Mac almost 25 years ago.
The Cube was encased in a polycarbonate shell. Some G4 Cubes quickly started developing cracks in the shell. When owners complained, Apple said those aren’t cracks, it’s just harmless mold lines inherent in the injection molding process of producing the shell. Bullshit or not, it was not a reassuring response.
So I’m joking that Apple will handwave away the reports of cracked AVP glass by saying they are just mold lines.
Supposedly sales have been low enough that Apple is cutting production pretty dramatically and possibly cancelling work on updates to the Vision Pro.
In my inexpert opinion, I think the price is the real killer. The Meta Quest is priced in a way that you can justify trying it as a hobby and get your value out of it before it winds up sitting on the shelf collecting dust. The Vision Pro “starts” at $3500 but needs another $500+ worth of accessories to be viable. That’s a lot of money to sit in the closet.
Also its “augmented reality” applications feels like it would cut back on its user base. The primary purchaser for the other VR headsets is for gaming but the Vision Pro isn’t usable with game libraries on Steam and doesn’t have any notable native games. Watching movies or seeing your memos pop up over your coffee is kind of cool but probably not as attractive as immersive VR gaming.
In any event, however right my guesses are, the Apple Vision Pro seems to be something of a commercial flop.
Well I had completely forgotten that they even existed. They’re not being talked about at all.
It’s in a very awkward market position. It obviously doesn’t have the natural demand of something like the iPhone. It’s more expensive that it needs to be, with its focus on being a premium unit–but I’m not sure that cutting the price would help either, since it’s so packed with tech that it probably can’t sell for less than $2000, and for that you’ll get something plasticky like its competition. And who wants to pay $2k for that? And the software support is very limited because it’s so niche, making it even less useful.
If it had some killer app, it could still be useful as a toy for rich people, and maybe help fund its own development, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
FWIW, analysts are frequently wrong when it comes to their Apple predictions. If this news had been leaked from some internal Apple document that’s one thing, but going by an analysts sources, even Kuo’s, needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
Also, the headline in the story says Apple has canceled an updated version, but the text makes it clear that that is entirely the opinion of the analyst, with both a “could” and a “may” to equivocate his position.
That said, it’s still a $3,500 solution in search of a problem.
My recollection is that part of the uproar was Google advertising that you could use it identify random attractive women you see out and about. Basically, being sold as a stalker device. Now, I may be misremembering and that wasn’t a Google selling point but a concern I read/heard about elsewhere.
I stopped by an Apple Store shortly after the AVP came out, and had the opportunity to do a demo. The whole demo was really impressive, starting with the eyesight fitting. The store rep started by asking to borrow my glasses, which he put in a scanner. Then he used a phone to get a 3-D scan of my head and face. Less than 5 minutes later, someone came out with the demo headset which had been pre-fitted to my head, complete with prescription lenses.
The technology itself was impressive enough to almost tempt me to buy a set, until post-demo clarity set in. At the end of the day, I think of them as something like the Newton - there were handheld computers prior to the Newton, and Apple didn’t sell many of them in the grand scheme of things. But they ended up changing the way consumers thought about the potential of PDA’s, which ultimately evolved into the smartphones almost all of us use every day. As I was playing with the AVP, for the first time I saw how the user could interact with VR goggles in a way that extended beyond passively viewing content. The promise I saw wasn’t in this iteration, but in the potential of future devices.