Vision Pro to ship with 1TB storage
In news that is not surprising for a data-hungry and high-priced device, Apple Vision Pro is said to come with 1TB of SSD storage on board.
got an exclusive look in detail, and while far from flawless, it demonstrated high-quality images and AR. Consequently, then, it's not startling that there would be 1TB fast SSD storage inside.
French publication iPhoneSoft reports that it has been told by a developer session attendee, that Vision Pro's storage is listed in a System Settings, just as with the Mac, iPhone and iPad.
Specifically, this attendee reported that the Vision Pro he or she used came with 1TB. Unfortunately, while 1TB may have been chosen for attendees at the workshops, it doesn't necessarily follow that it will ship to the public with that, or that will be the "entry-level" configuration.
It does almost certainly mean that 1TB is at least an option, however. Apple could yet sell an edition with 512GB, or it could be that 1TB is just the lowest of the available storage options.
Apple may have not yet settled on its configurations, either, as the company does still have a lot to do before it's ready to ship the headset.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
The R1 chip really is the great unknown………
M2 needs more memory as it's running apps. Each app can use 2GB.
The SSD storage is for persistent data. It would be nice if the minimum is 1TB and for Apple to do this across their product line. SSD is really cheap now. 2TB PCIe SSD is ~$100, 1TB is $50-80:
https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-Internal-Gaming-MZ-V8P2T0B-AM/dp/B08RK2SR23
https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Plus-PCIe-NAND-6600MB/dp/B098WKQRDL
Today Apple charges $400 for 0.75TB and $800 for 1.75TB, this is 8-10x higher than mainstream SSD prices, nearly $500/TB. If they charged 4x premium for SSD, they could make 512GB standard on entry Macs with 1TB a $200 upgrade and 2TB a $400 upgrade and 1TB would be standard on devices $2k+.
Images? Video? Apps? Data?
It makes no sense in a world of wifi and streaming.
Local storage is necessarily expensive from Apple and adds incredible cost.
One exception, Apple profits incredibly from it. Margins of 200-500%, probably. So, there's that.
Margin-wise, it is probably on the lower end of the spectrum. It has a lot of cameras and sensors, it has 2 4K+ OLED-on-silicon displays that will be supply constrained for 1 year, at least. It has 2 big chip packages in the M2 and R1. It has 2 state of the art multi-layer lens. It's the thing that warps the planar OLEDoS display into a >100° spherical field-of-view. It has compound curvature glass and aluminum frames, and pretty complex fabrics in the straps and light seal. The $3500 price looks like something pretty low margin to me.
So if you take a iPad Pro 12.9 1TB at $1800 and multiply by 2.5 or so for the VP hardware, that's probably a 30% margined price. But the VP hardware isn't commoditized yet. It won't have a good margin for another 2 years at least, end of 2025 time frame and assuming they ship million+ units by then.
Meta is basically freezing out competitors and setting incorrect expectations for how much headset hardware costs. They are dumping Quest hardware into the market for at least 3x lower than they should be priced.
Apple definitely isn’t perfect and there are some things that are inexcusable like no iMac over 24 inches yet, the lack of video target display on iMac’s, or the WebCam on the Apple Studio Display not being the equal of an Pro iPhone camera at this late date.
I really want to test out that "immersive experience" people are talking about, which makes you feel as if you are actually there. To me, that's as ground-breaking as the move from B&W film to Color, or B&W TVs to Color, or from SD to HD. Still images and 2D video we have today are great in that they bring make memories. But an immersive experience helps you relive that memory in ways you never thought possible. The only thing better would be to add smell and touch too. Heck, thrown on taste, and you've basically got the Star Trek holodeck. The only major limits to technological advancements are our own imagination and commitment to achieving the impossible.
SSD isn't expensive now and there were reports that Apple would bump base RAM levels next year, 8GB->12GB, 16GB->24GB. They can do the same with base SSD, 256GB->512GB, 512GB->1TB similar to what they do with iPhones/iPads. Then it would be standard for a premium device like Vision Pro to have 1TB entry storage.
Mainstream movies can be streamed but some people will prefer to download them as 4k 3D will probably be around 20GB = 30MBit and streaming can show blocky artifacts, which would be more noticeable on a room-sized display.
HDR video uses 40-bit color, sometimes higher (e.g 12-bits per channel).
https://www.idownloadblog.com/2020/10/20/system-requirements-hdr-video-capture-iphone-ipad/
But all of this is moot until the actual phones come out.
Speaking of which, I'm sick of rumor after rumor. I just want to phones to be released and then the tech media to stop reporting on rumors for a few months, at least, so we all can take a breather.
What really ticks me off is reading through Flipboard stories in the morning of late, which all give "5 reasons to skip the iPhone 15." Complete morons in journalism. They are making the iPhone 16 out to be something so great that the unreleased 15 is worthless in comparison! Then you see that all their cited reasons are ridiculous, especially since they are nothing but rumors anyway.
Rumors and speculation has gotten out of hand. I want to be pleasantly surprised again, like I was in the past at Apple events. This isn't the fault of Apple. It's the fault of both the tech media who publish the rumors, and the readers who demand the rumors. Both are at fault. Everyone should just ignore the rumors so we can all be surprised and wowed once a year with all the great tech, which of course includes more RAM too!