InspiredCode

Good review. I agree with most of it.

I think there are 4 core consumer areas to the Vision Pro market (or reasons to buy) and I think Apple only nailed one category at launch- movies- and came close to getting spatial apps right.

1. 3D movies and immersive video recording. These are really good. A lot of people with disposable cash will be buying it just for this. There is a disappointing amount of content on Apple TV+ at launch, but an incredible amount of content on Disney+ and in the iTunes Store. This is a better experience than a real movie theater. There is evidence Apple has 3D content for TV+ in the works that isn’t out yet. Their Dinosaur feature looks incredible if they can move beyond a short demo experience. Overall 3D movies are nearly perfect at launch. Just remember to push the video player back as far as possible and resize it as large as possible for the best experience.

2. Spatial Gaming. This is not a hit on day one with limited content. Hopefully we see this develop over the next year. If you don’t need to buy a Quest 3 too, it gets a little further to justifying the price since the Quest can’t play movies well. Eye tracking doesn’t seem to be great for games. I think motion controllers are a necessity to really feel immersed in games. I hope Apple doesn’t pull the Apple TV Remote is good enough for games scenario again and prevent this area from taking off. In this case, eye tracking is the Apple TV Remote. It is a good remote, but not good at all forms of input. In theory even traditional 2D games could take advantage of the headset if they render in to a portal in space using full 3D rendering or stereoscopic rendering. Apple seems to be experimenting with this a bit in Apple Arcade.

3. 3D graphics software. There is nothing on day one other than jigspace. Shapr3D was hiring Vision Pro developers last year. This could be extremely compelling on Vision Pro, but will need at least another year to develop. Hopefully we see sculpting, motion capture, modeling, CAD, etc.

4. Spatial Apps. A testbed and preview of future comfortable glasses and headsets. I would consider remote control of a Mac part of this category. Using apps isn’t comfortable enough except to use in a pinch. I don’t think this will sell headsets yet, but it is cool to experience the future today. It is nice to have apps available while using core areas 1-3, so this is useful. There still seem to be some issues. Scrolling long lists is hard. Eye tracking distracts you from your content. With a trackpad, you can use the UI while still keeping your eyes on the content. This will be a compelling core use for the headset, but probably not replacing an iPad for a few generations. However, I think people will find a few niches where they prefer spatial apps early- especially for those that travel frequently. Apple got close to getting this right, but it isn’t good enough yet to be the primary reason to buy a headset.

5. Fitness (maybe). In theory there could be interesting fitness use cases. Possibly limited this generation since it may not be suited to aerobic exercise and possible damage to the headset. I think it is yet to be determined if this will be a compelling use case. Nothing at this point.

The headset will sell if they can get 1-3 perfected and do good enough at 4 to make it feel like we are in the future.

Coming back to motion controllers, I think they are required for games. If Apple played their cards right they would make motion controllers that also functioned as gamepads, iPhone joycons, keynote presentation device, and Wii style Apple TV remotes all in one device. If they worked across multiple devices they could help rationalize spending Apple level prices for beautifully engineered hardware. I think Apple would prefer not to depend on motion controllers for spatial apps (they might be good as a “pencil” for 3D design apps though), but making them work for all gaming I think is a good middle ground.

Pretty awful that it is for Unity Pro only ($2200 per year per developer or artist, $185/mo billed per year). That means it will mostly just be used for ports that are already generating revenue. Unlikely to be used much for new development or by Indies. Other major platforms like Meta Quest are not locked to Unity Pro.

Unreal is also working on AVP support and may end up a better option despite their fight with Apple. Disney uses Unreal heavily and may be a big reason Epic is still working on AVP support despite their feud. Unreal pushes MaterialX for shaders in UE5, a standard for shaders that Apple is also pushing. MaterialX is artist friendly and works across different vendors shading languages. Unity doesn’t have support for MaterialX, although there is partial support to translate Unity shader graphs to MaterialX for Unity’s RealityKit backend.

We may see more use of RealityKit for games. Although RealityKit is more suited for AR or casual games. It is missing features normally expected for heavily immersive games. It is a great artist-friendly engine, but you are not going to write a AAA game with it.

Apple generally treats API abuse as a temporary ban, so seems like they are just following their normal playbook.

I noticed through the order process that the 1TB model is referred to as the 512GB model. At the end it does flip back to saying 1TB. 

You have to remember no technology, no data was "stolen" here. It's the nature of the US patent system to award patents that are as generalizable as possible, such that the patent is basically an idea that anybody can think of, and they leave it to courts to have the patents invalidated, modified, and to have the companies fight it out.

Right. And if you want to read the patent it is very clear this is what is happening. Not only that, one of the two patents was Masimo patenting Apple’s design after they released it. I saw on one patent news site that observed this was a strange aspect that rarely happens. Apparently so trivial that Apple forgot to patent it themselves. The second patent was struck down as prior art, contested, then brought back in. It is also very trivial.