mayfly

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Username: mayfly
Joined: July 2023
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Last Active: October 2023
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Apple Watch Series 9 vs Google Pixel Watch 2 -- Specs, price, and features, compared

mayfly

October 2023

kmarei said:

I just can't get over the rectangular face of the apple watch, it looks so geeky
i want a circular watch
Still using my motto 360 3rd gen
not sure why the obsession with all the health features
i want a watch for notifications, so I don't have to pull my phone out to see I got a new Viagra ad

"Not sure about the obsession with all the health features???"

Well, I'm sure. My brother was running out of breath walking his dog. His 7th Gen Apple Watch was sending him warnings about aFib. He went to a cardiologist at the VA, and he said, don't worry it's probably not aFib. The watch disagreed, multiple times every day. Two weeks later, he was out to dinner with us, and he felt so short of breath we took him to the ER. He was admitted, and an ECG confirmed aFib. He's since had two cryoablations, two cardioversions, and a Watchman implant. He's also on 4 heart medications. That watch may have saved his life. And when he falls out of sinus rhythm, he knows right away, and takes action.

And the fall detector has already saved many people who otherwise may have died. I've gotten one false alarm from tripping on an area rug, but was able to cancel it. I wear mine all day every day, and don't often take my phone when I'm out. I don't really care about texts or phone calls in the moment. And like your opinion, I don't get the obsession with having to stop whatever you're doing to answer the phone!
Heavy Apple Vision Pro leads Apple to lighten future headsets

mayfly

October 2023

Marvin said:

mayfly said:

I thought of a way to solve this weight problem, if not the vertigo problem. Since there's already a detached battery pack, why not offload the memory, CPU, graphics processor, and the rest of the electronics, to the battery pack in the pocket?

I suspect that would be a bandwidth issue. It has 12 cameras likely streaming 4K HDR data at 90FPS+. Passing that down a USB-C cable all the time and then getting 2x 4K HDR 90 back would be problematic and very limiting if they ever use 8K. If they had R1 on the headset to compress/composite/process the feeds before putting them down to the box, that might work out but it's easier to keep the cameras, displays and processors in the same place. Those chips probably don't weight much. I'd say the cover glass and metal interior plus lenses will be the heaviest parts.

In their other product revisions like the iPad, they've gone over every part of the interior and tried to reduce weight, changing the layout and parts. They managed to reduce the iPad weight by about 1/3 in 3 years. They can likely do something similar here.

I thought of that. But by changing it to ThunderBolt 4 port/cable, the potential bandwidth increases to 40Gbps. That should take care of the bandwidth issue. Obviously, can't move those cameras out of the headset. I think you're right about Apple being able to cut the weight in subsequent releases. When I changed my eyeglasses from glass to polycarbonate, the weight difference was dramatic! And they really don't scratch any more than the old glass ones did.
Heavy Apple Vision Pro leads Apple to lighten future headsets

mayfly

October 2023

StrangeDays said:

mayfly said:

stoneyg said:

StrangeDays said:

9secondkox2 said:

It’s like a refined beta product. Apple just wants to get this out to recoup the massive R&D spending in the hopes of figuring out an actual Apple way of solving this in the future. And that in and of itself is not very Apple. Strange times.

In a few years, when this becomes a sunglasses form factor, I’ll be interested as will the mass market. Until then, we are looking at a market limited to apple fans with expendable income. It should do better than the microcosm of PC centric VR toys, due to Apple’s fan base, but it won’t approach anywhere near Apple Watch levels of the market.

Until the until Apple iSight or whatever comes out, looking forward to the advancement of Macs and Apple Silicon to stir things up.

Yeah no, it's not unusual -- AV is already best in class in many aspects, but of course it will get better. Iterative development is how Apple rolls and it's been that way for decades. The original iPhone lacked copy & paste -- copy & paste! The original Mac had a puny black & white screen. You gotta crawl before you can walk or run. If they held off on these products until they had everything everyone wanted, they'd never get released.

As for sunglasses form factor -- ain't happening in a few years. Be prepared to wait a long time.

https://www.macworld.com/article/205387/apple-rolls.html

AR vs. VR/MR are just two completely different use cases IMO. All the uses of AVP are either specific to content creation (similar to a Mac or latest iPads) or fully-immersive content consumption (closer to Apple TV than iPhone).

A sunglasses form factor will need to be solely AR and be a device for light content consumption - more like iPhone compared to a Mac. You just can't get the same amount of processing power into the glasses factor, including proper battery life, to package the current functionality of AVP into it. A future AR glasses project will utilize much of the technology of visionOS (pinning content to real world areas with the ability to interact with it) but you can't get the same immersive content experience as you can with AVP completely blocking out external light.

I think there are reasons to always have both products around.

I can think of more than one reason not to have either around. Factoring in sales tax and lens inserts, $5,000+ for a toy that will be obsolete in a few years seems inadvisable at best. For $5,000 you can get a pretty nice TV set and watch with your family and friends and have about $4,000 left over, rather than sitting alone on that smelly couch in your parents' basement, flogging your joystick. Or you could move out and get your own place.

As yes, the “But it’s a toy!” trope. Haven’t heard that one before. They said the same about the original Mac, and even PCs in general. Oops.

Speaking of the original Mac, it was over twice the cost of the AV corrected for inflation. Over seven grand for that small black & white unconnected primitive desktop! It wasn’t for everyone then, and this isn’t today. And that’s okay.

I didn't buy the original 128K Mac, but I bought two 512K Fat Macs for my printing business in 1987. They were both used, and I remember paying $2,100 for the both of them. I also bought a new Apple LaserWriter for $3,500. Far from being toys, I used them for typesetting instead of sending out to a dedicated typesetter. They paid for themselves many, many times over, even with the $1,000 each cost to upgrade them to Mac Pluses that same year, along with a 20 MB (not GB) SCSI hard drive, which was around $1000 as well. I don't recall anyone thinking of them as toys, and they certainly served me well and profitably, with yearly upgrades, until I sold the business in 2003.

Now the Commodore 64 I had, yeah, that was a toy. As are these gaming headsets.
Heavy Apple Vision Pro leads Apple to lighten future headsets

mayfly

October 2023

Marvin said:

mayfly said:

Kierkegaarden said:

If Vision Pro is indeed around 450g, that isn’t too far off from AirPods Max at 385g. I’m sure they are experimenting with different materials — possibly titanium or carbon fiber.

There should be at least 2-3 different choices: cheap, light plastic for 90% market penetration, 5% aluminum for the Apple fanatics, and 5% carbon fiber for the carbon fiber fanatics (road cyclists mostly).

Price points: $1,499, $3,499, and $3,999, respectively.

Plastic isn't much cheaper than Aluminum, definitely not $2k cheaper. The cost of Apple Vision Pro is in the components, mainly cameras and displays from 3rd party suppliers.

The 11" iPad Pro is $799, likely with 30% margin or more. That means M2 + display + battery + networking + chassis etc = $560.

Apple Vision Pro parts likely come to around $2200 with the largest costs being 2x 4K micro-oled ($800) + 12x cameras + R1 ($700) = $1500 / $2200 (70% of the cost).

Meta Quest 2 is $300 with only basic low-res black and white cameras
Meta Quest 3 is $500 with ~HD passthrough
Meta Quest Pro is $1000 with ~720 passthrough

Meta sells hardware either at a loss or break-even and they do 2K resolution, Apple does 4K and close to real-world passthrough.

Meta AR is pretty much unusable:

https://kguttag.com/2023/01/03/meta-quest-pro-part-1-unbelievably-bad-ar-passthrough/

Quest 3 improves on it but is still a distorted, blurry image:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MLd-rz1goXw
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zKvyoPaVETs

To lower Apple Vision Pro price would need cheaper suppliers for displays and cameras, maybe use fewer cameras. I don't think they will be able to get sub-$2k by version 2 but maybe version 3 in 3-4 year times.

If they get the displays closer to smartphone display cost, use say 8 cameras, have a cheaper eyesight setup, that would cut $900 of costs to $1300, which could make it under $2k. I think unit volume at $3.5k would be close to 1 million, $2k would be 3-5 million.

iPhone Pro Max is $1200 and part of the most popular product line with monthly payments and it won't sell more than 20% of 250m units (50m units/year). VR at nearly 2x the price would be easily 1/10th this or less.

The hardware available still isn't ready for affordable AR yet and when it is, Meta will sell it at break-even. If Meta charged $1200 for a 4K Meta Quest Pro 2, Apple would price this hardware spec at $2k.

All good points. Until you get to your projected volume numbers. You have no quantifiable metrics to make those, since none have been sold yet, making them just guesses. Especially given that in the next sentence, you guess the VP will sell 10% of the iPhone Pro Max units, which you project at 50m. That would lead to 5 million units sold, not the 1 million in the previous guess. Or am I misreading something?
Heavy Apple Vision Pro leads Apple to lighten future headsets

mayfly

October 2023

stoneyg said:

StrangeDays said:

9secondkox2 said:

It’s like a refined beta product. Apple just wants to get this out to recoup the massive R&D spending in the hopes of figuring out an actual Apple way of solving this in the future. And that in and of itself is not very Apple. Strange times.

In a few years, when this becomes a sunglasses form factor, I’ll be interested as will the mass market. Until then, we are looking at a market limited to apple fans with expendable income. It should do better than the microcosm of PC centric VR toys, due to Apple’s fan base, but it won’t approach anywhere near Apple Watch levels of the market.

Until the until Apple iSight or whatever comes out, looking forward to the advancement of Macs and Apple Silicon to stir things up.

Yeah no, it's not unusual -- AV is already best in class in many aspects, but of course it will get better. Iterative development is how Apple rolls and it's been that way for decades. The original iPhone lacked copy & paste -- copy & paste! The original Mac had a puny black & white screen. You gotta crawl before you can walk or run. If they held off on these products until they had everything everyone wanted, they'd never get released.

As for sunglasses form factor -- ain't happening in a few years. Be prepared to wait a long time.

https://www.macworld.com/article/205387/apple-rolls.html

AR vs. VR/MR are just two completely different use cases IMO. All the uses of AVP are either specific to content creation (similar to a Mac or latest iPads) or fully-immersive content consumption (closer to Apple TV than iPhone).

A sunglasses form factor will need to be solely AR and be a device for light content consumption - more like iPhone compared to a Mac. You just can't get the same amount of processing power into the glasses factor, including proper battery life, to package the current functionality of AVP into it. A future AR glasses project will utilize much of the technology of visionOS (pinning content to real world areas with the ability to interact with it) but you can't get the same immersive content experience as you can with AVP completely blocking out external light.

I think there are reasons to always have both products around.

I can think of more than one reason not to have either around. Factoring in sales tax and lens inserts, $5,000+ for a toy that will be obsolete in a few years seems inadvisable at best. For $5,000 you can get a pretty nice TV set and watch with your family and friends and have about $4,000 left over, rather than sitting alone on that smelly couch in your parents' basement, flogging your joystick. Or you could move out and get your own place.