tht

schlack said:

This is amazing performance, compared to the competition. However, I haven’t noticed any lag when using my quest 3, so I’m curious about real world impact. 

The lower the latency, the more people can use it without motion sickness. That's one of the biggest issues for these headsets. Really, there are a lot of wearability issues to address. By driving down latency to a decent number, it increases the numbers of people who can use it without feeling nauseous.

Other benefits is it makes occlusion of hands possible, it will make your hands and body feel like your actual body parts. Some basic math. If you wave your hand at 10 inches per second, and the latency from camera to display is 40 ms, it means your real hands will be 10 x 0.04 = 0.4 inches ahead of where it is being shown in the display. The occlusion will also lag. Everything regarding your interaction and movements will have lag between what your body thinks it is doing and what it sees it is doing.

So, if you were to grab something, you may tip it over instead of being able to grab it. There is motion sickness involved with this. It has ramifications in the UI well.

So, no ramifications for you, but there are a lot of people out there. Quest headsets likely have a larger fraction of potential buyers being affected by motion sickness. AVP? Smaller fraction. Ie, more potential buyers. Obviously the price alone eliminates a lot of buyers, no gaming eliminates a lot of buyers, but they made the potential market of wearers bigger in the first place.

Morgan Stanley currently forecasts that Apple's headset business will "conservatively" ramp up to $4 billion per year in revenue after four years. In theory, this would be below the product ramps of the Apple Watch and AirPods in their post-launch timings.

$4b per year is 1.1m units at $3500 in the 4th year of sales? Yeah, conservative. They may be able to do that in year 2 or year 3.

As a contrast, Meta's Reality Labs division has never made $4b per year. Here's Reality Labs' financial performance:


This is amazing, and speaks to Zuckerberg's absolutely control of Meta. That operating loss line continues to scale with the revenue line. This implies that if Meta sells more Quest units, they will have more operating losses. IOW, for every Quest sale they have at $500, they lose about $2500.

A normal CEO would have stopped this a year ago, at least. That loss line has to stop getter bigger. There has to be projections in Meta when the Quest ecosystem can pay for itself, and it looks very far away. 

Would be interesting to see what the AVP financials are like.

Come on Apple. It needs Terminal.app. Just do it. Put it on iPadOS while you are at it.

Not much talk on how good Safari is? That is a hugely important app. Probably the single most important app. Safari must be desktop quality. Be able to deal with apps that use pop-up windows. Who knows what is done about the trackers, ads, and stuff. If it prevents adware from scroll-jacking and is able to actually select close buttons, it would be great.

Can you play web based games on visionOS Safari?

One nice feature of a web browser I'd like to see is a "Never go to this website" button. Or, something along the lines of identifying if this or that website has x megabytes adware load, don't open up the website. You see a URL, select it, but the web browser will put up a message saying I don't want to visit this web page due to ad load. Unfortunately, some bank websites will have to be let through if there was such a features.

Every once in a while, I think of maybe a text based only web browser being a cool thing to use. They actually had some back in the day. Wonder if I can configure some browser to do this.

ericthehalfbee said:

The fact those idiots at Spotify and Epic are whining so much just shows Apple has done something right.

it boggles the mind that Spotify, the worlds largest music streaming service by far (and more of a monopoly in music than Apple is in smartphones) doesn’t have to abide by the DMA. Any artist that wants to be on Spotify has to agree to their terms. That’s the very definition of a gatekeeper.

One interesting fact is that developers who create a 3rd party App marketplace (store) can’t use it for their own Apps. They have to accept submissions from other developers who might want to use their store. So Meta can’t open a Meta Store that ONLY has their Apps.

The media loves to find the people who have the most dramatic takes for their articles. Spotify and Epic CEOs are perfectly happy to provide them. What the media never points out is both of them are basically the worst examples, and really should never take quotes from them as it's just a publicity thing for them. They really love the us-versus-them fight-fight-fight articles.

Spotify has effectively paid zero dollars to Google and Apple for several years now. Zero. Yet, there is the continual "storytelling" of them trying to get out of the platform fees, to this day. Spotify turned off in-app subscriptions on iOS for years now, and therefore 100% of iOS subscription revenue goes to Spotify. Then, not just 3 months ago, it was revealed during the Epic vs Google court case that Google gave them a deal where if an Android user uses Google's in-app payments, the platform fee is 4%, and Spotify was able to use their own payment system with Google getting 0% of that.

What the hell is Spotify's problem? They are literally paying no fees on Android and iOS, and it's been like that for years? Every single advantage has been given to them, and they want more, and the media is more than willing to play the story that they are being bullied. They clearly are not being bullied whatsoever. Even in the EU, iOS is at a minority share of 25%, and Apple really can't drive much at that marketshare. Ultimately, if the EU can drive Google/Youtube Music, Apple Music, Amazon Music and Tencent Music subscribers to be Spotify subscribers, Spotify would love it! They want to get to a monopoly position in music and media streaming.

Then, Epic, sheesh. They were making something like $500m to $1000m revenue per year on Android and iOS. This was only about 10% of their revenue. Their revenue is 90% driven by Sony Playstation, MS XBox and Nintendo Switch. 90%! That 90% where they had to pay a platform fee of 30% on all three console platforms, just like on Android and iOS. What is their problem? They are essentially making billions of dollars on an afterthought platform at incredible margins and had the same deals as every other platform they are on. They aren't being bullied by Apple here either, and that media storytelling, keeps on hitting that well of how Apple is bullying Epic.

designr said:

tht said:

Wesley Hilliard said:

tht said:

What do you mean by dramatic? What changed in the operating system? How about some UI screenshots?

I use my Apple Watch as a notification device all the time. Phone calls, text message replays. That's not Digital Touch or sending heartbeats, but it is still communication, which was a tentpole type feature from the beginning. I basically use the Apple Watch in accordance to the original tentpoles: time, fitness, communication, and weather. Don't see any big changes.

You want me to do the research and gather screenshots from an operating system that existed nearly a decade ago because you don't understand my point? Yeah, sorry, no.

If you believe you're correct, go nuts. Or go look at the information yourself. It's not like I'm unique in my perspective since it's what happened.

What changed? The entire functionality of the operating system. How apps were loaded. What the buttons did. What data was obtained and processed on device versus on the phone. Native SDKs weren't even available until watchOS 2.

The platform got turned on its head. Go look into it, it's quite the fascinating history. Or don't, I don't care. lol

I'm just tired of hearing people say the original Apple Watch was not a health and fitness device and Apple had to change direction. That is simply not true.

There's actually a lot of revisionist history going on around iPhone, iPad and Watch (some include iPod and the Apple retail stores as well).

There certainly were critics and doubters for all of these. But not everyone was in that camp. Furthermore, Apple did have early success in each of them. They each were also addressing a fairly clear, known, and understood set of problems but doing so in the inimitable Apple way. They brought an Apple level of excellence, design and—dare I say—panache to product categories that needed them.

AVP may end up being a similar success. But its prospects are murkier right now. As I've said before I don't hear a lot of people clamoring for something called "spatial computing" or having a huge desire to strap a device to their face for hours. There might be. I'm just not hearing or seeing it. Speaking for myself, I actually want my devices to be of a more environment, unobtrusive, ambient nature. Smart devices around me and even on me but not in an obtrusive way. AVP looks pretty obtrusive to me. I want even smarter watches, maybe AirPods (to be used to sometimes but not always), a more reliable and consistent HomeKit/AirPlay/Siri/HomePod ecosystem, etc. Devices I can more casually interact with in ways that make my life better. But that's me. I'm not particularly interested in immersive experiences like AVP. Possibly millions of other people are.

Yes. I agree very much.

I would say that for most people, it is not really a purposeful revisionist history. People just don't remember, and what is remembered is often just filler filled from whatever or an imagining of what happened, while the historical account is really multi-factorial. Or the history is sacrificed in order to make a point.

One interesting aspect for success for the Vision Pro is that eye and hand tracking comes to the iPad, Macs and external displays. It would be a new and different UI mechanism and that just doesn't happen. In the old days, when focus-follows-mouse or focus-follows-click for keyboard input was raging, I wondered what happens if keyboard input focus followed your eyes.

One of things that would spell trouble is people often look at something else while typing. How will the Vision Pro deal with this? We will see. I'm imagining only front-most windows will have keyboard input focus, and therefore the user will have to bring it to the front with a look and pinch before typing. Then, various UI controls will by live to look at, which is basically the click-thru on macOS.