$800 to upgrade from 256GB to 2TB? A fast 2TB NVMe drive can be had for ~$130.

For example, I bought an OLED Windows laptop that was nearly $2000 less than an identically equipped Apple device. Side by side, the Windows unit has better screen and at least equivalent chassis, keyboard, sound, and it has a better touchpad.

I have an iphone, and its primary purpose after being a phone is nav in my cars. 75% failure rate the last 4 trips I tried to use it for. Failure as in black screen. This is on top of Apple's increasingly useless nav that has tried to take me out into the boonies more times than I can count.

Eventually, people are going to tire of being insulted with high prices and subpar products and switch. I'm already there. The days of me paying to fuel Tim Cook's yacht are over.

Apple's headset is so poorly done that it is clear there is deep rot at the top of Apple. When I first saw that absurd front screen, I physically laughed out loud. How anyone at Apple let that through to final product is beyond me. Anyone who brought that crap to Jobs would have been fired on the spot.

I've never understood this common opinion. The cost of materials is not a good representation of the manufacturing process, especially since the entire board is built as a unit and not a set of interchangable components.

Have people actually run the numbers on the costs of manufacturing the different variations or are they just comparing against the SSDs they can find on Amazon?

That is an extremely strange view of history. While I don't think other Apple v1 products were "half-assed", they were clearly unfinished, but showed a ton of potential. I think the exact same thing applies to the Vision Pro.

The original iPhone received a lot of complaints about not supporting 3G, not supporting custom native apps, not supporting copy-paste, etc. But the original iPhone was still revolutionary, and I loved my original phone.

Nearly all of the in-depth reviews I've seen of the Vision Pro say essentially the exact same thing: it is a technological marvel, but has a bunch of rough edges, most of which were simply necessary because you can't just, for example, pray super-light batteries into existence.

To emphasize, I think the Vision Pro (and, honestly, many other VR headsets) is largely a solution looking for a problem, and I don't intend to get one, but I think calling it "half assed" compared to other v1 Apple products is a strong misremembering of history.

Why? Because they need developers to make worthwhile apps. Yes, the original iPhone shipped without an App Store, but it could also do regular phone stuff (calls, sms, etc). What’s the “regular” stuff you’d expect to do on a VR headset? Other than watch movies on a big screen, there’s currently very little reason to own one, and encouraging everyone’s mom to buy one is setting them up for failure.

Give it a couple years for there to be some really groundbreaking apps, and Apple will open the floodgates with a cheaper/more ergonomic version.

Wait, people think this thing is going to replace a phone? I can't imagine...

The first iPhone/iOS didn't? It had no apps, no MMS, no 3G

> Meta Quest 3 is better on everything, despite eye tracking

Apple is using eye tracking as an UX, so that "despite" is very big. That being said, I don't understand eye tracking UX, it seems to go against human nature to me. (I'm not continuously looking at my HN windows rn while typing this message)

> and the image quality(because it's expensive as hell).

There are many things for which even just 15% improvement changed them from interesting to a revolution. LLMs, capacitive touchscreens just to name a few. I could accept that the sames goes for VR

I'm clearly on the side "I see nothing the Apple Vision Pro is good for". The examples I've heard are pretty much "watching youtube while cooking": Well, buy a XREAL Air AR at a tenth of the price, and it'll follow you rather than keeping at a fixed position.

But I can see how the differences between Meta Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro can actually lead to completely different outcomes.

And it is priced out of the consumer market by a factor of 10. Also, the developer program is not interesting.

This will become more of an advantage for Apple as the platform matures because it’ll allow for (for example) automatic adaptations of existing apps for different device form factors, which Meta will not be as well positioned to match with their Android fork, unless they seriously ramp up platform development efforts and significantly diverge from mainline Android.

I predicted this many years ago, but the evidence I've seen convinces me I was wrong. I really disagreed with their past emphasis on the iPad as a computer at the expense of the Mac, but I feel they've course-corrected since.

Of course, on a long enough time scale you/me are right but I think that timescale extends beyond Tim Cook's retirement, at this point.

What evidence do you have?

Can't think of an Apple product line in which the first edition wasn't half-assed in some important way. This is something the company is known for, it's a truism. Even the first iPod made significant compromises.

Apple first-gen products are often half-assed. But they iterate and improve on a regular cadence. The current Apple Vision Pro is a dev kit, it will get better.

If they can make it less bulky, less heavy, similar to even Magic Leap 2, it would have a wider appeal.

Counterpoint: the Apple Watch and AirPods were not indispensable from day one but became very successful product lines for Apple over time. I still wouldn’t call them indispensable (generally at least, I consider my AirPods Pro pretty damn indispensable personally though) and they still consistently bring in billions for Apple per quarter.

However I am not optimistic about Apple Vision Pro. It’s Macintosh money with an iPad’s software distribution model. The iPad could never replace the Mac with that model, and I don’t see these being any more ambitious with what is public knowledge at the moment.

I buy and judge a product for what it does RIGHT NOW, not for what I'm hoping the manufacturer could fix down the line, long past the return window. So asking consumers to gamble with 3500+ on what might be, is a tall order.

Maybe Apple should have kept it longer in the oven and not rush to half-bake it, selling what's obviously designed to be a dev-kit, as an end user product using users who paid $3500 as beta testers.

Steve Jobs would be spinning in his urn. He always understood you never release half baked products to consumers.

Every other VR headset in question costs a fraction of the price and has sold a multiple of the units. The way their strap interfaces with the headset also appears to be a significantly larger engineering effort than other VR headsets. So basically, you'll be spending multiple hundreds of dollars after having already spent $3500 for the vision pro. That's insanity.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213994

On the contrary… I can already imagine the backlash against this one „oh, the profiteering, they don’t even sell the strap with it”.

Creating engaging high quality spatial content/experiences is insanely difficult and expensive. It's something Disney can do, but not 99% of current iOS developers.

Computer displays aren't any of these either, but we managed to integrate them.

This is Apple. You got all you're going to get. If you want more, you have to wait for AVP2 because they'll either software lock features to it or find some way of having hardware that AVP doesn't and thus can't support new software features.

What I'm still trying to understand is: what is the use case that Apple thought people would pay that much for? Are people walking around Apple HQ in these things because they are indispensable for some purpose the rest of us have yet to figure out?

[0] I was a Macbook Pro user for many, many years until they started soldering everything to the darn MB. Apple is user hostile, imo, to the point that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. I strictly buy used workstations (Think Dell 7820's, SuperMicro, etc.) that are a generation or two behind the latest and greatest. TCO is just phenomenal here AND I can upgrade them or downgrade them very easily. A chromebook with internet access is all I need to have my own private, GPU enabled, "datacenter" when I am away from the house. I love my setup and its so gdamn practical that "justification" is not a verb in my vocabulary.

Meta has huge return rates on their headsets, which is a big reason for their 30 billion loses on it so far.

At $3500, people will play with these Apple units and return them. I can't guess what their return rate will be in terms of numbers, but I know it will be shocking.

It's not just pure nonsense or "not ready for consumers" yet. For people using VR daily, it is entirely good enough for their use cases, and they have useful use cases (even if "useful" means "entertainment").

But I would agree that very very few people need it and trying to get it mainstream where "this is how everyone is consuming media" is a bit outlandish.

We are nowhere close to that being feasible for anything like as cheap as $5k, the compute requirement would be insane. VR gaming is already intensive, add the inference of 'fully immersive, hyper-realistic, real-time generated worlds'...

Given the cost challenges, if this is ever a proper mass-market consumer product, you're probably looking at at least a few years down the road.

The Verge gave weak ratings to the first AirPods and the first Apple Watch. Despite their issues (first version of watch was kinda slow, buggy on 3rd party apps), they were overall great devices. Maybe you agree with me here, maybe you don't, but the point is that the Verge is not somewhere that blindly says whatever new thing Apple creates is amazing.

I am NOT AT ALL arguing this is a good device. I am, however, arguing that talking about the Verge like that isn't warranted.

Also, to add in agreement to your overall point about it being isolating, MKBHD's latest video hits on the same point. So I agree with you, but just think the subtle swipe at the Verge was wrong. It's a great publication, even in the specific instances where I've disagreed with it. (And for AVP, I think they had the best review... which was somewhat negative.)

But if it was the reverse and iPhone was unpleasant to use and carry around for long periods of time due to it's physical properties like the vision arguably is, (at least as a "AR" device) I don't know if adding those features later would have saved it.

Also, given how important the cameras are for high-end smartphones, and how damn many cameras the Vision Pro has, it wouldn't surprise me if the Vision Pro's budget per camera is actually less than on a flagship smartphone.

They're definitely not as good as the cameras on my iPhone, either.

They don't market it as a "developer device" or a "prototype." They are selling this as a consumer product. Watch movies! Look at pics of your family! It's your new giant computer monitor! Facetime with your friends while you're cooking and packing your luggage!

The in-person demo of the Vision Pro in the Apple Store is scripted to a few actions and apps that the user is allowed to open under supervision, and nothing else.

E.g. you should not open a website of your choice in Safari.

Apple staff said "we cannot tell you what the device can or cannot do, and we are not allowed to let you try it it out here in the Apple Store; you need to first buy it and try it out at home. If you find it cannot do what you want, you can return it."

With this approach, it makes sense that all returns are accepted.

"Even for a technological tour de force, 5K is a lot of dough. If I used it, and loved it, I’d keep it. But for discomfort, actual eye pain, looking through a periscope, and the inevitable resulting gathering-dust-in-a-corner? I’m not insane. It has to go back. I’m an early adopter, but not a throw-away-5-kilodollars early adopter."

Not all problems become evident in a carefully-curated demo at a well-lit store, either.

Or, another way to put it, if it's so certainly causing a loss other customers have to bear why would the company promote the return policy and lose out on that margin from paying customers?

Second, because it's a $5000 thing that was not clearly advertised and was over-marketed to the point where people are disappointed because it's not the magic they were sold. I feel like they'd have sold 0 of them if they didn't offer easy fast refunds.

You act like this is taking money out of others' wallet- imagine how much money shoppers would lose if they had no recourse when a product didn't perform as expected. It doesn't need to be broken to be disappointing, and returns are one of the few tools consumers have to protect themselves from companies that oversell and under-deliver.