My wife still makes fun of me when I'm working at home with Vision Pro - I wouldn't wear it out in public. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41836437
Would you feel comfortable wearing one and limiting your awareness of your surroundings on a public bus? In a coffee shop? Sitting outside a coffee shop? In a park? In a pub?
And also your answers may be yes if you are male, but I can imagine in the current world we live in a lot of women would feel potentially at risk if they were wearing these in public.
If I’m taking a commuter train every day , my view is not something great. Most of the time it’s rundown houses, tunnels or fences. This has been my experience in the UK, US and Canada.
If I’m taking a more long distance train, you assume I’m sat on the side with a view. Ever taken a mountain train? One side just gets rocks wizzing by.
You also assume they’re travelling in weather and a time of day that affords them a good view. Traveling at night? Traveling in misty weather?
And all that aside, you assume they’d prefer to look at the same things you do.
When I take trains in the USA, I usually look out for a few seconds every couple of minutes, because it's mostly the same -- lower-middle class housing or warehouses if we're in a city, or ugly terrain outside of a city.
I tested the device in an Apple Store and was blown away by the experience. Such an amazing tool to explore, enjoy and relax.
The work part though? I had the same feeling as with the iPad early on. I need a keyboard and a mouse to be productive.
There are some views you never get tired of looking at, especially as seasons, weather, clouds and time of the day makes it an ever changing postcard.
All in all in most of europe the trains usually offer nice views and I often find myself daydreaming about climbing that dirt trail on the left with my bike, riding my motorbike on that twisty road on the right side a few minutes later and what kind of life was it living 500 years ago in the old castle I can see here.
I wonder how soon will Maya or CATIA offer good enough integration. Maybe they already offer it at the high end.
There was even a Youtuber that got annoyed of the black screen on the Macbook when doing this that he removed the screen from a Macbook altogether[0].
Both my iPad Pro and my Vision Pro have a keyboard and trackpad:
- The iPad Pro of course uses the excellent Magic Keyboard.
- The Vision Pro uses an Apple keyboard w/o numpad side by side with the Magic Trackpad, in a custom tray to hold both. (Make sure that your carryon's front pocket can hold the full tray.)
For sure if I thought I could only do work on a MacBook not an iPad Pro (what most people seem to think, insisting iPad is a consumption device), then I definitely couldn't work on a Vision Pro.
But once you've figured out how to code (e.g. VSCode using blink code, or Koder, Working Copy, Textastic, etc.), do graphic design (e.g. Affinity suite), or run Office on an iPad (Teams, Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel), the Vision Pro does those too but with "all the app windows at once" (ofc, iPad Pro 13" makes excellent use of Stage Manager for window groups).
All that said, I haven't felt a burden to pull AVP out on the plane.
iPad Pro 13" HDR with AirPods Pro USB-C using Spatial Audio that anchors to your iPad screen seem more than enough. Especially since you can share audio with a seat mate who also has AirPods, and both watch the same movie together.
Not often talked about: for doing real work, do consider a fresh glasses prescription and the Zeiss add-ins. To keep windows rectangular instead of trapezoid, insist you're under 40 regardless of your age, otherwise Zeiss do a stealth "progressive" that warps window sizes.
Why must we always escape?
These kinds of broad comparisons are utterly useless. Continents are much too large for that kind of thing to be anything resembling accurate.
I want to replace my macbook, I don't want to replace my ipad. I can't work properly on my ipad unless i'm using it as a dumb terminal. And at the price point of a macbook that's what it should be replacing.
People may point out that i can use it to mirror my macbook screen.. but now i'm paying 2x to replace a screen. I think this is a primary misplay in he vision pro strategy.
Give me a windowing system that lets me place windows, not in a little box that is essentially a virtual monitor, but wherever i want in my immediate vicinity. Let me put my goland/ide window front and center, let me put a terminal to the left, and my music player above.. whatever.
I'd take a vision pro with much of the compute hardware stripped out but that I can tether to a macbook via usbc/thunderbolt as well.. just not an ipad strapped to my face.
Again, you are fortunate to have a view that you enjoy. That doesn’t extend to others, unless you believe that there are no other situations on the planet other than your own.
You might find that real life is boring, I find that most tv shows and movies are super predictable, following the very similar scenaristic mechanics and aren't more entertaining. Obviously some are also very nice, but these are the ones you would like to watch comfortably on your sofa or in a theater, not in a train or plane anyway.
I went from modern metropolis of skyscrapers and tower cranes to run down rusty industrial facilities that wouldn't look out of place in a STALKER game to sod roofed villages that look as they might have when Napoleon was making an ill fated expedition. Then of course a vast expanse of nothing at all.
https://support.apple.com/guide/airpods/control-spatial-audi...
Apple Music marks Dolby Atmos and Spatial Audio separately. They are not the same experience for the listener. They do work well together.
Since we only have two ears, a degree of our surround cue comes from where the sounds are when we move our heads.
Apple's "motion tracking in space" spatial audio implementation taps into that to an uncanny degree, because your own motion is not simulated. Real motion in real space results in a real sound difference from the sound model that, you're right, is simulating how that motion should sound relative to the origin.
As a listener, you start to forget the sound isn't centered out there on the anchor point, and then you start thinking the surround sounds are really surrounding you...
Here are two different explainers:
- https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/05/18/apples-spatial-au...
- https://www.gearpatrol.com/tech/apple-spatial-audio-vs-dolby...
Note that I disagree with the second explainer's final section that surround sound speakers like Sonos are the same "spatial audio" as the motion tracking sound modeling Apple is doing.
I agree with the first explainer that Apple's Spatial Audio is a system that takes advantage of the gyroscopes and sensors in the listening device and headphones to, yes, “simulate” a 3D listening space that stays static as you move your head.
Probably the point is that there are many mindstates to be in and maybe we should just let folks do their thing.
I've taken the train across the Canadian prairies, and my god is that dull, but I just chatted with people, did a bit on my laptop, looked out the window since there always is one, read, used my Gameboy. If I wanted to completely immerse myself in anything but the train experience, I'd just fly, it's cheaper anyway
But you can still see the world and communicate with others. Why is that materially different than being engrossed in a handheld video game with headphones in?
Also all your examples of other stuff you do to occupy the time, they are all temporary. Why do you think the Vision Pro user would use it the whole ride?
I think this is down to the Boolean nature of “is this normalized or not”
Because it’s not normalized, people don’t afford it the same benefit of the doubt of other things that they have normalized in their life.
The SimulaVR guys (who are working on a competitor to the Vision Pro) had the exact same opinion (https://simulavr.com/blog/chassis-adjustments-and-apv-reacti...):
> From our perspective, we still think the main problem with the AVP is that it only supports native iPad apps (at least for 2D apps) [...] The AVP does allow you to tether to another Mac, but this relegates its usability to that of a "laptop aid" rather than a "laptop replacement". [...] We want to do this for the engineers and knowledge workers who need the extra capabilities in VR, and for the people who want to completely replace their laptop, rather than their tablets!
Lord forgive you have a new unexpected experience while traveling or expose yourself to the underclasses or subject yourself to the shtty social environment you helped create...
I'd only ever consider bringing something that is nearly invisible to both myself and others in terms of weight and required infrastructure, wouldn't bring anything with me for the purpose of occupying my attention that I can't forget I have, or that would consume more than a negligible amount of space/weight; I'll bring a book, but not a tome
Incidentally, Canadian cross-country trains don't even have outlets at the seat as far as I know; they're quite old sadly.
That said, I buy almost no superfluous electronics for raw consumption, and even an iPad Pro would be wildly out of scope, as nice as they seem to be, since although they do have other utility, I can't picture myself doing more than reading or watching videos. On-the-go entertainment is something I try to keep at arms length so I can spend that time at peace.
Fwiw, I do also hope it doesn't become normalized, not to squash others' potential for fun, but because our existing devices already enable people to protect themselves from social interaction on a large scale, which strikes me as damaging.