Great review! You don't seem remotely convinced it's worth the price given the current ecosystem.

@PlainBG Yeah. The thing is, my Pro 2 market (https://manifold.markets/ZviMowshowitz/will-the-apple-vision-pro-2-come-ou) says it's going to be several years to the next model, and the software and ecosystem will improve, and Apple doesn't discount, so it's not obviously wrong to take the plunge anyway?

I didn't get a full demo of the Quest (it seems that's only on weekends? Will try to get one on Saturday or Sunday) but I did briefly put it on, and the graphical quality contrast of the AR part is stark.

This is slightly off-topic but I bought a cargo ebike last spring for about the same price; one of the best purchases I ever made. Truly insane utility available.

Will I be sufficiently impressed that I buy one?

Is there a certain use case you are looking for where you will only purchase it if it fulfills that need (like having a bigger screen while traveling?)?

Or is “cool new gadget to try out ” a sufficient bar for purchasing?

@Nikos Zero Effect rules - I'm looking for any sufficiently good use case, or combination of cases, at all, but it has to be good enough to burn $4k (I'll need lenses and I presume you're supposed to bump up storage). Potentially up to $6k if we add in the cost of a Mac/iPhone, depending on the use cases.

Could be work modes, could be working while traveling or while others are asleep or distracting, could be media or gaming, or enabling activities with AR, or something else, or a combination, so long as it's worth that much to me.

Even if it's a very impressive way to consume media, it's fundamentally solitary in a way that a big TV isn't necessarily. IMO we have enough solitariness in our lives already.

@MattLashofSullivan Arguably even more social than a physical TV if you have online friends who have VR and use Bigscreen or VRChat video worlds, so "fundamnetally" is definitely wrong.

@makoyass I am highly skeptical that online friendships can be a substitute for in-person relationships.

@makoyass Certainly one can do this, but in practice would it ever happen? Why would it need the Vision Pro to do that?

@ZviMowshowitz Hmm, yes actually. With prior headsets, the resolution was low enough that if you really took a movie seriously the headset wouldn't be your first choice. They're also usually depended on an external PC, which made switching over to VR from your workstation slow, inconvenient, and failure-prone. Vision pro removes enough of the barriers that joining a social watch session would be frictionless enough that I'd expect them to actually happen.

Only, you'd need to know other people who either have a visionpro or are down for some other reason. Personally, if someone explicitly asks me to come on VR and watch something with them I'll usually say yes, and I preferred it generally for watching stuff until VRChat shut down the pirate movie world.

But when Movie and Chill got shut down I stopped initiating social watch sessions. There's still bigscreen, but one of the selling points of vrchat was that it was a genuinely amazing place to hang out and bigscreen doesn't have that at all. Resonite might, but idk, doesn't run well on my PC.

@makoyass if you think that's a great and convincing use case, I've put up 500M NO to 40%; put your mana where your mouth is :)

@MattLashofSullivan for a second I read that as 500 million and was debating if I could do the arbitrage...

@MattLashofSullivan (by honor I must respond to such a challenge) I don't know how to operationalize that question and don't think this is it.

I guess I'd expect to see a decrease in sales of TVs and movie theatre attendance among advanced headset owners in the age of robust social VR. That could take 10 years to resolve.

@makoyass oh I had just meant by betting on this question. Mana has gotten low but I'll refresh the order tomorrow