After having the Apple Studio Display for several months now, I feel about the same as I did when I got it. It's great, but the camera makes me look so bad that it's nearly useless. I'd buy it again, but I still can't believe what an own goal the camera was.
@collin Hot take: Displays for desktop computers shouldn’t even have built-in cameras.
The industry should standardize on an integrated mount with I/O (USB-C?), making it so that there’s an easy way for people to add — or not add — a camera if they wish, and swap them out as newer/better cameras come out.
@collin I kinda-sorta feel the same about built-in speakers, but those seem to result in fewer design compromises than webcams so I don’t feel as strongly about it.
@jeff Speakers and built in mics are useful sometimes and it seems like they don't have trouble making to satisfactory level. Also, this might be strange, but if I don't use the speakers, I don't see them. That stupid little useless camera dot is always staring at me and reminding me how shitty it is.
@collin The problem isn’t so much the camera itself for me but the fact that it invariably results in the display having a “forehead” bezel that wouldn’t need to be there otherwise.
A tradeoff I could live with if the camera were really good, maybe, but not when it isn’t…
@collin@jeff My display is the LG 5K one. The camera is ok, I don’t care much about the quality. As long as other people can see me, it’s fine. On the other hand I wish it didn’t have speakers. They sound like a tuna can, I never ever use them (the MBP sounds way better than the display and I use headphones all the time anyway), and they make the display more expensive, complex, heavy, and it’s one more thing to break down eventually.
@jeff I like that. I would have found it much less offensive for this display to have no camera. No camera on my $2000 monitor is fine, a terrible camera is infuriating. I can't explain how that makes sense.
@collin@jonhendry I don’t see them adding an actual hot shoe, as it’s kind of ugly, but I could see them adding something along those lines provided that they had a really cool external camera add-on they could sell for it.
@vampirdaddy@collin This is pretty much what I was thinking of, although I could see Apple doing something more proprietary and involving magnets somehow.
@collin I wanted so badly for there to be a 32" 6K version of the Studio display too. I'm already rocking 2 LG UltraFine 5K displays and as ugly as they are it just doesn't make sense to replace those.
I am eyeing a Vision Pro just for the opportunity to have a big 4K monitor even when I'm on the couch or my hammock chair.
@harpaa01 I will probably get one, although I am skeptical how convincing the monitor thing will be based on the number of pixels available in the Vision Pro. Maybe there's some foveated rendering trick I don't understand that makes it okay.
@collin I'm bummed that it's limited to 4K resolution. Why can't I have the equivalent of a massive curved 80" display that takes up a massive chunk of my field of view? (i'm guessing the real answer is "too many pixels to push over wifi" but my response to that is "let me connect via a Thunderbolt cable and we don't have to worry about it”).
But, if the OS is adequate, then a bunch of the apps that would otherwise be on my Mac can just be floating alongside my window that contains my whole Mac
@harpaa01 That's true. It would help if the iPad versions (which I think is what Vision Pro apps kind of are?) tended to be as powerful as their Mac counterparts, but there's definitely some that will be great that way. Ivory is a good example of one I'd probably do that with.
@collin That touches on one reason I feel like this is such a long shot for Apple getting a whole new OS off the ground as a productive general compute OS: Apple's been developing iPadOS for a decade and a half now and it still has these massive gaps in functionality.
I feel like OS X did a great job of rapidly gaining feature parity with classic Mac OS. If VisionOS does the same it could be great but I worry.
@harpaa01 I agree 100%. I think it's the first computing paradigm they've introduced which could potentially fill the role macOS does for pro use, but I think to get there requires letting go of some control. I'd like the Vision Pro to be a little more like a Mac than the iPad is.
@collin My rule of thumb is going to be that if it doesn't support Alfred or Terminal, then it's not something I seriously will consider as a compute platform.
Also if Files.app or something similar to it is the way to interact with your files on the headset, that would give me a serious lack of hope unless Apple manages to knock it out of the park with improving it.
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