Congratulations to @laurasouth_, Amy Pavel, Caglar Yildrim, and @michelle_borkin
for earning an Honorable Mention from @chi for "Barriers to Photosensitive Accessibility in Virtual Reality" 🎉
#Apple#VisionPro#AR#VR#BigTech: "The concept of the Vision Pro might have excited some developers in an Apple lab in Cupertino, but most people are never going to use computers in the way those engineers and their managers imagined. Before the 14-day return window closed, there were plenty of reports of people heading back to the Apple store or popping their headsets back in the post to get their money back. They bought into the hype, they tried the new thing, and they ultimately realized it wasn’t worth it. That’s now being reflected in the sales numbers.
Apple initially had a sales target of 3 million Vision Pro units in its first year, but slowly revised that number down to 900,000. When the product was released, estimates pegged initial sales at around 200,000 units, though it’s not clear how many of those were returned. Even people who kept their devices have recently been sharing on social media that they rarely use them anymore. It was no surprise on Tuesday when Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported Apple had slashed Vision Pro production even before its international launch, expecting to sell as little as 400,000 units this year. Kuo also suggested a cheaper version had been pushed beyond 2025, if the company makes one at all.
For some companies, selling 400,000 units would be a major achievement. But for a company like Apple that sells well over 200 million iPhones every year, along with tens of millions of Macs and iPads, it’s nowhere near the success they need it to be to justify the resources that went into it. And it’s looking ever more likely it will never get there."
I haven’t had enough energy this week to distribute my time among the various fitness games I have installed, so I’ve just been allowing myself to gravitate to what I enjoy most. Every day, that’s been Supernatural; I’m glad I have a bunch, but if I had to pick just one, it’d be the clear winner.
Apple’s Vision Pro is a bad product with an even worse vision for the future of computation.
New sales numbers prove it’s a failure, but more than that it shows the idea of tech’s inevitability is a myth. We have the collective power to stop tech that doesn’t serve us.
I completely agree with David here — viewing panoramic photos in the Vision Pro is fantastic. I’m so glad that over the past years I’ve taken a lot of them without any good reason at the time. The Vision Pro was the reason.
Meta lost $3.85 billion on the metaverse in the first quarter of 2024 alone. You know, that thing we all laughed about a couple years ago and next to no one actually uses.
It’s burned $45 billion on the metaverse since the end of 2020.
Apple is cutting Vision Pro production as it fails to meet sales targets.
Analysts expected it to sell 700-800k units in 2024, but it could now be as low as 400k. A lower cost model could now be pushed beyond 2025, if it ever arrives.
Apple was never going to "save" VR.
We've spent the last decade giving Apple an unlimited runway of speculation and hype to bring a face computer to market.
Instead of doing a better job earnestly and fairly covering the tech along the way, properly educating consumers on what these things can do, now even Vision Pro can't live up to the media's imagined narrative of Apple.
Apple did nothing to earn a DECADE of media support for XR products, but think of all the projects that were criticized for not living up to some kind of imaginary Sci-Fi standard.
"Wait for gen 2 or gen 3 instead!"
Techies expect everyone else to lift off like a helicopter, but Apple gets UNLIMITED runway...
It's kind of upsetting that Apple called their #VR headset, oh wait excuse me, their "spatial computer" (🙄) the Vision Pro when Apple Eyephone was, like, RIGHT THERE.
Coucou, je profite de tout juste avoir mis mon casque VR en vente pour vous le proposer :neocat_heart:
Je suis prêt à vous faire une ristourne de -25% si vous venez de Fedi :fediverse:
PLOT TWIST !
Your vision blurs and white text appears in front of your eyes saying Game Over.
You remove the goggles, realizing you were still in a demo from the first time you tried the Oculus Rift back in 2014. Seeing a pixelated game followed by a realistic dystopian world when you removed the in-game headset was just a marketing gimmick in the demo and the passage of time was just an illusion.
So, I was diagnosing a weird webcam issue for days and days. I've been using a Oculus Rift Sensor for head tracking for a while now and it suddenly stopped working. It's basically just a USB webcam. I tried several different kernel versions and even some from last year with no luck. I dug into the code of the uvcvideo driver, I tried setting quirks, nothing helped. I was obsessed with this issue.
Long story short: I disconnected my computer's front panel and everything worked.
The front panel must be faulty which must've tripped the USB controller in such a particular way that it kept working fine but was unable to recognise newly plugged devices and sent garbage to the kernel.
What the actual heck. USB is so weird. Do you have any USB stories like this?