I'm disappointed even though it's entirely predictable that VisionOS is built on the iOS/iPadOS foundation rather than OSX. I guess we'll see how "walled in" it is but it's hard to see any reason Apple isn't going to be just as constraining and controlling about what happens on this OS as they are on iOS, if not more so. Which ultimately means I'll be very reluctant to ever adopt it in any meaningful way as my primary computing device.
It's a bit odd if you think about it: a desktop OS effectively creates a virtual 3d space for windows to live (move them in X and Y, or change their depth relative to each other), and the iPad or iPhone treats the surface as just a simple 2d plane with no depth or really even XY axes (you could sort of argue that the app switcher is an X axis).
So they're effectively recreating a lot of the elements of the macOS w/r/t window positioning, resizing, and depth, but building all on top of the iPadOS paradigm. If you consider the input methods are probably closer to a touch interface than a MKB interface then it kinda makes sense.
Personally I have zero interest whatsoever in living inside Apple's "only what we allow you to do" world, and the fact that they seem to be expanding it to what seems like a very powerful, desktop replacement computing device is kinda gross to me. But from an interface standpoint I think it's really interesting and actually makes some sense.
Definitely pros and cons. I remember reading that because of the tight integration with iOS this allowed them to achieve best in class latency for iPad + pencil that couldn't be achieved on any other platform. Having followed Oculus / Quest development that low latency is not optional in this context and every millisecond counts so I can see why they would go this route.
On the other hand, the closed ecosystem is definitely cause for concern. Fingers crossed that WebXR support comes out from behind a feature flag to allow for progressive (spatial) web apps.
A 2018 Dell XPS that has a Wacom digitiser and OneNote gives me lower latency and better inking experience than an iPad and pencil 2. I used them side by side for long-form writing for a while and the iPad was left in the dust.
You might be right it's more marketing than substance, but FWIW this is the article I was thinking of praising low latency of iPad + stylus: https://danluu.com/term-latency/
Yeh this was my main thought. However good the hardware is doesn't matter if the software can't fully utilise it. The idea of virtual displays (the most obvious immediate benefit of Vision imo) for MacOS seems like a huge benefit, but for iPadOS its downgraded to pretty cool. I've never felt any particular need to add multiple displays to my iPad, and whilst a big display would be nice, I wouldn't describe it as groundbreaking (especially as others such as XReal are already doing this in a much smaller form factor).
This might have made sense with the iPad but I can't see how anyone is going to write software that 'fully utilizes' the system in a way that Apple doesn't support without billions of dollars of investment.
Also it’s locked to Siri which is dogshit and falling further behind by the second. Apples speech to text is atrocious, the OpenAI tools blow it out of the water, as does Google’s.
No matter how fancy the visuals, it’s hard to have a pseudo-hands free voice interface that doesn’t uh, work?
I would not be so sure, mainly because of ecosystem lock. I sincerely doubt a double-digit percentage of Apple employees have touched and android phone or used OpenAI APIs. Big problem with ecosystems is you don’t know what you’re missing.
> I sincerely doubt a double-digit percentage of Apple employees have touched and android phone or used OpenAI APIs
I strongly doubt you're right. Apple is full of geeks; just because they tend to be tight-lipped doesn't mean they aren't paying attention to all the same stuff we are.
Double digit? I live walking distance to Apple HQ and there’s not exactly a lot of people in the shops and cafes with Android phones and you practically never see someone pulling out Google pay at a register.
Whereas I’d wager more than half of Google employees use iPhone, and a lot of Google staff work exclusively on iOS and Mac apps. Apple software runs in their hardware, period. It makes them too insular and unable to see their shortcomings.
The regression in autocorrect is also nuts. It seems to aggressively modify grammar to the point of regularly changing the meaning of what I’m writing. It’s like a CS undergrad project where they went too hard on Markov chains.
I also have a fairly expansive vocabulary and talk about esoteric technical matters on my phone frequently. As far as I can tell Siri was trained on 8th-grade level text and constantly dumbs down my text and distorts the meaning.
Ugh, so true. I'm both a software developer and an avid reader of literature & philosophy, so my day to day word stream is both extremely varied, and frequently allusive with cryptic phrases and idioms. Not to mention the fact I do actually care about correct punctuation. Autocorrect and voice typing have long since given up on me.
The current voice transcription engine at OpenAI is using Whisper-1[0] which is open source and runnable locally, if you wanted to keep it all on-device. I run it locally for various things and it works pretty damn well.
I also wonder if it made more sense from a security perspective. In the early iOS days, one of the big problems for desktop apps was unrestricted access to your data. IOS improved this with application sandboxing by default, and it eventually made its way into OS X.
But we all know the difference between implementing something brand new versus retrofitting something into an existing system. So my guess is iOS had more secure defaults for a system like vision.
Ultimately its more about the openness of the OS. If they built on iPadOS but they made a reasonable experience for freely sideloading apps, I'd be OK with it. Or even if they support WebXR really well, I might (just) find a way to be OK with that. But if they lock this down and position themselves as rentseekers to take a cut from every piece of software that runs there regardless of how much they contributed to it - I'm out.
well i remember seeing you can bring your macbook or other devices into the space as a virtual window/screen/monitor (whatever they're calling it) so I already thought I can run vscode and any other apps at first at version 1 release. but I know what you mean.
From a developer POV it's about the difference with the other platforms. If Apple provides a platform that bring the dev 50% more profit than the status quo, sure taking a cut of that extra profit could make sense.
If that same dev would have made the same profits on other competing platforms, Apple is just fragmenting the market and it's take should be limited to basically management fees.
I hope this new platform brings newer applications and innovations, but also expect competition to adjust, making it a situation where Apple is just one of the many platforms.
It's more complex than that...the whole limitation on promoting your existing membership services, the rules enforced on pricing and passing the 30% to the users etc. makes it a much muddier picture.
iOS sure brings some value to the table. How much actually ? who knows...
For comparison Youtube is also a platform regularily criticized by its participating creators, but you're not seeing high profile lawsuits or the EU slapping them fines at every turn.
I'm not sure where you're taking your figure of twice as much, but I assume it's the AppStore vs Google Play break down ?
That number is the total revenue for the whole store (there's a lot to say about it, since Google is also not the only Store for android, in particular in China and Korea), and it matters very few for any individual developper.
It's not because the total amount of in-App purchase for all games is twice as much on iOS that my new ssh shell app will make twice as much on iOS than on another Store, for instance.
Most US developers are not producing versions for Chinese app stores. That’s a red herring.
Of course individual products have their own idiosyncrasies, but is it in fact the case that on average, an app on iOS will make more than the same app on Android.
Part of (my) definition of a platform is that when you buy it you are fully paying for the cost and contribution the platform provider made when you buy it. If there's a residual financial (or other) obligation after that then you don't have a platform, you have a partnership. I know there's other definitions of platform but that's the one that's important to me.
I don't see why that should be. Obviously you have a right to do whatever deals you like and not buy this product, but it seems to me that one reason Apple is investing so much in this is because they expect to recoup a huge reward over time, not just from device sales.
I guess you can always buy an android based headset that allows sideloading but presumably it won't have the same level of investment.
Right - and the Quest Pro isn’t well compared to what Apple is marketing here. I couldn’t accept a job working with a VR company because I couldn’t get past the nausea the Quest Pro induces in me.
I think the point is that Meta’s investment is weak compared to Apple’s full court press. It really is laughable.
> I couldn’t accept a job working with a VR company because I couldn’t get past the nausea the Quest Pro induces
Ouch. I'm sorry to hear that, I feel sorry for folks like you that are sensitive to nausea. There's so much potential in this tech but I can see a whole new class of disadvantaged people coming who aren't able to fully utilise it.
Yeah it kind of sucks because it seems like won't be able to use something like Hammerspoon to control windows and other UI elements the same way you can on Mac.
> I'm disappointed even though it's entirely predictable that VisionOS is built on the iOS/iPadOS foundation rather than OSX.
They’re the same foundation, iOS is a fork of OS X and was originally announced as such. I’d be shocked if there isn’t a well maintained internal build of iOS which keeps parity with macOS windowing etc.
The difference in restrictions between the platforms is entirely arbitrary. If this device appeals to Mac users or would-be Mac users, I’d be shocked if it doesn’t at least eventually allow a Mac-like environment.
It certainly isn't arbitrary, macOS has swap and doesn't kill apps and iOS doesn't have swap and does kill apps. This makes everything very different, and one makes it easier to do real-time rendering than the other.
I guess I should clarify. It’s arbitrary in that the restrictions are policy-based, not limitations of the underlying technology. There’s no technical reason iOS couldn’t have swap, it’s not available because trade off decisions were made to enable use cases on much more limited devices.
It's different-ish. iPadOS is still a more limited/controlled OS and the swap policy is also more limited. You can see it in the open source kernel where it's called "app swap", so it doesn't swap out the OS, but on macOS it can.
"Limited" makes it, well, limited, but it has performance advantages: fewer unexpected page faults mean audio/video processes won't unexpectedly drop a frame as often, and there's fewer disk writes which is good for the lifespan of the hardware it runs on.
Btw iOS actually has a very limited swap policy called "freezer" that only applies to suspended background apps, and only when it's in the performance budget.
The xnu source code on github. The rest of it… well you just did read about it. There's an older book called Mac OS X Internals that covers some of it.
I'm disappointed even though it's entirely predictable that VisionOS is built on the iOS/iPadOS foundation rather than OSX. I guess we'll see how "walled in" it is but it's hard to see any reason Apple isn't going to be just as constraining and controlling about what happens on this OS as they are on iOS, if not more so. Which ultimately means I'll be very reluctant to ever adopt it in any meaningful way as my primary computing device.