If one of the primary use cases, from the outset, for Vision Pro is plugged in at a desk, with mouse and keyboard…
…should the platform have had native Mac/AppKit app compatibility alongside or instead of iPad?
Was basing the OS on iPadOS the wrong choice? Will this give it a permanent impairment that hinders it longterm and relegates it to toy computer status for most people, just like its tablet ancestor?
@stroughtonsmith with the customer basis they’re going for I think it makes perfect sense to go with a more iOS like interface and feel. It’s effective, we already see younger generations being more and more unfamiliar with traditional guis. That being said I do wish it would be more akin to macOS. I do love my posix standards and tinkerability.
@stroughtonsmith like every other “platform” (if you can call them that) Apple has built since the Mac, it is closed. I have no reason to believe Apple has any interest in open computing platforms going forward. It doesn’t serve their short-term financial interests. This is not the future of computing I want.
@stroughtonsmith I wonder if the current single window Mac mirroring setup is expected to be a temporary bridge solution before a much more robust multi-window, semi native mirroring is added. I could imagine a great situation where each Mac app gets its own live window. I don’t think the performance/battery life of an M2 would be great for my main Xcode machine to be the Vision Pro but if I could run my MacBook Pros apps more richly in the visionOS virtual workspace now that’s intriguing.
@_Davidsmith@stroughtonsmith I wonder if the constant ‘streaming’ keeping the radios up in that situation would be a battery killer. (Having used iPad against PC’s w/ RDP a few times and watched my battery drain fast)
@_Davidsmith I feel like everybody is forgetting about latency and networking when thinking about how the virtual Mac mode is gonna work 👀 The best case is that it connects first time, doesn't have heavy artifacting or show lag, and doesn't do too many weird things with mode-switching on the Mac's own display like rearrange all your windows or desktop icons.
@stroughtonsmith Oh sure, the proof will be in the actual using it, but the dream is real. I’d even be happy to plug in the device to my Mac if that could do it in more realtime/high quality where it is more of a super display. We’ll have to wait and see what the reality is like.
@_Davidsmith@stroughtonsmith FWIW Remote Desktop from a Mac @ 4K to a Meta Quest already works pretty great. I’m sure it’ll work even better with Vision Pro since Apple control the whole stack.
@caseyliss@stroughtonsmith@_Davidsmith I haven’t seen this anywhere since the thing was announced, but do we think you can still see the physical mac screen (and presumably others) well while wearing Vision Pro? that way the screen sharing thing could work as a huge second (or third or fourth) screen…
@stroughtonsmith hmm, I didn’t know that. still, the thing I’d like to do would be having “accessory apps” or screens around my mac, or like pull out a video and “project” it on a wall.
curious how looking at a screen through the headset would be like, if it’d be usable at all.
@stroughtonsmith@_Davidsmith There is Wifi 7 which is supposed to massively improve latency and throughput, and AR headsets are one of the referenced applications. Many of the new PC laptops at CES have it. Neither the Vision Pro nor the M3 MacBook Pros do, even though the draft spec has been out for some time. It seems like this would have been the perfect use for Apple to have been an early adopter, with a direct MacBook to Vision Pro wifi 7 connection. Maybe battery is the bigger issue.
@_Davidsmith@stroughtonsmith Regardless of the technical hurdles (sending lots of pixels back and forth), I see a bigger issue with logistics.
Do you really have to carry a Mac around to get real work done with Vision Pro? Apple's refusal to open up the sandbox to be at a parity with the Mac is killing things for developers.
Folks working with spreadsheets and word processors will be fine, but as soon as your work involves more than one process you're screwed. We have so many processes.
@stroughtonsmith IMO the base OS isn’t as important as the choices Apple makes with it. The iPad wasn’t held back by technical capabilities, except insofar as Apple has refused to allow the kind of flexibility it does allow on the Mac. I bet Vision Pro will be hampered in the same way, unless Apple decides to make different philosophical choices about what it allows the platform to become.
@stroughtonsmith I think iPad was the correct choice for this initial launch. Mac UIs are too dense for straight-up ports to Vision. The vast majority of apps for the first year or two will be non-optimized iPad apps where the dev “checks the box” to allow it to work on the headset.
If it was Mac-based, there would be nearly no apps at launch.
My hope is that Vision apps help pull iPad forward to meet the challenges.
@coperob I mean, if that works, that's ideal — but if it's anything like iPad, we'll be here in ten years time still having conversations about how it's not a real computer and can't do real computer things
@stroughtonsmith It’s always possible that they’ll switch base platforms at some point down the line if it turns out macOS/AppKit is a better fit. With Catalyst keeping visionOS 1.x apps running shouldn’t be too much trouble.
It wouldn’t be unprecedented. Apple TV was originally OS X based and HomePods got switched over to tvOS.
@stroughtonsmith The enthusiast nightmare has already come to pass. The "toy computers," smartphones and tablets, have replaced laptops and desktops as the personal computer. Productivity/office is the last bastion of the legacy computer, and the Vision Pro appears able to evolve into this space.
@stroughtonsmith What do you think native Appkit compatibility would look like? Would it include more Mac-like access to modifying things, or just being able to run appkit apps in VisionOS natively
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