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vFunctyesterday at 2:19 PM5 repliesview on HN

It doesn't need a battery at all. Just have it connect directly to a Mac to use as a virtual Mac display. It's what I use my Vision Pro for as its primary use case, to have an ultra-wide monitor in front of me without taking up any physical space. I use it for hours every day as my primary programming platform.

I really have no other use case, and don't need the VR/AR features. The virtual ultra-wide display of the latest VisonOS updates, which has the area of 2 4k monitors, is just amazing for coding. It's an incredible user experience and worth every penny for the Vision Pro for that alone.

Throwing away some of the AR/VR features and using it as a virtual display only would make it lighter and smaller. I could use something that doesn't block me from taking a drink while I code, for example. I couldn't care less about video games as well.


Replies

asadotzleryesterday at 7:18 PM

Apple (and Meta) didn't want a great PC accessory, they wanted new platforms they could own and monetize. They spent 10 years, both of them, integrating the whole PC inside the goggles because the display only approach had little value to them. Apple may try a PCVR headset, probably similar to the Beyond 2 but with glass and aluminum instead of plastic, as "big Mac display" is the only value any decent number of Vision Pro users get from their devices and Apple's got plenty of unused component supply and supply chain lined up already, but goggles are likely a dead form factor.

andybakyesterday at 2:36 PM

There's nothing really to "throw away" that would make it slighter and smaller whilst still keeping your desired feature set.

The reality is that you're using the VR/AR features in one specific way - not that you're not using VR/AR

It's possible a slightly weaker CPU or GPU could be used but I don't think so and in any case the effects of that would be on cost not on weight. And I don't think the difference would be significant.

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oofManBangyesterday at 5:32 PM

Man, I don't even bother using the ultra-wide monitor on my desk. The screen on my laptop can already display orders of magnitude far more information than I can easily process at one time. Even with contexts where I'm comfortable managing windows/buffers manually (e.g. emacs) there's simply too much space to easily manage. What do you do with all that space? Is it just pulling up every possible resources at once so you don't need to bother doing anything more than moving your eyes to switch contexts? How often are you switching contexts?

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numpad0yesterday at 3:27 PM

Congratulations, you just reinvented a decade old discontinued Microsoft products, Windows MR and HoloLens, which ended up being subsidization program for SteamVR and a pure tech demo.

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nemomarxyesterday at 3:19 PM

I think those exist - look at Xreal glasses and etc? much lighter