alt Hacker NewsI'm also curious. I bought the cheap alternative: XReal One Pro and… it is kind of as expected. It is a cheap alternative. Don't expect to use it for coding for several hours a day, in spite of what people keep saying. The optics are not up to it: there are imperfections in the lenses resulting in blurry areas of the screen, very visible as you move your head around.
They are great for watching video, make for a fantastic travel accessory, and one can use them for coding in a pinch, but I honestly couldn't find a good reason to, when I have a perfectly good MacBook Pro screen right in front of me.
I would definitely pay more for glasses that would allow me to have a better virtual computer display. Perhaps not $3500, but $2000? The main reason why I didn't even consider Apple Vision Pro is because of its humongous size, weight and complexity — I don't want another computer with another (locked down) OS requiring updates and maintenance. I want things that do not require anything of me. This is why XReal glasses are so nice: they are just a display. No battery, no OS, no maintenance.
EDIT: Just to clarify, I am very happy with the Xreal One Pro purchase. They provide excellent value. They are light, they are small, I can toss them in a bag to have a private display whenever I need. They are fantastic for travel and overall provide a great value. I would highly recommend them. Just don't expect them to be a better screen than your laptop screen for coding.
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That's a very interesting comparison thanks. Hard to believe one is 87g and the other is ~800g and there's not much in-between!
I've been using the XReal One Pros for coding work for a few months now, and have had a great experience.
For me, the ergonomic benefits are the selling point, not the display quality. Not having to sit hunched over a laptop screen for several hours means I can work almost anywhere. Sometimes I'll use it in a cafe. Other times I just lie down in bed. I also make use of speech to text, so I just need to be able to press a hotkey and reach the track pad.
On the topic of display quality, it's important to use Better display to upscale the output to the XReals to high DPI - that gives noticeably better quality when it's downscaled to the (lower) native resolution of the XReals.
Fellow XReal One Pro owner here. I agree 100%. The One Pros do make for a fantastic travel accessory but when it comes to coding (or reading text in general) for longer periods of time, my eyes usually start hurting after 2-3 hours because text is not 100% sharp and there's a slight blurriness / Moiré effect. (Which is a real bummer because, posture-wise, wearing the glasses puts a lot less strain on my neck than looking at a screen.)
That being said, there have been quite a few reports on Reddit lately from people that do use the glasses for coding all day every day. At the same time, my impression is that there have been fewer complaints about text blurriness than right after the One Pro got released. So I've started suspecting that Xreal might have fixed something about the hardware in recent batches. This is all very anecdotal, though. Maybe the hardware is the same and it's just my eyes.
Either way, I'm excited about future models with higher resolution. As many other people here in the thread said: This is definitely the future.