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wvenableyesterday at 7:44 PM2 repliesview on HN

Since it's tethered anyway for the battery, I think Apple made a mistake just not building it as a (smart) monitor tethered to a separate PC.

Imagine if the vision pro could just be plugged into a small compute module with a battery or just plugged directly into a Macbook. It would be lighter, cheaper, and more flexible. I think a lot more people would have been interested in it.


Replies

Cassellyesterday at 8:06 PM

Yes, make the battery 2x bigger and include the compute in that.

It would be so cool to be able to plug in arbitrary input devices too, like a dvd player, but its understandable that others don’t feel this way, and it would totally not be an apple product if it did this.

One of their main imposed constraints was clearly to make the battery pocketable, which sadly precludes a lot of things which would have made it a better product, in favour of wider acceptability.

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asadotzleryesterday at 9:11 PM

A tethered virtual monitor wouldn't be a PC, it'd be a PC peripheral. Cook wanted a PC platform and app store he could call his own, so we got this 1.5 pound strap-on facial PC instead of a really nice virtual display.

Also, it doesn't make the best virtual monitor anyway, as the display fidelity is about half-Retina, so all the pixels really stick out compared to every other display Apple's shipped in recent memory. A 1998 Powerbook has crisper text.