Yesterday was the annual Apple “World Wide Developer Conference” – which is where Apple shows off all of their new and updated stuff.
There was all of the usual stuff; iterations on current machines – like the 15″ M2 MacBook Air, which is pretty nice for anyone needing a basic, well-built, laptop.
There was also the quick mention of the new Mac Pro… It’s basically the old Mac pro case with the CPU and logic board out of a Mac Studio, and several PCIE slots for cards. It starts at like seven grand though, which is a lot for a $4000 Mac Studio in a fancy box.
The big news though, and the thing that they devoted half of the show to, was the Vision Pro HMD.
I’ve purposely avoided “VR” for the most part since the turn of the century. Prior to 2000 I spent quite a bit of time, money, and development effort on VR – even having a fancifully airbrushed $6000 Liquid Image MRG2 ‘back in the day’.
But the whole scene hasn’t really moved forward, other than getting smaller, faster, and higher-rez, since then.
The hardware is nice and all, but the use-cases were still lacking. VR has pretty much been a solution perpetually looking for a problem.
I think the Vision Pro might actually have the right mix of hardware and use-case though, and when they finally make them available next year I’ll probably take the $3500 plunge and buy one – it’ll be cheap by comparison to the last HMD I owned.
Listening to "Not Alone" by Kalax