I use mine daily… primarily as a monitor for my laptop.
Now you might think that’s dumb, but I can go sit outside in the backyard, park, beach, coffee shop, wherever and work on a big, totally private, crisp and clear, glare-free anywhere monitor. I can bring it to the in-laws or on trips and even use it as a monitor for my Steam Deck. Or I can lay in bed or on the sofa or on a lawn chair and use the Steam Link app to play games from my PC.
Taken purely as a private, portable, omni-monitor, it’s absolutely worth the price for me.
As an AR/MR/XR device, it has some MAJOR software problems. Honestly, it makes sense they’d pause hardware development… it’ll be a couple years before there’s anything worth upgrading and they have a long way to go on UX, gestures, inputs, and even basic real-time object recognition and tracking. I bought mine knowing it was a Development Kit and planning to use it to get ahead on AR development experience, but I hit major roadblocks so frequently I’ve just about given up on every interesting use-case I went into this with.
VisionOS 2 is a baby step forward, but Apple has a long, long way to go before it makes sense for regular people. Heck, they aren’t even including all the cool new AI features in VisionOS 2, and it’s the one device that could benefit from that stuff the most.
So, yeah… it can still be worth it to certain people with specific use-cases, but I think it’ll be a solid 5 years before the software and hardware can reach a “normal consumer” level of quality and value.
This whole “for-profit owned by a non-profit” paradigm needs to globally crushed right the fuck now. It should never have been allowed to happen and should not be tolerated.
I blocked Reddit via PiHole and configured Kagi to never show me Reddit results. When I left that cesspit, I spent a week running scripts to ensure all of my nearly 20 years worth of content was overwritten. I’m here because Reddit can DIAF.
This. I remember having a text file of emoticons back in the day because I couldn't remember what they were supposed to mean (and often didn't mean what I thought). :-/
I do like their laptops, but for literally everything else: the fact that I basically don’t own my own hardware.
I can’t install or distribute my own software without Apple’s arbitrary approval. When Apple decides it’s done supporting the products, I can’t even install a different OS like Linux because the hardware is completely locked down… they become paper-weights.
Same. We got a super limited deal well over a decade ago that they ran for a single Christmas. While our bill has gone up ever so slightly in that time, the extra cost is all due to misc “fees” rather than the base rate, according to the bills.
I use mine daily… primarily as a monitor for my laptop.
Now you might think that’s dumb, but I can go sit outside in the backyard, park, beach, coffee shop, wherever and work on a big, totally private, crisp and clear, glare-free anywhere monitor. I can bring it to the in-laws or on trips and even use it as a monitor for my Steam Deck. Or I can lay in bed or on the sofa or on a lawn chair and use the Steam Link app to play games from my PC.
Taken purely as a private, portable, omni-monitor, it’s absolutely worth the price for me.
As an AR/MR/XR device, it has some MAJOR software problems. Honestly, it makes sense they’d pause hardware development… it’ll be a couple years before there’s anything worth upgrading and they have a long way to go on UX, gestures, inputs, and even basic real-time object recognition and tracking. I bought mine knowing it was a Development Kit and planning to use it to get ahead on AR development experience, but I hit major roadblocks so frequently I’ve just about given up on every interesting use-case I went into this with.
VisionOS 2 is a baby step forward, but Apple has a long, long way to go before it makes sense for regular people. Heck, they aren’t even including all the cool new AI features in VisionOS 2, and it’s the one device that could benefit from that stuff the most.
So, yeah… it can still be worth it to certain people with specific use-cases, but I think it’ll be a solid 5 years before the software and hardware can reach a “normal consumer” level of quality and value.