Comment by dangus

These analogies don’t compare well. Your examples don’t demonstrate an extreme tradeoff like you get with the Vision Pro.

Why do we have video calls? Because a webcam costs $1-5 to put into a laptop and bandwidth is close enough to free.

Why do we have 4K monitors? Because they only cost a small amount more than 1080p monitors and make the image sharper with not a whole lot of downsides (you can even bump them down to 1080p if you have a difficult time driving the resolution). I paid $400 for my 4K 150Hz gaming monitor so going with 1080p high refresh rate VRR would have only saved me $200 or so.

Serviceability for purpose is a spectrum and the Vision Pro is at the wrong end of it.

For more than the price of three 4K OLED 144Hz monitors, you get to don a heavy headset that messes up your hair, makes you sweaty, screws up your makeup, and you get less resolution and workspace than the monitors. Your battery lasts an hour so it’s inferior to a laptop with an external portable monitor or two. It’s actually harder to fit into a backpack than a laptop plus portable monitors since it’s not flat.

Then you have to use some complicated proprietary technology [1] to make a 3D avatar of yourself to overcome the fact that you now have a giant headset on your head and look like an idiot if you were to go on camera.

You can’t do a bunch of PC stuff on it because it’s basically running iPadOS.

This is not the same as “why are we bothering with 4K?”

[1] What will you do if Apple starts charging money for this feature?