The most powerful One More Thing: The AR glasses that Apple has been waiting for 7 years are finally unveiled, priced at 25,000

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Heart of Machine Editorial Department

After seven years, we finally got to see Apple’s AR device in action.

In the past six months, ChatGPT has attracted the most attention.

But today, Apple really attracted everyone's attention.

Today, Apple’s product that has been prepared for seven years, the AR glasses Vision Pro, finally appeared: directly subverting the way humans and machines interact.

From now on, our interaction with the world can look like this:

At the WWDC conference held on June 5, local time, Apple brought the long-awaited MR headset-Apple Vision Pro.

The release of Vision Pro is Apple’s biggest hardware launch since the Apple Watch debuted in 2015, and may revolutionize the way millions of people interact with computers and the world around them.

“With Vision Pro, you are no longer limited by the display.” Apple CEO Tim Cook said, “Mac brought personal computing, iPhone brought mobile computing, and Apple Vision Pro brought us spatial computing. .》

Apple said that Apple Vision Pro is the culmination of decades of Apple’s experience designing high-performance, mobile and wearable devices, ultimately resulting in Apple’s most ambitious product ever.

Apple Vision Pro

Given that Apple has been acquiring AR-related startups for many years, and Cook himself has never concealed his interest in augmented reality and virtual reality, the release of Vision Pro is also something that everyone is looking forward to.

Like some of the previously exposed photos, the Vision Pro has a very smooth shape, resembling ski goggles.

The difference from some similar products in the past is that when you wear Vision Pro, you will not be "isolated" from the world. The new headset, called Vision Pro, features an outward-facing display that displays eye movements and facial expressions via the EyeSight system.

When a user is viewing content through Vision Pro, a halo of light flashes on the display, indicating to others that the user is immersed in an AR world. But when any person or object comes into view, Vision Pro will focus on it.

Of course, in order to match Vison Pro, Apple today also released a matching operating system, VisonOS, which Apple calls Apple’s first space operating system.

VisionOS is built on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS to deliver a powerful spatial experience.

VisionOS features a new three-dimensional interface that allows users to see and feel digital content in the physical world. By dynamically responding to natural light and casting shadows, it helps users understand scale and distance. To enable users to navigate and interact with spatial content, Apple Vision Pro introduces a new input system controlled by eyes, hands, and voice, allowing users to navigate apps by simply looking, tapping a finger, or using voice commands.

Judging from the introduction, Vision Pro has a wide range of application scenarios. In addition to entertainment and office work, it can also be used in conjunction with other Apple products, such as browsing photo and video libraries in a more immersive way. The experience revolution brought by Vision Pro is most obvious when browsing panoramic photos. It can bring you back to the specific scene when a certain photo was taken, which is something that other Apple devices have not been able to do before.

Let’s take a closer look at the configuration of this AR glasses.

Vision Pro is powered by the Apple M2 chip, in addition to the latest R1 chip responsible for video streaming, which handles input from cameras, sensors and microphones. The R1 is able to transmit a new image to the display in just 12 milliseconds, 8 times faster than the blink of an eye, meaning latency is virtually eliminated.

Vision Pro features an ultra-high resolution-based display system that uses micro-OLED technology to integrate 23 million pixels into two displays, each the size of a postage stamp, with wide color and high dynamic range . This technological breakthrough, combined with a custom catadioptric lens, results in better clarity and experience.

The high-performance eye tracking system in Apple Vision Pro also uses a high-speed camera and a ring of LEDs to project invisible light patterns onto the user's eyes for responsive, intuitive input.

According to reports, this AR glasses can be used all day long when connected to a power source, or can be connected to a separate battery and carried in a pocket. Standalone wired battery life is two hours.

At the same time, security issues are also taken into consideration. Similar to Face ID, Apple has introduced an authentication method for Vision Pro - Optic ID, an eye-scanning method. In addition, the Vision Pro app does not know what the user is looking at, nor can it see what is in the surrounding environment except when the user clicks.

Although the configuration and effects look cool, the price exceeds everyone’s expectations and is overwhelming.

Vision Pro is priced at US$3,499, approximately RMB 25,000, which is much higher than most of its products, and will be officially launched next year.

M2 Ultra

Of course, today’s launch isn’t just about AR glasses.

At the very beginning of the conference, the 15-inch MacBook Air and the new Mac Studio and Mac Pro were officially released, and the latest member of the M2 chip family, the M2 Ultra chip, was also unveiled.

M2 Ultra is built on the second-generation 5nm process and uses Apple’s groundbreaking UltraFusion technology to connect the dies of the two M2 Max chips to double the performance. The M2 Ultra is made up of 134 billion transistors, 20 billion more than the M1 Ultra. Its unified memory architecture supports up to 192GB of memory, 50% more than the M1 Ultra, and features 800GB/s of memory bandwidth—twice that of the M2 Max. The M2 Ultra has a more powerful CPU that's 20% faster than the M1 Ultra, a larger GPU that's 30% faster, and a Neural Engine that's 40% faster. With all these advancements, M2 Ultra takes Mac performance to a whole new level again.

Johny Srouji, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware Technologies, said: “M2 Ultra delivers amazing performance and capabilities for our professional users’ most demanding workflows, while maintaining Apple Silicon’s industry-leading power efficiency. With CPU, GPU The massive performance improvements of the Neural Engine and Neural Engine, combined with the massive memory bandwidth of a single SoC, make M2 Ultra the most powerful chip the world has ever created for PCs."

Based on the release of the M2 Ultra chip, Apple launched the second-generation Mac Studio and the new Mac Pro.

In its first-ever hardware update, the second-generation Mac Studio is powered by the M2 Max chip and the new M2 Ultra chip, starting at $1,999. Apple says the new Mac Studio with the M2 Ultra chip is three times faster than the previous Mac Studio with the M1 Ultra chip.

At the same time, the latest Mac Pro equipped with M2 Ultra is officially back. This is also the first major update to the Mac Pro product in four years. So far, all Mac products have migrated to Apple’s self-developed M series chips.

Design-wise, it looks identical to the previous generation Mac Pro:

The M2 Ultra Chip-Powered Mac Pro starts at $6,999 and features Apple’s M2 Ultra chip along with six open PCIe Gen 4 slots for expansion and eight built-in Thunderbolt ports. It can be configured with up to a 76-core GPU and 192GB of RAM. Apple says that with all the specs, it can be up to 3 times faster than the older Intel version.

The 15-inch MacBook Air is the first release to appear at this conference, but it has nothing to do with the M2 Ultra: it is equipped with an M2 chip, is 11.5 mm thick, and weighs only 3.3 pounds (about 1.5 kg). It uses an Apple M2 processor (8-core CPU, 10-core GPU), a 15.3-inch display, a maximum brightness of 500nits, a memory capacity of up to 24GB, and a storage capacity of 2TB.

Apple says this will be the best 15-inch laptop on the market and is 2x faster than the best-selling 15-inch Windows laptop with a Core i7 processor. The 15-inch MacBook Air starts at $1,299 and is available next week.

Finally, I want to ask, do you think Vison Pro will become a new tipping point for Apple? Can it drive the currently less popular MR industry?

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