Up to 30% of Apple Vision Pro Returns Are Because Users Don’t Get It, Analyst Says::While Vision Pro returns were uncommon, many came down to owners not figuring out its spatial computing.
1% of the headsets are returned. 30% of those returns (0.3% of the overall headsets) are because the user couldn’t figure it out.
This is clickbait.
To save me reading what is surely a terrible article, what aren’t people getting?
Frankly, if just 0.3% of buyers return an IT product (especially a novel one) because they “don’t get it”, that’s a massive success in my book. Have you seen users?
I work in IT so the answer is “too many” lol
Returns are very low. If the tittle talks only about a PERCENTAGE OF that low number, while that percentage being a high number, it is easily confused. Confusion is the goal of the modern journalMARKETINGist
Edit: I will not remove or replace the word tittle. I like it.
Wow, from all the stories of people returning them for all kinds of reasons, I thought the number of returns was way higher.
That’s actually a decent piece of information for the article to include IMO.Good point. But also fuck apple and all the capilistic consumption thriving on over seas suffering.
- posted from a non-Apple device (which was also made with over seas suffering)
Not if it is a Fairphone, and probably also some other devices.
Your mom suffered last night…
*up to 0.3%
Following the links it’s 20%-30% – it’s about 360-540 users if there were 180,000 sold as the analyst predicted.
I would bet some percentage of those only chose that option because they didn’t want to admit they bought it with the intent to return it but it’s pointless to speculate without knowing how this compares with other similar product launches.
Right. There were a bunch of streamers advocating just that: free use for a couple weeks, then return. Is suppose it makes more sense if you were a soulless, self-serving streamer, that wants to make a video while cheating the cost
I didn’t even have to spend $3,500 to not get it!
I knew a lot of people who returned the first iPhone because they “didn’t get it”. Sometimes new tech takes a while to catch on.
This article has a really weird way of presenting the statistic. Wouldn’t it be equally right to say that most people even those who choose to ultimately return the device found it intuitive?
Doesn’t the data kind of say the opposite of the title?
I don’t really know.
The first iPhone was slick but sucked as a smartphone. Heck, it couldn’t even send MMS, copy-paste, gps and the camera can’t even record a video! People looking to replace their Symbian or Windows Mobile smartphones would of course be disappointed by the lack of apps and customizations.
I know. I had it. Biggest thing about the iPhone. Is that what it did and how it worked was very very new and novel. And it looked very very cool. Apple was able to sell it for about three years simply as a fashion accessory, not that it was especially amazing in its features. It wasn’t until the 3GS, or even the iPhone 4 until it was exactly what it had promised to be 
To be fair, the first iPhone did kinda suck in many ways, especially shortly after launch. Only the 2nd or 3rd generation had most of the basics in place.
The Iphone was a good idea, though.
It’s not that this isn’t, it’s just that most people don’t know why it’s a good idea or how. The execution, here was the problem, not the idea itself. Especially the awful price tag.
I just don’t see it taking over the world in such quick fashion as the phone. Like VR I think it will remain a niche
It’s also not as hip and sexy as the iPhone was at the time. People didn’t care how well the iPhone worked at first. They just had to have one because it was the coolest thing on earth at the time.
My iPhone legit got me laid a few times in the first few months I own it. It got me the phone number of Del Marquis, the guitarist from the Scissor Sisters at a party in November 2007. I’m not fucking kidding. I would like to think it was because I was that smoking hot back then, but no, he was more interested in my brand new iPhone. (I was very hot back then, but my iPhone was hotter.)
Exactly. Well… not exactly as that particular story was very particular indeed.
But it was what I meant. I don’t think the goggles will have the same effect, even you in your prime tauting them.
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I know that story sounds fantastical and difficult to believe,
Well I didn’t really doubt it, as it’s way too specific to have been made up and it’s fun to imagine, but with goggles on, lol. Thnx for sharing!
Like VR I think it will remain a niche
Which is why I think Apple is really trying to make this an AR/VR type device. I think that AR will gain much more popularity out of the two.
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I don’t see it
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Why are devices like this called “Pro”? Are there people making their living as goggle-laden douche nozzles?
Pro is now a marketing term that has nothing to do anymore with its original ‘professional’.
Well what about these apps then, surely they will change your mind!
No, I wouldn’t know any of those, it’s not my profession… :D
‘Pro’ just means you can charge more.
It stands for ‘Profits’
There is regular and then this is Pro model. Obviously a cheaper VisionPro is coming in the future.
Because this thing has best on the market resolution, passthrough quality, and passthrough latency. And probably raw power for a standalone headset by a pretty good margin.
Is it made to be used as part of the work done in a profession? For example, a “professional video camera” may have lots of extra features needed by people whose professions are video-related.
Is this headset designed specially for professional use? If so, what profession? If not, then the term seems to be disingenuous marketing crap that devalues any other claims made by them.
Pro has never meant that on products. It has always exclusively mean where it fits in their product stack.
This is their high end product at a high end price point, and legitimately takes a shit on everything else you can buy at any price. They don’t have the non-pro yet because it can’t be done to an acceptable level without being just VR, and that’s not the point of what the Apple Vision is.
I would definetly agree, compared to the base apple vision (not pro version) this thing is very literally… infinitely better.
Seems like a decent chunk of apple users are just idiots. Not because they don’t want the AR, but because the reason is because they couldn’t figure it out.
I think the more relevant characteristic isn’t that they’re Apple users, it’s that they have $3,500 to spend on something they don’t understand. That much disposable income tends to promote short attention spans and little patience.
0.3% is a decent chunk?
Yeah
Man try to work in retail for a month and tell me that again.
All returns aren’t $4000 pieces of new tech. All returns aren’t returned out of confusion.
The number is significant, no matter how non-zero it is.
There’s probably more than 0.3% streamers looking to get one video in without paying
There aren’t really apps yet.
There will be. The tech is genuinely super impressive.
But developers need time to have it in their hands to really implement anything that’s actually AR. You can only lock it up so far on a computer or iPhone.
I’ve said it before, but the overly simplistic interfaces and the complete lack of customization of iOS means one thing
#iPhonesAreForBoomers
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I find the iPhone interface extremely unintuitive. I have one for work, and I’m a complete imbecile at using it, despite being decently tech-savvy. Everything I want to do is not were I expect it to be, it takes me forever to find things and settings.
And anyone who primarily uses iPhone would feel the same on an Android device.
They operate differently. That doesn’t make one better or worse. It’s like Photoshop and GIMP, once you know how to use one, using the other is unintuitive.
(I say this as someone who used Android phones for over a decade—and loved them!—and an iPhone for two years now.)
Using an iPhone for work, but returning to your Android phone for personal use, means you are never forced to relearn. Instead the iPhone just frustrates you. My first few days/weeks with the iPhone were constant frustration as I had to relearn how to think about the little things that had become so automatic about how I used my phone. But once I got the hang of it I actually quite like it.
I think the same would be true in the reverse.
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There is a big ol’ search bar right at the top. Did you try that?
If you can only find things with a search function, the UI is dogshit…but yes, they also often call things different names than what is obvious to me.
I can find things just fine. I was just pointing out that the first thing in the menu is the quick solution to your problem.
In my opinion, it is much harder to find something on someone’s heavily customized android than it is on an iPhone which remains essentially consistent across all devices.
To each their own.
I regularly use the flashlight on it, but I haven’t found a way to enable that from anywhere else than the bloody lock-screen. Searching for any variation of flashlight, light or torch only brings up websites and apps to download…it’s a small thing, but insanely annoying.
Plus the support is excellent. My ex mother-in-law went for free lessons and assistance on a regular basis until she understood
And, yes, I’m a tech-heavy guy myself and love my iPhone. I save my tinkering for my lab - my phone needs to just work. It does everything I ask of it quickly and easily. I’ve never felt constrained, except when I was getting up around 5 years with the same batter on my X
I’m afraid that your Gen Z-ers often graduate college without knowing how to use an email app or create a file structure like folders. It’s because they grew up on iPads and didn’t have to learn that.
Yep. I know far more Z’s and younger that use iPhone (ah, hell, Gen X and younger)
IPhone’s interface is not simplistic.
I can’t figure out how to navigate one even if my life depended on it
From one video i watched about the apple vision pro, it looked like it had some really cool features
Could you replicate every single one of those features with a google cardboard? I think so, but the extra $34999 is worth it for the apple branding
Could you replicate every single one of those features with a google cardboard? I think so
This is so far from the truth I just have to assume you’re making a “joke” and not an apple hater who’s too fanatical to form their own opinions.
The vision costs a shit load of money because they’ve put an abundance technology and R&D into the product to make it capable of things no other VR/AR headset is capable of. By all accounts the screen resolution, response rate, 3D tracking, and gesture recognition create an experience that other headsets can attempt to mimic but will fall short of. Watch MKBHD’s videos on it, it’s genuinely a really impressive piece of technology.
And yes, they charge more because they are Apple and they know their hoards of loyal followers will buy anything they make.
Sorry, i meant all the feaures that looked cool to me, not all of them
Also, yes, it was a joke
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Tech bros were vocal with stories about why they were returning their Apple Vision Pros earlier in February.
However, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo found that nearly a third of returns were because users couldn’t figure out how to set up the $3,500 newfangled technology.
“It is noteworthy that about 20–30% of users who return their products do so because they do not know how to set up Vision Pro,” said Kuo in a translated analyst note on Wednesday.
Kuo’s investigation finds that just 1% of Vision Pro owners returned their headsets, which is fairly standard, and less frequent than lengthy essays on social media would have you believe.
Apple’s products are renowned for their intuitive user interfaces, like the iPhone and Mac, but it seems the Vision Pro might be missing the mark in this respect.
Apple is expected to sell more Vision Pros this year than the company original forecasted, according to Kuo, though it still appears to be a niche market.
The original article contains 409 words, the summary contains 163 words. Saved 60%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
If your users don’t get what you’re trying to do, maybe try to do something better?
As far as I can tell this is a really nice and well built headset, with a great screen, but it doesn’t actually do what all the other VR headsets do: Play VR games. Telling that even people already used to forking over large sums to Apple aren’t really interested in paying $3500 to arrange iPhone apps around their living room.
(Setting aside how much I hate Apple for the moment)
A lot of these VR and mixed reality things are much neater in theory than in practice. I have tried the whole virtual-desktop-in-VR thing before and it just isn’t really much more productive unless maybe you are really pressed for space. You can just get another monitor, not have to wear a giant gizmo on your head and be able to drink your coffee while you work without issue.
What’s not to get about Face Monitor? If looking at a screen is good then obviously looking at it all the time is more good.
The inevitable conclusion is that these people bought a product without understanding it.
I thought it would be more with all the wannabe influencers making YouTube review videos.
Makes sense to me. Sounds weird but some people don’t have the ability to think in 3D. My wife is one such person. For example she can’t combine in her head her actual spatial position and surroundings with Google Maps, so she can’t use it. Same with those 3D rotation IQ test types of puzzles. I’m sure she wouldn’t be able to use spatial computing.
Yeah this isn’t surprising news to me. I can see the vision being super useful in some niche business/art cases but for 99.9% of people it’s a prohibitively expensive toy.
And what about the broken glass?
I see iPhones as hand holders so makes sense older parents bought them and introduced their kids to them. Which again, are being held by the hand on what they can use and not use.
They can’t figure out new technology. I’m able to use an iPhone even though I’ve never had one but opposite can’t be said about people using my android. It’s weird.
If the user can’t figure it out you built it wrong
Not defending Apple here necessarily but have you not ever been in line for a self checkout? It’s not a difficult piece of software or equipment to use and in my experience half of the users if not more cannot handle it. Users are really fucking dense
Self checkouts don’t work the same across stores, don’t accept the same methods of payment across stores, require human intervention the moment anything off the happy path occurs (like not moving an item fast enough and it scans twice), provide constant interruptions during the execution of their single purpose, and are unfathomably slow and inconsistent at what they do.
They just don’t work well.
The only intervention I have ever needed over 20+ years of using was for an ID check, it’s very very possible to use them without having an issue 99% of the time. They fuck up because people don’t have any patience or just a general misunderstanding of how a cash register works, which is not a difficult concept
They also fuck up because they aren’t designed and implemented properly.
- Walmart’s don’t accept tap to pay.
- Whole foods’ requires manual keying in of pastry items as different options (they don’t have danishes in their DB so they need to be rung up as a bagel; per the human worker that resolved the issue for me when I predictably couldn’t find the item they failed to include).
- None of them allow you to cancel the order (such as when you want to check the price of an item because the store neglected to actually list the price on the floor).
- None of them let you remove an item (such as a duplicate scan or removing a luxury item that stretches your budget or rang up higher than you were expecting).
- You can’t purchase shaving goods, alcohol, canned air, or other adult items without intervention (probably no way to actually avoid this one, but it doesn’t promote a smooth flow) and the kiosk often locks down until aided by an associate preventing you from continuing to scan your items while you wait.
- Often locks the kiosk when placing a reusable bag in the bagging area.
- Inconsistent payment methods: some allow you to scan your card at any point in the process, some process payment the moment your card is scanned, some require a manual trigger on screen prior to scanning your card.
- Often forces popups between scans (“This kiosk is in card only mode,” “Enter your loyalty card number,” or “how many bags did you use today?”)
I’d like to:
- Walk up and set down my bag
- Scan all my items
- Remove arbitrary items
- Tap my card
- If required; verify my age and have an associate clear any blocks
- Grab my stuff and leave
Instead what often happens:
- Walk up and set down my bag
- Kiosk locks because there’s an item in the bagging area
- Pickup my bag, move to a different kiosk and set my bag on the floor
- Scan my first item
- Dismiss the card only pop-up
- Dismiss the loyalty pop-up
- Scan the item again because the first scan just wakes the machine and the order doesn’t start until you dismiss 2 popups
- Put the item in my bag on the floor
- Scan the next item
- Dismiss pop-up about first item not being in the bagging area
- Take first item from my bag on the floor and set it in the bagging area
- Kiosk locks until associate clears it
- Scan a razor blade
- Kiosk locks until associate clears it
- Scan the remainder of my items
- One of them scanned twice
- Click the visible delete button next to duplicate item
- Kiosk locks until associate clears it
- Tap my card
- Realize that this unit works differently than the last one I used and click the “Finish and pay” button
- Select card as the payment type (on the kiosk in the card only queue getting run in card only mode)
- Dismiss the bags used pop-up
- Tap my card again
- Move all my items from the bagging area to the reusable bag on the floor
- Collect my receipt and goods and leave
I’m glad that you’ve consistently had a good experience with them, but I have not. While each of our experiences are anecdotal, the machines’ failure to routinely accommodate my expected use case is an engineering failure. I am a software engineer by trade and know how to interact with computers well. While we have a running joke about customers not reading what’s on their screen that’s no excuse to design an interface that cannot properly react to unexpected or unusual inputs or tasks.
I’m not gonna sit here and tell you your experience is invalid, but having watched thousands of people interact with self checkouts I have to say yours is an outlier at least to my experience, I just see people who expect the computer running the software to read their minds. Never once have I seen a system just do something and lock up without improper input, I’m sure you’re a very bright and tech savvy person but that doesn’t preclude you from having blind spots in the POS sector which is very different than most others in tech. Scales can fall out of calibration but that is really easily fixed by a program within the systems, it would literally take ten seconds if the retailer gave a damn
Can’t help you with the Walmart tap pay though, that’s on them as a retailer and one of the many reasons I don’t shop there, although I know that’s not an option for everyone.
You know, I have to agree with unmagical on this one. It’s gotten to the point where if I want to just run into the shop for a quick trip there’s a mental list of things to avoid that will cause trouble. I’m of the opinion that if I have to change my behavior to avoid something putting up artificial roadblocks for me, then that system is a failure. Case in point I went to CVS to buy some cough medicine for my kid the other day and discovered that cough medicine is now age-restricted. Instead of letting me scan my driver license (you know cause the kiosk has a bar code scanner and my license has this fancy new bar code) the clerk has to come out of whatever dungeon he was in to put the mk 1 eyeball on me and give the kiosk his blessing.
There’s a certain store I go to that needs an employee almost every single time because the scales are insanely sensitive and lock you out immediately if they think it’s wrong.
That’s on the retailer for not getting a tech out there to calibrate them, which takes 20 minutes and is 100% included by their maintenance agreement unless they bought shitty used equipment from a shady reseller.
The self checkouts where I am get confused from things as simple as a customer placing their own bags on the scale before even scanning anything and constantly need staff intervention. Not to mention how often prices are wrong on these systems. For the cost of constantly developing, upgrading and maintaining them. In the long run companies would be better off training a few extra staff for express lanes instead. Only my humble opinion though.
Why would you place your bags on a scale designed to detect a scanned product, scan everything pay and then bag if you are bringing your own. That’s what I do every time, stop thinking it’s anything more than a customer facing cash register, the scale/bagging area is the area of transition between pre and post purchase, once the transaction is done it stops caring. I don’t understand how someone can make more than one mistake on those machines without learning what not to do
Because that’s double handling and the scales where I shop have bag holders on the side of the scales for their own bags, hence they are designed to account for the bags weight before scanning and placing items.
Self checkout is a corporate excuse to not train employees and instead get customers to work for free performing point of sale. Expecting customers to be trustworthy and care about performing this task competently for free is “fucking dense”.
Some of us are a bit asocial
That’s what it’s become, but it’s also an easy way to get in and out without talking to anyone if you aren’t dumb as shit. If understanding how a cash register works is so hard we should be paying the workers who do so much better and giving them much more respect. We really should anyways but that’s a different issue.
Corporate initiatives to reduce workforce by misusing technology isn’t the fault of the tech itself. Which is incredibly easy to use, or at least I haven’t ever had an issue that wasn’t the result of another customer over the entire time self checkouts have existed
Edit: to be clear I’ve watched people struggle with them long before giant retailers decided to get rid of as many human cashiers as they can, that is fucked up and I hate that as much as y’all do, but that isn’t the fault of the self checkout system that was originally supposed to alleviate traffic by allowing those only buying a few items to bypass the lines
Not to mention that some of these systems are really badly made.
Self checkouts are the worst! Perfect example of bad engineering. I had the shower thought the other day that perhaps they design them to be slow and crappy so they can gather more biometric and video data of us at the checkout 🤔
Seriously though there is a whole branch of hardware engineering that specialises in making things intuitive and user friendly…even for the special needs (apple customers)
It’s less being bad engineering and more capitalists not wanting to devote enough money to fix a problem.
If you have a problem with working self checkouts that isn’t related to a scale calibration that’s on you, I’ve been using them without issue since I was a teenager which was two decades ago. They are stupidly intuitive
The scales are always off and unnecessary anyway. They factor shrinkage into the price.
most of the self checkouts i have used in the past 5 years or so have not even included the “scale” as part of the process. i do remember maybe once or twice that being an issue but it almost never happens any more. 10 years ago they were all “scale stupid” but it seems like that died off at least here in the eastern US
That’s only true if you assume that people are generally smart, especially when it comes to technology. Such an assumption seems to me to be… overly generous.
Factoring in intuitive functions is part of proper engineering
Nah GUIs were a mistake
I mean, Apple is THE accessible usage company of the world. If you think that Apple can’t make it work, then you also think that nobody can make it work.
Counterpoint:
Made me chuckle … mfers stopped being UX friendly and accessible a long time ago. I still want the home button on iPhones back, it was the perfect phone for my granny but I upgraded her to an XR and she did not get it, gave her an android instead . the button made it way more usable
Your grandpa can plug that in. That’s what makes it accessible. If you don’t like their design choices, that’s a different question.
Plug it in and use it you say?
