Apple confirms 256GB of storage will be on their Vision Pro

[filpo]

Summary

Apple recently confirmed today that the Vision Pro will come with 256GB of onboard storage, and any bets that it's upgradeable? (intense sarcasm)

 

Quotes

Could we get more leeway in the future?

Quote

Apple's forthcoming Vision Pro headset will feature 256GB of storage capacity, but the company could offer flexibility with the second-gen model 

 

Added by @filpo but this ^ is just a speculation

How to get more storage (possibly), the Apple way

Quote

A handful of speculations suggested that Apple will launch the Vision Pro headset with 512GB of storage capacity. As it turns out, the headset will only house 256GB of storage capacity. We are unsure if the company will offer the 256GB variant as the base model. If the company plans to sell only one variant, users will have no option but to buy the 256GB version. However, users must spend extra bucks above the $3,499 price tag if the company has higher storage models in the queue.

Other extras (that will cost you money of course)

Quote

Apple's press release details that the Vision Pro will launch with a Dual Loop Band, a Polishing cloth, an external battery pack, and much more. Additionally, the company also shared the prices of the ZEISS Optical Inserts. At launch, the company announced many features of the Vision Pro, for instance, the chipset and the remaining sensors that will power the device.

 

We know the Vision Pro headset will launch with 256GB of storage capacity. Besides the storage, Apple also shares that the Vision Pro headset will be available with different ZEISS Optical Inserts. There are two options available for the lens. The prescription lens will cost you an extra $149, while the reader lens will push you $99 above the standard price. Other than this, the company also details a wide range of functionalities in the press release

When can I order it?

Quote

The company announced that the headset will launch on February 2 in the U.S., with pre-orders opening on January 19 at 5 a.m. PST / 8 a.m. EST.

My thoughts

 

EDIT: As @Zando_ pointed out these headsets won't need that mass storage (read his post for more info) so it doesn't seem like a huge deal anymore, but then again I assumed they would've put 512gb of storage on it even if you weren't gonna use a lot of it

 

Sources

For a $3,499 Price Tag, The Vision Pro Should Have Housed 512GB of Storage Capacity Instead of 256GB, as Confirmed by Apple (wccftech.com)

Apple Vision Pro will launch in February — $3,499 for 256GB storage | Tom's Hardware (tomshardware.com)

Edited January 9 by filpo
Changed some of the 'My thoughts'

[Zando_]

Just now, filpo said:

256GB is barely enough to store GTA 5 and probably GTA 6 too at the same time! It does depend how this new headset will be used though.

... It is an AR headset, not a VR headset. Much more focused on overlaying stuff onto the real world, than rendering an entirely new one. See also Microsoft's Hololens that's been out for a while, similar headset and advertised for similar uses (though MS's has leaned more towards enterprise stuff than home use). The storage is likely fine for what the headset is meant to do. 

[TetraSky]

You won't be running GTA5 on the headset anyway. Beside, it's Apple. They aren't known for putting a lot of storage on their devices. Otherwise, how would they sell you their cloud services.

[Needfuldoer]

7 minutes ago, filpo said:

any bets that it's upgradeable? 

 

 

When was the last time an Apple product had upgradable storage? I'm sure Colin Mistr is going to figure out how to solder different NAND packages to the board eventually, but I bet this thing's going to be a sealed, disposable appliance like most other portable consumer electronics these days.

[Dracarris]

1 hour ago, filpo said:

EDIT: As @Zando_ pointed out these headsets won't need that mass storage (read his post for more info) so it doesn't seem like a huge deal anymore, but then again I assumed they would've put 512gb of storage on it even if you weren't gonna use a lot of it

But nevermind that, I‘ll leave the stupid clickbait thread title so ppl can drag yet another thread about a generally great Apple product into absolute shitposting over the (base) mass storage capacity while ignoring all other properties.

 

JFC

59 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

Otherwise, how would they sell you their cloud services.

Reasonable conclusion at first sight, but doesn‘t really compute. You only can ditch Cloud storage if you have a single device with a lot of local storage. As soon as you have at least two, you either need bulk storage on all of them and a Cloud storage of appropriate size to sync between your devices, or only ample Cloud storage and little local storage on each device (and only pull what you currently need).

 

Also, you are free to use any other Cloud service on Apples devices (e.g., gifting all your photos to Google and using their „free“ cloud storage), including self-hosted ones.

[ARandomPerson]

42 minutes ago, filpo said:

any bets that it's upgradeable?

Even if it is, it will be proprietary, and unlike the Series X, you will definitely not be able to plug in an external USB drive to it.

[SorryBella]

7 hours ago, Dracarris said:

But nevermind that, I‘ll leave the stupid clickbait thread title so ppl can drag yet another thread about a generally great Apple product into absolute shitposting over the (base) mass storage capacity while ignoring all other properties.

 

JFC

@filpo Im not a fanboy of apple products but for the love of it all avoid heavy editorialization of thread titles for news. This is a bad practice to be had when sharing a news and is partly to blame in how disinformation spreads. If it were up to me i would force edit the title of the few tech news youve posted.

[hishnash]

8 hours ago, filpo said:

256GB is barely enough to store GTA 5 and probably GTA 6 too at the same time!

Given all the compute happens locally on the headset and you need to render 2 eyes at 90 to 100fps you're not going to be shipping any games with assets anywhere as complex as these games.   What makes these games massive is huge high rest textures and high poly meshes. 

A much more readable size metric would be to look into how many hours of 4k 3D video it can store. 

 

 

7 hours ago, ARandomPerson said:

you will definitely not be able to plug in an external USB drive to it.

No you can, it has a USB-C port and it concludes the files app from iPadOS that supports extenders storage so yes you will be able to attach remote storage. 

[hishnash]

7 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

but I bet this thing's going to be a sealed, disposable appliance like most other portable consumer electronics these days.

Apple is very unlikely to seal it up with glue, they operate at the scale were items like this for them it is better to make it repairable so that when they give you a warranty replacement your damaged unit is sent to a repair centre refurbished and then used as the replacement for the next person who comes in for a warranty replacement (this is what apple do with phones, watch and Macs.. warranty replacements are not new devices  just refurbished ones).    Doing this saves apple $$$$$ so apple are infact rather good at making systems reparable (just they never think about third party repair the $$$$$ savings all come from first party repair centres that do things like board level repair). 

[Issac Zachary]

8 hours ago, Dracarris said:

Reasonable conclusion at first sight, but doesn‘t really compute. You only can ditch Cloud storage if you have a single device with a lot of local storage. As soon as you have at least two, you either need bulk storage on all of them and a Cloud storage of appropriate size to sync between your devices, or only ample Cloud storage and little local storage on each device (and only pull what you currently need).

Um, I don't agree entirely.

 

1. First of all everyone's needs are different. Does a person need the same documents on their phone as they do on their laptop or tablet? Everyone's answer will be different
2. The internet still isn't everywhere. I would know, about 75% of the time I'm using my electronic devices I do not have any way to access the internet unless I decide to carry around a Starlink device in a briefcase or something like that.
3. Even where there is internet it can be painstakingly slow. I have some friends who ran out of room on their iPhones on vacation so paid for a bunch of iCloud service. But in the country they were in the internet was so freaking slow they still ended up having to stop every now and then to delete pics and videos to make room for others.
4. There are other ways to transfer your files from one device to another without a cloud service. While usually not as smooth and easy as a cloud service, many other methods are faster and do not require you to hand over your files to someone who could potentially leak your data to someone else (hacker, government official, sell it to advertisers, etc.)

My own way of doing things is to use the 1TB of OneDrive that comes with their Office subscription and have 1TB on both my 2-in-1 and desktop with everything synced. So yes I do use a cloud service, but still benefit from having 1TB of storage (actually the desktop has way more as it has a 1TB for each family member, plus a backup drive with another 1TB for each one.)

[Kisai]

8 hours ago, filpo said:

 

My thoughts

Now this is slightly absurd to me. 256GB is barely enough to store GTA 5 and probably GTA 6 too at the same time! It does depend how this new headset will be used though. As I'm assuming if you have $3,500 to spend on an AR headset, you should have enough for iCloud, so maybe it's not that big of a deal. But then again to store all of the programs, I would want to use the fast SSD in the device and not a server over the internet.

 

 

I'm not sure why Apple insists on nerfing flagship products. Every time they've launched something new:

- RAM too small

- Disk too small

- CPU too weak

 

Especially for the ask price. Sure, Apple is a premium, Luxury, product, but unlike say a Hermes bag, there is nothing special about Apple hardware that qualifies it as Luxury. For those who don't know Hermes bags are "made to order", "handmade", and often cost as much as a fully loaded high end computer ($11,000.) Meanwhile Apple devices are so anemic's loaded and mass produced, made in china.

 

Now, I'm never going to say Apple products are inherently bad, but the price differential in all their product lines trends towards "we have no problem selling at these prices, so we're not going to change." 

 

This is why when Apple releases something new, I'm extremely hesitant about buying the "first model" especially considering how short the lifespan of a lot of Apple's first gen products wound up being, like the iphone, ipad, and appletv devices.

 

[saltycaramel]

Apple nerfs base storage and RAM to entice the base-better-best upsell. 

 

Other OEMs nerf everything else.

Some people are willing to pay good money to get the un-nerfed “everything else” part.

[StDragon]

Marketing, price, usage, the creep factor goes to 11 on this. All that's missing is promotional material of an ultra-wealthy passenger using one of these on Emirates 1st class flight to Dubai.

 

This halo product isn't for gamers.

[da na]

Let's be real here. Nothing is actually stored on your iphone or iVRheadset. They'll use maybe 10GB of that space and try to upsell you on a $49.99/month 4TB iCloud plan.

[saltycaramel]

My current personal rules for picking storage (I keep the devices a number of years)

- iPhone 512GB

- iPad 256GB

- Mac 4TB

 

The Vision Pro is a room-sized iPad so I could probably do with 256GB (plus SMB shares from the NAS and Mac), but given the price I would succumb to the pressure to future-proof it a bit at 512GB. 

[GhostRoadieBL]

From a monopolistic perspective of apple, this makes a lot of sense. AR headset for the 'want to look rich' posturers and industry professionals, the former who will have cloud everything making these a glorified iphone. The latter who want it for real work being tethered with real processing and storage or have a very specific use case like site previews or AR virtual workspace requirements where they have support hardware making these a replacement for $3k worth of ultrawide or multiple screens.

 

[williamcll]

The most interesting thing is that they are marketing this for use with office apps.

[HenrySalayne]

Isn't it a little bit early to discuss the storage size of the Apple AR glasses? Their first presentation showed video streaming, light gaming, video calls and and light office tasks - nothing reliant on large amounts of storage.

Let's wait if this device even turns out to be more than a virtual monitor accessory. I doubt it will have the capabilities to be the only device you own. Apple also has an incentive that the AR glasses are more of an addition to the ecosystem than a singular stand-alone unit.

[filpo]

Thanks everyone for the insight, I will change the title and my thoughts accordingly

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, HenrySalayne said:

Isn't it a little bit early to discuss the storage size of the Apple AR glasses? Their first presentation showed video streaming, light gaming, video calls and and light office tasks - nothing reliant on large amounts of storage.

Let's wait if this device even turns out to be more than a virtual monitor accessory. I doubt it will have the capabilities to be the only device you own. Apple also has an incentive that the AR glasses are more of an addition to the ecosystem than a singular stand-alone unit.

No, because Apple did this with the iphone and ipad. The release iPad models, 256MB of RAM and 16GB of disk, that space was basically gone after you loaded 3 things that uses Unity.

 

If this device is a glorified AR/VR/private-monitor device, time will tell. The biggest potential this device has is Vtubers and other virtual performers, because it can't currently done with "VR" HMD's because HMD's don't capture eye and mouth movement. Controllers for VR resemble gamepads, rather than the need for individual fingers. Plus all the VR trackers don't have battery life.

 

Like the price for this unit is cheaper than a mocapsuit, and can do half of what you would need from one. If people buy it for that use alone, sure, that disk size might not even matter.

 

But I imagine this is more in line with the iPad where the iPad was basically a bigger iPod/iPhone. This is closer to the iPad that you wear, in concept.

[Dracarris]

5 hours ago, da na said:

Let's be real here. Nothing is actually stored on your iphone or iVRheadset. They'll use maybe 10GB of that space and try to upsell you on a $49.99/month 4TB iCloud plan.

Easy display of "I did zero actual research".

5 minutes ago, Kisai said:

No, because Apple did this with the iphone and ipad. The release iPad models, 256MB of RAM and 16GB of disk, that space was basically gone after you loaded 3 things that uses Unity.

You really pull out releases that happened like a decade ago or more, to draw any conclusions for a current release? More recent first-gen products like the Airpods Pro or all the Apple Silicon Macs are jolly fine.

[HenrySalayne]

1 hour ago, Dracarris said:

You really pull out releases that happened like a decade ago or more, to draw any conclusions for a current release? More recent first-gen products like the Airpods Pro or all the Apple Silicon Macs are jolly fine.

No. There have been similar basically "obsolete" base models quite recently. I'm looking at you, base model MB 14" Pro...

[Dracarris]

14 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

No. There have been similar basically "obsolete" base models quite recently. I'm looking at you, base model MB 14" Pro...

No. That model, na matter how often people on this forum repeat it, has enough users which do jolly fine with the base config. That machine is very very far from "basically obsolete".

 

Apart from that, it's the base config that can be changed. Not set-in-stone limitations like a slow CPU with no other option available, that apparently an iphone from 10+ years ago had. Do you guys keep a list somewhere of "doo doos that Apple did" that you can quickly pick from, as soon as any Apple related thread comes up on here?

[leadeater]

7 hours ago, Dracarris said:

Do you guys keep a list somewhere of "doo doos that Apple did" that you can quickly pick from, as soon as any Apple related thread comes up on here?

Yes and it's VERY long so easy to remember at least some of them 

 

Actually serious though, some of the base specs multiple generations over have been bad and the "just upgrade" at the inflated prices Apple ask for simply isn't good enough. Increasing the base spec isn't that costly to Apple if at all due to less SKUs and other supply chain factors but it's not about cost to Apple, obviously, it's more profitable to do what they do. And it's not like the user base is significantly pushing for change either.

 

The base spec doesn't give you an unusable device by any means, it's just insulting for the price and the proclaimed "quality"/"premium" level of the products.

 

It's no less excusable anywhere else too, but at least it's more common on lower priced products. There's always a bad deal to be found, no shortage of those from every company 

 

Anyway there is absolutely no real way to know if the storage on the Vison Pro is enough or not, wayyyy too soon to know.

[PocketNerd]

One of the neat side effects with today’s storage is that larger capacity tends to equal longer longevity.

 

so even if you didn’t use all of it, having more is still beneficial.