TB5 goes up to 120Gbps. I'm guessing unidrectional since it provides 80Gbps bi-directional.
The industry-leading connectivity solution will provide up to three times more bandwidth compared with Thunderbolt 4.
www.intel.com
There have been headsets with belt-mounted processors - I think the ill-fated, massively-hyped Magic Leap headset had one. Given where Apple wants to get with this, as quickly as possible, even the battery pack and cable is not ideal.
IMO there is only one “killer app“ needed to win this game, and that is form factor. Whoever is first to come up with the Warby Parkers that bear something like AVP functionality becomes the first mover. If I were at Apple, at this point most of my R&D energy would be in wireless bandwidth and power. I’d be designing a chipset to enable the broadest possible short distance signal transmission via a customized multiplex Bluetooth protocol or similar; for the headset most efficient possible transceiver, low energy translucent displays, inductively chargeable. Doesn’t need to match the immersion factor of the AVP. Just be good enough for during the day AR.
This is absolutely where Apple wants to be, as quickly as possible. It's what they were working on for years before deciding that the tech wasn't close enough and changing course to Vision Pro to get a product into the market and start iterating based on what they find out.
We have a couple of iPads at home (including a Pro) and they definitely do not replace laptops in 90% of use cases.
The iPad is great for a number of tasks but it's terrible as a general computing device. A big reason is the OS itself.
I suspect it will be the same with the Vision Pro. It will be awesome for a limited number of use cases and mediocre or just bad for the rest.
The iPad is always
potentially a replacement for just about anything - not too many years ago, I thought the future of creative workflows would be an iPad connecting to local network data, with the user sitting in a comfortable chair instead of chained to a desk. The big tech players all went to the cloud instead of local, and then Apple Silicon made working with a Mac much more pleasant from a noise and heat perspective, and that possible future evaporated (at least in my case).
If iPadOS had improved faster, maybe I'd feel different, but touch/pencil requires affordances and makes precision difficult (and even an iPad with a trackpad still has things scaled for touch), and for the work I do most often, those are the things I need, so being at my (low-tech sit/stand) desk is still the best option.
With Vision Pro, precision won't be an issue - literally anything you look at can be selected instantly - but how that will actually feel in practice remains to be seen. Some have already noticed that only being able to interact with what you're actively looking at takes a lot of getting used to, and text input of any length is going to rely on either dictation (which apparently works very well, at least for shorter things) or connecting a bluetooth keyboard.
While they already have effectively latency-free remote control of a Mac in place (even over non-exotic wifi), it's limited to one 4k-equivalent display, and you have to deal with constant context switching, with the Mac still using Mac input methodology (keyboard, trackpad, click and drag, etc), while everything else uses the native VisionOS inputs. It will be interesting to see how people adjust over time.
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