Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1691
GPS is to allow nuclear submarines to accurately launch missiles; chips (integrated circuits) are to allow nuclear missiles to fly to the correct target; the Internet is to ensure that communication can continue after nuclear bombs land; The display is also an old technology that fighter pilots have used for more than 60 years.
The above is the fate of many advanced technologies we use today: they were first born for military use and then turned into civilian use. Because only government projects such as military or aerospace can afford such an expensive, cutting-edge investment that can do its best for the effect.
So when Apple released the AR head-mounted display Vision Pro early this morning, it was somewhat confusing-shouldn’t such a thing be used on a fighter jet or spacecraft first?
- 12 cameras and 5 sensors continuously scan the surrounding environment, and move the environment around you into the virtual space as it is in real time;
- Images are projected onto your retinas from two tiny micro-OLED displays. Each piece packs more pixels than a 4K TV;
- You don’t need any controllers, you can do everything with your eyes and gestures, and there are enough sensors to track your every move;
- An M2 chip of the same type as a Mac computer is not enough to drive it, and a newly developed R1 chip needs to be plugged in to complete real-time calculations, and two fans are used to dissipate heat;
- After wearing it, it will recognize your pupils and confirm your identity.
It will be half a year before the Vision Pro goes on sale in the U.S. — following the pace of the first-generation iPhone — partly to give developers time to launch apps, partly because of capacity constraints. According to information provided by a core Apple supplier to LatePost, Vision Pro will produce up to 200,000 units this year.
It’s hard to argue that such headsets are the future of human-digital interaction. After all, the price of $3,499 (approximately 24,800 yuan) is really prohibitive, and it will take quite some time for Apple and the entire consumer electronics industry to reduce products with the same experience from a somewhat scary figure to a level acceptable to the public.
The Vision Pro also doesn’t have the almost beloved product positioning of the original iPhone – the title of the Wall Street Journal’s review article was “The Jesus Phone” (The Jesus Phone).
Vision Pro is a brave attempt that relies heavily on technology and supply chain accumulation, which can only come from Apple at present. More than 2,000 Apple designers and engineers led tens of thousands of suppliers’ R&D and production personnel all over China, the United States and Japan, spending 8 years of life and billions of dollars. All of this is just to allow consumers to watch movies and play games on a virtual 150-inch screen at home, or cast 3 applications to process work in the office.
A commercial company does not rely on government orders or occupy scarce resources. Just selling products to consumers can support such investment, mobilize such a global supply system, promote technological progress and mass production, and make personal life more convenient. . It can be seen that no matter what the twists and turns, the world has moved forward a little.
Lock simple but critical requirements, regardless of time and cost to achieve
Eight years ago, people lived in a more relaxed world—Trump was a comedic figure in the US election, trade wars were a distant memory of the Cold War, and the coronavirus was still exemplified by the long-extinct SARS.
At the Communication Exhibition in Barcelona, hundreds of media reporters and company representatives wore VR monitors issued by Samsung and immersed themselves in the simple and novel images. No one noticed as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg trotted past, framing the famous 21st century painting Rich and Poor in the VR Age.
In February 2016, at the MWC International Communications Exhibition, Zuckerberg delivered a keynote speech at Samsung’s venue. He already bought virtual reality device company Oculus in 2014. Image via Facebook.
Since Zuckerberg acquired Oculus in 2014, VR mania has been going on for more than a year. In the United States alone, hundreds of start-up companies have received financing to make head-mounted devices, panoramic cameras, and games, vowing to bring humans into the future world imagined by countless sci-fi works.
The Vision Pro project was launched at the culmination of this frenzy. Jobs’ old partner, Jonathan Ive, then Apple’s chief designer, mocked in an interview with The New Yorker in February 2015 that it was a wrong choice to tie a computer to his face[1]. Six months later, Apple poached Dolby Laboratories head of product and technology Mike Rockwell (Mike Rockwell) to take charge of a classified project to study how to strap a computer to the face.
During this period, Zuckerberg launched generation after generation of VR helmets, but they have not solved some basic problems: they are too heavy to wear for a long time; the screen clarity is not enough, the refresh rate is not enough, and they will feel dizzy in less than 30 minutes. In 2017, there are already more virtual reality practitioners than its users.
Rockwell originally hoped to follow Zuckerberg’s path and make a VR device with functions and experiences far superior to those of its peers. This suggestion was rejected by Ivey and Cook during the project approval stage. Both of them hope that the new product can change the way people interact with the world, but it should not be like the mortals in “Ghost in the Shell”, ignoring the surrounding environment and sealing it in the helmet. Entertained to death.
Cook often wears MYKITA glasses weighing less than 30 grams. Today’s technology is not enough to create such a lightweight, high-quality AR device. Rockwell’s solution is to implement AR (augmented reality) in the way of VR (virtual reality):
Wearing the Vision Pro, the user still has two screens in front of them and cannot see the outside. However, 12 cameras, lidar, and infrared sensors capture external images, and render real-time images on the screen in real time, giving people the illusion of seeing through the screen. Turn the knob on the upper right of Vision Pro to switch from a realistic external world (AR) to an immersive virtual space (VR), such as sitting in a jungle watching a horror movie.
At the same time, Apple also added a curved screen to the outside of the device to display the user’s eye images collected by the sensor to create a perspective effect. Apple calls it EyeSight.
The Vision Pro is full of cameras and other sensors inside and out. Above is the exterior of Vision Pro, with 8 high-definition cameras, 2 depth-of-field cameras, and 1 lidar. Below is the inside of the Vision Pro, with 4 infrared cameras and a circle of LEDs. Image via Apple.
Vision Pro will simulate the user’s eye view on the external screen. Image via Apple.
In order to make AR glasses on VR devices, Apple has successively acquired more than a dozen start-up companies with relevant talents and technologies, and developed key components such as new processors, optical lens modules, operating systems, and application development platforms. In the later stage of research and development, Apple invested 1 billion US dollars in this project every year.
Comparable to SpaceX’s investment in building rockets, it is only to solve some special basic needs:
- Make the device lighter. Currently lighter headsets are generally 400-500 grams. Apple once proposed a 150g head-mounted device solution, with the goal of allowing people to wear it continuously for 8 hours. However, Apple did not disclose the weight of the Vision Pro, but only emphasized the use of lighter materials, such as the use of breathable fabric for the headband and external batteries.
- Make the picture more realistic. Apple is equipped with more than a dozen high-definition cameras, lidar and other sensors to obtain the surrounding environment, and two self-developed chips to process these images; custom 4K resolution, refresh 120 times per second micro OLED screen display images, and then optimize the three-layer The lens refracts, making the image more realistic and transparent, and finally transmitted to the retina of the human eye. The VR industry commonly uses pixels (angular resolution, PPD) per 1° field of view to comprehensively judge the display effect of head-mounted devices, and it needs to reach 60 to achieve the effect of human eyes. The current equipment is generally only about 20, but Vision Pro has achieved 40.
- Make the operation easier. Today’s head-mounted devices are almost always controlled by controllers. Apple thinks this is an “annoying tool”. It has acquired several facial tracking companies and used multiple sensors to track human eyes and gestures in real time—the line of sight is the mouse, and two fingers pinch. Just click.
- Let myopia have a better experience. Now myopic users use head-mounted devices, either wearing glasses to squeeze their heads in, or sticking myopia lenses. Apple is one of the few companies that introduced how myopia users use their devices at the press conference. It cooperated with Zeiss to customize myopia lenses suitable for Vision Pro, which can be attached to the device to ensure a perfect experience.
A former Apple manufacturing engineer involved in the development of Vision Pro told “LatePost” that the manufacturing team basically has no say in the parameters determined by the industrial designer, and must do everything possible to achieve it.
Specific to the hardware module of myopia lenses, Apple will work with suppliers to develop a plan for cutting lenses, and try to think in advance of extreme situations that users may encounter, such as ensuring that the magnetic attraction module can adapt to lenses of different degrees (thickness), Every detail has been tuned hundreds of thousands of times to expand the range of vision correction without compromising display performance or eye-tracking accuracy.
If the selected supplier cannot produce parts that meet the requirements, Apple’s first choice is to send multiple employees to be highly involved and spend several months improving the production process. change plan”.
In terms of core technology, Apple is infinitely invested. When peers generally use the same LCD and OLED screens as mobile phones, Vision Pro has already used a customized 4K resolution micro-OLED screen. According to the analysis of CICC Li Chengning et al. [2], this can solve the problem of AR/VR. Most of the problems related to the display in the device, such as low resolution, easy dizziness, etc.
The supplier Sony quotes more than $300 per screen, and a pair of screens is already more expensive than most VR devices on the market[3].
Apple will also actively invest and participate in the research and development of new technologies. According to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Apple will set up a laboratory in Taiwan, China in 2021, hire dozens of screen experts from the local area and Japan, cooperate with TSMC to develop micro-OLED screens, and set up a production line for trial production [4].
For the most critical user experience, Apple will even change the plan when the product is released. According to several media reports, by 2018, Rockwell’s Vision Pro was basically completed and ready to be released the following year.
At that time, Rockwell developed a base station similar to a computer host, which was placed indoors to provide computing power support for the headset and was responsible for wirelessly transmitting content to the device. He has made an extremely lightweight and powerful product without having to consider heat dissipation.
But by the end of the year, Rockwell’s design was overturned again. Ive believes that users should not be limited to a specific range. According to Bloomberg, the product confrontation between Ive and Rockwell lasted for several months. In the end, Cook sided with Ive [5].
Rockwell needs to cut down the base station, integrate all components into the headset as much as possible, and ensure that the product is light enough and the experience is good enough. He gets another three years. In October 2019, Rockwell held a meeting with team members, announced the release of new products in 2022, and shared ideas on how to solve heat dissipation problems [6].
Poor heat dissipation is a direct problem caused by Apple’s stuffing high-power chips into the headset. Until 2022, when Rockwell and members of Apple’s board of directors demonstrated the finished product, the heat dissipation problem was not resolved, and the product release had to be postponed. At the press conference, Apple’s final solution was to add two fans to help dissipate heat.
The aforementioned former employee of the Apple Vision Pro team told “LatePost” that what he feels most is Apple’s attention to equipment details. At the end of 2021, a hardware module has reached the last step before mass production, and the final quality needs to be evaluated.
Apple tested how it behaved after being dropped from a height of one meter, two meters, and five meters. Finally, it was found that after the device was dropped from five meters, the plastic frame covering the lens had a one-to-two probability of cracking.
“Everyone along the line, from the vice president down to the grassroots, stepped in and redesigned the solution, and the suppliers were realigned,” he said. Near the product launch, engineers from Apple and suppliers worked overtime and stayed up all night to solve this problem.
A company without a factory spends $10 billion a year on equipment to promote manufacturing technology
During the Jobs period, Apple could find key technologies at a very low cost and make breakthroughs. In 2003, a 6-person interactive design team at Apple made a concept device, where two fingers could tap and draw on the screen to scroll web pages and zoom in on pictures. This is what later became multi-touch, the control interface everyone has on their phones today.
At that time, Apple had just stepped out of the bottom of the Nasdaq crash in 2000. Engineers hadn’t changed their computers for many years, and the multi-touch technology was completed on Windows PCs. But Jobs organized a team of more than 200 people and forced them to make the touch-sensitive computer the size of an iPad first, and then make it a 3.5-inch screen to become an iPhone, which completely changed the way our world works and built a new era for a generation of Internet companies. Entrepreneurial infrastructure.
Around the same time, engineers at Microsoft Research demonstrated multi-touch technology to Chairman Bill Gates. Finally, a month before the iPhone was released, Microsoft released a table-sized touch computer, the Surface Desk.
Microsoft’s Surface, released in 2007, runs a custom version of its Windows Vista operating system.
After Jobs died, Ive became the most important manager outside of Cook. But this legendary designer did not have the talent of Jobs. Under his leadership, Apple Watch aimed at the fashion market, launched a gold watch priced at $10,000, and set up a complex three-step try-on process in the Apple store[11 ]. After dismal sales, Apple Watch began to adjust its direction from the second generation, and changed to iPhone sports accessories, gradually becoming successful.
Cook is more self-aware. In 2009, Cook, then Apple’s chief operating officer, stood in for Jobs, whose cancer was worsening, on an earnings call. The first question analysts asked him was “how would Apple operate without Jobs”.
“We believe in owning and controlling the major technologies behind the products we manufacture, and only entering those markets where we can make a significant contribution.” Cook said[7].
After becoming Apple’s CEO in 2011, Cook increased annual capital expenditures (land, factories, and production equipment) to tens of billions of dollars—more than seven times that of the year the iPhone was released.
Worldwide, only cutting-edge chip manufacturing plants and car manufacturers have such large capital expenditures. However, Apple closed all its own factories as early as 2000. After that, in addition to building a new headquarters and researching and building cars, it did not buy much land, but invested more than TSMC and Intel for many years.
Apple spends almost all of the more than 10 billion U.S. dollars each year on the production equipment it participates in research and development, and then provides it to cooperative component suppliers. At present, Apple has a total of 188 suppliers, among which Tier 1 suppliers usually get 20%-50% of their production equipment from Apple.
At AAC Technologies, the supplier of Apple’s acoustic components, all the control software and computers in the factory are owned by Apple, and the company’s internal ERP process management system is also provided by Apple. AAC’s production line engineers often receive emails from Apple engineers, and after obtaining Apple’s remote authorization, they go to the production line to check problems. “Except that the equipment and workers belong to AAC, the rest are controlled by Apple.”[8]
Even the most influential giants in every industry are willing to work with Apple for iPhone profits. Before winning Apple’s big order in 2014, TSMC’s pace of advancing chip manufacturing technology iterations was irregular and unpredictable. In order to meet Apple’s annual need to update the iPhone processor, TSMC will launch a new manufacturing process node every year, and quickly debug equipment to stabilize the yield rate.
“When we look at the mobile revolution, the biggest challenge is the trade-off between performance and power consumption. The view at the time was that you have to choose one or the other.” Apple COO Jeff Williams (Jeff Williams) said in 2017, “Thanks to the joint efforts of companies such as TSMC and Arm, we don’t have to weigh.”[9]
Reflected in the Apple Vision Pro, it is Apple’s overall lead in chips. Most mainstream VR devices now use Qualcomm’s XR 2 chip-this is Qualcomm’s chip based on the Snapdragon 865 mobile phone processor released in 2019 and enhanced graphics processing capabilities.
The Vision Pro is powered by the same M2 chip found in the latest-generation MacBook Air, supplemented by an R1 chip that quickly processes and transmits data from the cameras, sensors, and microphones.
According to multiple media reports, Apple has developed at least three chips for Vision Pro from scratch, and its M1 chip released in 2020 was directly born out of the process of developing chips for Vision Pro. An analyst who has been following the AR/VR industry for a long time said that if Apple’s other hardware designs are more than three years ahead of its peers, it is far more than three years ahead of Qualcomm XR 2 in terms of chips.
According to a report by Tianfeng Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, most of the core components of Apple’s first-generation Vision Pro come from a single supplier. For example, the display screen is from Sony, all assembly is handed over to Luxshare Precision, and the camera module is from Cowell Electronics, etc.[10 ].
The participation of a small number of suppliers helps Apple develop new products as efficiently as possible. “Although the price of US$3,500 is high, the cost pressure on suppliers is very high,” said a person involved in the Vision Pro parts supply project. Many suppliers lost money this year to make Vision Pro, and they need to invest a lot of resources to help Apple do it. Validation testing to improve yield.
“LatePost” learned from a number of people in the supply chain that Apple Vision Pro is expected to be in stable mass production from September to October, and the monthly production capacity is expected to be about 70,000 units. Indeed, it can only be prepared first and sold at the beginning of next year. . Suppliers are looking forward to the Vision Pro’s next-generation products, which are expected to ship in the millions.
However, according to Apple’s supply chain management style, as technology is optimized and new product shipments increase, it will purchase the same component from multiple suppliers to strengthen its control.
According to The Elec, Apple is working with Samsung and LG Display to push them to accelerate the development of micro-OLEDs, which are now only mass-produced by Sony, in preparation for next-generation devices.
The Adventures of Cook and Apple
Apple is a technology company that deeply controls the supply chain, and it is also a brand company that does almost luxury business. This brand started with a series of revolutionary products such as Mac, iPod, iPhone, etc., and was deepened by the full investment in a product every year, and details such as the rounded curves of the iPhone that have remained unchanged for ten years are engraved in the mind.
The power of a brand is reflected in profit margins. Apple’s net profit margin in its most recent fiscal year was only slightly lower than that of Hermes and Moutai, and much higher than that of LVMH, the parent company of Louis Vuitton. Apple’s products are priced close to luxury goods, but they have to be replaced after three or four years, so it creates hundreds of billions of dollars in profits for the company every year-only Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company in the world, is more profitable than it.
This company is so profitable that people have an illusion: iPhones will always be bought, not subject to technology, product or economic fluctuations, and can continue to grow forever. But the iPhone, which has to be updated every year, is not something that has to be bought. Every year Apple has to figure out how to do it a little bit better, or the growth of the entire company is in trouble.
In fact, there is no second company with a market value of more than 100 billion US dollars that must face a major product test every year. Needless to say, petroleum, chemical industry, banking, daily chemical industry, aviation and the like. Internet giants either monopolize social relations, or monopolize online retail or search. One misstep won’t hurt these companies’ prospects. In 2018, Apple’s sales of the iPhone XS series declined, and it lost more than $300 billion in market value in a few weeks—more than Alibaba’s market value.
Cook is soberly aware of this fact, and has firmly invested more than 10 billion U.S. dollars in the supply chain every year for more than ten consecutive years, researching new materials and technologies that most consumer electronics companies cannot touch. People always need a mobile phone, and Apple’s investment of hundreds of billions of dollars in more than ten years has ensured that it always has the latest technology, does not require special inspiration, and can also increase the success rate.
Such profitability allows Vision Pro to become a reality, but it does not guarantee its success. Mobile phones, watches, tablets, computers, and earbuds are all definite categories, and Apple can always guarantee that it will be several years ahead of its competitors in technology. But the AR/VR industry only sells millions of units every year under various subsidies. It’s not a matter of choosing between products from Apple and other companies, but a matter of whether users want to wear a monitor on their heads.
Apple has done considerable preparation. In addition to 8 years of hardware investment, Apple has also prepared for 6 years in software. In 2017, Apple released the AR application development kit ARKit, and then iterates every year, attracting 14,000 related applications through the limited AR functions on the iPhone and iPad.
Oculus founder Palmer Luckey (Palmer Luckey) believes that Apple’s jaw-dropping pricing is also necessary, “It has to make virtual reality something that everyone wants, and then it will become affordable for everyone. something worthwhile”. But the high price will affect family purchases – a family of four will buy four movies together.
Vision Pro, as a first-generation product, is also extremely simple. Although its hardware is sufficient to support more complex tasks, Apple’s story in the entire press conference is just about carrying a super-large screen to watch videos, play games, and work. Simple, easy to understand, but doesn’t show a particular need, which the development community has to make up for.
Now the product is released. Not surprisingly, this will also be the most important new product launched by Tim Cook during his tenure. In two or three years, we will know whether this is the next generation computing platform.
Li Zinan also contributed to this article.
“TECH TUESDAY” series
In 1957, a man-made object entered space for the first time, orbiting the Earth for three weeks. Human beings can look up and see a small flash across the sky in the night, parallel to the stars in mythology.
Such a feat cut across races and ideologies, sparking joy across the globe. But not in the triumphant joy we might have guessed, touched by human feats. According to the political philosopher Hannah Arendt (Hannah Arendt) observed back then, people’s mood is closer to a long-awaited relief that science has finally caught up with expectations, “Humanity is finally on the way out of the cage of the earth. took the first step.”
People are always rapidly adjusting their expectations of the world based on technological exploration. When a fantasy of a science fiction writer becomes a reality, it is often that technology has finally caught up with people’s expectations, or in Arendt’s words, “technology has realized and affirmed that people’s dreams are neither crazy nor empty.”
At times like today, a little more dreaming is better.
This is also the expectation of “LatePost” launching the TECH TUESDAY column. We hope to regularly report on new scientific research and technological developments outside of the business world that “Later” focuses on on a daily basis.
These may be about the progress of a cutting-edge research, the observation of a technology application, or a tribute to some outstanding technologies or even an era.
This column will record the various changes in the world from the perspective of science and technology. During this journey, I hope readers can join us in gaining a little understanding of the world.
[1] Jonathan Ivey interviewed by The New Yorker
https://ift.tt/eMB7o9z
[2] CICC Li Chengning and others’ research report on Apple MR equipment
https://ift.tt/oMu0bfX
[3] Introduction page of Sony micro OLED products
https://ift.tt/LoXh6jv
[4] Nihon Keizai Shimbun’s report on Apple’s cooperation with TSMC in research and development of micro OLED
https://ift.tt/Ht7iWYA
[5] Bloomberg’s report on Cook’s support for Ive’s opposition to the base station design
https://ift.tt/MUgNAXr
[6] Reports about Apple’s updated product release date set for 2022
https://ift.tt/7AlNurH
[7] Cook’s 2009 earnings report meeting
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[8] Article about the partnership between AAC Technologies and Apple
https://ift.tt/qGLcem4
[9] Speech by Apple COO at TSMC
https://ift.tt/4f7DgP6
[10] Report by Tianfeng Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo
https://reurl.cc/dDXq8D
[11] From After Steve by Tripp Mickle
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