I think it’s reasonable.
First of all they didn’t want to put a battery on the headset. Fair enough, even without a battery it’s heavier than most headsets.
That decision means the cable doesn’t just need to provide average power consumption, it also needs to be able to handle peak power consumption. Chances are it’s somewhere inc the vicinity of a Mac Mini - which has a 185 Watt power supply.
USB can provide up to 240 Watts, however it needs relatively high voltage to do that over thin cables permitted in the USB specification. 48 Volts for 240 Watt power delivery and 20 Volts for 100 Watts.
Vision Pro is only 13 Volts - which means that cable almost certainly has much thicker internal power cables than most USB cables. If you tried to power a Vision Pro over a standards compliant thin USB cable it would likely be a fire risk.
Apple could have made it work with a USB cable but they would have had to use 48 Volts, and that likely would’ve meant transforming the 48V power supply down to 13 Volts which is needed by the headset… and voltage changes are not free. You lose power, which means less battery life from the same size battery. Again - battery life is an area where Vision Pro isn’t really good enough already. They didn’t need to do anything that makes it worse.
Tangent5280@lemmy.world 7 months ago
money?
HelloHotel@lemm.ee 7 months ago
That, the law not applying to this specific thing, and durability. The suits chose due to the former amd the engineers the latter.
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 7 months ago
The law does apply to “this specific thing”.
The law is that (most) battery charge cables must use USB-C, and Apple’s headset does use a USB-C cable to charge the battery.
erwan@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
I believe that’s why they make it impossible to remove without a sim card tool, so they can argue that it’s an internal connection that the user is not supposed to remove.