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Comment by scheeseman486 | Hacker News Reader

Carmack's vision culminated in Quest 2, which is the only hardware Meta has produced that any significant number of people care about.

Instead of Macintosh, I might point at Commodore. Affordable hardware with success in some niches like video production, but poor broader acceptance beyond gaming markets. Weirdly out of touch management with a yearning to be accepted by stuffy business types, but completely misjudging wants and needs. With Quest Pro I get vibes of the Commodore 128, a game machine trying and failing to be a Serious Business Device.

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Tbh if oculus weren’t associated with Facebook in a meaningful way I’d be all over it. But it is so I avoid it. The technology works fine but is a commercial failure, that’s not wholly Carmack’s fault.

Why do you think it's a commercial failure?

It is probably helpful to define 'commercial failure'. In the sense that it sold a lot of units, it is a success; in the sense that it made any money for the company which produced it, it is a failure. So, it could be taken different ways depending on how the term is defined.

I think, in terms of the hype, VR was going to be the next big thing in gaming, and then maybe not just gaming after that, but other applications. So I was expecting it to become a required peripheral like a headset or a good mouse & keyboard.

But I don’t feel like I’ve missed anything by not having a VR headset. Like the product direction was very clear for oculus, had lots of buy in from devs… then it was bought by Facebook and became so much muddier. (“We’re going to use it in the meta-verse for boring work stuff” VR will be everything).

You need an exciting killer app for these things and they need to be commodity hardware. I’m guessing the best thing anyone could do for VR is give up all their patents.

I also fall into this category.

Oculus without facebook would have probably sold me multiple pieces of hardware right now.

With Facebook however, I'll never touch the stuff.

While I completely agree with you. I think it’s important to point out that if it wasn’t sold by Facebook, it would be 2.5x the cost and then most people wouldn’t touch it as it would be too big of an investment.

Yea it is a device that goes on your face, puts cameras in your room, and creates a pseudo-reality for you. Who in their right mind would trust Facebook with that?

The millions of people who put microphones from Amazon or Google in their homes.

That simply demonstrates how low a regard people have for facebook.

No no, we're looking for people "in their right mind"

in my experience, even those people tend not to trust facebook

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