Apple’s Best Hope for New Headset: a Smartwatch-Like Trajectory
bloomberg.com
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This rapid and random access is why people love smartphones so much. With a headset, you either have to be wearing it all the time (something people aren’t willing to do; it’s like wearing sunglasses indoors no matter how good the waveguides are) or have to take the time to take a fragile headset out of its case, put it on your head, adjust to the complete take over of your field of view & environment, then figure out what you need to do using an input modality (be it voice, gestures, an input peripheral or some combination) that is far inferior to a touch interface for the 90% of tasks.
People like to claim that AR is less intrusive than a smartphone but all the cases they present are carefully crafted demo’s. If you watch actual people use AR devices trying to accomplish some task you immediately notice that isn’t true at all.
It will be interesting to see how Apple has addressed these problems but AR needs to be better at doing tasks average people can already do well with a smartphone, and like I mentioned you have an uphill battle due to the headset form factor alone.
All the current high-end VR headsets have pass through cameras, of varying quality. It’s not clear yet whether Apple is bringing anything significantly new to the table. Will somewhat higher quality components make a significant difference?
That is, once a device is useful or otherwise desirable enough... Issues like awkwardness or microefficiencies fade.
I think the issue is that there's not enough to do in vr/ar. If we had a vr game of thrones, then everyone would be in vr watching it. If ar made some job much better, everyone doing that job would use one.
The modern platform paradigm means all the speculative, creative investment is on the platform itself. "Creators" make the content. Well... The prizes for creating "content" are mediocre.
A breakthrough filmmaker will have to make the VR's first blockbuster for the art... and so will their financiers. You can raise some money to make ar software, but the unicorn potential is slim compared to a platform play... the big bucks aren't available for such.
I think Apple first needs to solve how to license a piece of media to one account that can be then be shared to anyone else in the same room, or a lot of families are never going to try it.
The Nintendo DS blew me away with its "buy one game and let others download the multiplayer part for free" approach.
FWIW I see an alarmingly lot of people glued to their phone while walking, in a restaurant, on the train, while driving, etc.
Once it's normalized that they don't actually have to "pull out, put it back", just use (wear) it all the time as it is with phones, there will be a market.
It seems hard to imagine how this could possibly be enough to satisfy the waiter scenario you’ve described. But my understanding is that it attempts to handle some version of this social need.
Immersive experience, that is.
(note that I understand your point, just want to be sarcastic and bitter when I think about phone / AR-VR and other social media addicted people, who are eventually going to be the target audience of any of these new time wasters)
They sell million or less in year or two. This is simply too expensive to be a consumer device. There must be at least 5-6 years of iteration until it finds use on the mass market.
Heck, even Cyberpunk 2077 is somewhat interesting in this regard. I started with a Corpo character and realized the persistent screen elements with a news ticker, some other data etc were interesting in a game world I knew nothing about. I imagine having extremely limited but immediately present text overlays would be exceptionally useful to replace my phone or watch if the device enabling it was of a sufficiently unassuming form factor that didn't take work to use.
If Apple can give me the equivalent of what airpods did you headphones with cords but for smartphones, even if in an extremely limited capacity to just say, iMessage at first, that would be huge.
Then give me a haptic ring I can fidget with that, when combined with a purpose built virtual keyboard, can do text entry, and that is a killer app IMHO.
The thing about Apple is not to judge based on v.1 but to watch the iteration. They are the most persistent company in the world. Compare to Google which seems to have ADHD. Apple will iterate and iterate and in 5 years we’ll all be shocked that it is an “overnight success” and undisputed market leader with an unassailable ecosystem.
If their stock tanks after the release I’ll see it as a good buying opportunity!
Apple has had its share of failures like any other company, and kills products like any other company. There is plenty of precedence for their AR headset to just fizzle out.
Good for them that meta has shown this is a dead end. I'm sure they're ready to cut bait on this.
...dovetailed with their cut support for SteamVR and the OpenXR standard. In-house APIs are a nice investment, but arguably pointless when everyone's content is built on pre-existing and open frameworks. This whole project feels like a side-pot to me, and Apple themselves are clearly afraid to commit.
These were all part of the persistent iteration of the iPhone and Macbook, hardly failed products.
Also Homepod has just had a second version (released 2023), and a third version is in the works, and it's homepod mini has been very successful, so still under iteration. Considering the state of LLM's and everyone's assumption that this will turbocharge smart-speaker capability, they are probably quite glad that they at least have an established and mildly successful product in the space (they own c10% of the market for smart speakers).
The current ‘normal’ MBPs don’t have touchbars.
Getting more successful with the Mini. The OG Homepod was a very V1 product like the person you replied to was saying
https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/06/06/homepod-mini-was-...
AirPower: never released
Butterfly keyboards/Touch Bar/force touch: all features. The person you’re replying to is talking about product lines. You might as well list cd/devs drives and FireWire as well because things come and go.
MobileMe: The majority of MobileMe features still exist under iCloud so I’m not sure what you’re getting at there.
Ping: this was always just a feature for iTunes and not much more. It wasn’t a product in and of itself.
>All services were gradually transitioned to and eventually replaced by the free iCloud, and MobileMe ceased on June 30, 2012, with transfers to iCloud being available until July 31, 2012, or data being available for download until that date, when the site finally closed completely.
The MobileMe Drive system was shut down in 2012, as your link says. However the new feature in iCloud wasn't introduced until Yosemite, which came out in 2014. There was a two year gap where the service did not exist.
The first-class products have all been launched like the parent comment said, along with iterations that build upon them.
So to me it seems Apple is still putting some level of priority on its main products and just less so on accessories.
HomePods still exists in both the mini form and the original form factor with newer chips.
The modern version of Ping is what is built into Apple Music.
Unless a new round of layoffs starts because of gpt-4 powered apps.
Yes, and the fact that they don't abandon a product once it ships. Other consumer electronic companies still see products as one and done, sort of like videogame consoles before Xbox. When the product went gold it became forever frozen in time, warts and all.
Apple not only iterates the design every year but tries to bring forward the software in the previous years. The iPhone you bought gets arguably better every year.
Other companies try to emulate this behavior by pushing new versions of operating systems but their hardware bares to lineage so it's often a Herculean effort that undertake half-assed.
To build upon your argument…
The art is in being strong out of the gate in the correct one or two dimensions.
To try and be perfect on all dimensions and depend on concomitant perfect synchrony is a big reason why products like Stadia fail.
This just isn’t true. People loved that thing and experience wise it did 90% of what people needed at the time better than anything in the market.
Although this headset isn’t the product. The product was going to be ar glasses in actual glasses form factor but it’s clear that’s many years past the spec’d release date and now this headset is just some way to actually profit off this tech investment and get people building apps for the future glasses, if they ever solve the issues.
Comparing it to the state of the Apple Watch is pretty strange because if nothing else the Apple Watch was functional, self contained, worked, and was under $1,000. Even if it didn’t work you could put it on and ignore it. A VR/AR headset is nothing like that and at $3,000 is a significant investment for most everyone.
But who knows. I haven’t seen it. Maybe it will be amazing and exactly what the VR space needs. I suspect it is a really fancy Meta Quest with significantly more processing power. Certainly Apple is in a unique position with their Apple Silicon. But will Apple open it up enough for gaming if that is what it is? Because that has been the problem in the past. Gamers aren’t going to want to buy this thing unless you can plug it into a PC and have it function as a regular VR headset and the Meta Quest crowd isn’t going to shell out 3 grand.
If you sit on Zoom calls all day it sounds amazing.
As someone who spends all day on zoom calls this is the last thing I want.
However, I don’t see why it would be a problem to render my face using AI given there’s already head and eye tracking going on.
The "headphones for your eyes" analogy is incorrect, because if you're on a call, then you can listen via headphones while, for example, making food, or taking care of children, or doing chores. But you can't do any of those things if you can't see your surroundings. Taking over your vision is far more disruptive than taking over your hearing. You might as well be sitting.
Well you’re not going to be able to walk around unless it’s some AR mix, but I can imagine it being very confusing, with trips over furniture galore.
Sure, smart watches were called revolutionary, but the first Apple Watch told the time and was fun but mostly unusable for much else. The notifications popped up, but actual interaction was so slow. But that's fine. It was great to have a watch (a >100 year old device), that shows texts.
Same for phones - it was just iterative, but done well.
Music players - obviously, around for a long, long time, and people were well used to portable tape, CD, and minidisk players, and even basic MP3 players existed.
This is a genuinely evolutionary change. People aren't used to information privately beamed to their eye-balls, walking around with glasses sure, but those don't provide information like a mechanical watch did, so not sure that's the analogy.
It's a Mac all over again - something actually new, interesting, and needing a killer app.
There's a reason people think Apple invented them.
I'm a grump, and don't see how you could make VR headsets into a mass market product at this time, but Apple has been good at doing that in the past; MP3 players were probably going to boom otherwise, smartwatches were a bit of a fizzle (imho), but Apple inspired everyone to become smartphone zombies in a way that BlackBerry and Nokia couldn't.
Which is not to say everything they touch is gold. AirPorts are dead. Xserve is dead. Not sure if I should mention 90s failures like Newton and Pippin. Apple TV doesn't seem to have the broad reach into non-Apple users that iPod had, etc.
Airport Express isn't necessary any more either - they've been replace with HomePods and HomePod Minis.
It would be nice to have a dedicated Apple Timemachine box, but plenty of other devices exist in that segment.
I think if they wanted they could come up with a mesh solution, or build it into HomePods. But, it's not really necessary, and not an area they'll sell in quantities that make a difference to them.
AppleTV is actually a pretty fantastic product, and I love mine, putting them onto TVs, especially the modern ad-filled smart TVs. Dumb TVs are hard to find, so I just don't both connecting the TV to a network, and purely use an AppleTV. The interface beats anything I've seen natively on a TV, and I trust it more than Samsung, LG, etc.
I had 1st gen watch till 2019 and my usage pattern hardly changed with the newer versions:
- clock and weather information
- notifications
- Apple Pay
- exercise tracking
What else are you using it now?
I use it for things like timers, eg. cooking, quite a lot. I have high blood pressure, so like the other health features, which have improved a lot.
Pretty nice for directions, and it can store music now to use, which is handy.
I think a lot of features, even the basic ones have improved a lot too, to the point it's hard to remember that the first was pretty basic. Maybe I'm mis-remembering and the rest of the world has also caught up to the wonders of tap to pay, and wallet/etickets. Somewhere in the last couple of years realistically not carrying a phone became more of a reality.
Go back over old threads here where people describe it as life changing.
I used supernatural for many months, and yes it does get sweaty—-you have to wear awkward vr sweatbands.
But the experience is like no other exercise I’ve tried. The reporting about the meta acquisition of this company is all off.
This is a major market, and it doesn’t really matter if it is $3k if it gets people to enjoy exercise. People spend vast amounts of money on fitness equipment.
This would be just one use case for the product, but a perfect fit for apple’s ecosystem.
Maybe Apple has just worked out that they can't build a good VR headset at a level of quality that they are proud of for a sales price of less than £3k with today's technology?
Apple probably isn't going to compete with the Meta Quest, but if their initial goal is just focussed on building the best VR headset on the market (never mind the cost!) rather than to make something price-competitive with Meta, they might achieve that.
If gaming isn’t the primary use case what is? Nothing in VR/AR I have seen beyond gaming has enough appeal or function to be worth it for more than a few hundred thousand people in a few different industries.
- 3d modeling/sculpting
- Architecture
- Interior Design (great uses for passthrough AR here)
- Product Design / CAD
Quite happy to still work with a keyboard and mouse sitting down though and don’t really want to give that up for some waggly controllers.
Doubt plugging it into a PC to play windows games even crossed their mind, but also the number of people who can both afford a pc, headset and have the room to actually use it is such a small number that it’s an evolutionary dead end.
The Apple Watch was far from “self contained” when it was first introduced. It couldn’t really run third party apps at all. The “apps” were just projections from the phone.
Over many years, it did become more self contained
- running apps independently
- gaining its own GPS chip
- gaining its own cell connection
- gaining its own App Store
Even today, you still need an iPhone for at least the first setup.
Also don’t forget that you couldn’t buy music on the iPhone when it was first introduced and it wasn’t until the iPod Touch was introduced later that year that you could buy music directly from the phone and then only over wifi.
It wasn’t until iOS 5 that you could update your phone without using iTunes on your computer.
People who have a full sized tower PC in their house are a market too small for apple to ever care about.
I say that as one of the few that does.
- Apple initially positioned it as a fashion accessory, which few people cared about
- the public wanted it to be like a smartphone on your wrist, and were let down by the limited features
Then Apple realized the value was in the health features. They started positioning it properly and people bought it more. All at the same time the tech improvements made the watch more capable and started becoming even more useful. But at the core, it’s the health focus + typical Apple ease of use and quality that made it take off.
I can see the same trajectory happen with VR:
- Apple starts positioning it as a metaverse / HoloLens type headset, which few people care about
- People assume it’s an « iMac in VR » type device and get disappointed that it isn’t.
But over time, Apple realizes that the number one value is in gaming, and gradually shifts focus and positioning. It attracts more and more people while at the same time the tech improves. Then eventually the tech allows for a headset that can fit in a smaller for factor and truly helps people beyond gaming. As an enhancement to day to day tasks with light enough glasses for example.
Before bed I plug in all my devices.
One can dream. I wear a solar eco drive that is coming up on ten years with the original battery. Not exactly comparable but the middle ground is unimpressive.
Except that Apple sucks at gaming. They just don't get the market. There's no way they'll make a product whose primary focus is gaming. If they do they'll fail hard.
Did Apple even have a hundred executives in 2008?
The first I heard about it was certainly when Steve Jobs returned. In fact I remember it struck me how "Jobsian" it was: to create in-the-circle and out-of-the-circle groups. Unsurprisingly this is when you started seeing political jockeying, coattail riding and all the other rather gross human behaviors I had not experienced at Apple up until then.
Decision-making doesn’t scale, so there’s a practical reason not to have thousands and thousands of people in that decision-making ring.
What do you make of the fact that this is also when the company went from nearly bankrupt to wildly successful?
Is making humans compete (within ethical boundaries that should be set by labor law etc of course) a great way to get the best out of them?
https://www.quora.com/unanswered/What-is-it-like-to-attend-a...
Does it get leaked though?
First, there are the "expected" predictions (a new phone is coming in the fall!) that keep failing to predict what actually will happen with hardware or software on the phone (iPhone 14 was to be foldable and made out of titanium with new exciting ways of interacting with the OS ffs)
Second, there are outrageous claims about new hardware that either fail to materialise completely (AR/VR was definitely coming two years ago and absolutely one hundred percent definitely coming last year, and will absolutely certainly no doubt about it come this year), or are not nearly in the ballpark of what is actually going to be released (rumors of a desktop-level CPU were around since probably the first A-series chips, but literally no one predicted either M-series or the transition process).
The one actual leak I remember when an iPhone pre-production version was left at a bar almost a decade ago now.
Apple excels at opinionated product vision on new form factors and finding new killer features. And that's what the dying AR space needs the most.
The problem with VR/AR is that they anything but frictionless or perfect. They are expensive, uncomfortable and limited. They are a million miles away from what's depicted in sci-fi and likely will be for decades, perhaps hundreds of years. If anything, the sci-fi dream works against them by illustrating just what a stark difference there is between fiction and (artificial) reality.
AR glasses could replace your phone, TV and computer monitors. Of course we are a bit away from that future but just replacing screens alone has the capability to shake up the world.
It’s an unfixable problem. Instead of fucking around, why don’t they just make siri be like cortana in halo. Give me a cute hologram in the real world with a GPT model behind it.
Every house in the world could have a siri pod. Your phone could connect to their siri pod and let your siri come out and talk to you while you’re at their house. That would be some real science fiction. Imagine siri popping up in your car and directing you or warning you about pedestrians it can see that are about to step into the road.
Tempted to get the Reality Pro/One on launch, but at $3k and the tech team saying that not only will there be nothing exciting software-wise at launch, but a cheaper version and a more advanced version are on the horizon (no pun intended), I can't justify getting it.
If someone like me who is basically the perfect demographic crossover doesn't want it, not sure who will... but time will tell.
Recently they have Wi-Fi 6E across new products and it could be for pushing compressed pixels to the headset which needs only to be a thin client like the studio display.
I tried productivity / desktop on my quest 2 and it was awful.
Their confidence is blinding.
I have not found a use for a VR headset or the Apple Watch, beyond as a toy, or fashion accessory. Even then, it's been so long since I've worn a watch that wearing a watch is awkward. Yet apparently Apple sells a lot of them, and it is the smart watch with the highest number of global sales.
It was only once I started using it for its health tracking capabilities and turned off many of the annoying notifications that I started regularly wearing it.
Is it as essentially as having my phone with me when I leave the house? Ultimately, no, and it does require more thought about how to squeeze the most utility out of it (when compared to a smartphone) but I think the reason it’s so popular is the flexibility it affords:
- Sport tracking watches are great at tracking everything down to a fine detail BUT you wouldn’t want to be seen wearing them out to a dinner
- Traditional (non-smart) watches look very nice as a fashion accessory BUT are useless for fitness and integrating other data into the faster-to-read watch form factor
Particularly as it didn't show the time. (Initial versions didn't have enough power to keep the display on all the time).
Apple finally got me by fixing that and by making their phones too large to carry around while running. Grrr. But glad they did.
It's been eye-opening. The fitness and sleep tracking are fantastic, and if you are having issues in that area, potentially life-changing.
I was also resisting contactless payment, being a typical German "cash is good" guy. And I still think cash is good. But during the pandemic everything went contactless, and Apply Pay with the watch is just super convenient. Always there, no PIN to enter or signature to verify, ever.
Life-saver when my wallet got stolen on holiday.
And of course super-comfy listening to podcasts, books or music while exercising or on public transport.
Since I got it with the cell radio, I nowadays often just leave my phone at home. Who needs to carry that around? And no phone, no social media :-)
If it follows the Apple Watch, then it will be the undisputed market leader in the product segment, which honestly I think it will. The competition is very weak. Meta's efforts have largely failed with the MetaVerse and their whole ecosystem seams very stagnant. Valve and HTC aren't doing much in this space. Sony's PSVR is promising, but it is completely locked into the PlayStation ecosystem, so I see it being limited just to first person games for the most part. Microsoft has completely abandoned the consumer market with HoloLens and prefer to sell very expensive headsets to industry and the military instead.
This is a very ripe market for Apple to disrupt if they can execute well. Very reminiscent of the smart watch market before the Apple Watch.
What is there to disrupt?
Really think about that statement for a minute. Maybe telepresence if you market it right, but the money is all in gaming and social use. And if you're gonna buy a headset, would you rather get the $300 one with Beat Saber and VR Chat, or cough up $3,000 for FaceTime in VR?
I think Meta has done all they can here. It's frankly a shock they managed to sell over 10 million Quest units, it would be a miracle if Apple can ship over a million at the price they're considering. Even if they do get the coveted iPhone-level install-base (fat chance), Apple cut ties with industry standards like OpenXR and SteamVR years ago. Their entire ecosystem will have to get built up from scratch, and they'll also have to fend off competitors selling units at literally 10% of the price.
For Apple to become the undisputed market leader in this product segment, they'd need a lot more than just a headset that exists. This project is looking less Apple Watch and more Apple Newton.
This isn't about disruption, this is about creating a new market.
If I think of myself as an example, I don't have interest in the gaming angle. If it is comfortable enough and the experience is great, I might buy it for telepresence, if for no other reason than richer visits with my children on the other side of the country. Maybe there is some other use I would buy into, but I'm sure not seeing it yet.
Working with the industry seems like it could stand to make a lot more money for Apple. As a Quest competitor it's a hard pill to swallow, but as a high-quality dev kit for cross-platform VR/AR experiences, it could carve a lucrative new segment for itself.
On the other hand they wholeheartedly embraced gaming on mobile (their AppStore page is nothing but gaming, realy), so who knows
At $3000 it is already nothing like the Apple Watch. That's the real deal breaker that I see.
The whole wearable & ubiquitous computing dream greatly motivated me as a grade schooler. The idea was compelling then & still interesting/hopeful now. Given the specs (below) of the hallmark display, the p4 Private Eye (1989), I am excited to see what we can do. And Apple's general competency at hardware will be interesting to see at play as we go-forth-again:
> Mounted on a pair of glasses, with a 720 x 280 pixel red monochrome screen in a 8.89 x 3.81 x 3.18mm casing, the actual display measured 1.25-inches diagonally but appeared as though you were viewing a 15-inch monitor from 18-inches away.
The possibility of me owning an Apple product is up from 0%.
3D content - particularly live procedural 3D animated content based on large models - is maybe 15-20 years away. It needs a couple of orders of magnitude more processing power.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's Apple's planned destination. If so, it's going to take a while to get there.
This version seems more like a toe in the water. It will appeal to early adopters and a few gamers, but it's not going to be a game changer.
That's how Apple/Cook should refer to Apple VR/AR.
Under promise, over deliver.
Projecting 1m unit sales the first year is nutty. Sure, they might sell that many. And then what?
Also, the initial models should be over priced, specifically targeting sexy use cases. Ridiculously expensive, maximally awesome, hype building applications. Like telemedicine, protein folding, and walking tours of fictional settlements on Mars.
Let people imagine and build boutique applications for a couple years, normalize the emerging market, before introducing a consumer mass market model.
But Apple TV still hasn't delivered, and its first version was released 16 years ago. It's still unusable for anything but the most basic tasks, and is a mess as a product: it fails as amedia hub, it fails as a smart device hub, it fails as a compute hub...
I am going to go out on a limb and say unless headsets change profoundly they will have limited impact on most people's daily lives. I'll have to remind myself to come back in a few years and check this post.
My guess would be that their headset is just a set of goggles that requires an iPhone for computation. Then, they can sell them for $300 or even $150.
The article suggests that VR is a tool for long-distance relationships. For $300, that could become possible.
You think that same Apple will sell, what may be a totally new revolutionary product of less than half the cost of WHEELS?
Try again.
Not many of them though.
AirPods are 200-300 and an absolute cash cow, and probably system sellers for Mac and iPhone.
Something that does less for cheaper might be an easier sell though then more for more.
For me the Apple Branding is enough. One of the biggest barriers for me picking up the Oculus Quest is that it’s attached to Facebook.
At least we know that the apple device, whilst limited in screens and slam, will have a decent software stack that will put consumer's ease of use first, rather than bullshit promotion driven dev from oculus.
With ads.
Good luck, Meta.
So which is it? Is VR a dehumanizing medium with no redeeming qualities, or is it a horizon of content and potential yet to be unlocked? It feels like HN's opinion on it changes every 15 minutes.
Personally, I think VR is a bust. That being said, there is not an ice cube's chance in hell of Apple out-maneuvering Meta here. Zuck will happily pour billions into this spite machine, he already has. On top of that, he has the leverage of a more "open" platform (will Apple give you Root?) and larger install-base. All Zuckerberg needs to 'win' is a cross-platform killer app. If Apple's hardest spin on this is "FaceTime with 3D characters", their product is toast. A cross-platform protocol/experience will become the dominant player, and everyone will gravitate towards the cheapest option.
I assumed however that Zuck would need to see a return on his investment — which hitherto has been in the form of advertising. If we entertain the idea that VR has legs and Apple's is ad-free then I already see a clear winner.
> which hitherto has been in the form of advertising.
Where are you getting that from? Their main revenue outlet is the same as Apple's, payment processing for their store: https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/10/oculus-sold-5-million-wort...
Why place an opinion on ‘hacker news’ as if it is an individual mind?
Hacker News isn’t one person constantly changing their mind it’s a hive of constantly shifting debate about a new technology and all that implies.
It would be weird if the opinions were uniform and unchanging.
As opposed to Zuckerberg literally pouring billions into exactly poorly executed Facetime with 3D characters that even his own employees are unwilling to use?
Its clear... how?
They did have a moat, and they were ahead of the game with Oculus. And then they squandered that on whatever the seven hells Meta is.
And John Carmack ended up quitting Meta. "we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort": https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid0iPixEvPJ...
If during the VR headset announcement Xbox was somehow involved, it would get my attention though.
It’s just ludicrous money for a shit product. Even the first full VR headsets came nowhere close to that price.
This isn't the less expensive mass market consumer device that people have been calling "Apple Glasses".
Apple can be fashion too.
As long as the product is closer to AirPods Max than Mac Pro, people will buy it.
The real problem isn't the shapes (there's plenty of free meshes out there), it's making them interactive, which is a complicated problem that extends well beyond the capabilities of our current generation of LLMs. Just look at Roblox: it's successful because you can make the world do stuff. But we can be pretty sure that just making VR/AR Roblox doesn't make a killer app.
The challenge that a killer app for VR/AR needs to overcome is being more than a glorified art gallery.
2. I think Apple has enough money to fund both initiatives to be alright
3. The unit economics of LLM products are still not proven and even when it is, any hardware product will more than likely have higher margins. Do you think people are going to give up the iOS ecosystem for Android based on an improved voice assistant?
- Clear Vision
- Reality Field
- Apple Reality
- Reality HD
- eXtended Reality
This headset will have a loyal customer base, will make a big splash, but will not transform computing, creative work, or anything for the everyday user.
Apple Watch got so extremely lucky. I do not ever want to see Apple make product decisions like 'well this worked, so let's see if this will, too.' There is zero taste in that, zero craftsmanship, it's just AppleGPT Product Edition.
[not done]: Have we really all forgotten how we all fell on our collective a** we were when we saw Mac, iPod, M1, iPhone? How hard is it to know - "guess what, this was kinda 'meh'" vs. "well that changes everything"?
Oooh, I love these "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."-type proclamations.
> Apple Watch got so extremely lucky.
Breathtaking.
> Apple Watch got so extremely lucky
But given that others have tried and arguably failed to have the same impact, this is not sizably attributed to luck at all.
Apple won it not because their watch is 'great' - but because they have such brand cache that they could sell 100m of anything once the market learns about them. Airport could absolutely come back and sell that amount, taken into consideration 6 watches == one household == ~1-3 airports - with the marketing budget they used on Watch.
Long story short, they are in a precarious position. They must make something to stay relevant with financial markets, their manufacturing pipeline, keep operationally excellent with sourcing, etc... so it's not meant to be a full 'knock' on them. The 'knock' comes in taking that chance twice with a shrug from your top execs 'well the watch worked out, let's see if this does' - that's just not it.
I partially disagree with this argument. They sold some 10 million units in 2016 - it might be that because of the success and ubiquity of iPods and iPhones in the decade leading up to this, that people thought that the first Apple Watch was a great product (it wasn't, really IMO). Brand cache, or whatever, sure.
But you don't sell nearly 60 million units in 2021 off luck.
The number of Apple customers from iPod that transitioned to iPhone was x%,
The number of iPhone to AirPods was y%
The number of iPhone to Watch was z%
z < y
z < x
in a cumulative measure from a time frame of 3 years from launch. Defining the proportion of current customers to converted sales is where one can play words with defining luck vs. skill vs. rent-seeking. If you have billions units and only convert 20% vs. other products that convert 75%, then maybe one is considered inferior to the other - and to which I confer the title of luck.
Now the fun question would be if x < y or the other way around.