Apple’s new headset meets reality
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
What does the author consider to be a victory?
Tim Cook was elevated because he had the operational capability to grow Apple. Jobs did not consider Cook to be a product design person. But Jobs trusted Cook to find and keep people who could design products.
By any stretch of the imagination, the company's biggest victories have been in growing and holding together the vast ecosystem of HW / SW and services that continuously deliver the highest customer satisfaction ratings. The reward for that has been becoming the biggest company in the world. (Some might consider this a victory.)
If introducing new hit products is the only kind of victory that can exist, then Apple Silicon and AirPods victories also go to Cook.
Well, there's the Apple II, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone...
Apple has had a long history of products that redefined the future of entire categories, and almost all of them up to this point except the Apple Watch included deep involvement by Jobs.
Other than that not much, but to be clear there has not really been any other inventions in this time span like those you mention. The market is more mature.
This is what makes coming out with new products harder - Apple doesn't have a market for a mid-range camera, or a GPS, or a music player, or a PDA - because those are all things the iPhone does. They add capabilities to the phone to usurp other device markets (most recently, emergency satellite communicators and OnStar-style crash detection). Apple releases new devices most often by releasing them inside the iPhone.
Which is why now, with a saturated cellphone market which is slowing down the upgrade frequency, they are so interested in wearables (separate hardware that augments your phone) and services (software that augments your phone).
The sad thing is that there are areas they could make a lot of innovations, such as smart home accessories. They killed off the AirPort line, and license out HomeKit with almost no first-party hardware, because those just don't move the needle for a company of Apple's size.
Another example is Lidar 3d scanning in iPhone.
>Which is why now, with a saturated cellphone market which is slowing down the upgrade frequency, they are so interested in wearables (separate hardware that augments your phone) and services (software that augments your phone).
I suspect that annual upgrades to Watch, the maturation of Fitness and Music services and the mix of HW "devices" released in iPhone have strategic goal of supporting the new headset device.
RE: HomeKit, even if it couldn't deliver the revenue opportunity of other businesses of the company, I think it had potential to be far more than it is now.
The head of home services, Sam Jadallah left before his third year during a critical push into the home with Homepod and Homepod Mini.
It could be his efforts were blocked--perhaps to starve advancement of Smarthome while Amazon was bleeding cash on Alexa. But regardless his team failed to push the category forward and Home languished.
HomeKit and Siri are perhaps the most high profile weak products from Apple that, had they been handled differently, people would have greatly benefited from for several years now.
That said, neither seemed to have that much revenue opportunity and it is clear looking backward that their weakness has not (yet) obviously held the company back in any way.
Is it equal to the legacy of Apple under Jobs? Definitely not. But how many other companies/people released 3 revolutionary products?
If that is the measure, then we have to bring in Jobs' tenure as not only CEO but company founder that stretched 25 years as CEO, 1976 to 1985 and 1997 to 2011.
Cook only took the reins in 2011, and at that time arguably the company should not have focused on releasing yet more revolutionary products.
iPhone is the most successful consumer product in history, focus was correctly placed in supporting that, building moats around it and positioning the ecosystem to support the next big thing.
One product often left out, which may have started with Jobs, but delivery should be attributed to Cook is the new Apple HQ. The initial impact has crumbled due to Covid WFH.
However, this campus may turn out to be a force multiplier going forward. If so, it is a victory, but not in the minds of consumers.
Much more important is the people you interact with every day, both in person and at a distance. If I had to choose between jobs doing the same work but one was in a closet but interacting with people I like or the apple campus and interacting with people I felt no connection to, I would take the former in a heartbeat.
I don't think I'm an outlier. If indeed I'm not, what does that say for how important and special Apple HQ will end up being in the long run?
Even in an online office! When I had Slack, I felt much more involved with people and the company (500+ employees) culture overall. Ever since they transitioned to Teams, I feel like I only exist within my own team.
A pleasant and aesthetic office, surround by nature, built with sustainability in mind, etc is already a driving force for the type of culture you want instilled in your company.
It will certainly attract a type of people that want to work surrounded by beauty, it’s already paving the way for a common ground of understanding.
It goes much further than just wonder. It’s a feeling that persists. A nice feeling.
Culture does matter for this as well though, as enjoying your coworkers but not the culture may still make the job somewhere you don't want to stick around.
I think physical surroundings may help with the culture some, but they'll always be a much lesser influence than the people and policies in place. What's worse, sometimes companies will think the physical surroundings are much more important than they are, and focus on those instead of fixing the policies destroying their actual work culture. I think most people past their early twenties would much rather have a better set of work policies than a really good view out of an office window. Sometimes that's doubly true because those policies might allow you to spend less time in the office and more time at home, around your real family.
I was once like that. Until I get over my anxiety and started to hang out more with girls. Especially from the arts and languages side.
The way they choose their environments… where they go to eat out or have a coffee, the clothing they wear, buying flowers, how they setup their home…
Even when I was down, being in their environments just made me feel more cozy. It was heartwarming.
In contrast, most of my engineer friends have either literally a mattress and a desk. Or, they just buy for their house whatever, without any thought in regards to color pallete, textures, shape, etc
You’re describing my first two apartments. I only wound up buying a couch and a coffee table because I wanted to appear somewhat normal in case a woman came by my apartment.
The combination of design work, history of buildings/art/cities, and socialization with people hyperfocused on their surroundings gives you superpower awareness of great environments at every scale, from silverware to regional planning. It makes travel a joy, no matter where, Paris or Poughkeepsie, it’s all fascinating.
On the downside, there are impossible odds you’ll ever get to actually create any of what you imagine, and the horrors of miserable design, a world full of McMansions and cheap junk, will crap all over your visions of paradise.
Not that Apple is a bad company or place to work or anything, but it also isn't some magic zen garden that will imbue all who work there with the power to change the world.
For 90%+ of the people who go to work there, it's a job, and the scenery changing that equation meaningfully seems like wishful thinking. It might be nice, but it's not going to radically alter your output.
https://www.macworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Jons-and...
I'm pretty sure (strike that, am certain) the secret sauce is not the office.
Apple Park: it kinda sucks to actually work at Apple Park. It’s a goldfish bowl. It’s impossible to focus. But, yes, it looks really nice. It’s very pretty, that is undeniable.
Also, Teslas and Mercedes aren’t exotic or rare. They just cost a bit more than most Hondas. And the rare, occasional actual exotic doesn’t inspire new features, better design, or QA polish, they just indicate someone’s a pretentious ass with more money than sense. Remember that Steve drove a fairly pedestrian Mercedes.
Here's a forum post saying they were selling for $160k at dealerships https://mbworld.org/forums/sl-class-r230/25583-how-much-2003...
Really not a "pedestrian" Mercedes, at the time it would have been in the upper tier of their price range. The current-day SL AMG model starts at $178k.
And he leased a new one every 6 months.
Tell me you live in a rich neighborhood without telling me you do.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/10/how-s...
Sometimes what people think they want isn't what they actually want once they experience it. People unhappy and surrounded by drab office space might pine for a beautiful setting to work in, but I suspect most of them will find that it wasn't the lack of beauty making them unhappy and that a change of scenery doesn't do nearly enough to rectify the problem.
Lack of environmental enrichment is not what gets in the way of innovation.
But, no, it’s not a force multiplier vs a more pedestrian setting.
> However, this campus may turn out to be a force multiplier going forward. If so, it is a victory, but not in the minds of consumers.
Curious, have you ever actually talked to anyone that worked there? While I have admittedly only talked to a couple folks, they either hated it or were at best indifferent. There reasons ranged from "my commute is now twice as long" to "it's still just a giant suburban office park".
Again, in no way arguing this is some sort of representative sample, so I am curious what Apple employees who work there actually think about it.
Personally I'd almost certainly prefer a real office (even a tiny closet-like one) with a door, maybe in Infinite Loop.
[1] https://www.macworld.com/article/670869/complete-guide-to-ap...
(I've always compared it to some beautiful, modern art gallery — but without any art.)
But to the above degree, I have to say I enjoyed all large Apple work environments (even some of the more far flung ones I worked at like Results Way).
It's because I have enjoyed being able to walk down a hall, up a floor, and chat with The Guy That Works on IOKit Display-support. I am a "social engineer" (not one to socially engineer though if you know what I mean). I truly disliked working from home for extended periods.
On my current team we share a hall-wide office that seats 4. On my old team I shared a half-hall wide room with another person.
Most people have this 2 person arrangement. Some teams sit in groups of 6-8 together. All of this is Siri.
Teams in other orgs are wildly different. I had a friend in iCloud that was in one of those open office style arrangements. She hated it. She left to Netflix eventually.
I'd say it's probably Coca-Cola?
https://s2.q4cdn.com/470004039/files/doc_financials/2023/q2/...
It's an unrealistic & impractical scenario, obviously, but IMO it's more likely they'd want to increase their liabilities (and likely WOULD be able to - lol!) without touching their assets. It's actually an interesting & somewhat comical mind game, even if nothing else.
FWIW, I've no personal position.
But Air-pods, Apple Watch and Apple TV streaming were all under cooks watch. Maybe not as ground breaking but still very important. Mind you, who else has been doing ground breaking stuff like under Steve? I cannot think of anything other than the recent AI stuff. It kind of feels like Steve picked the last of the low hanging fruit and then bowed out before it came to stagnation.
I say this as someone that uses none of these type of devices from any vendor.
Is this similar to how AMD's Bulldozer architecture back around that timeframe was the writing was on the wall for their current competitive dominance over Intel?
PA Semi was a great talent accu-hire, but AFAIK at the time of acquisition they only had Power-based designs ready for market.
> It kind of feels like Steve picked the last of the low hanging fruit and then bowed out before it came to stagnation.
PT Barnum was a renowned showman as well, but that doesn't mean he trained all the elephants.
For instance, I would hardly say the release of a market-dominating phone was a foregone conclusion based on the success of the iPod, and an Apple without the iPhone would look incredibly different.
Sure, people wanted to take their music with them, but the nearly purely multitouch interface was a fresh invention - the iPod did not have a touch interface AFAIK until three years later.
I just don't see something which was such a fresh take and new engineering - to the point that other smartphone vendors thought the original keynote demos were staged - was low-hanging fruit.
By low hanging fruit, I mean the concept of a portable computer in your pocket. I'm not undermining the astounding work that went into things like the iPhone - The execution was fifth steps above everyone else. I just mean after the iPhone and iPad, ideas that had been around for a long while but had not been executed well, we have been waiting to see what the next step will be. I feel this is why things like VR got so much traction.
The idea that you could have two, disconnected pods seems to have been quite bold.
The obvious idea of wireless is anything but bold
While the Airpods seem completely obvious now, they were pretty radical and controversial when first announced.
Maybe noise cancelling boom is another reason. NC also requires battery and amp so why don't make it wireless? IIRC until Sony MDR-1000X sold well (that's sold in 2016, same year as iPhone 7!), noise cancelling market was minor Bose's market for airplane user.
Their winning traits may seem banal, but in everyday carry objects small utility improvements play a huge role. Not having to deal with cables and increased range of movement are enough - what elevated AirPods though is that a visible, wearable product is an implicit fashion statement. Apples product designers succeeded in making st thing that is clearly recognisable and stands out against similar products already on the market, but is subtle enough not to disturb anything or polarise by totally overthrowing stylistic and societal convention. Perfect mix of identity and brand that is easy to integrate with your personal image.
Apple silicon is another kind of thing: it's just the same thing as before but cheaper and more powerful, without compromising any trait that made the predecessor products appealing.
Apple "reality" or whatever - I don't see carrying any of those same traits. It's much too visually disruptive to become an AirPod, it's much too close to similar products to be an M1, and on top of this it's success fully depends on expensive-to-produce software content within a technically complicated ecosystem, while Apple has long lost it's profile as a developer centric and welcoming brand and rather capitalized on it's ubiquity and alienated many developers who only still contribute to the platform it because they have too by sheer numbers.
Apple might be able to not totally fail spinning up the platform, because of buying power, image and again numbers.
But those just slightly more practical, still bulky and odd looking VR glasses are nowhere near replicating the seamless product fit of iPods, IPhones, AirPods or CPUs.
It's Metaverse all over again.
I don't think that's enough. AirPods "just work" in a way that no prior Bluetooth headset ever did. Everything else was a kludge, particularly when it came to switching between multiple devices.
I haven’t heard anything in-ear that comes close, disclaimer though I honestly haven’t tried many other in-ears in that price category.
The AirPods Pro were a game-changer for me: I could always have headphones in my pocket, and isolate myself from the world whenever I wanted. The 2nd generation surprised me with much better sound and noise cancelation.
Don't get me wrong: over-ear Sonys (I have those) will still sound better and remove more noise. And my B&O H6 gen2 sound much better still if there is no noise around. But I can't have any of those with me at all times, I can't wear them when it's really hot outside or when it's really cold (because of head coverings).
AirPods I just always throw in my jeans pocket and they work anytime, anywhere.
It's not about a "fashion statement" as some say, it's about a really good product that changes your life patterns because it works so well.
Tim Cook's first major executive move as CEO was to fire Scott Forstall.
So was Steve Jobs—Tim Cook would have fired him, too, if he could.
I just don't think society currently has an appetite for a $3000 product that gives the wearer visual superpowers (that is the promise after all) and is an impossible to ignore distinction between classes. I honestly think we're at the point where I wouldn't be surprised if it's google glass all over again x 100, where unhinged people are attacking and pulling these expensive devices off of people's heads [1][2].
Maybe in 2017 when AR was really hot could it have gotten adoption, but as it stands in 2023 the average consumer is starting to reject this level of tech and fewer and fewer people have the wallet that could support this.
I also suggest avoiding a comparison with the VR market - the only thing they have in common is that it's a thing you put on your face. The infrastructure, deployment, product features, economics, user interfaces, battery, environmental use, UX, legal etc... are all doubly complex with HMD AR over HMD VR
I think it's going to continue to be a long time before persistent everywhere HMD AR is going to be a reality
[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/i-was-assaulted-for-wearing-...
display in-coming text messages and caller ids, a navigation arrow and take snaps. that's it
I suspect there's a market there, but only if the device can be made to look like a pair of fashionable sunglasses, and was driven by the phone in your pocket, adding a customizable HUD to the real world, doing all sorts of things, from translating foreign-language text to overlaying directions or providing real-time info about the bus or train you're trying to catch.
But for now, that's science fiction. Even if we could make the screens/optics work, the glasses still need power, and batteries are still relatively bulky. It wouldn't be much use if it had a short battery life, or drained your phone battery too fast.
But, if you get there, I'm pretty convinced that you will have a population of adopters whether it creates a class divide or not. Certainly cell phone adoption wasn't held back by this factor.
What do you mean by that?
Just curious because I feel the same about EVs, when I see one I think that's a richer than average person.
So I don't see how an AR headset would be a problem. It really depends how does it look like though.
That said, usually people tend to seek out status symbols. People obviously wear Gucci sunglasses in their faces because they are Gucci and expensive. However, I also wonder if this case would be different because of the growing anti-tech resentment and the wearer now being associated with issues liked gentrification, disliked mega corps etc.
The implication here is that you know a compelling case for "what we could do with it" and how to "do it right", so what are the answers (because I'm stumped)?
Interior design is another subject that comes to mind.
I think this is because these companies are preoccupied with controlling the content, they envision doing the same things we do IRL but on their platforms. This is problematic because it means people instead of improving their lives and actually doing things are expected to be pretending doing it and spent their precious lives and money away on this BS.
VR and AR becomes exciting only when you can explore yourself and the world by doing things you can't do in real life. Maybe you want to try being assassin? Maybe you you want to try being from another gender or species? Maybe you want to try being in an actual war zone? Maybe you want to try to create a society with completely different rules from we have now? But no, these are too dangerous because someone might be offended, so in VR you are supposed to go to Paris and spend real money throwing virtual darts or something. They also can't distance themselves from the moral panic because they must milk the platform by controlling the content.
It is outright dystopian and dumb. The core promise of the platforms is "do the same things you do when you don't already do on our platforms so we can monetise that too" and this doesn't converge with the core promise of the tech which is to do things you can't do in real life.
All it takes is a killer app to come along. AR music instrument instruction is my bet. If Apple released this one app along with the glasses it would become a massive hit.
for anything glasses like, you can simply take them off
Might as well just buy a keyboard with lights built into the keys.
anymore, or yet? I think the biggest barriers are form factor and price. History suggests that price of such devices will increase over time. Whether the tech can be squeezed into a form factor that will be desirable to the masses is another problem altogether. The fact that apple (according to this article) have not managed to do it suggests to me that it might be some time off.
The good: - Great form factor - Image quality for screen mirroring is great - Display has good brightness - Decent speakers
The bad: - Nebula (AR software that allows projecting multiple screens) has a worse image quality (I see some flickering). It's also buggy (e.g. it doesn't work on latest MacOS) - Slightly heavy. You would start feeling the weight on your ears after wearing it for an hour or so. - When screen mirroring an M1 Mac, the display settings on Mac doesn't allow you to resize the screen. It works on an Intel Mac though.
Eventually I decided to return it as I want to wait for the device to mature and I don't really have a strong need for AR glasses at this time. I'd be looking forward to their next version.
I think the current AR glasses (Nreal, Rokid, etc) are probably at the same level of maturity as smart watches when they first came out in the early to mid 2010s.
You can get a huge screen in a portable form factor anywhere.
Yep, that’s an easy one. Guess what. It’s not for general use.
I have no idea where AR/VR is going. However, I’m all for Apple spending part of its large cash reserve in R&D. I guarantee something useful will come out of it.
Hopefully, someone with a little vision comes along and says “you know what we could do with this technology…”
Even as an Apple enthusiast, I think this product is destined to be this year’s HomePod.
Apple currently sells a pair of 500$ headphones and a 5000$ monitor. High margin products that are sold as fashion to their top fans is Apple's thing.
They will need one killer app and a sleek enough package, and those are the main bottle necks. The money is hardly an issue.
Technologically, Apple has the distinct advantage of having the best power efficient mobile chips which Facebook did not. Other than that, I don't see how they can solve all the other open problems in VR/AR right now.
I can bet that most people and companies buying the pro-display XDR don't need that level of color calibration to do their job well. But as long as Apple is the most fashionable brand, they can convince people into thinking that's exactly what they need.
Entire industries are built upon impossible to ignore distinction between classes - 100 thousand dollar watches, 10 million dollar cars, designer clothing, and a thousand other examples that come under the category of "bling".
While I have similar doubts about the short to medium term AR/XR future, I don't think it's based on people not wanting to be seen as better than everyone else. As a society we basically encourage that behaviour.
It’s might have been possible 5 years ago, but they missed the bus.
I think the SpaceTop laptop[0] shows an excellent use case for a realistic AR device.
Right now, the kind of AR headsets that companies seem to think they can produce are all fantasy/sci-fi, not much different than the whole Dream of Self-Driving Cars. Sure, it's probably possible eventually, but not anytime soon, or at a price point most can afford in the case of self-contained AR headset that look like normal glasses
[0] https://www.bigtechwire.com/2023/05/19/spacetop-the-groundbr...
Maybe Apple is on the right track here, since the Oculus Quest has sold more units than all the other VR headsets combined. But there is one big difference: Apple's headset will be a very expensive premium product (apparently around 3000 USD), while the Oculus Quest costs just 400 USD.
I think consumers just don't want to spend a lot of money on VR. Except for the Quest, they are all far too expensive, and that's why they didn't sell. Apple just makes the problem worse by increasing the price even more.
John Carmack has made the same point repeatedly: VR is not a high price product category. If he is right, the Apple headset will fail. It may be more feasible to sell $3000 smartphones than to sell VR headsets at this price.
If you use it for a high value application then a high price isn't a barrier. The fundamentals that are shifting here are: (a) Apple is going to push a massive increase in quality (b) Apple is accessing a different market - cashed up professionals
So the real question here is, does the increase in quality get it into a space where new high value applications become viable.
For me, it would only have to be equal or better than using a physical monitor and that would probably justify its value. The fact I could just go anywhere and a full multi-monitor setup with me would be enough.
That type of ultra confident assertion is the sort of thing that usually turns out to be the faulty assumption when breakthrough technologies happen. People struggle to imagine the future reality where something's value add is far outside their experience.
How many businesses have computer monitors? I'd say that's the number that have a use for an ultra high resolution headset that does the same thing. Is it better? I don't know. It has advantages and disadvantages. Is it worth the cost? I don't know. But if you are going to tell me they have no use for it then I'm going to strongly disagree.
On the one hand, sure. On the other hand, beware survivorship bias.
Even with the Meta Quest Pro, it only gets to about 24. The same goes for the HP reverb g2. For $1999, the Varjo Aero PCVR headset comes at 35 PPD, but at that price it doesn’t include the $3000 -$4000 PC to run it or the $600 base stations and controllers. It’s also wired to the PC
At $3000, i am guessing that the Apple headset will be 35 or higher PPD
Something must be off here. My 4k 40″ screen at 30 inches distance gives 70 ppd. It works well for reading, but I don't think it fits "retina quality". Retina would be above 100.
BTW, half of that (35ppd) would be an uncomfortable 1080p on 40″. Which makes Quest Pro even worse.
The only thing I think might make it better is that unlike on static screens head motion could add a nice smoothing effect to the picture, which might potentially lower the required PPD.
F2P game companies? I guess they won't be interested either because Apple will try to bite off a lot of profits from their ads by not letting anyone but themself to run targeted ads.
More importantly, Apple did not ruin relationsships with Media companies. I'd love to see some more VR concerts or other events. Meta totally failed at scaling this.
I not saying like Apple have no chances at all here, but building own gaming ecosystem is extremely prohibitive expensive even for large corporations. Both Microsoft and Sony spent a decades on building their console ecosystems as well as tens of billions of dollars.
Google and Meta both tried an failed miserably. Both Microsoft and Epic tried to compete with Valve on PC, spent billions and 5 years later their store is still dont have any real marketshare.
Most importantly Apple just can't really go out and buy some companies simply because Microsoft, Tencent and few other giants already own half of big players out there. So it's gonna be really really hard for them to create mass market product that can compete.
PS: I won't even start on fact that it's gonna be impossible to do it "in secret" for them this time. Competitors will be on them immediately.
Did Google really try?
The only way they could have convinced me it actually might be around 18 months after launch is if Alphabet spun out an entirely new company for it.
Launching it as Google Stadia was basically a self-fulfilling prophecy of cancellation. Few wanted to pay good money for product that was going to dissolve in a year or two.
But they won't. As-is, Apple's insistence on iron-fisting their ecosystem is hurting them greatly. It's the reason gaming on Mac died, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was the reason inferior headsets outsell the Apple one 10:1.
> It's the reason gaming on Mac died
Some gaming on Mac died because they are pinched by consoles on one side and custom-built gaming rigs on the other. The majority of their sold systems are battery-powered, and your first chance at a GPU power envelope of even 150W is the Mac Pro. Which, coincidentally, is also the only Mac left that has a dGPU option.
The real question is why so few developers take the effort to build and support their iOS games for iPadOS and macOS.
Nope. The user can license it, as long as the client is supported. And good news too, recent Steam updates have added support for ARM64 clients on Unix systems.
> Some gaming on Mac died because they are pinched by consoles
I mean, most gaming on Mac died because of inconvenient 32-bit lib depreciation and Apple's coincidentally unfortunate refusal to support a standardized graphics API. With Proton, Macs are a Steam Deck. Without them, they're a Steam Machine. They're not mega-powerful machines in the first place, but neither is my Thinkpad and it still plays nice with Wine.
> why so few developers take the effort to build and support their iOS games for iPadOS and macOS.
Now that is a head-scratcher. My best guess is that the market is thin, and the carrot at the end of the stick isn't big. It's much easier than porting a DirectX or Vulkan title from scratch though, that's for certain.
I’m not aware of Epic making any VR games
Meta doesn’t make new games for other platforms even now. They’ve culled many od their own game studios. The only issue would be Beat Saber. Imo it’s still VR’s killer app. Still, there are plenty of passable clones and similar games that are good enough
The bigger issue is that Apple doesn’t like games. They never did. They only tolerate games now because of the revenue it brings in. Apple Arcade is a good start, but it still doesn’t convince me that they’re serious about catering to anyone beyond casual gamers
The other big issue is that market for VR and AR pre-Apple remains small. Because of that, there are barely any AAA games. I can count them on one hand. It’s also arguable if they’re actually AAA games when many of them are really dated games.
To be fair, a huge portion of the gaming market is casual gamers, and Apple does incredibly well there on iPhone.
Apple isn't going to make a huge dent in the console market because games have to be restructured to deal with touch controls vs controllers, and to have a revenue model that doesn't start out with a $60 purchase. For all the power of an iPhone, it also still lags a generation behind in graphics performance (because batteries, size, and heat)
There isn't a PC gaming rig market that Apple would make a dent in either. The baseline price of a modular Mac that could have a top-of-line dGPU is too high, and they won't sell enough of them to convince developers to port and support their titles.
It would take an epically _good_ relationship to convince hardware platforms to port their platform exclusive titles over - just count all the Mario and Zelda games that have shipped for Xbox and Playstation.
Beat Saber is available on Steam and any standartized VR headset.
Even if not officially Nintendo games work on PC / SteamDeck and even Xbox via emulation. But that will never ever happen on Apple platform because it's gonna be proprietary, incompatible with anything and locked.
They still have the same issues that everyone else has: compute/heat/battery. Sure they have the vertical and are able to offload rendering onto ipads or laptops, but then you're basically tethered like the quest/vive/etc.
Running unreal re
They still have the same issues that everyone else has: compute/heat/battery. Sure they have the vertical and are able to offload rendering onto ipads or laptops, but then you're basically tethered like the quest/vive/etc.
Running unreal requires a 300watt graphics card, plus ~60watt CPU. even assuming apple can quarter that, its still 90 watts. and not 90 watts of 37 degrees, its 90 watts at 65c. you can't keep that kind of heat next to your face.
And I don’t think Apple wants those people as customers, at least not initially.
$3000 for a headset from a company that sells $1000 monitor stands for $5000 monitors and $500 wheels for the computers doesn’t seem about right to me. In a year or two, the next generation of VR headset will be much better and still $3000 and you will be able to buy this one for, maybe, $2000.
There’s an awful lot of people who can afford $2k for a piece of hardware if it’s good enough.
All that said, I suspect the headset will be priced well under $3000.
To compare, Home Depot sells a $32 cordless drill and a $300 cordless drill (and more expensive rotary hammers and the like). They are not the same product and are not necessarily meant for the same people or the same uses.
Enterprises who are getting XDR monitors for employees when the Studio Display exists do so as a perk.
VR is perhaps like the original Game Boy: Not very powerful, no color screen, but low price and long battery life. It sold a lot, unlike the competition.
The bottom line seems clear: People want a standalone system at low price. That's what the Quest 2 is offering, mostly. I think it could really take off if it was still somewhat cheaper and if it had a lot of exclusive "AAA" games. Say, like the Nintendo Switch.
For comparison, the various leaks and analyst claims say that the Apple headset is going to have 3x or more the effective resolution of the Pimax 8K, with no dedicated space or desktop computer needed to drive it. That's a gigantic leap past anything that exists on the market right now, and at $3,000 it would be a significantly cheaper buy-in for anyone who doesn't already own a thousand-dollar GPU.
Apple's headset would be cheaper and even higher quality from what it sounds like.
That doesn't seem like the lesson to me. I think the lesson here is: VR is not good enough yet to demand a high price tag. And that's certainly my experience with it as well. It's a fun novelty right now, but not worth dropping a couple grand on. But if someone could push it, and make it, I dunno, twice as good, then I could be willing to spend a whole lot more on it.
VR is not there and maybe never will be.
I think that’s probably the ultimate truth at least as long as it requires glasses or goggles.
VR won’t be there, but VR may be here. Tens of millions of units are sold each year. That might be the right size of the market. It’s been around for 30 years now. In some ways it’s a mature market.
We got to where we are today by incremental changes to shipping products over more than 30 years. What VR people hope Apple can do is take the technology we have and make it work for people just like they did with smartphones.
Apple will have to come up with something new for users to do for this product to justify a $X,000 price, almost regardless of how good the hardware is.
many little niceties you hardly notice but would immediately notice the loss of.
with vr and ar you are placing yourself directly within the ecosystem. (the os becomes your reality, if you will, extended… xr… wasn’t that clever of them…)
the iPhone long game shows apple’s willingness to creep slowly into lower cost tiers to preserve the brand value.
carmack doesn’t need to be wrong for apple to succeed. apple just needs to be patient. (and maybe get back to some fundamentals on the software, the operating systems fee like they are beginning to rot a bit.)
But if it's yet another VR headset, it won't work. Camera passthrough is a gimmick that even with most advanced eye tracking and fanciest foveated rendering provides merely a limited approximation of AR that only leads to headaches and eye strain. Despite the article's claims such devices won't be worn all-day on a regular basis.
Apple is also all about being a closed ecosystem, and if the open VR/AR/XR community struggles with content, then Apple is not magically pulling out ton of quality apps (of any kind) out of some hat. I assume its "killer" app would be some AR assistant that would provide various additional contextual information at a literal glance. And then maybe some AR/XR game, maybe something like Ingress/Pokemon Go on steroids. But for an assistant, it has to be smart, and Siri's intelligence is a joke... so I'm skeptical it will be worth the money at launch.
apple can afford to iterate, and their high end and business customers can afford to participate in that process.
it won’t be siri, but they wouldn’t be rolling it out if they didn’t have something that felt different.
And Apple's domain is currently entirely empty of any VR/AR/XR applications. While I expect Safari to get OpenXR^W WebXR support (IIRC it's still not there, right?), even if the hardware specs will be suporior, it is hard to call it an advancement (something that beats the existing user experience), when there's maybe only a few applications.
again, this doesn’t have to be a successful device for apple to have made a successful entry. it just needs to do something different.
are you pretty sure it won’t?
Sure, now it is. But what about when the iPhone was first introduced? It didn't cost anywhere near this much money. For a new product category such as this it makes sense to start out with a cheap product so that as many people adopt it as possible, then you can begin introducing more expensive versions when you have the apps ecosystem to support it.
You could buy a full Index kit, get the wireless upgrade for it, and then a full Vive Pro kit and its wireless upgrade, and have spent about the same amount of money.
How big even is this market, at $3k? 50 million people worldwide?
But there are lots more rich people in the world than that.
And they will spend more than the initial cost, because they will buy apps, Apple Care, and next year some will buy version 2 of the headset.
Surprisingly, what’s worse are the pro controllers. If you have hand tracking turned on, you will constantly lose controller tracking. Even if you turn off hand tracking, you will still lose some controller tracking in fast paced games like beat saber. I am constantly also losing haptic feedback. The original controllers are superior for gaming.
You can pick up the pro from scalpers on eBay for -$800 if you don’t want to pay $1000 for retail. at $800, it feels more like a fair price.
The rest isn't much better than a quest 2.
Sure PCVR still might have better specs, but they’re primarily wired and that’s a huge con if you want to use VR for fitness and it kills immersion when you have to turn a lot. I’ve tried to mitigate this problem with hooks and pulleys on the ceiling. It didn’t help much and it caused additional issues.
You also still can’t do serious work with most of the existing standalone or PCVR headsets. Why? Because you need a minimum PPD of 35 (where 50 PPD is retina quality). To date, HP Reverb G2 and the meta Quest Pro are around 25 PPD. Only the PCVR varjo aero is at 35 PPD, but it’s wired, costs $2000, and doesn’t come with either the $600 base station / controller combo or the $3000-$4000 PC needed to power it
> You could buy a full Index kit, get the wireless upgrade for it, and then a full Vive Pro kit and its wireless upgrade, and have spent about the same amount of money.
You’re not accounting for the $2000-$3000 PC needed to run an Index or Vive Pro 2. Also both headsets are wired, and both rely on base stations. While they have the best tracking accuracy, they’re a pain to set up right and they’re one more thing you have to worry about. It’s not for normal people or even the average PC gamer. If it wasn’t for the lockdowns, I wouldn’t even have had the motivation to finish setting up my base stations. Until the pandemic hit, my PCVR sets where just languishing in their boxes. Self contained tracking is the way to go for normal people and most techies
The form factor for PCVR headsets is also terrible. It’s too intimidating for normal people to put a giant bucket on their faces. Even meta’s quest 2 suffers from this problem. This is yet another reason most people won’t even try modern 4th gen VR.
There are more downsides I can list. I'm very familiar with them because I still own both headsets including the wireless kit for the Vive. I also own the HP Reverb, the Quest 2 and Quest Pro.
As imperfect as they may be, my go to headsets are still from meta for now, mainly because of wireless which is why I’m excited for the new Apple headset
I’m not saying that it will be the same this time, but equally won’t be making statements based on what at the moment is a guess, educated or not.
Anything more for something that is essentially a short-lived toy is a fool's errand. Fool in this case meaning someone with more money than they know what to do with. I'd get better value from a Louis Vuitton handbag.
But with regards to VR headsets? Even $200 sounds too expensive if I were to be brutally honest, but I surmise going even lower would mean whoever makes the bloody thing won't even be able to cover the cost of materials so I'll compromise.
The PSVR2 has the additional problem that it requires a PS5. It's not a standalone system. That's like a Game Boy for which you need to own an NES. Or like a Wii U console, where the tablet controller wasn't a standalone system, and which flopped, in contrast to the Switch.
Upgraded screen, more battery and storage, and identical everything else.
In fact the rumored price may even be planted by Apple to create an anchor and make the product look cheaper once released.
Besides, in some genres, "X but in VR" can make for a very big difference. Space and flight sims - even very arcade ones - are a prominent example. The ability to actually look around and track enemy craft easily is huge - I wouldn't even consider playing something like Project Wingman without VR anymore, even though it is available.
I would be very surprised if Apple releases a device that has those problems.
If they provide some dock so that headset can be used Mac mini/ultra style as desktop + VR/XR is more like a bonus then this could still sell well.
Combine that with foveated rendering, possibly implemented deep in Metal, and being careful about graphically intensive applications, and this could be high FPS on 3K resolution, and be a significant step up in immersion.
most hardware support foveation, its not that challenging to do in software. its not the magic bullet until you get low latency accurate universal eye tracking.
Apple feels that eventually this class of devices will replace smart phones. It’s the same reason meta is betting almost everything on XR
That's not really accurate. The rumours suggest optics at least as good as the Meta Quest Pro ($1k), possibly with a substantial move forward from there. They suggest resolution of 3k per eye, significantly above the Meta Quest Pro, and using Micro LED for a big improvement on the screen door effect, brightness, quality. Then there's the compute, with 2x M2s, this is quite possibly going to be able to run AAA VR games (if they're compatible with iOS) – the M2 is running some AAA games on things like the MBA, and this one has an M2 per eye.
These rumours might turn out to be rubbish, but they seem to be credible rather than speculation, and they would suggest a high price tag. If this was a Meta Quest Pro "Ultra" it might be >$2k based on Meta's pricing, so Apple charging $3k for it given their "tax" (and high production quality) feels about right.
I'm not sure what value there is on speculating at this level.
We have no idea what sort of gaming content they are planning for it in addition to the AR stuff. At that price point it's hard to tell what the market or usecases with be.
1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-01/apple-mix...
So for VR, foveated rendering could mean the difference between ~2k and 3k is a wash. And AAA games designed for VR tend to be a little more conservative on the graphics. And the chip will only theoretically have to handle half the other game work and no full macOS.
Combine that with Apple's continued Metal development, which is very capable if you're willing to do the leg work to take advantage of it, and yeah I think it'll get close.
Doing the math to the OPs numbers. 6k vs 2k = 3x. 90 fps vs 30 fps = 3x.
That an extra 900% performance difference right there.
Reality, out the window.
FPS alone is +200%, but games are running above 30fps already so it's less than that. Add a reduction in system load due to not running the full OS, potentially framework improvements as we usually see at WWDC, and slightly reduced graphical fidelity that is typical for VR games, and we're back to the same ballpark.
The M2 doesn't even hit 30fps at 1080p. You also have to consider the power draw limits they set on these 2 chips placed near your eyes compared to a M2 running in a laptop with lots of heat dissipation.
> an M2 chip per eye
first, the definition on an M2 chip is very murky. There is a massive difference between an M2 targeted for small mobile, compared to a M2 found in a laptop.
A mobile can't sustain power draw of 5 watts for very long.
A headset can't sustain power draw of 10 watts for that long.
AAA graphics needs >40 watts of power. You can't have that next to your face without large amounts of cooling. Now, I'm assuming that Apple will offload graphics to phones/tablets/laptops in the style of oculus link. This solves a bunch of other problems like weight, size and battery life.
This is where Apple has the great advantage of course, not only does it control the entire vertical there, but they actually have a QA team, product metrics and leadership to make sure that the link will be seamless, easy and reliable. Meta will devote a team to it for a year, who will build a totally new system, sling it over the fence and move on to make sure that they get promotions. It never really worked of course, but it pushed the promotions metrics, and the leadership don't care about users, only moving a synthetic metric so they can be made VP of cables.
I digress.
However, for remote rendering to work reliably, you'll either need decent wifi(new time machine anyone?) or a decent quality cable. Wifi is a right shit to make work reliably at full throughput, if not impossible. so I'd assume cables would be the way forward (or some fancy 60gig networking stuff, but that seems unlikely)
> Micro LED for a big improvement on the screen door effect, brightness, quality
Nope. The screen is not actually the limiting factor, its the optics. The "barn door" and brightness is almost entirely down to the style of lenses.
My point was that it seems consumers don't care about expensive high performance VR headsets. They want something that is both easy to use and inexpensive: The unusually early Quest Pro price drop suggests as much.
It's like the Nintendo Switch: If it had cost substantially more, much better graphics, screen resolution etc would have been possible, but it almost certainly would have been a flop. The same thing seems to be true for VR headsets.
May be far fetched but, it could be a monitor replacement for offices; got supplied with a mbp and 4 monitors, 2 for at home and on desk on location, some coworkers 6 in total; that monitors alone add up from € 2-3 K fairly quick (fairly nice 27” 4K displays). I’d gladly take the headset over the monitors if it’s not to heavy; The ‘AR’ mode could mean I would be able to see my laptop screen and keyboard and display the other screens using the overlay and switch between them (& other operations) using hand gestures/ moving my head/ looking somewhere. Would also save me a ton of space.
Edit: rxOS instead of iOS, the marketing material seems to mention day to day usage mostly
- Apple Watch: $447 at release (inflation adj); $250 today.
- iPad: $695 at release (inflation adj); $450 today.
- iPhone: $877 at release (inflation adj, carrier subsidized); $800 today.
Similar story with all of their products. Apple has a history of releasing new product lines with the "top end" expensive models (remember in 2017 when they released both the iPhone X and iPhone 8). Early adopters will be early adopters. It should also speak volumes that this is likely to be introduced at WWDC; the first iteration may be extremely developer focused, to help build the platform, with more consumer-oriented and priced devices next year.
Historically: It has practically never been a good bet to bet against Apple, even if all the logic says to [1]. This time could be different. I would not bet on it.
Historically? What?! Apple had about 15 years of lukewarm products. Even during their initial phase many products were commercial flops.
Their post iPhone era is an outlier.
And it’s not as if the original iPhone didn’t have its own issues that Apple had to quickly pivot from.
Plus there’s a lot of talk about gaming here but Apple don’t have a good track record for gaming: their games console was a massive flop. macOS isn’t seen as a gaming OS (I see more talk of Linux than is do of macOS) and Apple Arcade is yet another one of those lukewarm products. So I’m questioning whether this headset is targeting that market…and if it is, whether gamers would even take it seriously.
I’ll definitely be watching this piece of hardware to see what happens but I don’t feel confident that this will be “another iPhone”.
So a $3000 VR headset with a FOV that's still the equivalent of looking out of a periscope on a submarine. Fantastic.
The overarching XR vision makes sense to me -- that you could instantly drop into any kind of environment you might want to, whether for work or entertainment or socializing.
But who creates these environments, and for what purpose? They seem like they'd be quite expensive if done well, and if not done well, you wouldn't want to go there unless you had to. If there aren't great places to go, what justifies a $3K headset?
Meanwhile, with the reality of technical limitations, how good is the experience really going to be?
I suspect you're going to be able to pay $3K to buy into some games and productivity software that, once the novelty wears off, are going to feel pretty mediocre and may never really get past the tech demo stage. And your hardware is going to be dreadfully obsolete in about 2-3 years too.
IDK, maybe I just have a lack of vision and I'm too down on this stuff.
I would like to try it and see!
Current optical designs mean that there is a large out of focus area when you look anywhere that isn't forward. That's just never going to fly for the general consumer. For VR to truly go mainstream you needs an optical system that is truly sharp, edge to edge. That probably means some kind of active optical system (like reverse OIS) or some kind of magic lens that currently only exists in theory. Instead what manufactures keep doing is trading off FOV for sharpness.
If Apple has implemented a new optics system here I think they have winner and the industry will change overnight. If it's the same as current designs just a little better it feels DOA to me.
I'm optimistic because I can't imagine Apple, of all companies, putting out a headset that's blurry at the edges.
There’s just no dang reason to use these things like their creators want. Someone needs to be brave in these organizations and say “hey look, we tried pushing Siri for years and never gained the loved adoption that chatGPT has, why are we trying the same strategy here?”
If the compute offering is not excellent, it does not deserve to be in a new context. Period.
I feel there's no idea of what the context is anymore - and that's what's killing all of these devices. No one can say 'this is the emphasis we gave these products for this reason' - because they all want the success of the iPhone, everyday use and wear.
We have to allow the pendulum to swing back to specialized devices - that's why Teenage Engineering is so captivating.
That's your preference, but it's clear that lots of people not just willingly, but enthusiastically do this; makes this an odd example. Likewise Siri/Alexa I guess - I would never use them but some people do dozens of times a day and love it.
Yes yes yes - a lot of people enthusiastically drink 3+ CocaColas a day too! Doesn’t make it a good use of technology nor dietary choice :)
And for Siri and Alexa, you probably use ChatGPT, so you know the difference when you see it
You seem to try to draw a parallel between largely failed tech (VR) and largely successful tech (apple watches, etc), and then to massively popular consumer product (coke); then suggest there is 'bravery' in rejecting the 'way these creators want you to use their products'
I sort of get the idea applied to VR as it has never really clicked for anything. But the analogies are all to things that are unambiguously successful with consumers. They are all very much "pull" not "push" at this point. Well, maybe less so with voice apps, that's more "bundle".
I guess you lost me early in your argument, and I was trying to point out why (and figure out what you were actually trying to say)
My premise is that watches failed (even though they sell millions of units) as the bar for success is higher for Apple, and they left a lot on the table by just putting a mini phone on your wrist.
So I think screens on wrists is a dumb use of compute. Then I went in a roundabout way to say, a dumb use of calories / sugar is Coke. Sugar and Compute have better uses, so their lost potential is taking issue with how their creators made the goods to be consumed.
The watch is the coke of computing - completely unnecessary for 9/10ths of the use cases and leads to bad habits. Just as a beverage can be crafted to be like Athletic Greens, so could the watch be crafted to use the wrist compute context better.
To provide some example, watch should have gone screenless and used haptics to communicate with us in new ways; and explain when it was important to move to a screen context (which is technically all it does now too) - with this view, it becomes one strata closer to excellence.
> pushing Siri for years and never gained the loved adoption that chatGPT has,
I say this politely, maybe you have bad taste?
Lots of people voluntarily pay for an Apple Watch for the privilege of wearing it all day. When Apple released the HomePod mini it quickly grabbed market share against Alexa et al. Siri has been available on apple devices for years, and a huge chunk of consumers use it regularly.
The nice thing about a lot of tech, is that you don’t have to use it how the creators want. The first gen Apple Watch didn’t focus on fitness and health, but the latest ones do became that’s how people used it. I’m not sure how you think the “Siri” strategy is repeated here, but Siri is a success.
I’m very skeptical that apple will find a winner with a VR headset but you’re not exactly providing an argument that you understand consumers. A much simpler argument is that it’s too expensive and does too little - the original HomePod is a good example. Apple of all companies can make the hardware good, but ultimately it’s still very expensive to generate VR content.
And I guess you’re right; the simplest argument with my taste is: VR/AR are technologies looking for solutions
* meaningful solutions. And maybe SOL and others are right that hands free readers are the most meaningful solution for these head worn devices.
[Apple Watch was always going to be fitness (everything before it was fitness). HomePod is amazing but not communicated correctly for people to know it’s there. Siri is horrid to deal with as a developer, tho dictation is amazing as an interface. There’s too much to talk about - basically Apple achieved the center of the digital life for all the devices Jobs put up on the screen in the 90s and now they need the new devices / activities and nothings been as universal as the past]
You sound like you are a year or two out of date with your "current" understanding. The industry has moved to pancake lenses which make the view clear edge to edge. There's no more out of focus peripheral view, in recent headsets you read and look around using your eyeballs and not your head just like you would naturally.
It is already known that the Apple headset uses this updated optical system, along with micro OLED displays at super high resolution (approx double current industry standards). The clarity and focus are going to be absolutely amazing.
I think people really into VR get so used to looking around with their head and having low expectations that they don't notice just how poor it is. By comparison it's good. In isolation, not so much.
The "retina" display was a great example of that. People argued about whether it was true and whether Apple was really the first, but it didn't matter in the end. I expect the same here.
Those major leaps will occur. Apple has the wherewithal the stay the course. I'll look at the first generation VR headset the way I looked at their first tablet 30 years ago. Or their first computer 40 years ago.
It sometimes takes courage to challenge the status quo, to take the risk to establish a new standard. To identify and pursue the "right" standards.
It's somewhat hard to argue that the Command-Line Interface is better overall than the Graphical User Interface, look at Apple, they made $2.75 trillion for themselves from the GUI. But with large language models now the easiness and even the beauty falls back into the CLI, a simple blank screen with a blinking prompt awaiting your commands, and maybe we could remove the screens altogether. Why do I have to write this message while staring into, funnily, an Apple screen, when I could be drinking my coffee admiring the city skyline and the mountains nearby while whispering gently the words into the wind. Why must I know that for whatever need that I have from a software product, I must press some menu button, then 3 drop downs down, select some weirdly named options, and then go back and drag and drop some asset into the window: just do the thing already, I don't care about your software-y details. The GUI might be dying, perhaps we should strive to kill it.
Just for the simple fact that Apple has in multiple occasions done 2 things:
1. Come out with something that shapes the rest of the industry. I mean how many times has Apple done something and within a year or 2 basically the entire industry follows.
2. Not captured a large (or majority) percent but continued to invest in a platform. I don't think anything they are in (except maybe the smart watch) do they actually have a majority marketshare but they continue to work on those platforms.
So there is a part of me that hopes that Apple realizes that this platform will be the same way. It will be a very niche product that will take years of iterating on (like the Apple Watch) with it in consumers hands to turn it into a mainstream product.
We have had too many failed attempts (Google Glasses and Microsoft HoloLens) just fail since they were not major successes right out the gate.
They also have the developer buy in on their other platforms that they may be able to transition that to this if they handle that properly.
That isn't saying that this is anywhere near a guarantee and obviously the hardware has to be there, the societal acceptance, etc. But I just don't currently see another company that is in the position to possibly pull this off.
Apple II - graphical OS
iPod - music in your pocket
iPhone - smartphone with cellular data
iPad - large screen low cost
iWatch - phone functionality on wrist
What does AR allow you to do, that you can't already do on a screen?
It's different... but different in amount. It's a better screen.
That might be enough to ship units, but it's not enough to explode in popularity.
Hell, even mystical eyeglass AR that was actually just a pair of eyeglasses would struggle. "Why don't I just do the same thing on my screen?" or "But I'm already constantly connected when I'm mobile."
For that matter, if "smartphone with cellular data" counts, why not "smart glasses with cellular data and apps"?
As you can tell, I'm a skeptic of this difference in kind v. difference in quantity construct.
wrist : insideOfPocket
wrist : eyes
That's the count of people for whom AR glasses would be different in kind.
Everyone who tries to speak a text message with Siri. Apple should have been brave and not reshaped messages - that screen is not meant to consume text messages at any length - they should have changed the communication to match the context.
On the other hand, existing AR, like existing VR, just doesn't deliver on that promise, not even approximately.
With current tech, it's more an issue that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. That can change when either (or both) side of the equation changes.
The Apple II OS wasn't graphical. The hardware had very simple colour, which made it stand out.
Mac was graphical, but it was a productised/commodified version of someone else's R&D.
Nokia's Communicator range had cellular data long before the iPhone was a thing. What iPhone did differently was - again - productise and commodify existing technologies to create something that was more than the sum of its components. Touch was the biggest part of that, but the App Store really killed the competition.
iPads were never particularly low cost. There were numerous tablets before the iPad. The iPad difference was - again - touch. And the App Store.
iWatch wrist phone may be true, but I suspect it's not the main use case. (I've yet to see anyone talking into an iWatch. I'm sure it happens, but not nearly as often as phone conversations do.)
The common factor - apart from iWatch - is taking/blending existing tech and packaging it into an accessible non-nerdy form with obvious and instant mass market appeal. And creating a vibrant developer ecosystem around it. And adding design stylings that make the product cool.
That's exactly what this display project doesn't have. Even if it does its job well it has no obvious instant applications.
And clamping a rubber facehugger to your head is the opposite of cool.
It may have mass appeal after version 4 or 5 when it's closer to the ideal of stylish glasses with a supporting ecosystem. But I suspect version 1 is going to have a very limited market.
- PCs were already growing in popularity.
- Mp3 players were already growing in popularity.
- Smart phones were already growing in popularity.
- Bluetooth headphones were already growing in popularity.
- Home automation was already growing in popularity.
Apple usually takes a look at a growing trend and decides that it can provide a far better experience.
... with the exception of: Apple Watch.
- Apple Watch defined the smartwatch category. Smart watches weren't that popular before the Apple watch. But, watches and luxury watches have been fashionable for a long time.
As awesome as AR / VR headsets are, they are practically dead on arrival. This will be the most challenging product launch in Apple's history.
From a marketing perspective, an Apple Car makes more sense.
And then Apple introduce the Macintosh and changed the industry forever.
- Mp3 players were already growing in popularity.
And then Apple introduce the iPod and iTunes and changed the industry forever. The ability to purchase and download music sealed the deal.
- Smart phones were already growing in popularity.
LOL. Blackberry? Windows Phone? And then Apple introduce the iPhone and changed society.
- Bluetooth headphones were already growing in popularity.
Meh. I'm not sure these are game changing, but that said my technophobic wife loves her AirPods Pro and has somehow not lost them, so shit, actually that's pretty game changing.
- Home automation was already growing in popularity.
Well, Siri kinda sucks TBH, and Alexa works just fine, so maybe not this one
Let's hope this is a Windows Phone situation, and Apple's headset is night-and-day compared to previous headsets. If it's a me-too like home automation, then it can only be a flop.
I really do think that Apple are much more likely to present some interesting AI products that run locally on Apple Silicone, thats where they truly can do something different and new that will impact all their customers. It will help them sell the next generation of iPhone and Macs.
I want my AI to be local and privet.
In some ways I think Humain have a better idea where this market is going to go. I'm not convinced by their product, I think it should be built into a phone, and I would be suppressed to see Apple do some stuff similar.
To copy what I put in a comment the other day, a next gen Siri with chatGPT like functionality, trained on all your docs, email, calendar, movements, browser history, video calls. All local and not in the cloud:
"Hey Siri, I had a meeting last summer in New York about project X, could you bring up all relevant documents and give me a brief summary of what we discussed and decisions we made. Oh and while you're at it, we ate at an awesome restaurant that evening, can you book a table for me for our meeting next week."
Apple execs: "why not both?"
The current stumbling block is that the tech sucks and the headsets are enormous. If someone got it into a lightweight pair of glasses or contact lenses, the use case is obvious, and it would be a big of a shift as the smartphone.
Denying this is like being the guy in 1993 saying “why would I want a computer in my pocket? Am I going to work on spreadsheets on a tiny screen in the bathrooom? And where would I plug it in?”
But yeah, so many things are obnoxious and clunky about smartphones. Glancing down is never a good look, let alone glancing down and then walking into a wall. The moment that minimum viable AR tech happens, people will suddenly remember how many compromises we have to make for smartphones.
Is this really a game-changer? Technology adoption is all about tradeoffs. We already have location-based services and applications that are granular enough for most purposes. AR applications add sensory awareness and localized interaction at the cost of distraction and intrusiveness.
History is littered with inventions that were supposed to be the next telephone, computer, smartphone, etc., but most of them never materialize because they don't meet people's practical needs. And if AR/VR isn't the quintessential solution in search of a problem, I don't know what is.
Currently any time you need information you have to pull yourself away from your present moment to dive into your phone. AR will make it so the information you need is just integrated into the world around you.
And with people's resistance to paying for software services, you'll have exactly the same problem with looking at something on your phone of half the crap being ads intentionally trying to sidetrack you.
I only need real navigation on holiday and I'm pretty sure not taking some expensive glasses on travel. Neither when hiking nor in a foreign country.
And all the other Infos? I don't even use my smartphone for them. Why would I wear an expensive headset to compare a 3€ product?
I only need real navigation on holiday and I'm pretty sure not taking some expensive pocket computer on travel. Neither when hiking nor in a foreign country. I just print out the directions from MapQuest. K.I.S.S.
And all the other Infos? I don't even use my desktop PC for them. Why would I carry an expensive handheld computer to compare a 3€ product?
And where would I even plug it in?
This is actually what happened historically. Various pocket devices existed for navigation (e.g. by Garmin), but they never got too popular until the smartphone became popular for entirely different reasons. Only after the smartphone become really common, then it was reused for existing applications where the benefit existed but was not that big compared to alternatives. AR/VR will need a killer application first, only then it might be reused for navigation.
You don't see the difference? Especially when hiking?
You are then a non sweaty asian?
A pair of glasses or monocle/power reader, wrist device with holo display or some other format makes much more sense as a way to interact with a portable computing device conveniently. The main bottleneck is hardware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase
It's discussed quite a bit on this site, but I wouldn't expect Apple to pull ahead in the GPU department. They really lit a fire under Intel and AMD's ass with the M1's IPC, but Nvidia laughed their way to the bank with every M1 upgrade. Even the 5nm M1 Ultra struggled to keep up with Nvidia's 10nm, bog-cheap 30-series cards. In the datacenter it's even more of a blowout, Apple would have to invest in something competitive with CUDA to turn heads. That's no small feat, and I don't think it's possible with an overnight API launch. It takes time and integration into the industry, something Apple wasn't patient enough for (see: Xserve).
The M1 Ultra is a 200w chip, fabricated with 5nm silicon. It's being outclassed by the RTX 3060, a cheap 10nm card that draws ~170w max. In Nvidia's 40-series cards (on 4nm), the M1 Ultra's performance profile is most comparable to a laptop-class RTX 4060 that draws less than 115 watts.
There's a story in the total package draw to be made here, and it does weigh slightly in Apple's favor. Overall though, even with last-gen cards it's clear that there's a massive performance-per-watt lead in Nvidia's favor right now. Which is impressive, considering how they've been stuck with second-class silicon when the M1 Ultra debuted.
The article says that Apple has a glasses product and a VR/AR product that sounds similar to a Quest Pro.
So if we look at the glasses product it immediately runs into a lot of issues. Do I want to be wearing glasses? Do I already own glasses? Do I like how glasses look on my face? Wearable tech is very personal especially when it's sitting on your face. At best this is a product for industrial environments.
Then the Quest Pro-like VR/AR product...separate battery pack in your pocket, need I say more? Now compare that experience to an Oculus Quest for $300. It doesn't really matter that the Quest is a less capable product, it's at the right price point and form factor and its strong sales show it.
Estimates of the size of this market were in the single digit billions of dollars for Google, who bailed out of Google Glass recently: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/18/google-glass-enterprise-mark...
For comparison, the iPhone makes $200 billion in revenue every year. Apple Services (Music, TV+, etc) make something like $20 billion every quarter.
Apple does not enter many businesses that only have the potential to make $1-2 billion.
But like the parent poster pointed out, I'm now talking about niche industrial uses, not widescale adoption.
Gorilla Tag, an indie VR game where you're an ape and run around with your hands and tag people (seriously, that's the whole thing) has made $26 million selling virtual hats and has peaks of 90,000 concurrent users.
I think what makes it stick is that it's more than just a game. It's a social space where my kids jump in to sometimes just to chat with their friends from school. Reminds me of hanging out in Team Fortress 2 game servers and just chatting while casually screwing around in the game.
Here's the interview where those stats came from for those curious.
https://venturebeat.com/games/how-gorilla-tag-made-it-big-on...
But I'm much more bullish than most of the commenters here. Many seem to not have shifted their understanding of progress in VR/AR in the last 5 years, when there have been fundamental tech advances. Then, others don't seem to understand how much Apple is planning to push the state of the art here. Their headset will have roughly double the resolution of existing devices, and contain not one but two, laptop level mobile chips. The lenses / optics are going to solve a lot of issues people have had, the pass through quality is going to be near photo-realistic - you won't feel you need to take these off at all. Some of the apps we know about include photo-realistic video conferencing with quality that is unheard of outside of laboratory conditions before.
Really I think social home sports viewing is the only situation for an argument of physical tv viewing and the comfort level (which i'm expecting apple to have improved on here similar to what Bigscreen is doing).
People talk about killer apps for VR and i'm like this is clearly it, we have just been hardware limited so far. People very comfortably spend $1-3k+ on decent TV's and that is just a tiny aspect of what VR can do.
Watching cyberpunk on Netflix was an experience.
So for me, a more immersive viewing experience isn’t worth the hassle of needing to strap a device to my head.
This will be interesting because clearly there's a high risk of failure, and Jobs was known to kill stuff that didn't full fly, I wonder if this is one of those 'momentum' projects that Execs just can't look back from?
Meta spent $25B and failed, man, that is a lot of good money after bad.
We'll have to wait to see what they announce though.
On a personal level I also dislike the idea of being home in the evening and myself or my spouse decide to watch something and put on some goggles and completely shut off to the outside world and the other person. Or going in the living room and seeing 3 kids with goggles locked away in different worlds. If we actually did start using VR as the main way to consume media I think it would do us a lot more harm than good. Just my opinion.
Other than that - I agree. Combining AI and AR successfully with cool and minimal hardware would make the iPhone revolution seem like a footnote.
Unfortunately no one seems to be working in that space. Or if they are, their efforts are comically terrible (like Meta.)
I think these VR headsets are built for the demo. How much daily demand they have is probably much more limited than the builders think it is.
Also, prolonged use causes nausea in a large percentage of people.
Supposedly Apple has been working off a patent that fights this specifically. Not arguing for or against whether this headset will slap (personally, I don't care for VR and think it's overrated) but just relaying some info.
There's an excellent video of John Carmack talking about this and how to solve it. This is much less of an issue now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHLpKzUxjGk
I agree with you though that there aren't any killer apps for VR/AR yet, and it remains to be seen if there will be any at all.
"Selling at-cost" - Also good, because they need to get the device into the hands of developers to seed the ecosystem before it becomes more mainstream.
I don’t care for VR, games or metaverse. Tell me what plant/insect I’m looking at, what’s that star/satellite in the sky, help with measurements. Simple useful stuff that doesn’t need me to wear a supercomputer on my head.
I find VR fascinating, but I kind of don’t want this product to happen.
If it's a gamechanger for remote working, then I'll buy them for my company and have my remote employees use them
If it's a gamechanger for communicating with family overseas, then I might see if I can convince one of my relatives to get one (though the price will be harder to justify for personal use - but not impossible if it's a gamechanger)
Both of those are contingent on how good it is. If it's something where I do a shared presence FaceTime call using it, and I feel like I can't go back to not having it, then I'll buy them and I expect it'll be a huge success. If I/people try it and it's not much of an improvement over regular FaceTime, then it won't be a big success.
If the big killer app for this headset is "calling people", then Mark Zuckerberg is probably doubled-over in hysterics right now.
1. https://blog.google/technology/research/project-starline/
I even made a proof-of-concept of my own at some point in… I think 2018?… which was just recording locally and playing back with Apple's own AR libraries.
Honestly, it was so easy I'm surprised it isn't already standard the same way custom backgrounds and 3D overlays (hats, face-paint, etc.) already are.
VR works very well today. But it's a niche business sort of like racing wheels and joysticks. So not very interesting to go VR only for the big players.
AR and VR are separate things, and it's sort of a delusion that has been pushed by Meta and others that one leads to the other. Or that they can be combined even.
Also, so many previous pre-announcement visualisations of Apple products were so way off-base that even if a headset does get announced, it's got an equal chance of being a $400 Siri version of the Amazon Echo Frames as it does of being what's in this article.
When they arrived in Australia, the first adopters were trades people. They could be contacted anywhere at anytime.
I can see huge markets for a good industrial AR/VR at building sites and industrial plants for plans, inspections, wiring, plumbing etc etc.
Markets for warehouse and logistics, shelf stocking, inventory, etc etc.
People already get provided with ruggedized tablets that have replaced ruggedized laptops.
If it's really good (Magic Leap fake demo good) AR, then that's the equivalent of an F35 pilot's helmet in terms of situational awareness, so can be used when managing construction equipment, cranes, diggers, etc etc.
Lots of different possibilities here that the new Apple Silicon and other potential (who knows for real yet outside Apple) technology advances could introduce.
Not directly relevant, but I’m realizing the relative ubiquity of Apple Stores are a competitive advantage. I assume you can test an Oculus headset at the occasional Best Buy, but I suspect the experience isn’t as polished
I don't use archive.is that often so I don't know if that link is any different from the one up there ^
Also, the sort of people who are going to work out consistently don't need a headset to work out. Or any other tech. They just do it.
I know you're not implying this in your comment, but if anyone thinks you are going to take someone who is sedate, strap on a cool headset and give them some sort of virtual experience that will finally motivate them to work out consistently...I'll take the other side of that bet every day...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221226721...
Anyway, the modern answer is Ozempic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/05/ozempic-a...
But I don't think behavior and diet are necessarily the cause; there's some room for gut bacteria (which control your behavior anyway) and environmental pollutants.
One particular thing that I believe is underexplored is using visual/haptic cues for movement learning (motor skills acquision). For example in FitXR there is a glowing semi-transparent path showing how your hand is supposed to move. If you deviate from it, it gives a light haptic feedback. There is no substitute for that in reality – we learn hand movements (like in dance or martial arts) either by proprioreception, visual feedback through mirrors or verbal feedback from teacher. All three ways are inferior to what VR can offer.
I think some progressive sports researchers are experimenting with VR (especially in Constraint-Led Approach community), but these are just first steps.
PS. I personally want to invest in learning VR programming for years, but waiting until software ecosystem will stabilize and settle on something. So waiting for the Apple announcements in that field.
I really want to get a new sleek VR/mixed reality device but I can't actually afford to spend $1000 right now let alone $3000.
I'm not speaking for anyone else here… But I simply cannot imagine an upside.
This concept has been well-explored in science fiction, and it doesn't look good. See "Hyperreality"[1] for one of the best visualizations. That's all too realistic.
There's a line in Ready Player One:
"We call this Pure O2. This is the first of our planned upgrades. Once we can roll back some of Halliday's ad restrictions, we estimate we can sell up to 80% of an individual's visual field before inducing seizures."
I was expecting that from Zuckerberg/Meta/Oculus.
Remember Google Glass? People wearing those were called "Glassholes". What to call people who wear this? "iDweebs"?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs
[2] https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?mo...
It takes a while to get there. Google started out ad-free. Google Search has now achieved "80% of your visual field filled with ads". Apple used to be ad-free. No longer.[1]
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/15/apple-reportedly-plans-to-pu...
>What to call people who wear this?
Why do you want to bully people?
Is there a name for the mental situation where we make fun of someone because he dares doing something that we know we wouldn't dare to do?
I think that's what OP is experiencing when wanting to give name to someone wearing the device.
Its major in games, its important in some technical applications but the 3D metaphor is hard to make as interaction friendly as 2D.
All the hardware, physiological and cultural challenges with headsets come on top of this very peculiar starting point that somehow does not have the versatility of the flat screen UI
That is the same PR tactics as AirPod. Gruber taking about AirPod was selling at a loss. Insane value coming from Apple.
Most people who comment on these sort of things have absolutely zero idea about supply chain or manufacturing, let alone BOMs.
But of course, people will fall for it. ( Thinking Apple selling it at cost or loss )
(Like if you don't have pockets, where does the battery go? Or if you're sitting in a chair your back pockets may not be easily accessible, which means the battery is either in front and you're constantly bumping the wire, or it's on the floor or something. I know it's not a completely unsolvable problem because the Vive had that special head strap that draped down the middle of your head which was fine, but I still got tangled up from time to time.)
Heat and weight from the battery directly just exacerbates the problem.
Making it not able to do as much is sometimes a winning move, but also sometimes not. The primary utility concerns that people have with headset products come from display resolution and framerate. It takes a lot of pixel density for readable text and a lot of frames per second to prevent display-lag-induced motion sickness. Crapping out on the displays and processing makes that worse, not better.
> Like if you don't have pockets, where does the battery go?
Clips. Straps. Bags. Hooks. People have been successfully carrying things on their person without pockets for millennia. Have you really never seen someone at the gym strap their phone into an armband?
You may as well be asking "Like if you don't have pockets, where does your cellphone go?" And yet billions of people all over the world manage to carry cellphones.
1) low quality passthrough is unpleasant
2) heavy headset is unpleasant
3) headset with weight imbalance is unpleasant
4) sensors, chips, and display all use power
5) battery with more capacity is heavier
6) battery with more power draw is hotter
7) hot headset in your face is unpleasant
8) battery at the end of a cord is ugly and annoying
So it’s easy to say “use a weaker chip”, but what if that means you have to degrade some must-have functionality? Or it means you have to wait 3 years for TSMC to come out with a smaller node before you can release your product? Battery on the end of a wire is a “bold” choice, probably an engineer won a cage match against an executive to make it happen.
One thing that Apple’s approach has going for it is that it could also be great at VR content like Beat Saber, Half Life Alyx, Bigscreen movies, or as a monitor for your MacBook. A Magic-Leap-esque device will suck for any of those.
However, the Magic Leap form factor may work better for a Google Glass type use case where you wear the headset as you go about your life and get some augmented features (maybe it can be an iPhone replacement eventually).
I kind of hope it's not a false leak, just to see the battery with cord, lmao.
The pricing will ensure this market will be small and niche for some time to come. And Apple being Apple, we can expect locked down SDKs, walled gardens, and all the rest. Why would content creators target that? And with what tools? Which are the launch partners (if any)? Who is already working to produce content? What kind of content?
Is it going to be games or is this being aimed at people wanting to do meetings (which meta seems to insist is the killer use case). Or are they like MS trying to target companies with some fancy AI use cases around people fiddling with complicated 3d models professionally? I don't think anyone has nailed content for AR just yet.
They're more likely going after creative professionals who're already all-in on the Apple ecosystem. Maybe product designers or architects, who want to show clients their designs in VR, and a slick Apple device will probably make a better impression than a PC VR setup with a bulky headset, cables everywhere, fans whirring, etc.
- Continual eye contact (reverse passthrough)
- All day wearable (not all day use)
- Rapid toggling of AR (via flip-up, probably)
- Fashnionable to wear when powered off
I believe this article confirms all of these now, and if that's the case I believe they may have cracked the code. All of these need to be there imo for this to be the beginning of the shift to mainstreaming of AR/VR.
That said, I thought the same about iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. I still do think that about Apple Watch, I still don't get why would anyone buy those, but now everyone has them, so what do I know.
aaaand, that's all I needed to read about that. It's never coming to market, maybe they'll revisit the idea in years to come though.
Maybe $3000 is just the minimum price to get such a thing right now.
There are tremendous downsides to wearing such a thing on your head, it would take a magical feeling device with tremendous upsides to warrant it beyond the niche VR gaming population. I'm willing to bet the thing isn't just an expensive Oculus Quest.
But I also doubt anyone (internal or external) knows how magical it has to be for the upsides to be so much greater than the downsides that it attracts significant adoption.
For heaven’s sake, Apple has a laundry list filled history of releasing half baked and subpar products - both hardware and software - and has been reliably consistent at doing that. I mean it’s just that its “target audience” sets their peak of standard what Apple expects them to, or to just what Apple offers.
I have been using their AirPod Pro 2 and I have also tried one by Jabra and Samsung (along with XM4 and 700 - I own(ed) these two) and my goodness the noise cancellation and call quality, in even slight noise, is atrocious. That’s just one example — don’t even get me started on their software and services suite.
It's just that it would be a spectacular failure to read the room if it's just a better Oculus Quest for a massive multiplier of the price.
If they ship a $3000 headset into what has proven to be a niche market, then at the very least I feel they MUST feel it's a different ballgame than Oculus Quest. It's not $2500 of Apple Tax to capitalize on a small market.
Ability to read and work in VR is a potential category shift, as is the ability to see your real-world surroundings clearly, and these are things plausibly in reach of Apple's technical capabilities. So my speculation is if they ship at $3000 headset it'll be because they think they've achieved this and that it's worth the very obvious problems any strapped-to-your-face headset has.
Instead they've been spending $1b/yr developing something that will never be finished
The first apple computer wasn't a fully loaded macbook pro. It was a circuit board strapped to a piece of plywood
some upstart will come up with something usable
They have probably iterated a lot, what makes you think they haven't? You have zero visibility into their process
FWIW I don't hold Musk or Zuck in very high regards either, it's just that neither of them were as successfully insidious as Tim was.
But it can sustain engineers and designers to keep working towards a good product for as long as that takes.
Which, apparently, is June 5.
I can't believe that people would go on permanent written record with this stuff, but humans gotta human!
1. iPod launch thread on macrumors: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.5...
2. iPhone launch thread on macrumors: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-announces-the-iph...
They might have a rocky start, but they still have a lot of advantages.
1. AR will devour smartphones.
2. Apple is the only company that can quickly overcome consumer AR/VR design challenges.
3. Apple has positioned itself to distribute the best AR/VR content.
4. Apple will cement its early lead with a new blue-bubble effect.
---
Likely because they expect AR to eventually devour smartphones, and they would rather devour it themselves than let others do so.
Plus, it will be a painful growth with rough edges anyway, so the iPhone faucet isn't turning off anytime soon. In fact, it would be quite a helpful source of revenue, until AR adoption reaches the masses and gets to the stage of actually being polished and commonplace enough to devour smartphones.
See: Apple slowly winding down iPod over the course of many years, as iPhone cannibalized it almost entirely.
They might have a rocky start, but they still have a lot of advantages.
1. AR will devour smartphones.
2. Apple is the only company that can quickly overcome consumer AR/VR design challenges.
3. Apple has positioned itself to distribute the best AR/VR content.
4. Apple will cement its early lead with a new blue-bubble effect.
---
I could see an argument for it growing along side smartphones. But even then, this feels like fantasy. VR only "works" for driving simulation because... you are sitting there. Any dreams of it making Zelda more immersive will have to grasp with the fact that, you know, you can't actually win a fight with most wild animals. Or climb a mountain. Or hike across the entire continent...
(I say "works" for driving, because even that is glossing all of the physicality of driving that fast. Which is intense and would also be beyond most of us.)
"Growing" is probably a better word than "devour".
In a companion essay, I try to make the argument that AR peripherals are likely.
My best guess is that a smartphone-like peripherals will be shipped alongside the flagship AR/VR headsets. I guess the AR headsets might be viewed as the "peripheral" in the beginning, but I think eventually the AR headset will be the main focus, and the thing you hold in your hand will feel more like a keyboard/mouse.
2. Not Meta? They're the #1 VR company with 75% marketshare and a years-long head start in the industry. The Reality headset from Apple has no rumored/leaked feature that goes beyond what the Quest Pro already has on the market today.
3. Is distribution difficult? Meta distributes content. Valve distributes content. What's so hard about distributing content?
4. What early lead? Meta has the early lead.