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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

> I think consumers just don’t want to spend a lot of money on VR

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.

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The current best uses for VR are engineering and gaming. Given this is a consumer product, it won't be used for engineering, and given it's Apple, it won't have a big gaming library.

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.

All the expensive VR headsets sold terribly, except for the cheap Oculus Quest. The lesson seems clear: When it comes to VR, people strongly favor price over quality. Which in turn suggests the Apple headset will fail.

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.

Actually it was also that it was standalone and no wires.

Yeah, but it seems that wasn't decisive. The Quest Pro is also standalone, but fairly high in price, and it seems it didn't sell well. There are no official figures for the Quest Pro alone, but it received a strong price cut shortly after release.

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.

Have people ever really had a quality vs. price choice? With all the computing power being discussed, the quality may be well beyond what has been available in any previous headset. Much lower latency with much higher resolution graphics. If that is the case, there is no existing applicable lesson concerning price vs. quality. You may still be right, but my point is that if the quality is pushed enough, the price/quality tradeoff may be much different.

I would say the current choice for high-end quality in the VR space would be a Pimax 8K ($1,387), a tracking setup and controllers (another $577 if you get the de facto standard equipment from Valve), at least a NVIDIA RTX 2080 with 10+ GB ($900, but you'll want something significantly more powerful to run anything beyond the bare minimum), plus of course the rest of the computer to keep up with that and extra-long cables and everything (add at least another $500-$1,000).

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.

The Quest Pro seems a better comparison: It sits between the normal Quest and the Apple headset in terms of specs and price. But apparently it didn't sell well (there was an early price drop), suggesting that an even more powerful even more expensive headset won't sell either.

Isn't the top end of the market the Varjo VR-3/XR-3?

Apple's headset would be cheaper and even higher quality from what it sounds like.

> The lesson seems clear: When it comes to VR, people strongly favor price over quality. Which in turn suggests the Apple headset will fail.

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.

+1 the tech isn't there yet. It needs to be able to replace my monitors and the visual quality has not been there yet. TBD on comfort and battery life. But I'd gladly drop $3K if it ticked all the boxes but not for a gimmick that I can only use for a handful of games.

There is an absolutely gigantic market for computers (and the monitors to go with them), it's almost impossible to do any kind of business without them.

VR is not there and maybe never will be.

> 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.

That reasoning feels a bit like saying only tens of millions of smart phones will sell because rotary dial telephones have been around since the 1890s. I think its very fair to say the Quest and PSVR and all their friends are a big leap from Nintendo's Virtual Boy or something. Enough we should consider it a different market for sure. The real issue is software still to this day utterly sucks. There is zero incentive for existing games companies to make content until the market is as large and easy to port to as the existing status quo. The difference with 3D accelerated screen base 3D games was the entire form of entertainment was new and clearly valuable. Too many business people think VR is just another medium for existing 3D games, which also means its being treated like a new console or something with respect to investment. The barriers to entry for plucky homebrew creating something of super high quality is also much much higher than the start of 3D games. Valve already demonstrated what the good end of experiences can look like, even on older gen of VR hardware, but also demonstrated it takes a seriously talented team given total freedom to produce the best with investment behind them. Augmented reality who knows, metaverse type VR who knows. But we haven't even seen the basic uptake of high quality AAA VR software because it doesn't exist regardless of how good a headset is. It's like if a smartphone could only act like an analogue mobile phone and everyone questions the hardware being important.

I wasn’t thinking of Nintendo’s Virtual Boy. I was thinking of the stuff from Virtuality. It was a visor with an LCD for each eye, 3d head tracking, stereo sound and it connected to an Amiga. It’s very much like modern devices in the same way that a PS5 is similar to the original PlayStation and other consoles from that era.

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.

(consider adding more paragraphs next time, otherwise it's hard to read)

Do people even buy those $1000 monitor stands, like really? Or is it just a highball so Apple can get better deals negotiating enterprise-size deals with larger companies buying in bulk?

Sure. But the XDR is meant to be a professional reference model - those stands are among other things built with magnetic latches so you can detach and pack up the screen and take it with you site-to-site.

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.

So is this about anchoring people at the higher price point knowing COGS will come way down?

Isn't the iphone 14 pro max 1tb version already $1600?

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