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Comment by NickC25 | Hacker News Reader

>I'm far more interested in the OS and Apps, that's the thing that's going to make this a success or a flop. Hardware (Apple will almost certainly get this right) is important, but the actual user experience and use cases that Apple present are what will be the deciding factor.

Outside of gaming and industry use AR/VR have felt a little like a solution in search of a problem. I do believe though that the people who work at Apple are capable of solving that problem, finding the use cases that an every day person wants it for.

This is my feeling too - I just don't see an immediate usecase for such a device outside of a select few niches, none of which (even combined) move the sales needle for a company of Apple's size. What are people actually going to use this for? I just don't see it - although there could be something as the tech matures in a few years.

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This is my feeling too - I just don't see an immediate usecase for such a device outside of a select few niches…

As usual, Apple is playing the long game. We should remember that when the iPhone was announced in 2007, Steve Jobs set the goal to get 1% of the cell phone market.

In 2007, there was no App Store and the only native apps were what came installed on the device.

Apple is laying the groundwork for the future. They’ll sell enough for it to meaningful while the rest of the ecosystem comes together.

Start with first principles in hardware. We are primarily visual creatures secondly we are linguistic. If the io for a hardware device were ideal would it not serve these two functions?

But the cell phone market was a pretty well-established and sizable market. The AR/VR market is not.

> But the cell phone market was a pretty well-established and sizable market. The AR/VR market is not.

I guess that's one way to look at it.

But compared to what was popular when the iPhone was released (Blackberry, Treo, Nokia), it was the iPhone that jumpstarted what became the modern smartphone market we see today.

Apple is uniquely positioned to usher in the modern AR/VR era, especially if it's true that iOS apps will run in on the headset. Nobody is better than Apple at capturing the imagination of developers.

The use case is replacing laptops - calling it now that we'll be reading Bloomberg articles about the "Headset Class" in our lifetimes :). Definitely don't think apple has a shot in hell of pulling that off in 2023, but I'd love to be surprised.

I’m pretty sure Apple wants to rule a new product category with better margins and no existing users. With laptops and increasingly phones and tablets most potential customers already have a thing from that category so it’s becoming harder and harder to sell and the profit margins and volumes are becoming smaller. So Apple is desperate to create a new category.

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