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Comment by bunga-bunga | Hacker News Reader

At 3500 this will be niche at best. They'll sell half the units of Watch Ultra if they're lucky.

Yeah… It's like sure, this replaces a TV for ONE person. If I want to watch a movie with my wife and daughter, I'm out $10,500

Keep in mind the battery is not enough for a movie. So the entire family will also be plugged into a wall wart. Mind the wire for any bathroom breaks!

It's a 2 hour battery with a dedicated cable and looks easily swappable in seconds.

Yes, even for that family of rich Apple executives, it will get tired by the third time.

For a 3500$ device? Fantastic!

The running time of the CD-ROM was designed to play Beethoven's 9th symphony in its entirety. You would have thought Apple would plan the battery life to allow you to watch all of Avengers: Endgame, or maybe Oppenheimer, without pausing to swap the battery.

> At 3500 this will be niche at best.

The original 128k Macintosh was $2,495 in 1984--that's $6,244.14 in todays (2023) dollars, just to put things in perspective.

Obviously there will be less expensive models to come; this is just the start. This will be mostly for early adopters and developers.

People are poorer today on an inflation adjusted basis

No, they really aren’t.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

I know the FED says we're not poorer, but their adjustment for inflation is just a marketing stunt.

If you look at the historical ratio of income to the price of housing you'll see we're making less compared to the cost of things every year.

Pull up a chart of "FRED:ASPUS/FRED:MEHOINUSA646N" on https://www.tradingview.com

edit: took a screenshot to save the trouble https://imgur.com/a/U5ml4Iq

If you look at the historical ratio of income to the price of computers we're literally orders of magnitude wealthier. You can't just pick one data point and blast off.

I mean, it’s not entirely implausible that housing is a better index of cost of living than computers.

Generally, regulated industries provide a better measurement (housing, healthcare, food, etc..) than unregulated ones (TV's, computers, etc..)

You're ignoring interest rates which allow the overall price to go up while keeping the monthly payment the same and the fact that houses have gotten a lot bigger over the decades [0].

[0]: https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home-prices/

If you look at the historical ratio of income to the price of housing

This has a lot more to do with governments making it illegal to build housing than the overall strength of the economy.

The original Macintosh was a flop in terms of sales, at first.

> The original Macintosh was a flop in terms of sales, at first.

The point: it sold well enough for it to lay the groundwork to the Mac market of today.

At this stage, Apple looks like the only company with a real shot at making a mixed reality headset mainstream in the next 5-7 years.

True, but the price will come down. The early MacBook Air's were also super-expensive, rich-early-adopter-only pricing, and now they're the mainstream product.

$1800 was expensive but there were a number of competitors in that price range.

I don't think the biggest obstacle is the price. I'm assuming the price goes down eventually.

I just don't see the must-have reason why everyone would have to buy one.

iPhone rollout not only first model

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