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Comment by dumbfounder | Hacker News Reader

No one will create the killer app because they won't have enough people to buy it. They aren't going to sell 100 million of these things. They will sell 1 million to prosumers. But you can't make a killer high-end game on a completely new system with completely new features with such a limited market, they would need to sell it everyone to make money. That's the real problem with AR/VR. You need critical mass in the number of users to justify people building mass-market appeal games and apps. The goggles need to not have a cord, be 1/3 as heavy, and 1/4 the price, and then we will get mass adoption. My gut says we are 3 generations away. But it will happen.

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Yes, they are going to sell 1 million. In this generation. Next generation will have non pro model. You can sell ten millions of that. It is not going to kill phones, but it will absolutely slaughter laptops. This generation is basically just devkits.

I don't think it's hit people (including me) that this is not just a headset. It's a full-blown computer.

You can take just the device and a keyboard with you to work anywhere.

Yep. This is huge for those who travel. It’s huge for those who do cad work. And the power available in such a small form factor really opens the door to previously impossible tasks

It seems awfully convenient that the laptop folds down nice and flat. It takes up very little space. Headset like this is still kinda big to carry around with you... Maybe just a preference on my part, but I quit carrying my big can headphones around with me because they were too bulky. I'd never carry around a headset like this. Plus you look like a dick wearing one.

Which is much bigger than a macbook air in a bag, and can do 2 hours at most.

You won’t need a keyboard.

You do. I’m 100% sure that flickering your fingers in the air simple (besides looking like an absolute moron) doesn’t have enough information to accurately type. Also, your arms will fatigue immediately.

If you can position things in AR, you can put keyboard keys down on wood grain and the device can tell where your fingers land.

If you can escape the skeuomorphic trap, many things are possible. A mechanical keyboard is certainly not the universally optimal means of character entry.

Maybe not in this rev, probably not at launch based on the video, but keyboards as we know them are due for an overhaul.

> A mechanical keyboard is certainly not the universally optimal means of character entry.

Funnily enough, I think that this is basically the ultimate limit of touch based systems — humans rely very much on touch, and touch screens’ smooth surface removes every physical hint from the system. Just remember back to how we could compose a whole message blindly in our pockets with feature phones, yet I can’t write a sentence correctly nowadays without constantly looking at the screen.

Now you would even take away that? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that the keyboard layout or anything is the optimum, but it is sure as hell closer to it than randomly hitting the table. The mechanical part is funnily being the key part.

It does seem to me there are strong parallels with the iPhone/Blackberry keyboard conversation. Some people will hang on bitterly until the end.

I can thumb touch-type on a cap touch screen with the help of autocorrect. With continued improvement of predictive text and new input methods I think all kinds of things are possible.

Maybe with another technology iteration of haptics you would get positional feedback?

> If you can position things in AR, you can put keyboard keys down on wood grain and the device can tell where your fingers land.

You'll get carpal tunnel syndrome faster than the battery drains if you're actually doing that. One of the main points of keyboards is actually the fact that they absorb some of the shock of typing.

It's actually extremely plausible that the keyboard is the best possible text input method - at least until we find a way to read brain signals non-invasively and decode those into text directly.

My (unchecked) understanding is that carpal tunnel comes about because of the angle of the wrist and the repetitive pushing itself.

If there are no keys to press wouldn’t you have no reason to exert force, and no need to angle your wrist or brace your hand?

Eventually, maybe. In the keynote, there was a vague outline of a virtual keyboard, but (unless I missed it) we never saw that virtual keyboard in use. Instead, the demo pivoted to using a paired Magic Keyboard.

How exactly would you replace a keyboard with anything even slightly as productive?

Just lay down in bed and put physical keyboard with touchpad on your legs. Many times I work from airbnb or hotel that doesn't have proper chairs or workdesk or from coworking hotdesk when travelling.

The GP was claiming a keyboard won't be necessary at all.

I probably won’t, but someone probably will. Productive might look quite different.

If we agree then why are we arguing? I said it would take 3 more generations to hit 100 million, and I said it would happen. My point is that it won’t attract big time developers until then because it will be not be economical for them. But I think apple can grind it out, make it just good enough to attract just enough value to grow just enough hit big numbers in 5-7ish years.

It will attract "big time developers" in version 1 because being first to market on a new platform is an enormous advantage, even if that platform won't have significant market penetration for years.

Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, etc. were not particularly revolutionary apps and would never top the charts if invented today. But because they were some of the first games on iOS they became multi-billion dollar franchises.

It will "attract" a few. As in, Apple will pay people to develop apps for it, and will basically buy teams to develop apps. I have heard of these deals happening. But you won't be able to make a bunch of money off it for many years, so how much developer talent can they actually attract? The iphone was waaaay different. There was instant utility for the phone that attracted millions, it wasn't insanely expensive like the vision pro, and the apps you could develop were simple and useful. Yes, there will be a bunch of AR apps from iOS you can use instantly on vision pro (I assume, not actually sure), but to develop a full featured app that takes advantage of the interface will be quite hard, and thus quite expensive.

No one bought an iPhone to play Fruit Ninja, though. They bought it to get access to the internet on the go. Essentially the browser was the killer for a phone.

Those games were also like 3$

To be honest, I see much more financial constraints ahead in 5-7 years for the average (even Wester-only) people to think about spending anywhere close to this amount on a luxury device and with the amount of hardware needed even with generational advancement I don’t see it changing.

killer app sells systems, not the other way around.

That’s exactly what I said in a different way. No one will make the killer app because it isn’t economical to do so.

If there was one to make, Apple would make or subsidise it, guaranteed.

Even after reading loads of comments no one can really think of one.

Yet.

Apple isn’t the only one with an XR device. Devs can still hone their ideas now that they have UX direction. The Apple AR SDK has been out for years now too.

The first iPhone also only had 1.4 million in sales. I’m not even sure the App Store was even out until the 2nd Gen.

The original iPhone sold some 6 million units from what I can google.

Steve Jobs himself said 200 days after the launch of the first iPhone that they sold 4 million units.

Source: https://www.macworld.com/article/188823/liveupdate-17.html

You’re right.

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