At USD$3500, who is it for?
And who will develop software for something with such a small user base?
And who will develop software for something with such a small user base?
this is literally how every single thing has worked in this industry for like 50 years now. are there really people on this site so young that they don't remember how this works beyond a single product hype cycle? is it that hard to remember how compact discs, dial-up internet, laptops, multi-CPU/cores, DVDs, mp3 players, broadband, smartphones, bluetooth, wifi, flash, SSDs, GPUs, plasma, lcd, led, smartwatches, EVs took 5-10 years to hit mass market? "well, that's different, those were obviously going to be hits" -- no. wrong. all of this stuff was atrocious and atrociously expensive when it first came out. anyone remember the first orinoco wifi cards? or bluetooth? the shit didn't even work.
here are some current things that sort of suck but will probably also continue get better: satellite internet, smart home tech, solar tech, LLMs. this stuff will get better. it's the housing, education, healthcare, financial services that are going to get worse and worse because all of the money flows to the people making the tech. talk about missing the forest for the trees.
i mean is it REALLY that hard to remember this stuff? am i REALLY that old? am i taking crazy pills?
I think significant questions remain at this point about their actual go-to-market strategy (unsurprisingly considering they have only been given a short keynote presentation) which make people suspicious if not sceptical when you take into account the other notorious failures in this market.
Developers are not going to be the primary demographic, this isn't going to be the final price and the product will definitely change over the coming year.
I always hear people giving made up use cases like "oh, service engineers will be able to see instructions overlaid on the machines they're working on" but a paper service manual costs a lot less than a 3D augmented reality manual - and anyone who's worked with service engineers knows for any repair that's performed often enough that productivity is important, the service engineer will know the process by heart.
Oh sure, you can sell a few units to architecture companies that want to dazzle rich clients. But you can't sustain a product like this on sales of 1000 units per year.
Google Glass and HoloLens both targeted the "business market" but that's just them saving face when they can't hit a price point that makes any sense.
The military bought enough Hololens (for whatever reason) to make it worth it for Microsoft. They knew that ahead of time too.
Apple has enough people that will buy whatever they make that this will be successful even if it is also useless.
What you are, is snarky.
The only times Apple ever did this in the past, the product flopped because it was too expensive.
Maybe other companies have been leading with expensive tech waiting for the market to catch up, but Apple hasn't - not since the Lisa anyway.
And yes I am on old fogey - ol enough to remember that the industry has been waiting for consumers to "catch up" to VR for many many years. It's not happening - VR is a niche. Ordinary people don't want to put a VR headset on - they just don't - there's no catching up because 99% of the people I know would never put on a headset except for one impressive demo and never again.
This thing will at best do "okay" - it's too expensive - there won't be a critical mass of software for it, and VR is a niche.
They will when it's got an Apple logo on it.
Why not? Because it's heavy, sweaty, smelly, expensive, uncomfortable for the eyes, or some other reason?
I doubt people have real ideological aversion towards headsets. If people don't want them it's probably because of one of the practical reasons above. And honestly most of those are likely to be alleviated in the near future.
I'd bet that if Apple thought in any way that they might have a sunscreen form-factor device in anything close to 5 years from now they would have held off on releasing anything to the public.
All signs 100% point to bulky headsets being the state-of-the-art for the foreseeable future, and this is going to keep dooming this technology.
Not to mention, the fact that no one has really found a good way to allow you to move around in the VR "space" that they're creating with anything other than a controller (to an extremely disorienting effect even then) also puts a serious damper on our ability to suspend disbelief while enjoying such a device.
Those are not my words, I wouldn't mind wearing it in private (for open spaces with other people including my family definitely above is valid), its from my wife who is a doctor. And she generally likes tech, has latest iphone and garmin 6 pro watches. Just because you like some gadget, you can't force it on folks who properly detest the whole idea of it.
Let's not even start the discussion on negative physical and mental health effects of watching this for longer, especially in kids.
A dentist friend of mine is so excited with the ability of using it for his work. He doesn’t want to look up to the X-ray screen, or has his assistant read out loud for him the number associated with the patient’s scanning result.
I don't understand how can people feel so strongly about this.
If someone wants to wear a headset, what's it to you? Especially if it's not in your presence.
> Let's not even start the discussion on negative physical and mental health effects
Like the physical and mental health effects people complain about EVERY TIME a new form of media consumption technology is introduced. It's a complaint as old as the pyramids, literally.
Of course we should be careful and mindful about the well being of children. But let's not loose our heads, this is not fentanyl.
- “Too expensive” - “Who is this for?!” - “my $20 watch has 20x battery life” - ”This will obviously flop because no one I know wants to strap a screen to their wrist and carry it around all day” - ...and on and on.
I don’t have a guess as to whether this will flop or succeed, but I’m always amazed at how people are willing to announce publicly with confidence that a product they’ve never used will undoubtedly fail.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070908223628/http://www.apple....
A standalone Sun-2/120, with cpu, 1M of memory, 42MB hard drive, tape interface, ethernet interface and software, cost $16300 in 1984 dollars, over 45k today.
So yeah, Macintosh was cheap
The difference was that the Mac shipped with WYSIWYG editing software (MacWrite and MacPaint) that was so obviously better than anything on the IBM that it was a no brainer. People wanted them very much, but most of us simply couldn't afford them.
In addition, desktop publishing was a stupidly obvious killer app on the Macintosh (Fat Mac plus LaserWriter plus Aldus Pagemaker) and you could make your money back within a couple of jobs given how much money you would save.
Even a $400 computer was a huge stretch for them. It was possibly the absolute best purchase they ever made for me as it sent me down the tech path, but they thought VERY long and hard about it.
Zoomers don’t remember a time before any of those things. Hell, they don’t even remember some of those things.
The reason it is priced at $3500 is because Apple does not have the supply chain to build more of these things. There is simply no point pricing this at $300 and being perpetually Out of Stock which would devalue their brand for no benefit. Hence the Pro tag and release at WWDC.
Eventually there will be a non-Pro version that everyone can buy.
Everyone. It's a laptop replacement.
Realistically this "Pro" version is for early adopters. There will surely be a regular/SE/Lite version in a couple of years for the price of a MacBook Air.
> And who will develop software for something with such a small user base?
Everyone will, if they're smart. Being first to market on a new platform is huge, even if it will take a few years to have significant market penetration.
Angry Birds became a multi-billion dollar franchise for being one of the first iPhone games. Who knows what the equivalent will be for XR.
Respectfully, even the iPad hasn't fully evolved into a laptop replacement, so why should we think this device will fit all the multitude of use cases that necessitate the computing power represented by a laptop / desktop device?
It is? As in it acts like a normal Mac OS machine that happens to be attached to your head, holds all your files and stuff without communicating to another PC?
Can I just run IntelliJ on it and write code?
Or does it just replace your monitor(s) ?
Nooo it's an emacs device.
But seriously, can the early adopter type FAANG income techie use this for work standalone? Can it even act as virtual monitors for a Mac Studio?
I'm one of those people who wants that day to arrive while I am still working, so I follow this space with interest and buy some of these devices.
So far, no headset has gotten close. The Quest Pro is probably the closest, but still very far from the goal.
This Apple device looks like it will get closer still, but it likely will fall short -- at least for a few product generations.
So I think the big question is will this product achieve enough traction to keep existing until the tech gets better and the price gets lower.
A VR headset that focuses on being really good at web apps (including complex ones like GitHub codespaces) would get a lot of the way there.
It's sobering to think this has now been so long ago but still: this is absolutely not true. Angry Birds came out end of 2009 and games were available for more than a year by then. See top 2008 here https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/12/apple-reveals-most-do... and top 2009 here https://www.ign.com/articles/2009/12/09/the-most-popular-iph...
And the new VisionOS (or whatever Apple will decide to call it) will have to be even more restricted than iPadOS was compared to MacOS just because of the tighter coupling to your body.
Can you build apps on it?
You can develop some toy apps with Swift Playgrounds, but Apple isn't developing realityOS using iPad.
When you take it off, your laptop, phone, whatever will still work great as normal.
It's a caveat because for a lot of people, I don't think laptops will be necessary in the future. My mom doesn't have one but is obsessed with her phone. Probably one day laptops will mostly be for pros.
But yeah, in general I agree with everything you said.
I thought it would be absurd to be wearing these goggles in the street. Then I thought that at home it would also be strange being with the family with those things on the top of your head. I thought "This is perfect for people who live alone". And then it dawned on me: the killer app for this is p0rn.
The cheaper mass market consumer version comes later. They've been iterating for years now on something in a thick framed glasses form factor, and haven't gotten anything they think is worth shipping so far.
>Microsoft’s HoloLens 2: a $3,500 mixed reality headset for the factory, not the living room
https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/24/18235460/microsoft-holole...
> Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-has-laid-...
I'm sure Apple's habit of iterating on and improving a new platform year after year without giving up would have served them better.
Sure the product exists and people buy them, but it's no earth shaker - in contrast, a success for Apple is iPad, iPhone, Macintosh - products that if you ask some random person in an affluent country, there's a pretty good chance they own one, two three or more of these products.
The Apple VR headset will not be a flop in the sense that Apple probably won't kill the product, but it also won't be any huge success by the measures above. It will at best be a niche, which is a flop for Apple.
But so far, that is the only app category I can think of that would justify me quitting my job and trying to bootstrap a business based solely on an app for Vision OS. I feel like I am probably overlooking a couple, though... :-D
Brand loyalty, consumerism, platform lock in. It's the reason why Apple is so wealthy.
People will defend the investment of their time and money by investing more.
At least on the phone market, iphones have much longer lifetime and can often be used second-third time as well (I also use a used iphone, which I plan on passing down to my mother when I upgrade). Their M-series laptops are unbiasedly the best and it is not even funny by how far. There is simply no competitor that would be anywhere near on the performance-battery life plot, and for that its price is really not high (especially an M1 air, used or new).
Android’s wearables are toys compared to an apple watch also.