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Comment by kristianc | Hacker News Reader

If the strategy is fully about content (which would make this device about selling services on top of the Vision Pro), why is the Vision Pro specced as it is, and why is the price point so high?

The specification of the device seems to be complete overkill for the kind of strategy you are describing, which frankly does not need extreme hardware power, and makes it cost prohibitive to many of the people who would otherwise buy the content.

All I can think of is that there are lower specced and lower priced devices coming, but I am sort of at a loss as to why they didn’t start with those - as if this fails, they aren’t going to get off the ground.

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It's specced the way it is to deliver the best in class, best possible content experience without compromises in initially small volumes. Neither of those things is an accident. Scaling up manufacturing is hard and expensive. Much easier to create a lot of hype for an expensive device that is going to be so popular that they won't be able to satisfy demand. So, they'll make lots of them and sell out in no time. The ebay value of these things is going to be insane.

By the way, this is a similar price point to the magic leap and holo lens devices. This just seems to be what it takes for a state of the art AR/MR experience.

And it's not like there is a shortage of very wealthy people buying things like Teslas, ipad pros, fully specced out iphones, that carry thousands of dollars worth of equipment. For those people 3500$ is just the right level of premium and exclusivity. Like it or not, Apple is very good at separating people like that from their cash. There are millions of them and most of them are already loyal customers. There is no need for a lower price point and there absolutely is no need to compromise on quality.

The goal isn't to make you happy but to make you crave something you can't afford yet. So, when the time comes you'll be spending a bit more than is comfortable for you. That's what Apple does. They leave the low margin scraps to others.

It’s a fair point but 1/ Apple for the most part didn’t start it’s product journey for any of the other products you’ve mentioned with the ‘Pro’ version - its strategy has generally been to get people to fall in love with the regular version and convince them they want more of it, doubly true when they’re introducing a new category product and 2/ It’s strange because I own many of those fully specced out things you mention, and this leaves me utterly cold. Fwiw, I also own a Kindle.

Yeah, this is the Vision Pro. That leaves room in Apple’s usual nomenclature for Vision Air, Vision Max, Vision Mini, Vision SE, and just plain Vision.

The high-end system spec is to ensure there’s no tethering requirement, thus the computer-class SoC in there.

Will help keep people from turning into Stephenson’s gargoyles. :)

I see a lot of the pricey functionality they packed into this thing as about making it less onerous to put on. People need to actually decide to put it on to do stuff that they could do with their existing devices.

There's one unavoidable obstacle to people wanting to put on the headset: you're going to look really weird and isolated to other people in your environment. The tech to solve this problem doesn't exist, and maybe it's too high a barrier and this product category just isn't going to work. But Apple is betting that if they chip away at all the other reasons to not put on the headset, it'll cross the threshold where it wearing it becomes a regular routine for most people who buy one.

If they can bootstrap that into an ecosystem so that there's things you'll want to do with the device that you couldn't do with your other devices, at that point they can start selling a cheaper device that doesn't try to solve the onerousness problem through sheer luxury.

Maybe this is the minimum spec device that allows users to read text without getting nauseous?

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