Comment by etempleton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by etempleton | Hacker News Reader

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Is it a better recording device? Do we know that? Everyone is going to hate the person that is wearing that thing during a birthday party. I remember how obnoxious camcorders were because they were so big and obtrusive. This feels worse.

Maybe this replaces monitors, but a lot of people work on their computer 8-10 hours a day. What does 8-10 hours with a headset on feel like? What do other people in your organization think of the uncanny valley avatar?

It doesn’t replace TV. You have to have a headset per person. And each headset costs 3X a good 55 inch tv? And each person needs to be plugged in to make that work. If someone comes over you have to say bring your own headset.

And the final example is a use case that will basically never happen. It is hard to get friends to coordinate over a normal game on Xbox or PlayStation.

I love Apple but this is just not a mass market device.

As stated, it does replace TVs for my household. Two headsets would replace two TVs, 2 sound bars, 1 monitor. When friends come over we play board games or hangout. I don’t watch movies with friends at my place. We talk about shows we’ve seen but we don’t watch together. When people come over it’s about interacting with them.

We will see whose vision for the future is correct. I don’t think your view is broad enough to see possibilities for how things can change and evolve. The criticisms I’ve read about the headset make me think of Ballmer laughing about the $500 phone or when he discounted the iPad and when he talked about Apple making a laptop without a DVD player. I remember people saying the iPad was just a giant iPhone.

This thing might flop but I hope it doesn’t because I’d love to get rid of TVs, sound bars, etc.

I hope it is awesome. I really do. I just have trouble seeing it become a mass market hit in the way I didn’t with any of the recent Apple device launches. I was on the optimist side for all of those. I project they sell 1-3 million per year, maybe more if they drop the price closer to $2,000. Ever breaking 5 million units sold per year will be tough.

My reaction to each previous Apple launch for context:

iPhone: "That is it. That is the future of all phones." iPad: "I don't know if it is for me, but they are going to sell a ton of those and it is going to replace the need for a laptop for a lot of people." Watch: "I want one, but I don't know I can justify it until it operates more independently from the phone."

Anecdote: My spouse said absolutely not when shown. Had a visceral negative reaction.

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