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Comment by mrobins | Hacker News Reader

Pricing the headset at 7x the Quest seems like an Apple power move. Ordinarily if you’re 2nd or 3rd to a category you’d expect there to be pressure to price in the same ballpark. You want customers to compare but say the new product is worth spending a reasonable amount more than the old product because it has some bells and whistles.

At $3500 Apple invites no comparison. They’re basically pretending Meta doesn’t exist and that they’ve invented the category, as though it’s the iPhone or iPad.

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On the flipside, it gives Meta a blueprint for disrupting the market. They're well-poised up to release a "Quest Pro Max" of sorts - keep the Quest form factor, but go all-in on eye tracking and screen tech. Price it at $3,000 and include a nice aluminum stand for kicks and giggles.

The Hololens was a "power move" headset that had to repeatedly re-adjust its target market because the price was too high. Apple could end up in the same spot if they can't iteratively bring down the price.

Apple filed 5000 patents. Meta can’t even figure out where the field is now.

I hardly believe that with all headstart that oculus/mega had they don’t have enough patents to ensure mutually assured destruction

It's amazing how seamlessly people have switched from relentlessly mocking Meta's investment in VR to pretending it never happened

Perhaps Apple entering the space with such significant investment lends some validation to Meta’s efforts.

N-no! It can't be. Meta is the company that my favorite company hates!

There's always the defense that he engineer wasn't aware of the patent.

That just gets you out of paying triple damages.

This is exactly what Jobs claimed about the iPhone in 2007 and it didn’t stop Android from absorbing every relevant innovation.

Jobs was exactly right to say that iPhone was 5 years ahead of the competition. The competition at that time wasn't Android, it was blackberry.

Android shipped their first public beta in 2007. Its development overlapped the iPhone, and similarly the development of the standalone Quest systems has overlapped the Vision Pro.

There are most likely enough patents on both sides to render these portfolio boasts moot, once again.

No one was using Android phones in 2007. It was BlackBerry and Moto Q days.

Android was ahead for a long time 3-4 generations only recently had Apple jumped ahead, basically after Google killed affordable nexus devices that was the turning point

I highly doubt Meta can match Apple's tech now and in the future. The hard part is the hardware. Apple is way ahead here.

The hard part is the low end - and Meta has 20 million devices sold there. If the hardware is an obstacle to reaching market fit, I'm pretty confident Meta could get there. It's mostly a matter of scaling up what they already have.

Yea 20 million cheap VR headsets that haven't taken off into the expected market at all. Any hardware company could do that tomorrow. It's easy. Just source the parts.

Apple is practically completely vertically integrated. They design their own chips. They have decades of experience in consumer hardware.

To make AR/VR into what Zuck wants, his hardware is NOWHERE near what it needs to be. And they don't have the chops to get it there. If it's possible, I believe Apple can do it.

> It's easy. Just source the parts.

Why is that not a relevant strategy for competing with Apple? Nvidia and arguably AMD could both out-engineer Apple if you're just talking about chips here.

Aren't they talking about the "ease" of competing with a lower-end, non-vertically-integrated device?

Same tactic won't work against Apple because they make the key chips, make the hardware, the software, etc. They can have you look at your MacBook, and the headset brings up your laptop's workspace ready to go.

You cannot sell a $3,500 toy with "Handoff". It really is that simple.

The sticking point is the silicon which they don't control. After watching Android flail for 10 years unable to match Apple's ARM processors in phones, I'm unfortunately not super optimistic that Meta can influence Qualcomm to suddenly make the necessary leap in performance needed. Of course, if they concede having an external power brick perhaps they can just stack multiple XR2's in there and get into the range ... but I'll be sad if they go that way. Carrying a power brick has to be a temporary detour, it can't be the long term of this.

Modern Android processors are pretty competitive with iPhone's silicon:

S23, 1.4k (Single core), 4.8k (Multi core), 79.3 (3d mark/GPU)

14 pro max, 1.8k (Single core), 5.3k (Multi core), 74 (3d mark/GPU)

Looks like gen2 is already on-par in multi-core and GPU perf. Single core still is 28% faster in iphone.

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https://www.tomsguide.com/news/galaxy-s23-ultra-vs-iphone-14...

Yeah but the Vision Pro rocks an M2 chip, not the A-Series in the iPhone.

And it uses all that power to run... iPad apps.

If you can get the high end to work well you can get the volume to make low end good enough. The 3k unit is probably the minimum viable product with todays tech but if it takes off in 2-3 generations we will get 1k headsets with equal or better features due to volume

The hard part is only the low end if you don’t start with the high end.

With a high end you can continuously fund a drive toward lower manufacturing and operational costs. Without it you just focus on cutting corners.

Depends who they’re competing against. It’s the exact same price as a HoloLens 2

Holo lens one was a piece of crap. So yeah low bar

The Quest 2 is $299 now. You can buy a dozen of them for one Apple device.

It is indeed a different category. The control paradigm is different and the Quest’s popular apps are games and fitness. It’s a bit like comparing a Mac Studio to a Nintendo Switch.

Maybe Apple doesn't actually want to sell a lot of a first generation product they know will quickly evolve?

Yeah. It made me wonder if they priced it such that it could be argued it's a success by a smaller metric, giving themselves leeway. As while they're positioning this as a general computing device it's unclear how many will be comfortable using it as such in this current iteration, compared to how they've traditionally been used almost entirely for entertainment (in the consumer space anyway).

Yes, hence the inventes "spatial computing" despite clearly providing hybrid AR. A.k.a. it's the same apps you already use, but now floating in front of you!

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