Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

From a purely technology point of view, Meta is well placed. There isn't an enormous gap between what their hardware does vs. Apple.

Display resolution, eye tracking and hand tracking are problems that can be solved today with a more expensive device. (The Quest Pro is a weird compromise because it's not that much of an upgrade from the base Quest. It has powerful eye tracking, yet the software doesn't use it. The whole device really feels like it's an internal hardware testing platform that got a public release because Meta wanted to show the world they're working on something beyond the consumer headset.)

Historically this kind of timing against Apple has boded well. Windows 2.0 looked ugly and for end-users was little more than a glorified MS-DOS file manager, yet ended up winning the market in five years. Same thing happened in smartphones. Android 1.0 was a hasty design reset to catch up to the iPhone, yet it became the world leader in smartphones.

If Meta wants to be the Windows and Android of this generation of computing, they need to think hard about the platform aspect. The Microsoft and Google platforms wouldn't have taken off if the companies hadn't actively worked to open them up to other vendors. Meta can't just be the "poor man's Apple" in their own proprietary garden, or they will end up like Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, BlackBerry 10 and others who tried that approach in the past.

I would argue that the whole "IBM PC clone" phenomenon came about more by chance than by design: IBM certainly didn't want it to happen, but since they cobbled their PC together from standard off-the-shelf parts, and outsourced the OS to a third party (Microsoft) who was more than happy to license it to others too, there wasn't much they could do to stop it either. The other platforms you mentioned were ultimately undercut by these cheap PC clones and by their own failings, not necessarily by the fact that they were proprietary. Actually, IMHO Apple only narrowly escaped joining the Atari ST and Amiga in the mid 1990s...

That non exclusive licensing deal with Microsoft was absolutely bananas on IBMs part

I think Apple might have a stronger moat this time, even purely from a technology point of view. I think "EyeSight" is a bigger deal than some people make of it just yet. I think Apple really did crack something technically that Meta (or anyone else, except for maybe Microsoft's HoloLens) isn't well-placed to duplicate, especially because Apple made it clear they've patented it and a lot of related parts to it and may not be in a mood to license such things just yet.

"EyeSight" may seem like a gimmick in demo videos, but I've got the impression it truly was a key missing stair step to general usability for AR/VR.

(Also, I agree, Meta's playbook could be to try to be the somewhat more open platform here. I doubt that's Meta's vision of what they are doing though.)

So far no one has mass produced microleds. There are no chips on the market that can match M2 to drive these duel 4k displays. Then there’s the R1 chip. And a smooth as butter OS. Meta’s only viable strategy is to flood the market with low end devices.

The past Windows and Android waves show that this is a great strategy if demand is really there.

When the mass market exists, multiple vendors will race to design competitive semiconductors, and even clunky UX will satisfy 90% of users. Windows 3.0 and Android 2.0 weren’t awesome in any sense. They were still good enough to surpass Apple’s sales in terms of units.

An interesting point about VR (and AR eventually) is that clunky UX can move from being merely annoying to literally nausea-inducing. I’m not sure that there can be VR equivalents of the low-end Android market for instance where there you can overshoot perf demands and have the UI lock up and the user just waits. Low-end VR will have to undershoot performance demands which can close doors on entire use-cases.

I’m not saying that platforms won’t figure out ways to profit off market segmentation, just pointing out the inflection point we’re crossing in the human-computer interface.

I recall the tech gap between original iPhone and Android wasn't that big. Apple had no custom CPUs or display tech. The tech gap between Quest and Vision is more like Atari vs Macintosh. One is a toy and other is a workstation.

> Display resolution, eye tracking and hand tracking are problems that can be solved today with a more expensive device.

I don’t think Meta really wants its devices to be out of reach for billions of people, limiting its data collection and the future it imagines with vast amounts of behavioral data collected from all those people.

If Meta were able to create an independent company that doesn’t have to have tracking or profiling or advertising or connected to its surveillance properties like Facebook and Instagram, it could create good devices at high enough prices to compete with Apple on the experience and quality. But its not in Meta’s DNA to leave such things alone.

The price problem will solve itself over time, as it always does for electronics components with enough mass demand.

The $500 Quest of 2028 will have OLED screens that rival the Vision Pro that ships next year. Just like cheap Android phones took a few years to catch up to the iPhone 4 display spec, but they did, and now DPI is not an interesting spec on phones at all.

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