The big Apple hits have been the perfected version of products that already had massive markets
Like the iPod launching into the music/mp3 player space or the iPhone into the phone/personal device space
The Vision seems to be going counter to this, launching one of the earlier products into a undeveloped market
I think all the other players WANT VR to take off, but haven't yet made a truly compelling offering that attracts anything but nerds. Apple has been forced to step in early to encourage the market to develop. Just like the others this first version will be early adopters, nerds and developers only but Apple will make it MORE compelling (unlike Meta who made their "pro" model less compelling) for the mass markets with future iterations because that is just what Apple does.
> The big Apple hits have been the perfected version of products that already had massive markets
Uh...
Did you own the first iPhone? It had no apps and no horizontal typing. It didn't even have 3g. Few if any mobile sites. Small screen. Bad battery life.
Did you own the first iPod? 5gb. Firewire connection (which were hard to come by). The scroll wheel was an ACTUAL wheel. You needed a mac to use. Again, bad battery life.
I won't even go into the early mac desktops and laptops.
Those were MVP's on the market. Where we are now with those products didn't dictate where were were then. The did the bare minimum to be considered products.
Those might have been MVPs in terms of what Apple can do
But the markets were already there
Millions/billions of people who already owned a personal music player or a cellphone
Compare the size and maturity of those markets to the current VR/AR market
There is an argument to be made for iPhone vs. media players. The Irivers and the like were comparable functionally. The iPhone just had a killer app… the iTunes Store.
They were arguably minimal for what Apple intended to do. They obviously wanted to carve out new categories and create products that would not be fungible with the competition in the minds of consumers, which from their perspective would raise the bar on what the minimum is.
But, in terms of the market, the iPod was not a minimum viable music player, and the iPhone was not a minimum viable phone.
Notes on iPod, 5GB was a very large capacity at the time, and the iPod was smaller than competitors with similar capacity. The wheel was very extra as a concept, however implemented. It had 10 hours of playtime on a single charge. It was built well from steel and polycarbonate. This was a premium product.
Also the physical wheel was amazingly good UX, and very responsive.