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Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

When the Airpods first came out, I was convinced they'd never take off, and lots of social media seemed to agree with me. There was even science - SCIENCE! - used to explain why they were a bad idea. While I don't see myself buying the Vision Pro, I'll make no predictions about whether it will be popular.

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I'm seeing those $200 earbuds in almost every students' ears at my local university.

I also caved and bought a pair.

The smart watch used to be pretty obscure and known as being a tech geek device, but now I see most people wearing an Apple Watch as opposed to not even wearing a watch it all just a decade ago.

what was the case against airpods exactly? Wireless earbuds always seemed like a no brainer to me, used them ever since they became available, never touched airpods specifically tho.

as for apple vision ar is the future no doubt, that seems obvious like wireless earbuds did. Vision pro tho imo is a devkit, but the fans will buy in anyway id guess. wait till they release a more consumer focused model and then itll be more obvious AR is working out.

The case against AirPods was that they looked stupid, were easy to lose, hugely expensive, had poor quality audio, connected via unreliable Bluetooth, and relied on batteries which wouldn’t last long enough to be useful. I agreed wholeheartedly, and now own my second pair.

Never bet against Apple

That is a common argument here. It is also a logical fallacy. Because heavier than air apparatus can fly, dropbox made money and so on does not mean anything in the future will be successful.

Absolutely. HN has an abysmal track record of predicting the success or failure of most innovations, because it tends to over-estimate the importance of the technology itself and under-estimate the power of marketing to overcoming challenges in adoption. This is why I make no prediction whatsoever at this early stage - we know very little about it.

It’s not just marketing but also confusing our preferences with the market as a whole. For example, AirPods are not as good as my over ear headphones … but they’re impressively close and the AR features are quite effective. Based on flat sales for traditional headphones and huge sales for AirPods, they clearly targeted the much larger group who don’t value audio quality more than everything else.

Using Apple's past track record to predict future success or failure is not a logical fallacy.

And I have no idea why you are talking about dropbox and flying.

Infamous Dropbox context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

There are other comments saying it's brilliant idea.

Apple's new device will not fail because there was some comment in 2007 on HN related to dropbox that pointed out alternatives (but even that commenter said it's good idea for windows).

Man I love that comment. Always makes me laugh.

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