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Comment by woeirua | Hacker News Reader

I think it's very important for people to get out of the HN bubble when discussing this. $3500 is just way too expensive for mass customer adoption. Meta is struggling to get customers to adopt the Oculus hardware when its an order of magnitude less expensive. I can't see why _any_ developer would sink tons of money into building custom apps on this platform when there will be less than a few hundred thousand users next year.

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I'm an AR skeptic but I appreciated Benedict Evans's take on Apple's strategy here:

> Meta, today, has roughly the right price and is working forward to the right device: Apple has started with the right device and will work back to the right price. Meta is trying to catalyse an ecosystem while we wait for the right hardware — Apple is trying to catalyse an ecosystem while we wait for the right price. So the Vision is a device pulled forward from years into the future, at a price that reflects that. It’s as though Apple had decided to sell the 2007 iPhone in 2002 — what would the price have been?

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/6/15/vision-pro

Yeah this is clearly the right take. One proven strategy for creating a new category is to start with the price-insensitive high end consumers with a luxury product, and lower the price as you gain economy of scale.

Same reason Tesla started with the Roadster instead of trying to build a mass-market sedan first.

To be fair, the original iPhone was like this as well - expensive and unsubsidized, locked to a specific carrier, small production, took many years to develop, was very much a future shock device upon its unveiling, etc. The 3g was the one for the masses.

Because this is a first iteration specifically made for developer to start to get their app running, so that when the consumer less expensive model will be released a couple of years down the line there's already an app ecosystem ready.

It's a strategic release aimed at devs and early adopters, the consumer level device will come in the future at a complete different price point. That's when mass customer adoption might happen.

Also Meta is struggling also because their device is a novelty without many great software. See a pattern?

Just saying, Microsoft already tried this with the HoloLens, and pivoted hard and fast into B2B only.

As a developer who's worked with the HoloLens, it's not very good & is extremely underwhelming. The tech is cool but the viewport is so small and the hand tracking is extremely tiring. It could never work as a consumer product in it's current state.

The Vision Pro seems to be more focused on the end user experience, so hopefully that will help Apple get their foot in the door with consumers. However, I've never used it so I cant say for sure. The company I work at will most definitely be purchasing them as soon as we can though, very excited to either be extremely underwhelmed or extremely impressed.

Microsoft’s ability to execute at anything hardware other than Xbox is very questionable.

I don’t even know if it is ability, rather than unwillingness to invest the billions of dollars and 10+ years it would take to get something like this off the ground.

"so that when the consumer less expensive model will be released a couple of years down the line there's already an app ecosystem ready."

....

You think that developers are going to create a thriving ecosystem of apps when there's no market until several years down the line? Bit of a Chicken or the egg problem isn't it?

Tens of hundreds of Innovator-category developers will build surprising, delightful apps for the hundreds of thousands of Innovator-category Vision Pro first-year buyers.

Early-Adopter-category developers and buyers will wait to see what the Innovators discover.

Did they say thriving? They will be the initial foray. There will be enough of a market for early creators (like Apple TV which had small numbers) but reduced competition. The early creators will have some return, reputation and experience to carry through for when the audience grows.

It won't be the opening of floodgates, but I think it will be interesting enough.

A well established dynamic in business is the “flywheel” or “virtuous cycle”. Yes, there is a chicken and egg problem here. That doesn’t in any way make it impossible to get the flywheel going. You just need to invest time, money, and energy to support/subsidize each part of the cycle.

The hardware is probably being sold near to cost, thus speeding up that side of the adoption cycle. And courting developers will allow them to build up the app ecosystem.

I agree with this.

Meta's attempts are currently limited because the sticky use cases seem to be fitness and a little bit of gaming. When you have a device that is viable for some level of work, it's a somewhat easier sell. Apple will be testing this for work (and hybrid remote work) with staff and will have a strong idea as to how viable this is going forward.

Except people have been crowing about using VR headsets for work for years now too and it still hasn’t taken off. This is one of those areas where I think techies are just totally out of touch with what the market wants.

The comments I've mostly seen are people saying that when the pixel density gets there, they'll jump on it or at least be very keen to try it. It hadn't taken off because we've been yet to reach that point. 2024 could be where it starts.

I think the incentive is there for employers to favour these (fit more staff in physical offices; and suits remote work well) and that will push it into the general white collar world.

> Meta is struggling to get customers to adopt the Oculus hardware when its an order of magnitude less expensive

I rarely use my Rift S these days - not because the hardware isn't good - but because the software experience is an absolute dog's anus. Wanted to play Beat Saber the other day. Turned on the PC. 25 minutes later, ready to open Steam. Whoops, now the Oculus app says its out of date. Another 10 minutes faff because what it actually meant was "you need to migrate to a Meta account". Then I had to sit through the tutorials again. Then Steam decided Beat Saber needed updating and took 45 minutes to download 800MB on gigabit fibre. Finally, after just about 90 minutes, I could play Beat Saber.

$3500 to not sit through that absolute omnishambles of a torture ever again? Sign me up.

That’s not exactly the modern oculus experience - the Quest is “strap and go”.

Yeah my Quest 2 never had that issue. Updates were always super fast or non intrusive too.

Best $300 I’ve spent in the last 5 years.

But google earth is gone. That was seriously one of the best apps on the device :(

i thought that was desktop only. is it completely gone now?

wander works on the quest 2, but doesn't have 3d features in streetview.

See above

It was never on the Quest. The desktop version still works fine.

However Google recently made the underlying APIs available so it will be soon

Rift S is basically ancient technology at this point.

Palmer's article "Free isn't cheap enough" seems relevant:

https://palmerluckey.com/free-isnt-cheap-enough/

Quest headsets are indeed cheap but but perhaps sacrifice too much on the experience quality. People gotta want something before it can get cheap (not my words).

Every time Quest 2 comes up on HN people whine about it basically playing PS3 games or glorified mobile arcade system.

I personally love it, RE4 VR and the month I spent VR boxing every night was some of the most fun I’ve had gaming recently. But there’s limits to that sort of thing, especially which games get ported and VR’d. Apple doesn’t even need a suite of A+ games to get people to buy it, I don’t remember them showing any games in the launch.

I get why Apple pushed it up higher in the market. The first two years will be for developers and very early adopters.

This is like buying an expensive monitor/TV/casual gaming device baked into one.

Hell there’s people who buy $2000 TVs, even though most people buy the $500 ones. This is way more capable than just a new TV.

Wow that's a really prophetic take on things - I've mostly written off Palmer Lucky these days but he was bang on the money there.

It's interesting though how counter it runs to John Carmack's philosophy where mass market accessibility is everything. I wonder if looking back people will rethink his contribution as actually holding things back.

It certainly seems like Meta is switching gears a bit with the Quest 3 going out to market at $500. It's going to be phenomenal value for what it is at that price still. But it's going to leave behind a significant segment of people for whom $299 was a palatable indulgence buy or gift for their children etc while $500 is not.

This isn’t a mass consumer device. $3500 is what Apple’s charging to folks with great ideas who want to dictate what the future of “special computing” looks like. This is for early adopters pretty much exclusively.

The rest of us will get the apple vision se in 2028 when the territory’s been mapped out

It's also possible that Meta is struggling because a $500 dollar VR headset isn't a broadly compelling experience given all the compromises they had to make to get it to $500 bucks.

"Smartphones" weren't the most dominant phone category until after the iPhone.

It's really hard to know until units start shipping though.

To be fair, the Oculus experience is pretty bad. Mine only has three eye-width settings, none of which match my face, so my vision is always blurry. And whenever I use hand tracking, it only picks up my “clicks” about 20% of the time. It’s not surprising to me that no one wants to use it.

I've used multiple VR headsets with wildly incorrect IPD settings and it's not really what I would describe as "blurry"- it's more subtle than that.

Are you sure it's not something else in your case?

I mean, it's not exactly a gaussian blur. It's more like an RBG shift, mixed with the kind of effect you get when you defocus your eyes ever so slightly.

Meta are struggling to make a worse device popular. Maybe $3.5k is the cheapest a truely compelling headset product can be made for at the moment.

The presumption, from an investing standpoint anyway, is that working on this version will give you a first mover advantage for a V2 in two years that will have slightly upgraded chips, similar display, and cost half as much.

Half as much is still no where close to where they need to be to get mass market adoption.

Apple is selling iPhones for what, 1500? That’s nearly half 3500

The average person is buying an iPhone under a 2-3 year contract. Most aren't being bought outright.

I don't really understand this assessment. Half as much is $1,750. That's really not much compared to what people are willing to pay for Apple devices. Basically the price point of an iPad Pro, and I think the potential of the Vision Pros is much higher than the potential of the iPad. It's just a matter of whether they can realize some commercial use-cases like with the iPad.

The Vision Pro is marketed as a device with the potential to replace or significantly augment a laptop and/or TV for a lot of users (I understand there are presently some asterisks needed there). And that's assuming no other novel, high value uses emerge.

Apple sells something like 7 million MacBooks per quarter. Many of them are well more than $2000. I don't think a $2,000 price point is a crazy barrier if the device is able to live up to what it could be.

It's NOT going to cost $1,750 in 2026. Not going to happen before a Macbook Air is sold for $600.

I don't see this as a big problem. This is clearly aimed for development/investors in tech right now, and in this market the 3.5k price tag is actually pretty low consider this is actually a product, and not even a prototype.

The potential thanks to the higher resolution is huge. If you ever tried to do any non-gaming task on an oculus, you realize how important resolution is for text. Forget games, this is an enabler for a disruption in user interface.

My biggest gripe to me, let it be either meta or apple, is the vendor lock-in. I'm not going to touch anything made by meta. But apple is not far.

Occulus may be an order of magnitude cheaper but I bet it’s an order of magnitude shitter too. Maybe this is the price/quality required to actually get people interested in mixed reality. It was a similar thing with the iPhone. Most people were happy with $100 dumbphones. Eventually the utility became worth the investment.

I think there’s a sort of Apple guarantee too. If I’m going to buy a $3500 headset I want it to be made by Apple.

Kinda happy they released the iPhone when I was capable of buying that, and this one now that I’m (potentially) capable of buying this.

To get a head start on other developers for when there are tens or hundreds of millions of users.

You don’t need a new codebase to have a visionOS app, you just need to tick a checkbox on an existing iOS project. Deeper integration will take longer but that checkbox will get you 90% of the way there as long as the project was built using UIKit or SwiftUI.

> there will be less than a few hundred thousand users next year

A few hundred thousand users with a massive amount of disposable income.

Agreed, and any app that's genuinely good will be purchased by a high percentage of early adopters.

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