Even if they only build 100,000 units, it should be enough to build hype and get developers onboard for their more affordable mass market 2nd gen device coming in 2025.
For context, Oculus sold only 56,334 of their DK1 devkits.
For context, Oculus sold only 56,334 of their DK1 devkits.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-parent-bytedance-battles...
I suspect that gets back to the space / isolation problem: if you don’t live alone there’s probably just not enough time where you’re using VR to be worth the purchase price to most people. That doesn’t get better until they’re cheap enough that the entire household can have their own or people find professional reasons to own one.
I feel like the major cuts are because of lack of hype. I don't think anybody understands if there is a market for this, so nobody is sure how much money to put into developing for it.
To me this feels like the first apple product in a long time without a compelling use case and no solid idea of who the potential customer is.
For some, maybe, but not for everybody. I certainly would never use them for this, no matter how good they were at it.
Sure apple could sell 100,000 anything. The question is are you going to be able to make any money developing for apple's $3500 VR headset or not. I don't think that these can be used for desktop replacements makes them worth it as desktop replacements. $3500 is an "out there" price with no ecosystem level market, in my opinion.
Apple has customers who will buy multiple $15,000 configuration Mac Pros without batting an eye. That’s the price of the tool and for what they’re working on (perhaps a $250,000,000 movie) it’s justified.
The Vision Pro, as announced, clearly isn’t much of a consumer product. The price is too high. But that’s not surprising, it does have ‘Pro’ in the name.
When the Vision or Vision Air. come out in a few years for $1000-$1500, that will be the (higher end) consumer move. And by then software will exist.
For now it seems more for executives. Maybe travelers. On The Talk Show Gruber and Panzarino were talking about how useful it would be for working on secret designs or private financial information or HIPAA information in public. You could be in an airline seat or at Starbucks or whatever and work on the information without anyone else being able to see it, unlike a laptop screen.
And it’s not hard to imagine how it might be very useful to architects or certain other businesses that might be willing to spend the money for an expensive tool to buy expensive software if it really helped them out.
I don’t think Apple will have problems selling them, even at $3500. Is it the next iPod? No.
But right now, they have got to be 109% constrained on those insane displays. Nothing else in the headset seems anywhere near as hard to manufacture.
Someone ought to tell Apple then; I see eight videos on https://www.apple.com/apple-vision-pro/ and seven of them show home use.
Of course, it's possible the product targeting will change. I certainly agree that "it's for business" is how the execs responsible for HoloLens and Google Glass have kept them on life support to delay pulling the plug.
I would absolutely buy this argument were it not for Apple's own portrayal of it during unveiling that shown a person watching movies, which is not commonly a professional role ( as in, it is intended as a consumer product ).
That is not to say that I think it is a bad idea. I am not an apple fanboy and I want to get my hands on it if I can convince wife it is not a waste.
It may have looked like that person in the demo was watching a movie, but maybe they were making a movie…
To be clear, I don’t think any of this will be driven by need, especially at first. It’s going to be something people want to use. If the virtual screens are just barely usable, they are going to sell a bunch of these things to people who want to work on virtual screens. I can’t seem myself ever doing it, but I know there’s some demand for it.
People who have the money WILL buy these as early adopters, but it's not a mass-market product.
Like the comment above said, the real game changer will be the Vision and Vision Air or whatever they're called. Either the tech gets cheaper or Apple will pare down the sensors and features to a point that satisfies the applications devs have built for the Pro and shown that they are viable.
The pass-through eye display for example is just 100% Apple flexing, not something a "normal" user will ever need. That's a few hundred off the price.
I have a gaming PC that I bought for 2000 EUR pc that I built for entertainment and some work. 4000 EUR is so much out there that I cannot imagine who is buying it with his own money
My Apple //e setup cost around $3500 in 1986.
My Mac LCII setup was $4K in 1992.
There are enough people in the world who will drop $3500 on the Vision Pro without blinking for Apple to sell all it can make.
People buy skiing equipment for 2000€ Euros just to go skiing a few times a year. They buy mountain bikes or road bikes for 5000€. They buy brake upgrades on their sports car for 7000€.
I think Apple will easily find a few people willing to spend 4000€ on a toy.
Whether the market will be big enough for 3rd party developers to be sustainable is another question.
Top designers for Ferrari? Famous architects working on buildings costs tens of millions? Other expensive people like that I can see it.
Or has that changed? I'd be lying if I said I keep up to date on this stuff.
You’re right, Apple stuff is certainly used in tons of other industries by people who either need them for a specific reason or just prefer them.
Do you have quotes showing otherwise? I wouldn't be shocked to be wrong here, mind you.
Movies are not just rendered on rendering farms. There's a ton of other stuff that gets done. Rendering the final movies is the smallest, most boring and trivial part of the whole process.
Exactly. And Apple showed exactly zero use cases for "vision pro" that would be useful to these people.
For me it seems more like a devkit targeted at developers who are supposed to figure out what can you even do with it.
Ideally yes apps should update themselves, tailor the experience. But the main focus so far has been pretty conventional app like experiences, which happen to be hovering in space. Where-as most headsets have tried to create entirely new ecosystems from nothing, and that would have been a huge mountain to climb.
They can sell 100k of them and crow about being sold out, but I don't think even apple has figured out who this is for - thats what I got from their presentation on it. The only answer they have so far is "people who will spend $3500 on a vr headset" which isn't a use case.
For the most part we got marketing level "watch people emote joy as they do things with this device" and all the use cases sucked.
It means that now you are competing against desktops which have been iterated upon for decades and have a lot of value already. Instead of standing out by having apps that are only possible in VR people will way if they would rather use the app outside of VR.
But the problem is:
1. The people who aren’t already engrossed in the field, don’t have a good view on how to bridge between their current world view and the new one.
2. The people who are already in the space don’t need to be sold on unique cases.
Very few post-jobs-return Apple products show dramatic new use cases even if the product then goes on to enable it, and even if Apple themselves have clearly thought of it.
Their marketing is: this is how you take what you’re already doing into this space. Unique VR experiences only matter to a fringe set of users. The every day mundane stuff is what matters to the rest.
Take the ability to run iPad apps on it natively. VR enthusiasts will scoff at it. The real trick though is that it means you aren’t having to switch devices to do a mundane task, which means more time on each device. That’s what appeals to the bigger market, and has been proven time and time again , because it’s not making them do contortions to use it.
Another issue is thinking that the demographic for sales has to be the demographic for ads. People will reply and say: well the price isn’t for the lay person. To which I’d say, who cares? They’re not the early adopter but they’re still the demographic for who the people buying this will be developing apps and content for.
I disagree with this. Why would someone buy a headset instead of use an ipad or desktop? If there is nothing unique to VR why should people put a heavy thing on their head for about the same experience?
>Take the ability to run iPad apps on it natively. VR enthusiasts will scoff at it
No, where have you seen this? Everyone likes the ability to run these apps, but my point is that these apps are not a draw. Most people find it more convenient to use these apps on their phones or tablets.
>To which I’d say, who cares?
Developers care. Most big developers don't care about devices unless they have a large amount of users. Their time is better spent on devices / platforms which have hundreds of millions of users.
Because the experience can still be enhanced by the form factor and be compelling. Watching a movie isn't unique, but watching it on a 100ft display while trapped in a plane is compelling. The entire pitch is progressive experiences, and has been for every product they've shown since the iPhone. Take what you're used to doing and make an experience that progressively scale to the form factors.
> No, where have you seen this?
Countless posts here on HN and in the virtual reality community (like /r/virtualreality) that bemoan the device as a glorified iPad, and hate the amount of 2D windows shown.
> Most big developers don't care about devices unless they have a large amount of users
Big developers will take the risk, and are already doing so. Apple showed off multiple developers like Unity, Disney and more making apps. ( more here https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/06/developer-tools-to-cr... )
Part of that is that the visionOS allows for progressive experiences, which is not something other HMDs allow for. Developers aren't building an app for visionOS. They're adding to their existing codebases for iOS. Their investment therefore isn't a niche new platform, but the entire ecosystem.
There's a huge first mover advantage in software on these platforms as has been shown by the iPhone where people were going ga-ga over fart apps, and beer drinking apps. Those people made bank because they delivered fun knick-knacks before the market got saturated.
Even looking at other HMDs, it's often the big players and the indie players that move first. The middle of the spectrum are the ones who move last when the ecosystem is there. The Oculus Quest launched with a Star Wars game available.
Also, iPad has had lidar for a while, which you can use to 3d scan stuff when building out AR apps.
I hope someone will find more compelling use cases for the hardware, but it will definitely have an ecosystem on day one.
That’s IMO why VR has largely failed, out of the box there hasn’t been a compelling reason to get one and there isn’t enough software to keep people interested.
I’ll be ordering a Vision Pro primarily to use as a display for my Mac, but also for development purposes. It is definitely a niche product at launch, but I think it’ll grow into the consumer space over time - it is really only niche because of the price tag.
Games will come, but gaming is the “easy” part of VR because you control the entire environment. AR interactions are what will make this into a viable computing platform that actually moves beyond the current 2D paradigm.
To me VR seems closer to where PCs were in the 80s at this point.
I doubt anyone is going to be using one of this in a spin class any time soon, but there’s plenty of situations where a laptop/phone/tablet don’t really work well.
By the way, how do you show something inside the VR headset to somebody sitting near to you? Do you buy two headsets one for you and one for guests? One for each family member?
Anyone who is willing to pay $3500 for this device is also likely to pay a lot for apps and games. Way better than extracting pennies out of Android users.
Their Vision Pro just needs to get into enough company's hands for people to start exploring what markets might exist. The direction Apple will take things if it turns out that most of the demand is in the medical field will be a lot different than if the demand turns out to be in education. By growing where the demand is initially, they can lower the cost of entry which will make it possible to go into other fields where their is value but lower margins.
The iPod is an even better example, the first three or so versions didn't hit the mark, but with 4G they finally had the right feature set to sell them like hotcakes.
This is exactly how the Apple Watch started! Today it's the most popular wearable on the market by a huge margin.
Those also required a high-end PC costing costing thousands of dollars and lacked key technologies like eye-tracking. There simply won’t be bargains here for many years: VR is less demanding than AR but even there the low-end approach hasn’t seen popular adoption because your brain’s threshold for something seeming real is quite high and has failure modes like nausea and vomiting.
The Vision Pro is Apple’s take on that problem trying to see if they can sacrifice on pricing but actually hit a threshold where the quality is high enough to work for most people. It’s going to be interesting to see if the productivity applications they demoed are going to be as good as they looked – if that experiment doesn’t work at this price, it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the field.
Apple has the luxury of being patient, and the benefit of a developer ecosystem and bottomless funds. This release may or may not be huge (I don’t think it will), but the one after, or the one after that, probably will be.
I agree Apple doesn’t know the use cases or customers that will be big for gen 3 in a few years. So what? They didn’t know that for the Watch or iPhone either. The markets evolves, as markets do, and the developers experimented, and later-generation hardware evolved to support how people used earlier generations.
I can understand skepticism, but I really don’t understand adamance at this point.
Apple hates 3rd party developers, the ecosystem exists because there's money to be made off Apple users. If there's no users of an Apple device there will be no developers - and frankly, there's no incentive to even hack around on their devices.
Apple likes to build platforms and let 3rd party developers figure out the application layer. After a third party finds a big enough market Apple will crush them and take it. It's essentially just outsourced R&D where Apple doesn't pay for the bad ideas.
You're outrageous. It seems to me you're the one outraged that someone would do anything less than praise it breathlessly.
The problem is the pricetag. It's 10x too expensive for mass adoption and 5x too expensive for developers to bother working for it.
If it were a smartphone killer maybe you could eat that market, but smartphones are commodity products at this point. You can’t compete in that space at 3.5k usd. Even if it was good, it still will be a niche product for enthusiasts. It needs a low price and a mass market killer app.
Perhaps, but only because most gaming in general is done on smartphones.
I reckon about 80-90% of the games I own on PlayStation are either single-player or online multiplayer, which is the same as single-player in what relates to the matter at hand.
PC gaming is even less social.
Movies - same thing, also not worth the headset price.
Remote Meetings - why do I want to wear a headset that stops a video of me being recorded? The presentation they had exactly showed that people who didn't wear the headset had video of them and people wearing the headset just had an avatar card. It was the opposite of helpful. This headset makes remote meetings worse.
Porn - its an apple device - any porn will just be web based because otherwise apple won't allow it.
None of these use cases are $3500 compelling. There's no target market, and no compelling use case. It's a brand new helicopter skidoo hybrid and as impressive as it sounds its not clear why it exists yet.
> The problem is the pricetag. It's 10x too expensive for mass adoption and 5x too expensive for developers to bother working for it.
Except when you want to show the display to multiple people at the same time.
Apple's name behind it, and advertising it as a work device as well as a gaming device, would let them steal a lot of the market.
And I say that as someone who doesn't currently own any Apple products.