Having messed with VR/AR tech since the DK2, the Apple Store presence could be the killer app that VR/AR needs.
The manual learning process of ordering special fit lenses, adjusting the headsets, etc would be a great fit with Apple’s store model.
The manual learning process of ordering special fit lenses, adjusting the headsets, etc would be a great fit with Apple’s store model.
for the enthusiastic, apple is going to make it as low-friction as possible.
this is a slow game.
> for the enthusiastic, apple is going to make it as low-friction as possible.
Going to a store is not low friction for an enthusiast. We've already established that the price tag shuts out all but the enthusiast.
Apple enthusiasts will do anything to buy Apple products.
besides, not all apple enthusiasts are wealthy. some will prepare last minute, by selling furniture to make space and help fund the headset. it doesn’t matter if that sounds silly, if it happens.
this is why apple goes slow. bring the ecosystem enthusiast to the object by attempting to integrate the object into the ecosystem first. start with the most eager, guide them in, let them deal with the growing pains, convert enough to full believers in the new object.
public-ish beta with an exclusive-ish signup fee.
apple isn’t merely training enthusiasts in how to use a headset. they are training fans that sell product. enthusiasts talk. easiest way into the ecosystem is with a guide, and even better if that’s a friend or loved one not getting paid to do so.
the least important part about this product is the product. it’s expanding the ecosystem into new territory. show apple enthusiasts that perhaps they want to be xr enthusiasts.
There is still 4 U.S states that lack an Apple store entirely. It's not like Wal-mart or even Best Buy.
Sounds like a serious shortcoming if you can't share the device with friends and family.
I get what you’re saying and it’s hard to describe (and never really does it justice) the experience of this technology. It’s something you have to experience yourself to understand.
Do you share the use of your tv with friends and family?
But there will be enough people who will by the headset for them to sell all they can make in the first year.
Likely the upfront issues would be getting everyone their personalized lenses, but actually using seems like it would be easy.
As for getting lost, Apple already has their AirTag technology. While I don't know if that's already in these lenses, it doesn't seem like it'd be difficult to add.
Heck, my dad loses his phone multiple times a week, necessitating a quick phone call to track it down. Are the lenses going to include built-in AirTags so people can locate them?
Heck, I’m even skeptical of the iPad. I own one and I use it so seldomly that I have to charge the thing up from 0 every time I use it. But I recognize that a lot of people love them as consumption devices and a few as creation tools for some niche purposes, such as digital painting.
Essentially pile up a bunch of mirrorballs. Point projectors at it. Then map where each pixel from each projector ends up on the walls/ceiling/floors.
Consoles, AppleTV, and iPads are at the lower end of the price range here, right? (Well, you can get an expensive iPad of course).
Laptop are expensive but personal, phones… definitely personal, tend to be a little more expensive maybe?
I dunno, it isn’t a straight line correlation but I don’t think the fact that the Vision Pro is expensive tells us much.
In have a Rift CV1, I enjoyed showing it off to people and got some party-game type things (Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes is great for showing the device off). But I don’t use it much solo, and I’ve shown it off to all my friends already, so I don’t use it much. Don’t get me wrong, it was fun, but it hasn’t integrated into my daily life.
If I were Apple—word of mouth is good, but I’d hope the Vision Pro becomes something that sort of gets embedded in people’s lives to the point where they don’t care to show it off (either because it becomes personal like a laptop, or because it becomes boring like a monitor).
I think we’re pretty clearly talking about a small number of contrary data points, here? I’m not trying to prove a general trend at least, just point out that we should at least double check the assumption that expensive implies shared.
If someone is really invested in that idea I’d love to see an argument for it, rather than silent downvotes.
Wrecking your first car is almost a teenage rite of package.
Again we are talking about people who are willing to spend $3500 on a headset. Not exactly the demographic of people who are “sharing a family car” and that don’t statistically have separate cars for the parents and don’t either buy their kids a car or subsidize them in some way to help them buy their own.
I know I never let either one of my sons drive my car alone and I bought myself a new car and handed my older one down to my older son and bought my younger son a car before he had a license.
However, we're talking about a 3500 US dollar (without tax) device and a novelty. Of course people are going to share it if they can.
As someone that wears glasses with VR, it’s awful. The light gasket presses against them, gets tangled. The band presses against them. I can see why they didn’t bother making it an option, since I often put my headset away because of the discomfort. This is why the quest pro has optional light blockers, and why I never use mine. Leaving enough room for comfortably wearing glasses would make things huge.
There are 270+ Apple stores in the US, I don't have the figures to hand but an overwhelming percentage of the country's actual population live within an hour of an Apple store. They are common, frankly.
I'm not defending the decision to require a store visit here, but lets not paint a picture of Apple store availability that doesn't exist. The number of people with disposable income in the US to purchase a 3500 dollar headset and actually want to buy one who aren't living under an hour from an Apple store is likely a very small list.
But I will to buy electronic gear or even to get my right AirPod replaced that I dropped in the water when I was on a boat in Cabos…
If I were in the target market for the vision pro I would totally schedule an appointment and drive a couple of hours to get a curated experience and feel confident I'd come home with the right combination of lenses and everything.
In my dads case, music gear
I even know people who would drive from the even smaller places than where my parents live who would drive to my home town to go the mall, movies and Olive Garden.
When you use an oculus, if you need to do something like reply to a text, check an email or reply to someone on social media, you have to take off your headset or kill your current task and switch to virtual desktop.
Having all your iOS apps on it, and being able to multitask means people won’t be taking off their headset as often and they’ll not have to consider dedicated VR time.
To me, that’s the biggest software differentiator
The reported battery life on the Vision Pro is still going to require that you have dedicated "goggles on" time for the foreseeable future.
It won't be using the app store, though. It's using a brand-new store, built from scratch. No iOS apps will be there unless the authors rewrite them to be compatible with visionOS.
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The reasons I would not like to have one of these devices ;
* Apple's closed moat
* App store lock-in
* 'DLC' model whereby not a single thing you do on this $3,500 device will be free - and no matter what app you choose, Apple takes 30% of whatever revenue stream that app wants...
* The piss-poor apple fix-service market, and their shitty designs of the iphone which break so fn easily that VCs (YC+) have had to invest in cottage industry of phone repairs
I've had iphones since the first day of launch... and while I prefer them over android, I still hate ios ecosystem.
The infra-mechanics of it are awesome, but compared to the smarmy and condescending greedy Apple, i still hate ios.
It's technically possible to develop on the simulator alone, but given that the simulator is confined to a 2D window on a computer screen I can't imagine that apps developed in this manner would be able to stand up to competition developed without such limitations.
Its just FN financially-dystopian
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@scarface_74 ;
"*May you please ELI5 expand on your comment - as I am OOTL and would like to understand what you mean, precisely. (because I want to learn, kthxbai)*"
/as-i-am-posting-too-fast....
A non-Apple device without the moat would be better. GP also didn't ask for free apps.
Almost every non game app on the iPhone/iPad of note require a subscription and most outside of the App Store.
I'm sure there are a number of people here who will agree with you.
On the other hand, the fact that Apple now has a $3 trillion-with-a-"t" market cap indicates that most people do not care about any of these issues. Not in the slightest.
2. Many commonly used apps don’t have a browser experiences with equivalent features. Take Instagram for example.
3. With the Quest , you can’t really multitask, except for the Quest Pro.
The Quest 1-3 are equivalent to game consoles in many ways. I can use a web browser on my PS4. It doesn’t mean it’s a full productivity system with multitasking.
Maybe I misunderstood, but if not count me skeptical.
This is particularly important for a) new product categories where customers aren’t yet sure they want/need it, b) products that “fit”, or don’t, and c) expensive entertainment products. These headsets are all three, so it’s really important.
Apple’s retail presence could solve this.
Aside, I hear a lot more about free returns from people in the US. In the UK they are seemingly near-universal, but there is significantly less willingness to return outside of specific categories such as clothing. I have a little experience working in a retailer (as a software engineer), and US return rates were far higher than UK/EU return rates, and this was apparently considered typical.
It has been one of Apple’s competitive advantages since 2001.
How many people are going to spend $3500 on a device that by definition you have to try on in person to see if you want it?
they’re front-loading friction in an effort to minimize it.
The Apple Watch was initially sold at fitting appointments in store, and I think that was important in establishing it as a normal thing to wear and even a fashionable thing to wear in some cases, and helped cement the product in the mainstream.
Tailored suits is another case where there’s a premium price, premium service, but a lot of friction. It’s not always bad.
They’re also probably supply constrained enough that the friction doesn’t matter for the first version or two.
Apple did not need to normalize the wearing of watches. Watches have been luxury fashion items for hundreds of years.
Apple was late to the game with smartwatches and didn't do a single thing to convince people to wear them.
And it was seen as a toy for geeks and software developers who think t-shirts are an acceptable office attire despite being the most watch-like of the smartwatches.
I would never have gone to the office wearing a moto360. People would have given me funny looks all day. Meanwhile you can wear an Apple Watch with your suit and everyone finds that acceptable.
Source please! That's not how I remember the release, I recall it was very well recieved and sold out everywhere with the battery life being the biggest complaint.
> I would never have gone to the office wearing a moto360. People would have given me funny looks all day. Meanwhile you can wear an Apple Watch with your suit and everyone finds that acceptable.
I doubt you'll find a source, this entire paragraph is you projecting your own insecurities onto everyone else. Your opinion is not the general consensus or a source for anything so find a reliable 3rd party to back you up that isn't a random blogpost by Joe nobody.
https://www.cnet.com/reviews/motorola-moto-360-review/
https://www.alphr.com/motorola/32669/motorola-moto-360-revie...
Criticisms of how much the OS sucks
Sometimes I wonder if I live in the same world than some of the commenters here.
Here is The Verge review of the Moto360: [https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/5/6108947/moto-360-review]. A few selected quotes by me: “It’s designed to prove that smartwatches don’t have to be ugly.”, “It’s not a gadget, it’s a watch”, “At 11.5mm, it’s a little thick”, “ Everything before it was a screen on your wrist”. And that’s the Verge being incredibly nice with the 360. Truth is it was very much still seen as a tacky piece of technology bolted to your wrist.
It took me two minutes to find by the way because this kind of reviews were literally everywhere in the years leading to the release of the Apple Watch.
I'm wondering the same thing.
You are arguing with people because you think Apple invented wearing watches as a fashion statement with their release of the Apple watch in 2015.
No, I said that Apple successfuly turned smartwatches from something seen as gadget into something seen as a proper acceptable watch, which they most definitely did as I have proved to you with my previous message (which you are conveniently ignoring by the way).
The watch industry is very fashion conscious. Swatch Group managed to turn mechanical watches - a clearly inferior product which not only can't keep time properly but has to be serviced every couple of years - into something of seen as timeless and the embodiment of success so clearly Apple was walking a well paved road.
It doesn't prove anything at all and Apple definitely did not make watches fashionable in 2015.
Whether you like it or not, for most people, celebrity culture drives luxury culture, and even in the top end markets it's still a leading indicator even if it's not driving it.
I'm open to hearing constructive arguments against this, but it seems very clear to me.
This sort of exclusivity makes some people feel special. It's a viable tactic.
That being said, it’s not like children aren’t already in Apple stores and they don’t seem to be damaging a substantial amount of phones and whatnot.
There were a lot of videos in the 2000s of Wiimotes getting swung into TVs.
I cannot imagine people being excited that they need to go physical store and deal with a staff there to get their fancy new toy.
Older people today have been using computers since they were in their teens or twenties. Conversely, I know a 20-something woman who can't understand why her iMessages quit working when she switched to an Android phone, despite explaining it to her multiple times.
As you note, they also have more money.
I find it surprising that this is less common than it was in the past, and that people are more willing to put up with something that’s a subpar fit for them. One tech example that would benefit from custom fit are in-ear headphones. It would make sure that product is a perfect fit for every customer every time, rather than roughly every single customer having to put up with a suboptimal fit and poor comfort.