Meta literally changed their name for this space, and Apple is going to beat them to market with a mass market product. This is clearly reactive "we have to show something" vaporware.
???
Meta already shipped 20M headsets. Apple won't get more than 400k of these in the field until 2025, and even then they will be so expensive barely anybody can afford it. Quite literally, whatever mass market there is, Meta owns it now and for the foreseeable future.
Apple is targeting the wider compute market which is capped at Billions. They won't sell billions in 2025, or at the $3500 price point, but this is the market they are building towards capturing.
Think of Palm Pilot vs iPhone. It's a decade-scale play.
* edit: Let me just add that Apple TV hardware which is largely abandoned and afterthought product line considered unsuccessful, for example is a 13M/year item for Apple. 20M lifetime is not mass market.
Source? https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics/#AppleT... says there 31M active Apple TVs in the US. https://9to5mac.com/2020/09/02/apple-tv-market-share-report/ says Apple TV has 2% share of 1.14B global TV platforms. These don't look like 13M/year of sales.
Besides it seems like comparing apples to oranges. Apple TV works with existing TVs which are already billions in numbers. VR devices are completely new devices. Meta has sold 20M headsets SO FAR, not in its lifetime.
Weird semantics on so far vs lifetime.. it's the same thing.
Meta and Apple are targeting different markets and you can tell by Apple's product videos.
To me, Meta is entrenched in the currently gamer centric VR market. I call it this because 100% of the people I know who have been excited by VR over the last 10 years have been young, single, male gamers. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but the marketing & people excited about the product, to me, seem to align there.
Apple doesn't even call it VR because they are trying to target a much wider market.
I agree with this (though trying is the operative word). It seems a strange moment in time to choose to call the game for Apple though, at a grand total of 0 units shipped and a price point of $3500+tax. It is literally not knowable now in 2023 if they will be able to manage to do what Tesla did, in transitioning from “toy for rich jerks” to “reasonable mass market choice, and we can manufacture them in mass quantities too.” I mean, it’s not even clear yet if the rich jerk set will adopt it.
I agree, that's why I said "what mass market there is". Because the whole thing is completely speculative that there can be mass market here ever, and that applies as much to Apple as Meta. None of the so far demonstrated devices are really appropriate for that.
I don't know why you think Meta is "capping" themselves to gaming market or why you think that market tops out at 10M units. That is where they started, but clearly that's not their whole vision (or why did they bother making the Quest Pro?).
Now that the chip shortage and supply chain issues have calmed down a bit, we're seeing big improvements. But these constraints also apply to Apple which is why their first run of Vision Pro headsets is set to be around 100,000 units. Hardware is the constraint.
That said, the focus for Oculus has always been much larger than gaming. The whole "Metaverse" pitch isn't a pitch for a product. The "Metaverse" is just another jangly marketing term just like "Information Superhighway" was for the Internet back in 90s. It just means using VR/AR for everyday situations like work, entertainment, etc.
Are you just saying that Meta has the wrong focus or do you think Apple has a moat?
Meta's focus on games right now is not by choice or by vision, but simply because that's the only VR product they have that actually sells. Kids love Quest and VR. Nobody bought the QuestPro for social VR or for work-in-VR. Horizon World doesn't seem to gain traction either, everybody is still doing VRChat. Gaming was also not their idea, the gaming focus came from the original Oculus company they bought, they just have been unable to move past that.
The difference between Apple and Meta is that Apple has a clear vision, they are building a device that works as full desktop replacement. They completely skipped any of the classic VR topics at their presentation. VisionPro is "just" a better monitor, everything else is optional and come later.
Meta on the other side doesn't really know what they want, they have this vague vision of VR being big in the future and they want to secure their place in that future by throwing money at it. But they don't know how to get there. So they have a lot of gaming here, a bit social there and a bit of VR-as-desktop, but none of it is polished, lots of it isn't even functional and nothing is ever used to its full potential. Worse yet, they handicap themselves, their VR must be mobile, since they want to own the VR platform, so their PC support ends up lackluster, despite all the best VR content still being on PC. They want to have ads and collect data, so kids under 13 aren't allowed on their platform, despite being very popular in that age group. It's all a mess.
You only comment on topics related to Facebook competition and say things close to “interesting feedback” and occasionally expose yourself with specific phrases like “Thanks for sharing, it's always interesting to hear these kind of anecdotes!”
Focus on their argument, not "outing" someone, whatever that means.
What they tend to shy away from are ultra-low margin sectors with little opportunity for differentiation and flooded with amoral competition. Sure, the cheapest iPhone is nowhere near the cost of the cheapest Android phones. But that's because most cheap Android phones are also abandonware, and/or manufactured e-waste, and/or using all of the conflict minerals/abusive labour practices/environmental hazards which Apple has to remain unambiguously distanced from.
I agree with everything you wrote but this. Just because Apple products are within reach of a lot of people, it doesn’t mean that they’re not a luxury brand.
While not cheap, Apple products are obtainable and utterly mainstream. In fact in the rare instances where Apple has experimented with luxury it has been a dismal failure — Apple Watch Edition being a noteworthy example.
I don't think we're going to stumble into good immersive AR/VR by cobbling together OEM parts bin specials to hit a $400 price point day 1.
It seems obvious that the displays & optics need to be as good or better than top of the line phone/computer displays, not worse. So I don't see how a remotely immersive experience can happen even at the $1k price point.
I strongly feel that you need to actually try modern VR for more than a few minutes. Is it perfect? Far from it. There are many problems, specifically that VR’s main form factors are too intimidating for most adults to even try. Is it immersive? Yes, a lot of apps and games are
I’m just glad Tim forced Apple to finally join the market. Otherwise, there would be VR winter for about a decade due to the mass public perception of VR and the fact that the most engaged VR users can’t even drive yet.
This was definitely the case with the iPhone, iPad and the Watch. It's arguably also true with the first generation MacBook Air.
(This definitely doesn't apply to the M1 transition as this wasn't a new product family. It was a fork of an extremely mature product, combined into another extremely mature product, resulting in a product revision which was very cool but did absolutely nothing new.)