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Comment by p1esk | Hacker News Reader

The specs seem meh, at a price comparable to the Apple headset. I'm sorry to be blunt but how could it possibly be successful?

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It's going to be more of a general computer than Apple's. There is a market for that, like how System76 and Framework sell laptops even though Macbooks exist and are arguably nicer for the money.

The market for the entire VR industry is not that great to begin with. Apple might change this eventually or it might not. I just don't see how a small player today could hope to succeed where all existing big players struggle and even Apple might fail.

Also, I'm guessing it's much easier to put together a laptop from off-the-shelf components than to create a VR headset.

It's significantly harder to make the headsets. They wouldn't need to place this complicated order with Sharp, for example. But, it's also why reason they have an opportunity as a new manufacturer and have taken orders at a premium price. They need to ship this and grow to place successive parts orders, but I'd think they could sustain the business at a few thousand sales annually. That's already a small percentage of the VR market and awareness should grow significantly next year.

But who exactly would want to buy it? I make good money as a software developer, but there's no way I'd drop 3 grand on some unproven beta quality headset with modest specs just to see how well it could serve as a laptop + 4k monitor replacement. I could see myself potentially paying that much for a 2nd or 3rd generation Vision Pro, provided everyone raves about the experience, but even then, I'd double check the return policy.

Most people would agree, but some people are early adopters and have different risk profiles. I'm typing this from a virtual desktop experience using a quest 2 looking at 2 giant VR 2k displays, 1ms latency connected to my laptop through a usb-c cable (if you have good wifi the latency is good enough for wireless, but my airbnb wifi is meh, and the wired doesn't bother me).

I worked like this for more than 12 hours yesterday, too.

I strongly considered their product and found it very tempting. Not a perfect fit for me, so I didn't go for it in the end, but you have to realize the world is not full of a bunch of clones of you.

Right now all VR headset sales are about 7% of laptop sales in the US, about 20 million units a year vs 280 million. You're in the uninterested 93% which is quite normal, but you can see that there's some demand.

The size of the premium headset market is a big question mark, but we know Apple's conservative order for 2024 is 300-400k units and they are planning an inconvenient sales process to slow demand.

Linux is around 1% of desktop market share so perhaps 1% of that 400k would want a premium Linux headset: 4k for Simula to serve. Then we'll find out if headsets grow as a market or they fade out like a fad or transition product category.

VR headset sales are about 7% of laptop sales in the US, about 20 million units a year vs 280 million

There's no way 280M laptops are being sold in US every year. Where did you get that data?

You're right. Those are both global numbers, not US. Sorry about that. If the rest holds it means Simula is going to have to sell multinationally to be a going concern, which seems difficult although the broad trend for electronics to become more accessible is in their favor.

I don't want apple's nerfed consume based user experience with limited integrations in a desktop replacement headset. They'll deigns it releasable.only ship what actually works perfectly in the first revision. Like they did with the watch and the iphone. Yet android and linux exist so for some reason people want to have a slightly clunky future well before apple deigns it releasable.

There are refuseniks like me who will never buy into Apple's (or Meta's or Microsoft's) ecosystems for reasons of privacy and control. I'm F/OSS only. In some areas, that leads me to do without. Having options like SimulaVR is very exciting even if the value proposition is arguably less strong.

Whether their potential customer base is large enough for success is a question I have, too.

My fear is that they'll want to make the system as like commercial offerings as possible, which will actually make it less appealing for nerds like me.

Native applications for Apple's Vision OS are as limited as iPad apps. I can't imagine being productive on an iPad-like OS. Everything there feels like working in one-finger gloves.

If you are not the size of Apple you dont need to have massive market success to be successful

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