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Comment by jpsouth | Hacker News Reader

I had this discussion with a friend who wants to buy whatever Apples new VR offering is, I believe it’s around £3,500. He swore it would increase his productivity because it offers virtual screens so he can have as many as he wants. It ‘suits the way he works’

He’s just got his first junior dev role, and loves going into the office as much as he can, and thinks that this bit of kit will be better than the monitors on his desk, which are the Apple Studio Displays.

I’ll let him make his own decisions on what hardware to buy, but I am very tempted to apply for my old role back just to witness some muppet sat at his assigned desk wearing a VR headset to code. What a time to be alive.

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We wrote about our thoughts on Apple's planned VR offering.[1] Their headset looks really cool & polished, but we think people like your friend might not find it as productive as they'd wish since it only supports iOS (iPad/iPhone) applications natively.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36326677

Thanks for the link, I’ve had a read through your post and wish you the best for the SimulaVR unit, maybe that’ll give him the productivity boost he seeks!

It feels weird that Apple have chosen to go down the route of iOS over MacOS, with a price tag like that it surely must be targeted towards professionals who want to use it for work.

I suspect the reason might be related to Apple not wanting to cannibalize their MacBook revenue (which historically is almost always higher than their iPad revenue).

So they've opted to create an iPad replacement instead of a laptop replacement, which is still a step up (and very cool), but not ultimately what consumers can get the most utility out of, from our point of view.

Your suspicion makes sense to me, my tattoo artist designs on an iPad, maybe he’d be quite interested in this and actually get a productivity boost.

I agree it’s really cool, I’d be interested in a future iteration, if the price was right at the time.

I was tempted to email you regarding testing, but I’ll be honest I’m likely not your target market for a tester, I’m probably in the 1st percentile of technical knowledge on this site, but I’ll keep my eye on your product nonetheless.

Apple's primary revenue growth and stickiness is in controlling everything you can do with their hardware, and taking a cut of every transaction. If it ran macOS it could run any code the user wanted and there'd be no way to guarantee a 30% cut of every movie, game, song, or experience you have on it.

Apple went evil the day iTunes started being a non-negligible point of its revenue.

It feels like Stockholm syndrome for developers to wax poetic about the various ways they're abused and ignored.

If Apple has a choice between supporting developers or consumers, they aren't even going to think about it for a second.

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