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Comment by retskrad | Hacker News Reader

How is Apple the world’s largest company when they bet on the wrong horse (AR/VR)?

Satya Nadella saw the writing on the wall many months ago and dissolved their VR/AR team and focused all their attention on LLM’s instead. ChatGPT is the fastest growing product in human history. It’s changing the world. Meanwhile, Apple has spent billions of dollars and some of their brightest employees on a product that is DOA.

People praise Tom Cook but there’s a clear difference between Satya Nadella and all the other Silicon Valley CEO’s.

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In my opinion, it is very healthy for tech companies to chase different gold rushes. Would look stupid if all of them chased the same flavour of the year like blockchain, crypto, self-driving cars, AI and so on. I’d rather see them dissect the new tech and apply it to their core products.

And your argument doesn’t hold strong when you step outside tech circles. Successfully selling AirPods to 75 year old grandmas looks more impressive to me than 25 year olds using ChatGPT. I understand it sounds extremely stupid, but both of the aforementioned tech giants are making generally smart moves. Will be interesting how eventually Microsoft applies OpenAI products into hardware, because they don’t really have much (compared to Apple and Google).

Just like Apple bet on the wrong horse by making a smartphone with no keyboard, making a smartwatch which is just a "toy/gimmick," making a tablet when Microsoft already tried and failed with Windows XP Tablet Edition, making wireless headphones nobody asked for and removing the headphone jack...all horrible decisions for Apple!

The only thing innovative about the ChatGPT business model seems to be selling compute cycles for below cost.

The difference between Tim Cook and the other Silicon Valley CEOs are that only Tim Cook runs the world's most valuable company.

Microsoft failed at the portable music player, the smartphone (multiple times), arm systems and their current flagship console is selling fewer units than the Meta Quest line.

If you’re going by things that Microsoft walked away from, you’d have a long list of products that have been extremely successful for other companies.

Implementation and longevity matter.

There isn't a single horse. VR and LLM are very different techs with different applications.

On the other hand, each company differs on it's ability to deliver in a given space. Microsoft failing on VR is just that, Microsoft failed on a category of products. Just like Google and cloud, or support. I'm confident Apple could succeed in the space, and so well that it will make it trendy again.

Yeah that's like saying Smartphones will fail because Microsoft failed at it, when Apple clearly didn't.

Apple’s headset isn’t even available for purchase yet, and you’re already doing a retrospective. Give it a few years, then ask the question.

I am convinced AR is one of the most promising technologies since the smart phone. Maybe even more so. But only if they can solve the hardware problems. VR is a novelty where AR will be everywhere.

Apple didn't make a misled decision, they were just one full hype cycle late to the game.

MS spent billions of dollars and doesn't even own the product.

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