¹ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/01/shot-on-iphone-12-por... ² https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coremotion/cmmotio... ³ https://www.apple.com/pl/newsroom/2020/03/apple-unveils-new-...
¹ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/01/shot-on-iphone-12-por... ² https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coremotion/cmmotio... ³ https://www.apple.com/pl/newsroom/2020/03/apple-unveils-new-...
It seems like a platform to test ideas, concepts, and reactions related to “spacial computing” that will show up in much higher-volume products later on… as opposed to being a high-volume product itself.
Essentially like a lot of other people I’m wondering “how many of these clunky ugly things could they sell?” But thinking that maybe they know that too, and they’re working toward something more compelling.
My guess is they just wait for the market to figure it out, then pull a Sherlock and corner that market.
My point is that AVP is step 1 of working on and releasing Apple Glasses. Rather than start with whatever minimal features they could fit into wraparound shades, they started with the feature set they wanted, built the minimum hardware that could do that, and from here out will keep iterating and improving until they eventually fit it into a pair of glasses.
In other words, it only looks like and functions like a VR headset by accident; the form is a side effect of the current hardware, and the VR functionality is just a nice bonus on top of what they actually wanted to focus on.
With a computer you wear on your face, they’ve just released their minimal viable product. You’ll get glasses when they can fit visionOS in them.
In the meantime you can buy glasses from other companies that only take creepy pictures.
I disagree. I think they don’t want to be compared to a $500 VR headset. VR hasn’t taken off enough to move the needle on Apple financials. It’s not “good enough”. As nice as the Vision Pro is can it justify its extra $3000 cost in comparison if it’s also just VR/AR? Sure it’s more powerful, but it doesn’t even have controllers.
On the other hand AR has largely failed so far too. The HoloLens didn’t revolutionize the world. And the level of AR a Quest 3 offers is much lower resolution than Apple had. And, again, $3000 difference there (HoloLens was way more).
I think they want to be seen as a new category and not just another AR/VR thing. Sure the Mac was technically a personal computer, it was so different from a PC AT as to be almost a totally different thing. iPod vs Creative Nomad. iPhone vs early Windows CE phones.
That’s what they want. They want to be judged on their own. Not “I bought a Quest 4 and it was OK, why should I pay $X more? It wasn’t useful to me.”
Will it work? Time will tell. If it does the Vision line will be looked at as a totally different product category from the Quests/etc of today. If it doesn’t they’re in trouble.
These, at least, had legit keyboards.
Palm devices embraced the limitations of their platform; WinCE just struggled to run well on anything.
I will also dispute your "in large numbers" assertion, although I do not have access to detailed statistics. In 2008, Gartner asserted ~1.3 billion devices sold, with most growth in emerging markets. A couple of publicly available charts on Statista suggest that slightly less than 10% (~120m) of those were smartphones (Apple sold less than 1% of all phones that year at ~11m units, a ~9x growth over its just-over 1m units in 2007).
The only "smartphone" models sold meaningfully in largish numbers before the iPhone would have been BlackBerry. Everything else was an also-ran. And even BlackBerry was an also-ran compared to people just buying phones.
Fundamentally, Windows CE was flawed beyond repair, and it should have been obvious from the very first iPaq and sibling devices. I used my Palm devices every day. I rarely turned on my iPaq (available third party software was also a problem; there was lots for Palm and comparatively nothing for WinCE).
I just feel like the technical challenges of AR are much larger than people give it credit for - even just dealing with "how to project an image" before even trying to miniaturize it is really hard!
Plus they don’t appear to know what its real use case is yet.
But they don’t want to be a $3500 thing to play ports of Quest VR games from 4 years ago.
I don't know what will work to commodities VR but the current platforms just ain't going to cut it.
Games are fun, but no one has come up with much compelling past that.
And enough people have nausea issues that it can’t be ignored. Higher frame rates will help. But a lot of software either ignores the issue or does half measures. The instant something screws up and gives you a huge lurch in your stomach the fun stops.
“Just wait until you get your VR legs” is not good enough.
I hate hearing this.
I've tried with VR. I built my own HMD back when a bunch of people were building them, including the creator of the Oculus Rift. I've tried every commercial product I could get my hands on since, and without fail, something will flip a switch in my brain and that it, I'm sick.
Not just nauseated, but destroyed. Like, instant hangover with a side of migraine. It's unbearable.
My hope is that with high enough resolution/coherence/realism for passthrough video/environment, the VR sickness won't happen. I think I'm being more realistic though when I predict that that same "high fidelity" is just as likely to make the sickness occur, as any mismatch with my senses and what my eyes and ears are seeing will seem more obvious to whatever demon is waiting for its moment to strike.
Sure they have, it’s the only medium capable of offering anything close to the presence of real life social interactions.
The worst social experiences in VR are worlds ahead of anything you can experience in any other medium short of meeting someone in the physical world, which would be my preference but for many people, is not always possible.
“meet your friends in reality instead problem solved, it’s better anyway”.
My friends live all over the world now, but thanks to VR, we’ve still been able to catch up and hang out in the same space and converse, watch movies, play games and even dance and exercise together plus many more activities in a manner that is simply incapable of ever being delivered through a monitor and keyboard.
I’m a gamer (though I hate to use that word) but it’s not where I see the value to this long term and it’s never really been where I see it, though it’s a value add to me of course.
Otherwise idt they've really done much beyond what Vive/Oculus have done for a while.
Been looking at https://www.bigscreenvr.com/ recently, a great contender and something I'd like to see more of.
Apple does have the benefit of the rest of their ecosystem and walled garden though, they can easily integrate with their own pre-existing apps/service/technology whereas competitors have to pick and choose 3rd parties and spend time building it themselves - meaning that they usually don't.
Realistically, for a VR headset to be successful it would need to be as light as a baseball cap and have a ~12h power source that would not cause overheating of the wearer's head.
AppleVision is going nowhere. Apple is a mass market manufacturer of status products with a limited lifespan and support. When they work and are supported they generally offer great experience for the money. Apple Car and AppleVision are not such products, but evolutionary dead ends in Apple's history, just like Newton or Apple Network Server. Apple is investing money into an old personal transportation platform when the future of transportation will be based on something else and that "something else" will emerge out of new ideas for urban planning. Some of the tech developed for those products may make its way into those new modes of transport, but it will take a while and may lesser impact than we think.
I think having an infinite power source via plugging it in will work well enough for power in this case.
Good Asian cities' planning efforts are mostly making illegal to let NIMBYs have input on anything.
Is that generally true or only in the US? I’m also wondering what you suggest we should plan urban centers with if it isn’t the methods of urban planning itself.
The US just has an unusually large money and land budget to spend on car dependency, but other countries have made their housing even less affordable.
Copenaghen or Amsterdam aren't perfect from the Urban planning PoV but after having spent a few months in an LA suburb vs a few years in those cities... Yeah, Thanks but no thanks, I think I'd rather have the imperfectly urban planned towns for the next few years. Matter of taste, I guess.
[1]https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-...
Care to point a good example of "unplanned" urban environment with an excellent quality of life for _all_ of its occupants? Outside of, dunno, some exceptionally small villages in the Swiss alps or northern parts of Scandinavia (which are basically unchanged since the middle ages), I can't think of any.
American suburbs are just about the most planned things in the world though. Try building an apartment there - you can't do it. They would never exist if it wasn't for artificial zoning laws. Gotta read Strong Towns.
They use a new term because they feel the only way to succeed is to create a new product category.
And that is part of why it is confusing - it doesn't feel like they could create a large enough market to matter for any device in the current VR/AR form factor, or even the idealized version of the current form.
retina display, pro-motion, touch ID, etc
For the ‘clunky’ I think they’re just betting on Moore’s law (in some interpretation) keeping up and batteries getting more powerful in the next few years, so that they can shrink the device and its production costs.
IMO, that is a safe bet for batteries, a bit less so for the electronics and even less so for the mechanical parts.
And what’s considered ugly can change fairly fast, if the device turns out to be useful/entertaining (which it IMO will be) enough to warrant its sales price (that, I’m not certain of.
you can see this immediately btw if you book some time on the expensive industry AR and VR devices. but even those aren’t any smaller than the Apple device, for reasons of physics.
Apple is a master at having the users pay for R&D. They didn't go and raise millions to billions of dollars in venture capital... they started with phones using cheap Samsung SoCs and from there on, they evolved rapidly, with their M-series SoCs now being on par with Intel performance-wise.
The hipsters pay outrageous amounts of money for Apple hardware - me being amongst them - and Apple doesn't go and waste all their income on stock buybacks or luxurious dividends, but invests it into developing technology to legitimately drive the state of the art forward.
I think Apple’s strategy is to just execute whatever the next tech thing is better than existing participants. MP3 players weren’t a forever thing, but they were a very profitable thing for Apple. Watch, tablet, 3D glasses etc timed after someone else proved the market and just in time for Apple to slurp up the most profitable slice of the pie.
They don’t want to be the first self driving car company, they want to be the most profitable self driving car company.
If we were to treat Apple and Meta equivalently, we would have spent a decade tallying Apple’s R&D investments as “losses”.
This project has been rumoured to have hundreds of engineers for 5+ years, that's that revenue already (let alone profit), then the manufacturing setup, new chip development, etc.
Even if this product makes $2bn revenue, which could be unlikely just based on the rumoured manufacturing limitations and number they expect to manufacture this year, it probably wouldn't be justified once you figure out the profit margins. This is clearly all about the next product, or the one after. It's about the iPhone 4 launch, for this product, not the first, 3G, or 3GS practice runs.
Apple have a history of healthy margins, but huge production costs on their high end stuff, so while this is $3500, I wouldn't be surprised if it's still only 50% margin. That's great, but it's not the 70% one might expect from such a high price, and it will be because of things like maybe the body costs $200 rather than $50 because of some silly uncompromising design choices that don't make sense for high volume consumer hardware.
The project could be 7-10 years old but they didn’t start on day one with hundreds of people. Let’s say a core of ~50 people for 5 years as proof of concept then ~350 people for another 5 years at 300k per person on average, that’s a 600 million dollar investment.
Sure they could have a larger team, but they also don’t pay testers anything close to 150k year.
Employees are expensive. That $200k salary comes with 100k in RSUs and then 25+% overhead.
Then factor in bonuses for leadership when they finally get the thing to ship…
And 350 people sounds like way too few, considering the novel R&D. Maybe 2000 would be my guess.
I’ve heard people quote hundreds of people working on the Vision Pro which is already a lot of people for Apple. The company only recently broke 150k employees globally and a large fraction of that are working retail at their stores. Now split the remainder across iPhone, Mac, iPad, App Store, Apple TV, Air Pods, Watch, marketing, this car project, back end infrastructure etc and ~2,000 people on Vision Pro for 5+ years just doesn’t line up.
For an idea of the scope, a number of years ago it was reported that Apple had 40 business class seats from SFO to Shenzhen pre-booked every single day. That's how much it takes to interface with manufacturing. Now this isn't the iPhone, the scale is smaller, but this stuff is hard and takes a lot of people, it's practically why Tim Cook got the CEO job.
Apple has a pipeline and they move experts between projects. The team making commercials is another late yet critical addition.
Admittedly, some of the tech was used in other projects too, such as spatial audio or LIDAR, and I'm not sure where that's counted.
There’s minor overlap but I feel like the R&D cost of the VP didn’t have much overlap with other products. Except the M2 SoC.
So even if VP head tracking works differently, the groundwork has been laid for that category of feature.
From what has been reported - a lot of the AR things, including RealityKit and ARKit came from the TDG which are also who made VP.
Meta has sold more than twenty million Quest headsets of various types, and by most measures that project is still basically a money pit.
Meta’s investment in VR has been a dumpster fire, but the headset R&D isn’t where the overwhelming majority of that money is going. They’ve done everything from making VR movies to promoting 3rd party games most recently spending 400 million for beat saber’s publisher.
More recently they also bought Supernatural (fitness app)
Meta are playing the long game with this, they are building out the eco system and the devices. They are doing a great job despite it being a money pit, the Quest 3 is an awesome device. It just needs a bit better software and better marketing around those killer apps, like fitness etc.
They do fund VR movies. I worked in 2015-17 in the area and they were doing it then.
With low retention, every sold device is likely costing them.
Having more demand for the network means the network can grow and expand at a much faster rate and make it cheaper. That's good for Tesla drivers in the long term. And Tesla itself. Tesla making more $$ also filters back to the consumers through R&D and new products.
If EV is truly going to be everywhere then charging needs to be generic and everywhere like today's gas stations. Currently it's still very much a luxury type thing when you consider a lower-middle class person living in a skyscraper in a city (which is a ton of people these days). In urban areas you don't have the luxury of multiple separate gas station services, given the limited real estate. Having to drive longer distances to use one near your apartment for ex. The more the better.
The network was always going to become a commodity anyway. Why not establish yourself as the leader ahead of time?
wrong ancestry. iPad from Newton.
iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad all come from the Newton lineage.
But the person I responded to said “iPod”. The iPod is far removed from iPhone / iPhone Touch / and iPad in terms of interaction modality, operating system, application platform, etc.
The iPod doesn’t run iOS, is a media player not general purpose computing device, like the others and their ancestor, the Newton.
iPad was basically a big iPod touch, which was basically an iPhone with no modem.
> iPhone / iPhone Touch / and iPad
Aside from the large list of physical differences (like, one has cameras while one has a big flat physical turntable as its input device), the biggest category of differences is as large as the number of unique apps there are in the app store. Because the biggest difference is: one does anything, the other does one thing.
Still, you're right. One doesn't leap over oceans of differences. There were many products and ideas between the original iPod and the iPad, each one potentially sharing with or influencing the other.
The 2nd gen iPad was the real magic, and made me start paying more attention to Apple. There were rumours of a "Retina display", higher res than an HDTV in a tablet size. I was doubtful. I figured if display manufacturers could do that, we wouldn't be stuck with all these 1080p monitors and 768p laptops... Well, it turns out I was wrong. Display manufacturers just can't be bothered to make compelling displays on their own for some reason.
That crisp display, with enough horsepower to run things smoothly, there was nothing else comparable at the time.
However, various products gained traction as the hardware was able to hit a better price point.
2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770_Internet_Tablet 2007: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800
Developing R1 itself would have cost ~$500M. Not to mention the cost of tooling the factories for mass production. Apple has fronted money to TSMC in the past to accelerate their manufacturing roadmap.
That said - a car is a completely different beast. They are going to upend a lot of things with it, including the dealership model. Probably timing it based on projections of when the demand is set to rise, given many countries are “banning” sale of new ICE from 2035. Though my money is on that deadline getting extended a few times.
Mega wasted 50B on VR as a category but that includes money subsidizing headsets, making VR movies, buying an VR company that had less than 100M invested for 2B etc. It’s a story of management incompetence not some requirement for headsets R&D.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage#Second-m...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_Multipla
But yes, everybody will love it.
I feel like Apple was double-dared into developing Vision Pro.
Back when there was a weird collective craze for VR: Oculus Rift, Ready Player One, Nintendo, Facebook paying $2B... "WTF is going on?" asks Apple.
Imagine then having spent years and billions of your R&D budget only to watch the whole VR craze go the way of the Pet Rock.
Still, you kinda have to show something for all that R&D.
iPod was the Next Big Thing, iPhone was the Next Big Thing. This VR headset is not.
iPhone came before the iPod Touch or the iPod nano (the one with the small touch screen).
however, the LG Prada was >$800 at launch so it seems that the impression was fairly limited to people who would spend $800 then $600 a few months later in 2007.
additionally, while the LG Prada had a touchscreen it wasnt really a smart phone. there was no full keyboard, texting and contact entry was with T9 [3].
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070108070435/http://www.lge.co...
[2] https://macdailynews.com/2007/01/19/lg_unveils_iphone_like_p...
[3] https://www.gsmarena.com/lg_ke850_prada-review-145p2.php
I still get a kick out of the ARM transition happening laregely in public with the T2-chip Intel Macs. Vast majorities of a T2 system ran off the ARM-based T2 for its ISA.
I know it was providing the Secure Enclave, some hardware encode/decode media blocks, and I think FileVault for the SSD. But would be curious to know if it was even more than that.
Video codec for encoding/decoding H.264/H.265.
Also handled the hardware for the microphone/speakers, camera, light sensors so that these would be isolated from the main OS. It handled Hey Siri voice command recognition.
It also had independent power/sleep levels from the rest of the system, and handled power/thermal management from what I understand.
Probably because it didn't operate as the NIC, they didn't move system/application background tasks like watching for push notifications or checking email.
If I had to pick an ancestor it would just be A-series chips in iPhones and iPads.