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Comment by teeray | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this will be a spectacular flop. It’s the first major new Apple product announcement that I completely forgot about (and I mean completely) in the time between announcement and ordering. Nobody I know is even talking about it, unlike when the Apple Watch came out, or the iPad. The experience needs to be as life-changing as the iPhone if you’re going to normalize people wearing ski goggles around the house… I’m not convinced that it is.

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To provide a contrasting anecdote, I've spoken to a couple of people who are already interested in virtual reality (VR) who have been very much looking forward to the release (we talked about it, and one forwarded me links to news articles).

One has worked with VR for research, and is familiar with the HTC Vive and Meta Quest headsets, but has not used VR for personal use. The other person used the Quest for gaming, and has been curious about Apple's approach.

Outside of people with past experience using VR, though, I haven't personally heard people talking about Apple's version. The price point is likely a major factor: a larger number of people could imagine owning an Apple Watch or iPad shortly after release (even if relatively pricey), in contrast to the Apple Vision Pro upon release.

People already invested in VR are not a big market at Apple’s scale.

They don’t need the average consumer to buy it. It’s practically a developer platform. It includes a bunch of parts that have never been manufactured at scale before. Based on rumors, Apple is projected to produce 400k of these and already sold >200k.

Microsoft sold around the same number of Hololens and that was considered a huge market failure.

Since the beginning? So over the span of like 7 years? And I assume a lot of those are repeat buyers since they released a few revisions.

Regardless I don't really think the products are really comparable. Microsoft never really made a good example usecase for what a normal person would use a Hololens for. It was always moonshot, "construction workers will wear them to map out things for work" and "doctors will use it to assist with surgery." Apple at least has a layman utility for the VP. Whether that utility and its tradeoffs are worth the money is yet to be seen.

Apple hasn't established any use case for the VP beyond watching a very limited selection of movies.

Anybody who can afford the VP for watching movies can afford the place and equipment to have a far superior movie-watching experience.

And as many reviews have noted: the VP has a worse FOV than the Quest 2 or 3, and the same blurriness and artifact issues that the Quest 3 has. The summary consensus is that the VP is the best VR headset on the market, but not 7x its next competitor.

Not to mention, there is no chance I would ever wear this at home in front of my family. My guess is that many feel the same; it’s just too anti-social and weird. If it can be used for VR/AR, there might be some industrial applications, but Apple seems to be positioning this more as a replacement for monitors.

These days I feel like when I'm around close friends and family I want to have mutual experiences. We're already on our phones so much, etc that it takes away from that.

I feel like this is for loner people who want experiences

To be fair, the iphone was subsidized by AT&T back in the day and was sold out for $200 or so, and the earpods and Watch weren't more than $300

we're arguably in a recession right now and this device is priced higher than almost any other apple product in history. Only a top of the line retina macbook pro really comes close. It's not a great time to sell super expensive tech, and not a good time to invest in such tech unless you can fund yourself.

> Watch weren't more than $300

The first Apple Watch started at $349 for aluminum/small screen.

Living in LA at the time, I know a lot of people that coughed up the extra ~$250 (so $599 total) because of the implications of having the aluminum ones.

Have you even looked at the Apple store? Some of the base Macbook Pro builds cost the same as the Vision Pro. They go up from there.

The Vision Pro is hardly "priced higher than almost any other apple product in history."

I guess it depend on what model we talk about. I considered the M3 the "base" model so we're talking $1600. Then M3 pro is $2000 for the 14" and $2400 for the (which I include because there is no M3 14"}

The Max prices do start to hit $3500 but by that point these are essentially top of the line builds instead of the bare minimum cost of entry.

If I can sit down at any table in my house and get a multi-monitor setup without needing to buy multiple 4K screens then it'll win me over. However, in practice, I do not think the hardware will be high enough quality for me to want this yet.

I think that's at least partly due to most people who've tried a VR headset before saying "that's kinda cool but I don't think I'd buy one"

It is already a success. You're talking about it, I am talking about. I haven't owned an Apple device in 10 years and now I am watching a review of one. With phone tech bottoming out, Apple has got to do something to stay relevant. It also desensitizes us even more to expensive tech.

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