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Comment by htk | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to see a common theme of "It's great, but not there yet."

Can you think of examples where a company starts making a product in a new category and nails it on the first iteration?

Experience shows that they will keep on iterating on it year after year.

The thing I was most interested in was if they could nail an intuitive UI right from the outset.

VR headsets have been around for many years now and why does anyone believe a somewhat better version of those things would hit critical mass? It seems like the form factor is as much the problem as any of the implementations. Many people really wanted an Apple version to be a game changer. Maybe this game can’t really be changed?

If this was $500 I’d call it a game changer, and hopefully it gets there in 5 years

I wonder what the BOM cost of the device is. At $500 they'd sell 100x as many. Hell, even at $999 they'd sell quite a lot of them. I'd probably give it a try for that price, but I'm hesitant to blow $3500.

I heard the display alone costs $1000. And thats with apples supply chain know how

2x iPad Pro 11 inch cost 2x$800 = $1600 - and they also have big profit margin on those. A lot of tech and sensors are similar if not the same, like: Lidar, TrueDepth, Cameras, IMU, wifi, bluetooth, M2 chip. The only obvious thing not available in iPad Pro is much smaller and higher quality screen.

Hopefully they can reduce price to $1500 in next few generations and increase functionality:

- macOS support (We can only probably dream about it)

- usb-c / hdmi out so this can replace desktop iMac when connected to external monitor (still probably unlikely)

- 3rd party access to cameras stream if given permission - hard to make any innovation with this hardware if you cannot even detect QRCodes because Apple doesn't provide any API and you don't have access to camera feed.

This isn't the mass market version of the tech. This iteration is a developer kit that early adopters can also buy.

Apple has always said that they want a version that fits in a glasses style form factor as their mass market product, but the tech wasn't there yet.

> Apple CEO Tim Cook said that it will be a while before the technology available for augmented reality glasses rises to Apple’s standards, according to British Vogue.

“There are rumours and gossip about companies working on that, and we obviously don’t talk about what we work on. But today I can tell you that the technology itself doesn’t exist to do that in a quality way,” Cook told Vogue.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/11/apple-ar-glasses-tim-cook-sa...

They keep iterating on it in-house, and keep finding that the tech still isn't ready.

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/apple-glasses

I think the current plans are to focus on a cheaper version of Vision Pro in the short term.

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/apple-glasses-reportedly-dela...

When they released dev kits, that’s what they called them.

This is a Pro product release. I’m personally inclined to believe that this product is more likely to kill off the entire VR/goggles dream than lead to a $500-$1000 iteration that’s at least as big as iPad.

Glasses? Like the ones I have on my face? Not in my lifetime…

This is Tim Cook’s trash can Mac.

> Glasses? Like the ones I have on my face? Not in my lifetime…

Your remaining lifetime must be pretty short.

Technology evolves at a ridiculously fast pace. Just as a reminder, the Nokia 3310 was one of the most popular phones in 2000. We went from tiny, monochrome displays to foldable full-color displays with magnitudes higher resolution in what most call a quarter of a lifetime.

You're moving the goal post. This is priced at multiples of what's currently in the market while being worse.

The original Oculus Quest was pretty much that. Granted, they had an unrealistic amount of talent on their side and a decent history taking stabs at the whole "consumer VR" thing.

But I mean, look at it - the first Quest was $300-400, fairly comfortable, self-contained and standalone with tethering capability. If you just wanted to watch TV or browse the web in VR, that's what you'd want to buy. Oculus made the Steam Deck of VR, and all the other business models seem kinda extreme by comparison. I doubt we'd be seeing the reservation towards Vision Pro today if there weren't cheaper entertainment-focused headsets already on the market.

Valve with the Steam Deck

That’s also a good summary of the 1st iPhone’s reviews.

Its not comparable. At that time, phone was already a necessity for most folks and most had one. VR (they are not AR from outside)? Still 90% of folks around me (doctors, IT, rest of reality) think whole concept of VR/AR is for kids and... big old kids lets say.

Also it costs 10x as much with huge drawback above. Inflation makes this a smaller number but the difference is still massive, for a plastic toy soon to be obsolete looking like kids ski googles.

But if they persist, which all reviews seem to hang their overall positive rating on, magic we all hope for might eventually happen

> Its not comparable. At that time, phone was already a necessity for most folks and most had one.

A cell phone was necessary, but a smart phone was not. At the time, most people were still using non-smart cell phones. It’s still a valid comparison.

> Still 90% of folks around me (doctors, IT, rest of reality) think whole concept of VR/AR is for kids

This is exactly why Apple insists on only using the term “spatial computing” in order to fight the strange bias people have for something they haven’t even tried yet

> But if they persist, which all reviews seem to hang their overall positive rating on, magic we all hope for might eventually happen

Yes, it mirrors the reviews for the original iPhone

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