Hacker News Reader

Comment by Johnie | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of iPhone 1.

Everything you've said is reminiscent of the reviews of the first iPhone.

This iPhone trope has gotta die. I worked at Motorola when the iPhone came out. Every single engineer knew this thing would blow everything else out of the water. It was one of the largest leaps in consumer tech devices ever. I assure you the Vision Pro is nowhere close to that.

I remember being angry that my Moto Razr V3 had the power to run awesome software but as a teenager I didn't have an easy way to boot stuff up on it. IMHO it was a perfect phone, except there was no way to run what I wanted. The best I could do was program text messaging services and use those. They discontinued the phone rather than give consumers the freedom to just use the hardware. I thought the iPhone was dumb, but when the App Store came out that was game over. I really missed the convenience of having buttons and being able to text with my phone in my pocket, but at least it was consumer programmable... even if you had to pay a $100 premium to become a "Developer" in order to do so.

Eventually the Moto X came along. I thought it was the perfect phone. Its voice assist features worked better than most voice assist features even today. You could easily do everything you wanted to do with the phone in your pocket and your earbuds in.

It had the perfect size screen. It had a great ambient-on watch-face screen that looked nice sitting on your desk among clutter. The dimple in the back was a really nice touch, it made it like a worry-stone[0] in your pocket. It had a lower resolution, but I kinda liked that about it. I think Motorola was bought or something, but whatever the reason, the next phone in the series ditched every single thing that made the Moto X special.

Those two devices were both my favorite mobile computing devices, and probably the closest I've come to getting fan-angry about a company screwing up their own magic.

More to the point: you might have been able to see it at Motorola, but even looking back, I don't understand why Razr couldn't have won against the iPhone. The Razr was a surprisingly capable little machine!

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worry_stone

You’re gonna love this — Motorola was bought by Google in an attempt to jumpstart their hardware business but it turned out to be a failed acquisition. They ended up grabbing the patent portfolio and selling off the rest of the biz fairly quickly.

> You’re gonna love this — Motorola was bought by Google in an attempt to jumpstart their hardware business but it turned out to be a failed acquisition.

I wouldn't call Motorola a failed acquisition - Google bought Motorola as a shield in an increasingly litigious environment: this was the age of Apple going "thermonuclear", Microsoft and patent trolls were wantonly shaking down Android vendors, and beginning to circle Google itself.

Motorola (under Google) had the best value-for-money smartphones - their midrange was solid, and reasonably priced while everyone else was continuously shifting to flagships, with each release priced higher than the last.

From the outside looking in, Google appeared to dispose Motorola to make Samsung happy - Samsung had been complaining loudly and widely about the Motorola acquisition, and openly flirted with other mobile platforms as a hedge.

Motorola shareholders got paid, Google got the patents it wanted, Samsung remained the 600 lb gorilla in Androidland, Lenovo got a good brand and keeps making ok phones to this day. So, not a failed acquisition by any reasonable measure

Yeah, I generally agree with that framing. That’s a good detail about samsung that I was not aware of. But I will say that from an ex-insider perspective — what you describe is mostly a failure.

Google was searching desperately for revenue diversity and was acquiring pretty hard at the time. I think the intent with Moto was to acquire a hardware shop and establish a market leading brand to compete directly with Apple. They eventually arrived at Pixel by building it entirely in-house. That Moto got raided for IP and spun out to Lenovo did not meet those (high) expectations. There was no need for anyone to take a loss but I think Google wanted to make a whole lot of money and did not.

I'll defer to you an insider on the hardware efforts, but the timing of the Motorola acquisition in the immediate aftermath of Google's failed bid[1] on Nortel's patent portfolio made it seem more like a patent-play more than a hardware acquisition. I recall Motorola's then-CEO even threatened to sue Google over patent Android infringement just before the acquisition, so it most certainly wasn't just about building a hardware business.

1. It was a crazy time. The winning consortium - which included Apple and Microsoft - invited Google to join their $4.5B bid; which would have made the patents entirely useless as a defense of Google against Apple or Microsoft. Google wisely declined, but bought Motorola less than a year later for $12B. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jul/02/google-pi...

Soon after the acquisition, Google, really Google X, started working with Motorola on a new watch, prototyping it on existing hardware (Motoactv?). Within a few weeks, the whole thing got cancelled. Not sure if that was because of the Samsungs of this world complaining or because of government agencies.

Source: I was supposed to run the dogfood program in the NYC office. I never got the watches, but somewhere I still have the USB extension cords and the (then quite fancy) chargers with dual USB ports, one for your phone and one for the watch.

> Motorola (under Google) had the best value-for-money smartphones - their midrange was solid, and reasonably priced while everyone else was continuously shifting to flagships, with each release priced higher than the last.

And they still do under Lenovo. Multiple-day battery, almost stock Android with very useful enhancements.

Moto X was peak phone.

IIRC, moto X was the first phone made by the Google-owned Motorola. The devices were made and assembled in the US.

I was hopeful for the post-acquisition Motorola but it didn't quite pan out. The IP salvaged from the purchase was always a big part of the deal so it wasn't really a loss, just not really much of a win either.

Moto X (2013) was the device I intended to describe. You are right on both counts. I think I conflated the second gen closure of the US-based plant with the acquisition in my memory. And I'm now remembering that the real reason I was so disappointed is that the Moto X (2013) was a phone that you could operate the entirety of the screen one handed. With the Moto X (2014) you could not.

I have an iPhone mini now, but it's still not small enough to 100% operate one-handed, at least not without grip adjustments. The Moto X wasn't quite a flagship phone, but it came close enough. I can't even find a properly one-handed phone anymore

Loads of phones could side-load J2ME apps. I never owned a RAZR V3, but I imagine it would have supported J2ME apps as well as I ran them on even crappier phones. The first things I'd install on my dumbphones back in 2005 was Google Maps and Opera Mini. I'd grab all kinds of J2ME games off Zedge and other sites and copy them over back in the day.

The better analogy is probably something like the Apple Watch.

Apple certainly wasn't the first smartwatch, but anyone who owned one before that was obviously a geek (said lovingly). Apple made the first mainstream acceptable smartwatch by smoothing over a lot of the complaints about their competitors, while adding some of their own in the process, just like the Vision Pro. It took a few iterations, but today people from all walks of life wear smartwatches. Certainly not as ubiquitous as smartphones, but Apple made smartwatches a standard piece of tech that millions of people own and they made plenty of money along the way.

The Vision Pro will probably be similar. For example, anyone wearing a VR/AR headset on a plane today would likely get stares. I bet a few years from now there will be several people on every plane wearing one of these. That doesn't mean Apple will make the best VR/AR headset or that VR/AR headsets will be a piece of tech that everyone owns, but Apple is capable of mainstreaming a piece of technology in ways that the Facebooks and Googles of the world aren't even if that is due to their marketing prowess and the strength of their brand just as much as their technical expertise. And in that sense, the thing that is more important than any of these reviews dropping today is the Super Bowl commercial Apple has almost assuredly bought to show this thing off in two weeks.

Correlation does not imply causation. I think smartwatches (and step trackers) were a thing, independent of apple.

I remember a friend talking about load balancers when they were first came on the market 20 years ago. Cisco had this thing called "localdirector" which I believe couldn't handle load in the first place, while competitors did load balancing in hardware.

I was puzzled why people bought them.

My friend said, "Look, people buy $1M of cisco equipment, and they can just add a line item for one or 10 of these with no friction"

So, I think Apple made their watch a "line item". People buy a phone, and they need cables and the watch is sitting there, and they say "ok!" and try one.

(aside, I love my garmin watch. I just put it on my wrist. I haven't hooked it to my phone or connected it to the internet. It is great with battery life. I track my sleep, which seems to be when most people put their apple watch on a charger. I put my watch on the charger during my shower, which is all it needs)

> I put my watch on the charger during my shower, which is all it needs

Same as the Apple Watch.

Every day though. I charge my Garmin once a week when it gets down to 50%. The Garmin is a fitness watch with a few basic smartwatch features though. The Apple watch is a Smartwatch (with a lot of fitness features) The two aren't really comparable I don't think.

> which is all it needs

...to top it up to 7 days of charge

> Apple made the first mainstream acceptable smartwatch by smoothing over a lot of the complaints about their competitors,

Really? Why do Apple fanboys make these kinda claims.. same as wireless Bluetooth pods, or fingerprint readers, or faceID. There are ample examples of these done well on the hardware side prior. The main advantage Apple has is its seamless integration with software, which of course it pairs well with iOS because nothing else is allowed to.

You clearly missed my point entirely. I'm not a fanboy saying Apple's products are the best. I even specifically said their success is "due to their marketing prowess and the strength of their brand just as much as their technical expertise."

They weren't the first smartwatch, but Apple is the company most responsibly for changing arbitrary societal metrics of "mainstream acceptance" like the percentage of people who would wear a smartwatch on a first date. That seems like an obvious observation and a "win" even if smartwatches aren't as ubiquitous as smartphones. I think the Vision Pro will follow a similar trajectory of success in that it will take years before anyone uses that word "success", but a few years from now you'll get on a plane and notice more than a few people wearing headsets and that will be because of Apple.

I agree with you, but not about the Vision Pro. I could see the potential and use cases for the iPhone, iPad, AirPods, Apple Watch, Apple TV. This headset though? It's a gimmick. I can see some niche use cases for it in very specific industries and in gaming. But I don't see that "normal" people would want to spend significant money on this. Not even if the price dropped to $999.

I would consider my use case (desire) of comfortably working from, say, a coffee shop without having to bring my 24" screen pretty "normal" and non-niche.

Maybe, but you would look like a dork. Most people don't want to look like dorks, so I doubt we'll see widespread use of this product in public.

People used to look like dorks walking down the street staring at a smartphone, or pulling an entire computer out of a bag at a coffee shop.

We'll adjust.

"Done well" was the Nokia motto. They did solid phones with a ton of features. Look what happened to them?

Their problem was that none of the features was _usable_. It was like they released the first MVP the engineering team got done and forgot that people needed to use it too. But it gave them a bonus and another line on spec sheet, so all was good.

For example Nokia had Copy & Paste years before Apple. But it was shit. They _had_ it, but you could copy very specific text bits to other very specific locations. Even Android had the same issue, you could copy some bits not others.

Apple isn't innovating, they haven't for a long time. They rarely come up with something "new" that _nobody_ has done yet.

What they are pretty much the best at is getting the tech everyone else has tried and packaging it to a usable form factor for the normal non-Hackernews consumer.

Wireless BT headphones existed before the Airpods, but they made it so seamless even my mom could do it and hasn't needed any help with them. Open box, insert in ear, done.

> For example Nokia had Copy & Paste years before Apple. But it was shit

To be fair iOS copy and paste is still shit today, selecting and copying/pasting is really one of the worst experiences on iOS.

You can use the space key to drag around the selection cursor.

My point was more about the fact that you can copy an image in most apps and paste it to pretty much any field anywhere. It'll just work. Same with other rich data.

You couldn't do that with any previous C&P implementations, there were hard limits on what you could copy and where it could be pasted.

You mean how a mole from Microsoft got in, used the feud between the old school Symbian team and the promising Maemo/MeeGo project to burn the whole mobile division down via nonsensical switch to Windows Mobile ?

3500USD, an external battery and still "looking weird", I don't think you are going to see too many of them on planes, unless it's some die-hard Apple fanboy. If they manage to make next iteration slimmer (like, half the size) and with a battery in it, this might start to happen. But the market will be anyway smaller than the smartwatch one.

prices will come down, there'll be a non-Pro line, you think the market will be smaller but you forget it replaces displays, so people with laptops will migrate to using this, and then Apple will come out with headless laptops.

Until the ergonomic radically improves, it will be a niche device for enthusiasts.

IF they manage to produce some AR device that 1) you almost won't notice you are wearing 2) it has pass-through light capabilities so being real AR and not VR mimicking AR, THEN it can get mass-adoption, at least for office workers or to replace big TV screens.

I still think it's weird how many people's eyes are glued to their phone screen in everyday situations and social settings. I think it's realistic that these headsets become acceptable and normal.

in general people have always saught a way to not have to look at each other in public. before phones it was newspapers and magazines as the social scourge of anti-social behavior

> The better analogy is probably something like the Apple Watch.

first apple watch was afailure and immediately fixed by the watch 2

>Apple made the first mainstream acceptable smartwatch by smoothing over a lot of the complaints about their competitors,

if anything apple set back smart watch development, the real groundbreaker was Pebble, but thanks to apple the smart wtach market is a stagnant perpetual compromise to justify low battery life with overpowered chips and bright screens, when all we really want is week-long batteries, e-ink always on displays, and physical buttons to work well.

i say this as an owner of at least 2 apple watches over the years. pebble never had a chance, but android's watch software has always suffered on trying to play apple's game instead of finding a true advantage

Vision Pro is not earth shaking or category defining.

It's entering a crowded market that isn't even that big. As the premium option.

Climbing that hill is going to be a very tall order.

Apple's brand will not be a moat, either.

Zuck's initial response to Vision Pro [1] was the correct one:

> From what I’ve seen initially, I’d say the good news is that there’s no kind of magical solutions that they have to any of the constraints on laws of physics that our teams haven’t already explored and thought of. They went with a higher resolution display, and between that and all the technology they put in there to power it, it costs seven times more and now requires so much energy that now you need a battery and a wire attached to it to use it. They made that design trade-off and it might make sense for the cases that they’re going for.

> But look, I think that their announcement really showcases the difference in the values and the vision that our companies bring to this in a way that I think is really important. We innovate to make sure that our products are as accessible and affordable to everyone as possible, and that is a core part of what we do. And we have sold tens of millions of Quests.

[1] https://www.roadtovr.com/apple-vision-pro-zuckerberg-reactio...

In retrospect, that was a very negative post, and I wanted to add that I'd like to see {V,A,X,*}R succeed as a sector. In fact, I'd like to see all of the players do well, including Apple. I really want to see a transportive vision of the future pan out.

I don't think this will be an easy market for anyone. It's low attachment, low critical app space.

I want to believe, though.

I love how people just rewrite history on the internet lol.

Iphone 1 was a collosal PoC. Slow, most of web didnt work. Its only appeal was the full touchscreen, which of course sucked to type on, but looked cool (which is the reason people bought it mostly). Everyone that needed mobile compute functionality was still on Blackberry and some other devices.

There was a time during early 2010s where the iphone was better than everything else due to native hardware and in house software and updated functionality. However by 2016 Android caught up, and since the first Pixel came out it pretty much has been ahead ever since.

> Its only appeal was the full touchscreen, which of course sucked to type on, but looked cool

and motion controls. Between the Nintendo Wii and the first iPhone people were obsessed with motion controls for some reason.

I think if you talked to someone working on Meta Quest they would say this is going to blow the competitors away. If you talk to a reviewer for a tech magazine they’re going to complain about any detail they can find in the 1.0 launch of a new product line as if it’s a colossal failure (aka PoC).

I think the difference is everyone knew market penetration on cell phones would be close to 90%. This may be better than the Quest but is it going to take AR/VR mainstream? Seems iffy. In which case drawbacks may never get ironed out.

Quest and Vive weren't great, but they actually had working VR that set the stage for subsequent development.

Iphone 1 set the stage for tech jewelry.

That's the history I remember tho.

I remember the first time I saw an iPhone. It was 2am at a house party with a bunch of 19-25 year olds. Pretty much everyone stopped drinking or dancing and played with this dudes phone for three hours.

This was my first experience with an iPhone too. A rich guy (friend of a friend) had one, my friend and I spent the rest of the night trying it.

I had the first Occulus when it came out. Big hit at my workplace. Anything flashy is going to get attention. The problem with Apple is that they have, do, and will continue on prioritizing flashiness over usability. Its actually pathetic that you can't install linux on Apple silicon (and no, REd hacked together Asahi linux does not count)

Not sure what you are going on about, that the original iPhone was a PoC.

Given what was available at that time (I was using a Windows Mobile O2 XDA AND a Blackberry at that time), the iPhone was simply magical. The ability to browse the full web on the go and a proper mail client, was amazing.

Worth the money to travel to San Francisco from Singapore just to get one (and the cost of the AT&T SIM masker to spoof it on the local Singapore telco network)

I think you have rose tinted glasses. I had one too, and the browser was garbage over 2g. You forget how much time was spent looking at that checkerboard pattern.

As for email. Proper email client? It was pop3 only, and you had to manually tap to fetch new messages.

You're right about the email client. I had IMAP email clients on mobile for a while before the iPhone supported it. Email on the OG iPhone was terrible.

I wouldn't bother responding to grandfather. Literally every time apple releases a new product, there's a bunch of people collectively shrugging off whatever the product claims to be bringing, and along come the "the iPhone v1 was crap too and look how that turned out" apologists. Not worth the discourse.

Again, no. You completely somehow forgot tech in late 2000s lol.

The internet on anything mobile was pretty painful when it launched in general. Websites weren't optimized for mobile, mobile data was unusably slow. Most people who wanted portability were using things like netbooks, which you could actually multitask on.

Blackberry was the goto for actual phone because it was much easier to type on due to the best keyboard at the time, well developed software for things like email, basic browser, e.t.c.

Ill leave you with this staplepiece of internet history: https://maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=iphone/

I am so glad his website is still up and running.

Internet is the new story telling at the camp fire, turning humble actions into historical myths for eternity.

> Its only appeal was the full touchscreen, which of course sucked to type on

I could've sworn that "it's easy to type on" was the one weird trick it did right? Though perhaps I'm just misremembering the media; my first iOS device of any kind was the iPod touch with retina display.

Something about Apple having a temporary monopoly (or possibly monopsony) on capacitive touch screens, where everyone else was stuck with resistive ones?

I don't think Apple had a monopoly on capacitive screens. There were a couple other mobile devices that used them and came out around the same time. Maybe they tied up all/most the available production capacity for a bit?

Typing on the original iphone wasn't perfect, but it was generally better than tiny physical keyboards in many cases

Physical keyboards were better than any touch screen one until the swipe typing became standard. You could type on them faster, and had more features like arrow keys, which were useful for smaller screens.

There was a whole era of autocorrect and the memes that came with it due to how much it was being used with touchscreen keyboards.

Of course the advantage of a full screen for things like web and media was more important, and making fullscreen phones was cheaper, so physical keyboards died out. The size of the screen increased as well.

> This iPhone trope has gotta die

It’s not a trope if it’s true. Most hard core nerds didn’t get it until they had tried it hands on (including myself, I panned the device hard until I tried it). Then it was the exorbitant price point ($650 at a time when nobody really paid for phones). Then it was the lack of hardware keyboard. No “real” apps. No copy and paste (even my older at the time Symbian S60 devices had that). The list goes on and on.

I get it, if you were at another phone manufacturer, you might’ve been scared, but the reality is the iPhone didn’t really pick up steam in the market until 3G or 3GS.

People thought Apple making a phone was odd. No one thought mobile phones, or even smart phones were odd. Mobile phones were common when the iPhone came out, and even smart phones weren't uncommon. And once the iPhone did come out, there was immediate interest.

AR though, that's something the public hasn't shown much interest in yet. These products are looking more like the Segway (which was once supposedly going to revolutionize transportation) - cool, popular in a few niche markets, but not the revolution that people imagine them to be.

To be clear, not disagreeing with your core point, but as a reference comparison, the Meta Quest 2 sold more units in its first 2-2.5 years than Apple sold iPhones (and iPhone 3G) in the equivalent time period.

Yep. People forget that the original iphone that could only run built-in apps really was a failure; it was only when they opened up the app store that it exploded (perhaps aided by this Cartmanland marketing strategy).

Nobody thought Apple making a phone was odd. Even prior to the announcement of the original iPhone and prior to any rumors about actually making a phone, the internet was full of amateur 3D mockups of what an "iPhone" could be like, including looking like an iPod with a click-wheel. They had conquered the personal media player market, and now people wanted a phone with the design of an iPod to carry less stuff in their pockets.

Everyone forgets that the nerds had windows ce phones before Apple hit the market. It was the 3GS and 3rd party dev arcade games that converted me. Apples challenge now is how to convince people who hate them to go to work for them.

I was one of those nerds! I equally loved it and loathed it. Some very cool software available, but as a cellphone-like experience, it was neither one thing nor the other. Most of the time I had a feature-phone as a daily-driver alongside the clunky early Windows stuff. Wasn't a bad compromise as I didn't want or need the power of Pocket PC/Windows Mobile 24/7, but it was however a fairly expensive one!

People also forget that using a stylus with a touchscreen made it a pretty crappy phone, and they weren't ergonomic to hold up to your face with a lot of the larger PDA-like ones. The Windows devices with sliding keyboards were pretty decent as a compromise in terms of size and features though. But boy were they expensive in the UK at the time as they were generally imports from the USA.

I loved my htc with the slide out keyboard! Sure, it would reboot occasionally when you slid the keyboard out and it took 45 minutes to send an email on edge but that was back to the future stuff back then.

Windows CE or Nokia N95 or Nokia 9500.

Yup. The App Store didn't come until the iPhone 3G. iPhone 1 had no non-native apps. (later backported)

These AR/VR are definitely a doomed profile unless somehow these things were given away for basically free. IMHO success for any new technology usually comes from: 1. Does it make you look more attractive? NO 2. Does it make you money? NO except for the YouTubers who will surely be pandering about how meme they are. How many streamers us VR? Oh yeah... 3. Does it make me more valuable to others? No? I can't see a mass adoption are where having a computer strapped to your face which enhances your productivity. This may be the area most attackable by some great use cases, but I don't see them today (once again, mass market in a way that Apples of the world would give an F).

Nobody thought Apple making a phone was odd. Phone + MP3 players were already in everybody's pockets. Telcos were making money selling ringtones for $2.99 a pop. Apple already had a digital music store. It all lined up. And that was before they tested the waters with the Moto ROKR in 2005.

Back in 2010 there were rumours of Apple building TVs and cars. Those would be weird because they're in areas where Apple had no experience and no software content to provide.

Peak Blackberry was 2011. It's easy to forgot that that the iPhone takeover took years and many releases.

I kind of find that hard to believe but maybe there were government/enterprise purchases boosting it or something? As far as I'm concerned Blackberry died with the Blackberry Storm 2 in 2009, which was a huge piece of junk.

I used to go back and forth to Shenzhen all the time trading refurbs and by 2010 I straight up would not buy anything other than Android devices because 1) iPhone was actually more expensive in mainland China due to it being a grey market item back then and 2) demand for everything else fell off a cliff.

How can you assure us that Vision Pro is nowhere close to that? Do you have one?

As someone who bought the original iPhone, it was extremely impressive, but had many many flaws. The browser was practically unusable over 2g and the whole pinch to zoom the New York Times desktop site was never actually practical.

I think the parallels are clear.

I also bought the original MacBook Air. Now that truly was terrible and stupidly overpriced. More expensive than the Vision Pro when adjusted for inflation, and with major functional problems. Today it’s the world’s most popular laptop.

Iphone was made from pretty much what was available to other manufacturers plus some secret software sauce, and was priced like a Blackberry of the time. There was immediately plenty of use cases that competitors kinda did, but not so well.

These googles are as bespoke as it gets, are priced at 7x the competition and more than a flagship laptop, steer clear of the most popular existing use case, which is games, and offers... what exactly again?

That's quite some difference.

> Iphone was made from pretty much what was available to other manufacturers plus some secret software sauce, and was priced like a Blackberry of the time.

Neither of these statements is remotely true.

Samsung CPU, samsung oled display, Balda touchscreen analogous to what LG has used previously, Marvell wi-fi, Skyworks cellular, various Intel and Infineon aux chips. $499 vs Blackberry's 8320 at $449.

Not even remotely.

Samsung OLED? iPhone X was first to feature OLED display. Surely you meant LCD?

The iPhone was also subsidized by Cingular/AT&T at launch. The $449 was the retail cost of the BlackBerry.

iPhone used capacitive touchscreen whereas the competitors used resistive touchscreens in their smartphones, which instantly added more usability to iPhone compared to Nokia N95/97 that was already a fully featured pocket computer in mobile case and likely much more powerful than the original iPhone. Apple did the dirty logistics trick on other smartphone manufacturers by buying all production of capacitive touchscreen factories and similar key components 3 years ahead, leaving other phone manufacturers unable to respond.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada

Except when the iPhone came out all the reviewers were like "holy shit, this is mind blowing" while with this one everyone is like "it's a shittier oculus quest with some apple polish"

No one is saying shittier oculus quest. It has a much higher resolution and I presume people will get used to letting their eyes linger a bit longer on what they want to click. We’re so used to a mouse paradigm we try to immediately apply that here.

The verge is probably the most critical. Here’s what they say:

“marvelous display, great hand and eye tracking, and works seamlessly in the ecosystem, … The Apple Vision Pro is the best consumer headset anyone's ever made”

Yes, they also list a bunch of flaws. But the people trying to make out that the reviews are saying it’s a shittier oculus quest are not being honest.

Almost every outlet is calling it a better Oculus Quest but one that is fantastically expensive.

I mean it's been over ten years since the new generation of VR headsets (I'm thinking of the Oculus Rift) came out; if at this point in modern VR development it wouldn't be better than existing offerings, I'd be deeply disappointed in Apple's R&D.

Anyway, I bring that up because when the iphone came out, it really did do something different than the locked-in feature phones of the time; I did have to look it up to refresh my memory (https://www.cnet.com/pictures/original-apple-iphone-competit...), but its competition in that year was a lot of Blackberry-style physical keyboard and resistive touch screens running Windows Mobile. I do want to highlight the LG Prada, the first capacitive touch screen smartphone - came out in the same year the iPhone was announced, and it along with the HTC Touch on that page had a similar screen focused form factor.

I think it's fair to say that having sharp text without screen door alone is doing something different than the existing headsets, and is very important for the more serious uses Apple is imagining.

Definitely looks better for productivity, but for gaming and social?

Nothing on Vision Pro is comparable to things like Beatsaber, VR Chat, Pavlov.

Hard to tell if the hand tracking could handle those sort of experiences currently.

Hard to tell if Apple cares about Beatsaber.

I do think iPhone is often made more mythical than it was. Sure it was good and we could finally use our sausage fingers to navigate it. But I recently heard someone say on Radio that iPhone was the first phone with a touch screen. Meanwhile me an the guys (yeah all guys) we’re rocking Sony Ericsson P800’s and the like in 2003,4,5.

I had an HTC touch when iPhone came out and I was most envious that you could do two finger zooming in Google maps instead of tapping zoom buttons.

Many things Apple related are very often about applying existing technologies to a novel place. Many forget that the touch screens at the time were resistive [1] that required pressing (small but nevertheless) at the screen and mostly usable with styluses. As long as I recall the novelty was to apply a capacitive touch screen [2] to navigation, it does not require physical force and that's where the fingers shined.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistive_touchscreen

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#Capacitive_touchsc...

Sure. But one can argue that capacitive touchscreens were about to happen anyway (like ARM laptops..). And HTC with their touchflow were moving into sausage friendly UIs.

But I agree, Apple is absolutely good at taking all this tech at the right time and making a compelling product. Steve insisted on glass/capacitive and that is just the best choice. Also, the UI didn’t feel like a layer (that you could easily get out off) as with touchflow. I’m also an iPhone user atm. Switched from Android about 3 years ago. The whole experience feels like higher quality to me still now. Although I have friends that would argue against that.

I worked at Nokia and we certainly did not had that opinion, specially since we already had a couple of touch based Symbian devices.

If we weren't busy with Symbian vs Linux internal feuds, and the Microsoft deal, things would have turned out much differently.

Can you elaborate on this?

The first iPhone, yeah, it had some detractors, but I don't think the kinds of criticisms the parent poster gave ever really applied to the iPhone. To succeed, the iPhone didn't have to be this utopian product; it just had to be more useful than its main competitor, which was dumbphones. People who complained that it was missing features the Blackberry had were working from an unstated major premise that the iPhone was initially targeted at enterprise users, and I think that everyone who wasn't too busy being a pundit to see how the world works could see that that quite transparently wasn't the case. There was even a time period where I had both an iPhone for personal use and a Blackberry for work.

And I think the criticism about entertainment is spot-on. By contrast, despite being extraordinarily limited compared to even the very next modal, the first iPhone was fantastic for entertainment, precisely because it was good for fostering shared experiences. It didn't take long after the device came out before you'd see groups of people clustered around an iPhone, looking at photos together on that big, vibrant, gorgeous screen. That was something that none of its competitors could do. And you better bet that people saw that happening and started wanting to have one of their own so they could have fun, too.

I do think we're still in the "wait and see" phase for this product, but, unlike some of the original iPhone criticisms or cmdrtaco's original dismissal of the iPod, the criticisms this article points out feel really personally relevant to me.

I checked a couple of those old reviews and a couple things that seemed to be a common take with the iPhone that definitely aren't holding now:

- incredible amounts of hype

- loving the design

- loving the touchscreen and input (directly contrasting folks worrying about the eye tracking now)

- a sense (at least from cnet and pcmag) that it's really just an overgrown iPod so they keep comparing it to an iPod (compared to the vision where folks get that it's a new category for apple and have good comps outside anyway )

There are definitely similarities in terms of complaining about missing features that apple's probably going to add soon anyway (keyboard showing up in portrait and stuff). Lots of complaints about not supporting flash but we know how that went. Also apparently the headphone jack position was annoying.

What I'm not seeing in the current vision reviews - and maybe it's impossible to see this in real time - is some feature that has the chance to change literally everything that people arent able to comprehend just yet. These reviews being relatively dismissive of this web browsing on your phone thing is absolutely hilarious in hindsight. The only similar thing in the vision is - the passthrough eye thing maybe? Nothing else seems particularly baffling.

I'm glad I read some of those reviews. The vibe I'm getting is - the iPhone was doing something fundamentally weird with this whole smartphone thing that reviewers just didnt get, so they kept reviewing it as an iPod with really bad voice calling and a browser and being confused by all the hype. The vision though? It's a vr/mixed reality headset, we know what those are like, and apple didn't throw any real curveballs.

An addendum - I'm surprised at how spot on so many of these iPhone 1 reviews are outside of the not getting the browser thing (and even there folks complaining about how web2.0 is taking off and there's no js/java/flash support? Good point!). Keyboard should work in portrait mode, voice calling is bad, 3g support is needed, no multimedia messaging. No replaceable battery and not user servicable enough. Camera is OK but needs dramatic improvement. Typing urls is very hard. And of course, no games, no 3rd party apps, no app store. After hearing all these memes for however long about how the media just didn't get the iPhone or something - yeah no they did pretty well

Before the 3g the web browser thing wasn't really that useful. If you have to be on wifi to get reasonable speeds, it's easier to just use your laptop vs a tiny screen with a slow processor.

Yeah (though apparently the wifi support was good idk) and honestly from the reviewers perspective - I think they'd be doing their jobs wrong if they were 'right' about the iphone. What were they supposed to say/forecast? "Oh and while the browser is pretty good, it's obviously incomplete, doesn't support flash, can be hard to read websites, etc. However, this won't be a problem if the iphone ends up catapulting apple to becoming one of the most powerful companies in the world, at which point they'll kill flash. Also while all websites are designed for viewing on desktop screens - that's OK because in the future the iphone is going to be so damn impactful civilizationally that basically the entire human species will start accessing the internet through small mobile computers in their pocket (and start accessing it a lot!) which means that society itself will reshape itself to prioritize making sure websites work on this phone."

Like seriously idk what people want from those reviewers. If they were 'accurately' predicting an outlier product like the iphone I doubt their wild fantasies would be accurately predicting much else

The first gen iPhone had a much better UX than other phones, so missing a few features like copy and paste was palatable.

I do think future generations of AVP will do well. Iterating and applying learnings and customer feedback will make this a good product.

You could say that about literally any product. The most important factor that will determine success is the starting point. Initial conditions matter. I actually believe this a developer tool from start to finish. It will end of life a lot quicker than we expect. The real product is going to be lightweight glasses we wear all day. But when? How many iterations of the AVP to meet the developer needs for seeding this future product that might be 10+ years away?

> The most important factor that will determine success is the starting point. Initial conditions matter.

So, I don't know if I agree with this considering Apple has such a large cash cushion. They can easily make missteps the first few generations until they figure it out.

Early Apple Watches focused on luxury and personal communication with loved ones. But later iterations de-emphasized all that and pivoted to being a health and fitness band and some subset of iPhone features like cellular phone calls and texts (instead of the weird heartbeat sharing stuff we saw at launch of the 1st gen device)

The iPhone also came with a great data deal for the time, as I recall.

Not really. I had a cheaper unlimited AT&T unlimited data plan than the original iPhone data plan, and that included 3G data!

The trick was to just buy the smartphone outside of the plan. Then you get unlimited data at half the price. I'd pull gigs of data a month on my "dumbphone".

iphone by far did not have a better UX. It looked nice, but it had no more functionality than other devices at the time.

In general, UX design is the argument people used to (and still do sometimes) run to "prove" that the device was better when it was clearly not. Fancy icons dont make a good UX, functionality does. You dont say copy and paste is good UX, you say its a feature.

Functionality does not make good UX. Good UX makes good UX

Not sure how people don't remember what a revelation the capacitive screen was. It was miles better than most Nokia phones that mostly used resistive screens (not saying that Apple invented capacitive screens but they most certainly made it popular) and the navigation with the simple home button and everything else being instant feedback with the buttons on the screen was better than anything else on the market from what I remember. The keyboard especially was incredible with that light tapping sound and instant keystrokes appearing. While it wasn't functionally better than most phones (famously less functional than a Blackberry), it was very much the leader of the pack in details that ACTUALLY contribute to good UX. Just as the iPod and the clicker wheel was ahead with the instant feedback and usability of rotating the wheel to scroll at high speeds through hundreds of songs

I honestly think that people like you experienced smartphones in mid 2010s and just extrapolating back to what they think they were in late 2000s,

When iPhone came out, the mobile internet was so shit and screen was very low res, so the benefit of having a full touchscreen was minimal (mostly being able to select things directly, but that was a very small advantage). Mobile web wasn't a thing. You had to have wifi for any real speed. And if you had wifi, you were likely in a building where you could sit down, and there were things like netbooks and mobile pcs that were just better than the iPhone for doing web stuff. Even people with iPhones still mainly used them as iPods and phones before 3g cellular.

The keyboard on Blackberries was in fact better UX because it was easier to use and faster to type on, without any delay in appearance. The on screen keyboards were all shit until swipe typing became defacto standard.

And then you look at the drawbacks, like no removable battery, no microsd expansion, no shit proprietary cables that would break, no copy/paste, e.t.c, all of them absolutely make the UX horrible.

And before that the iPod. CmdrTaco wrote: "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." Couple of years later the Nomad was gone.

If anyone does not understand the reference, "CmdrTaco" was the editor of Slashdot many years ago. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Malda

If anyone does not understand the reference, "Slashdot" is a link-sharing site oriented at tech news, that was popular many years ago as HN is today.

https://slashdot.org

Ah, memories from 20 years ago. How time flies.

I wonder what new site, and what new euphemism, will replace the "hug of death" and "the orange site" in 2044?

(Hopefully not robots that go around actually hugging people to death…)

Was it not a mailing list before a site?

I let the next guy explain what a mailing list was.

Most of the issues listed by @zmmmmm are the same issues plaguing other VR headsets for a decade now: motion blur, pixelation, distortions, fake looking colors.

Apple didn’t fix any of them.

I think this is the main thing — plenty of other headsets showed how these aspects are problematic. I very much appreciate just how hard a problem things like hand tracking, distortion, etc. are to solve, but I was hoping (perhaps unreasonably) we’d see a break through in at least one of them. It also feels like Apple design choices got in the way somewhat. Two things that surprised me most are the FoV and limited DCI color space coverage — now I get why they didn’t readily share that spec earlier.

> fake looking colors

I never heard this complain before. Can you explain more?

See the video in the OP at timestamp 5:00 to 5:20. The review from The Verge touched on it as well; essentially, at the end of the day, it's still a bunch of displays showing you camera feeds of the real world. And both displays and cameras have a lot of flaws—low field of view, motion blur, pixelation in low lighting, and a much more limited set of colors compared to our actual eyes.

VR avoids this since they just make up their own designed world instead, while most AR glasses avoid this by having actual transparent glasses and reflecting images off them instead. The Vision Pro is more ambitious and tries to pull off both AR and VR, resulting in these compromises.

The iPhone was subsidized by mobile carriers and/or interest free payment plans. I don't see that same path for this VR device, but maybe I am missing something.

The original iPhone wasn’t subsidized… it was bought outright. It was only after Apple proved the potential of the iPhone did the carriers get on board (and even then, it was limited support for quite a while).

Pretty sure AT&T had exclusivity there for some time and didn’t get that for free..

> The original iPhone wasn’t subsidized… it was bought outright. It was only after Apple proved the potential of the iPhone did the carriers get on board (and even then, it was limited support for quite a while).

Completely untrue. The original iPhone required a 2-year contract with AT&T/Cingular. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(1st_generation)#Releas...

The contract was a requirement, but it wasn’t subsidized like you’re thinking. Other phones at the time were cheap and subsidized as part of the contract. The iPhone, by comparison, was freakishly expensive and I don’t think Cingular was subsidizing it. And I don’t remember there being any penalties with cancelling the contract. But I already had an AT&T/Cingular account, so I’m not sure about the contract info.

The contract issue had more to do with how the phone interacted with the network. IIRC, AT&T was an exclusive provider because of the backend requirements (visual voicemail notification maybe?). I assume the contract was in part because they wanted to recoup those expenses.

Here’s a news article from the time that says that AT&T didn’t actually start subsidizing the phone until the 3G arrived.

https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/wireless/phones/2008-07...

Also, the subsidy might have been from Apple, if anyone… Apple got a kickback of $10/month per iPhone user. They might have used that to keep the price lower, but that wasn’t from ATT’s side of the account until the 3G followup.

https://www.wired.com/2008/01/ff-iphone/

You response seems a bit confused/confusing, but the linked articles explain the situation fairly well. The crucial point is that AT&T/Cingular had a 5 year exclusivity deal from the very beginning. They were "on board", and indeed no other carrier could get on board. The initial terms of the deal were that AT&T gave Apple $10 per month for every iPhone user. Then the deal was changed to have AT&T subsidize $300 per iPhone, thereby lowering the iPhone price. In either case, every iPhone sold required an AT&T contract and was locked to the AT&T network.

My only point is that the initial iPhone was an expensive phone that didn’t have typical carrier subsidies. It was successful in spite of this.

The original parent post claimed that it did and implied that this was the reason why it was so successful. They also implied that the new Vision Pro would need similar subsidies to be successful.

I’m not quite sure the killer feature is there yet for VR headsets. But if the usability is better for the Vision Pro than the Quest, et al., it could still be successful, regardless of the cost.

It did have subsidies, though. And they were “typical”. AT&T was paying for part of the cost so that people could buy it for $499 initially. Most other phones were that price at retail and unlocked.

>Completely untrue. The original iPhone required a 2-year contract with AT&T/Cingular.

That's completely untrue. The original iPhone DID NOT require a 2 year contract, you could absolutely buy it on a prepaid plan. Yeah, you had to "fail" the credit check to get offered the prepaid plans, but all you had to do was put "999-99-9999" as your SSN in the activation screens to get them.

That is not true at all. The original iPhone required a 2 year contract and you could only buy a maximum of 2 phones per account.

It was sold with a subsidy in the uk in a weird way. Iirc you had to buy it from apple but o2 subsidised it as it they were the only ones with edge (so assumed they would also sell you a contract). Worked out £50-100 which was mad as o2 couldnt actually make you get a contract.. quite a few people i knew boight a bunch of them and gave them away as gifts.

Also it was a totally stand out appealing device accessible to everyone with immediate value to everyday people.

Apple was paid a monthly fee by Cigular per user for the iPhone 1, so it was just subsidized weirdly.

Or the first Newton.

And the touch bar, and the magic mouse, and ping, and mobile me, and hi-fi.

They're just a consumer goods company. Sometimes they make good things people don't appreciate at first. Sometimes they make bad things that people don't appreciate ever.

Their track record is better than the mean, but comparing every criticism of a first-gen Apple product to the iPod/iPhone launches is unserious. Of course some people panned any given new thing on Earth.

And this isn't even in response to someone predicting that AVP would fail, but just that the 1st-gen AVP is an immature product. The 1st-gen iPhone was an immature product! It's delusional (and discrediting to Apple!) to think the iPod, iPhone, OS X, Intel Macs, M1 Macs, etc. were as mature at launch as the later iterations we associate those technologies with now.

Does "AVP" mean Affordable Viable Product?

Apple Vision Pro (assuming you were genuinely asking).

facepalm Thank you to correct me. Yes, I was asking sincerely!

Reminds me of Lisa.

Sales: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39184136

Fools and their money are quickly departed.

iPhone 1 launched without cut/copy/paste

the price is quite different though

iPhone 1 was the effectively the first mass market smartphone

This however is coming after a decade of existing AR/VR consumer electronics and still misses the mark

> iPhone 1 was the effectively the first mass market smartphone

... no?

Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Palm, Nokia, Symbian, Maemo?

first mass-market smartphone with mass appeal maybe, but it wasn't the first mass-market smartphone by a long shot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com