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.
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)
Same as the Apple Watch.
...to top it up to 7 days of charge
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.
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.
We'll adjust.
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.
To be fair iOS copy and paste is still shit today, selecting and copying/pasting is really one of the worst experiences on iOS.
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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...
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.
And they still do under Lenovo. Multiple-day battery, almost stock Android with very useful enhancements.
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.
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
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.
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.
Neither of these statements is remotely true.
Not even remotely.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistive_touchscreen
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#Capacitive_touchsc...
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 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.
If we weren't busy with Symbian vs Linux internal feuds, and the Microsoft deal, things would have turned out much differently.
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.
and motion controls. Between the Nintendo Wii and the first iPhone people were obsessed with motion controls for some reason.
Iphone 1 set the stage for tech jewelry.
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.
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)
As for email. Proper email client? It was pop3 only, and you had to manually tap to fetch new messages.
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 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?
Typing on the original iphone wasn't perfect, but it was generally better than tiny physical keyboards in many cases
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.