Comment by guptaneil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by guptaneil | Hacker News Reader

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> Does it live up to the stratospheric hype? Not so much.

Oh sorry, that's from CNET's review of the first iPhone in 2007: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/original-iphone-review/

It's way too early to tell if this product line will succeed in the long term. Will the first gen Vision Pro be a runaway success? Of course not! Will later generations look as obvious as the iPhone does now? I sure hope so!

For comparison, Apple sold 1.4 million iPhones in 2007. Supposedly Apple is expecting to sell around 500k Vision Pro units this year. Given the 3x price difference (in 2024 dollars), that effectively means the first gen Vision Pro is expected to bring the same revenue as the first gen iPhone.

We all have rosy retrospection about how great and obvious the first iPhone or first iPod was, but honestly nobody had any idea if Apple's crazy bet would pay off. We all agreed it was magical tech, but it was expensive, had tons of limitations, and nobody really needed it. Sound familiar?

All I know is betting against Apple has rarely paid off. They do have failures too though and this is clearly technologically more ambitious than any other launch, so who knows! And honestly that's what makes this launch most exciting.

It's been so long since I've had child-like wonder about some new technology that I'm just glad Apple took a chance on launching such a crazy device, even if I don't know what to do with it... yet.

The difference is that in that review there were plenty of remarks like:

> Fortunately, we can report that on the whole, the touchscreen and software interface are easier to use than expected. What's more, we didn't miss a stylus in the least. Despite a lack of tactile feedback on the keypad, we had no trouble tapping our fingers to activate functions and interact with the main menu.

What I’m seeing in the reviews of AVP say the opposite about many aspects:

> There is a built-in virtual keyboard so you can type in thin air. But it will drive you mad for anything longer than a short message. And selecting smaller buttons with a pinch should be a carnival game. I started getting real work done once I paired the Vision Pro with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.

I agree it’s still too early to tell, but the best thing that I see being mentioned is movie watching which is something all the other headsets already do as well. The AR aspect seems to be a unique aspect, but I wonder if there will be safety issues that prevent things like cooking and doing other tasks assisted with AR from truly taking off.

> I'm just glad Apple took a chance on launching such a crazy device

Probably a dozen other companies launched similar devices already. Apple is hardly going out on a crazy limb here. This is their classic iterative refinement of what other people already did.

But I do agree with the first point - the flaws in this gen 1 has very little bearing on the long term success of it as a product category. But I would argue it works both ways, in that to the extent it is successful in the niche that buys it, you can't tell yet if it will break out to mass appeal. We just don't know.

None of these articles are reviewing the future product line: they are merely reviewing the one product you can buy today. Of that product sucks but its successors in a year or two will be great--or even if this product with some major software update becomes awesome--that is entirely irrelevant. The original reviews of the iPhone weren't wrong just because some different later thing that was part the same product line earned a better review.

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