I bought the Apple Vision Pro and even though the tech is amazing I returned it
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What surprised me the most, though, is that when you put it on — the pass-through is certainly nothing convincing. I had the impression that reality would look like reality, but the truth is it looks like a sort of lower-fidelity, grainier, hazier dream world version of reality.
In practice, this doesn't matter much. Once you start doing work VisionOS windows are sharp and look great and that "dream world" is more in your peripheral. It's not distracting, but it was surprising. I'm not entirely sure it matters but it is perhaps noteworthy.
Is it a must-have product, money aside? No, I don't think so. It can be tiring on the eyes and it's certainly not replacing my Mac anytime soon, but I absolutely buy into the notion that this is in some form the future of computing.
No cheaper headset has these movies available in 4K HDR 3D with optional HFR. That has simply not existed for the home market till now.
No cheaper headset has the same native streaming apps capable of delivering 4k streams.
No cheaper headset has the color accuracy and resolution.
You might as well make the same argument about someone upgrading from a 720p TV to a 4k one.
Remember, implementation is often more important than just a feature on paper. The iPhone killed off cheaper devices that did everything it did because it did the core things better. The same goes for the iPod and the iPad.
Anyone who compares features without an eye for implementation is missing the forest for the trees.
HDR is missing and the resolution and color accuracy is lower but you can buy 6 Meta Quest 3s for the price. I don't think Apple has ever shipped a product with a bigger price discrepancy to it's competitors than AVP. It's not moderately more expensive and better but massively more expensive.
Yes you can technically do each of those things in isolation , but you literally have no way to access these mainstream movies as 4K 3D before the Vision Pro, because they were not available. You could choose one or the other, not both.
and it does not matter if I can buy 7 meta quest 3s for the price. All 7 would not be able to do the things the Vision Pro enables.
Maybe it doesn’t make financial sense to you, I don’t really care, because that is subjective. But let’s not be deceitful by trying to disregard the delta in quality as meaningless either.
And again, I will refer back to my point: Implementation matters more than just technical ability. Stop doing paper comparisons to soothe an ego.
The fact that these companies have their services on Vision Pro and nothing else is a result of implementation
It really doesn’t matter if the Quest can do something by jumping through hoops. Yeah you can rip your blu-rays, and then load them on, futz with compression etc. meanwhile a Vision Pro user can click one app and have it right there without any effort.
And there's really nothing stopping Disney or whomever from bringing 4K 3D movies to Quest. Many of the porn companies have 8K 180 degree 3D streams compatible with Quest already. It's nothing unique to the AVP.
https://www.techradar.com/news/oculus-quest-2-sales-figures-...
This tech cannot evolve to something mainstreamable and was best left in the lab. This is Apple shipping a slightly improved DynaTAK when people need at least a StarTAK and people would actually like an iPhone 1. Jobs would never have released this. He's have done what he did with phones, waited until the tech was good enough that regular people could at least imagine a few versions improving it enough to love. AVP is two or three decades away from that.
DynaTak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_DynaTAC StarTak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_StarTAC
I was disappointed. It wasnt the marvel of eye tracking I’d hoped it would be. But as soon as I got the lenses in later that day, everything was much nicer. Eye tracking, image quality, all of it. I like it more each day.
I’ve been on the home-theater projector train for over a decade. I have a 4K projector and this blows it out of the water. My extra BT kbds both failed to turn on, so I haven’t used it for work, yet. But I’m eager. My first game with is projects a skate park and you control a guy on a board. It’s decent, but looks cool. The speakers are unreasonably good for their size.
It’s a solid device. I just hope Apple doesn’t mismanage it like they have the iPad.
"I get headaches from using it, and there isn't enough reason to be in VR" is probably the same reason oculus didn't really penetrate the Apple/tech/trendies.
The target the author sets for them trying it again is basically meta's roadmap.
the _hilarious_ thing is that meta cannot coherently deliver/demostrate baby steps to those targets, or explain through the medium of snootynosed PR/marketing hyperbole the potential of the oculus platform.
Put it this way, the reason the iPhone succeeded is because a lot of people gave apple the benefit of the doubt. It had two things: music and well engineered smooth scrolling. _Everything_ else was sub par. No 3g, terrible batterylife, no GPS, no apps, no sideloading and no flash. Fucking slow proc (but the interface was always given priority.)
If VR is going to succeed with apple, it will be because people gave them the benefit of the doubt for v1/v2. Most of the reviews are a lot of "It will be" "when x is delivered" and "when x makes content in y". Meta doesn't have that good will to draw on, they have to deliver first time They can't because the head of VR/AR is someone who ships features not releases coherent products.
You know the best fucking part? the quest pro could have been a 95% AVP. If they managed to ship the depth sensor, then passthrough would have worked. If they had planned their shell properly, not wasted many many people-years fucking porting react to VR, then they might have had time to design a coherent UX.
But thats the problem with most competitors, they shitout features, rather than release coherent experiences.
Apple: I want a VR headset that anyone can use, requires no hand controllers, and doesn't block out the world
Meta: Lets ship eyetracking and hand based controllers, but only release 4 pages of documentation on all of it. something something metaverse, something something playing poker in a room together.
Devs could probably look past that if apps developed for the Quest had a possibility of running on competing headsets, with Meta offering to license their flavor of Android to other manufacturers and establishing Quest OS the “Windows” of AR/VR. They’re not doing that though, they’re instead going for a more Apple-like strategy, but without the platform chops to back it up.
Eventually, there will be a company that builds a “Windows” of AR that they license out and becomes dominant, but I wouldn’t bet on it being Meta. Maybe it’ll instead be Valve, given their recent work on SteamOS.
No. Maybe you're too young to remember, but the iPhone was a revelation at the time. It was clear that everything that had come before was obsolete. Seems to be hip to trash it now based on the original specs (2G! No camera! No copy and paste!) but the alternative at that time was either a landline or a plasticky junk phone with awful software (or a BlackBerry, which could sure message a whole lot but that was about it).
The revelation was that you could talk on your ipod, and that ipod had a really really slick interface. It was running at 60hz, vs the ~20hz of the rivals. The rest, was all marketing fluff. Apart from the itunes store, the only other thing that the iPhone had was google maps, buttery buttery smooth maps.
This is kinda what I'm hinting at before. Nokia had this great roadmap to basically deliver what essentially was the ipad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770_Internet_Tablet) However they fucked up the software, had internal teams at war, a conflicted road map, and a chronic inability to deliver. Meta, if they had different leadership could actually make a better, cheaper AVP. probably even with content, as there are so many streaming services out there trying to get a USP.
They won't, because meta can't execute. At best meta is going to be the cheapy android of VR, at worst nokia.
If you were there, surely you remember WAP?
Safari's interface was great. Safari was and still is, a bit shit. If you remember, a lot of sites were using flash, and safari couldn't run it (because the iphone didn't have enough ram/cpu spare)
The iPhone accelerated the "booo flash is shit, lets use javascript" trend significantly. But that was because the iphone was weak, not because it was strong. More over, it had a critical mass of people that were both webdevs, and target market.
In the same way that AVP can't operate on trains/cars that move too much (IMU is used to speed up SLAM) I'm sure there will be a lot of "oh don't use AVP as a passenger, its bad for your health" when its just that the hardware cant do it, without an external IMU reference.
And a _usable browser_, don't forget. No other smartphone at the time had a browser that you could use for more than a few minutes without getting a powerful urge to throw the thing out the window.
But yes the original iPhone was way beyond anything on the market, no matter how much money you wanted to spend and it's shortcoming where very easy "fixes" that anyone could see coming rather shortly.
The reason iPhone succeeded was because it was a much better product than anything else in its category and anyone who used it for a few minutes could see that right away, the only objection was the price...
In contrast, for the AVP even tech enthusiasts will object to the price before even trying and after they will object to many things because it's not that useful and it's not even that good, at any price...
Of course, I'm not confident that is actually true. At all.
It had a clearly superior capacitive screen with glass when competitors were still doing shitty resistive screens with plastic... or worse small screens and buttons.
It looked great and worked ok.
The rest could be ignored due to that.
It wasn't benefit of the doubt, it was a clearly superior product that competitors took years to catch up to some extent.
First, and foremost, I like the feeling of mental tiredness after using it for an hour or so, reminding me of how fatigued I felt years ago, living in a remote Peace Corps location and wrestling daily with a difficult new language. One can almost feel new mental connections being forged as utterly new visages appear floating in space and novel configurations of information present themselves. And, as a consequence, one can sense dreaded dementia receding a decade or so into the murky future.
Second, the meditation app is truly awesome, and allows a length of quiet sitting I've never before been able to attain, and lower blood pressure.
Third, the near-term prospect of virtual attendance at performing arts and sports events around the planet, without needing to leave home, is enticing.
Fourth, in the mid-future, tele-medicine will surely take account of the possibilities of AVP, tied likely to various monitors the Apple watch will have, opening new vistas of quality care at a distance.
And fifth, and best of all, the sheer pleasure of personal spatial videos is not to be denied. It was delightful to hear my own spouse gasp in amazement to see herself in 3D twirling gracefully during a recent outing.
All in all, a winner for nearly every senior.
Did you get two ?
Also, the inability to have more than one mac desktop is very strange.
And the weird limitation on not having audio from your mac go through the headphones.
I'm waiting to see if Immersed Visor [1] ever becomes real and lives up to the marketing.
is it. sounds like typical apple to me.
Factors like weight and comfort often arise. Perhaps a future strategy in this space will be to minimise the headset componentry by shifting as much as possible externally, similar to how Apple has approached the battery issue with the Vision Pro.
(imagination running with that idea : future iphones and Macs will be the processing units for more-compact future Vision Pros)
This whole approach is an evolutionary dead end. If users have to strap anything to press against their faces all around their eyes, forehead and cheeks, adoption's going to be limited to a small group of male gamers, think 10 million MAU in 5-10 years ("Quest" got 6M in 10 years) not 100 million and certainly not a billion. This product is a flop that should have stayed in R&D for 10 to 20 more years until the tech was ready to build something that didn't make your face look silly.
Jobs would never have released this. This is the DynaTAK, not even the StarTAK, and certainly not the iPhone 1. Apple didn't rush to build a mobile phone in the late '90s when the StarTAK was showing that cell phones could fit in your shirt pocket and work pretty well. They waited another decade until they could build something truly good, not just good enough like the StarTAK. But Tim Cook shipped this DynaTAK+ headset that dorks your face.
That's just the kind of good solid work a fashion tech brand like Apple needs /s
It does need more apps but those are coming along at a decent pace, and if necessary I can write what I need.
I mean, there was a picture of a pair of guys wearing them out in public, eating food or something.
And, you know, that's almost $8000 (with tax) of equipment there in that cafe stuck on those heads.
Make no mistake, its not a criticism at all, I hope you enjoy your purchase.
Maybe those guys eating were watching Iron Man or something.
I don’t think I’d take it out in public, except maybe on a plane or in an airport lounge.
The Quest is not early adopter, it is several generations in, and is the culmination of multiple product lines. The original Rift or the Vive were early adopter for this generation of VR headsets, excluding multiple previous attempts at the market. Factoring in the attached PC needed to drive the experience, they were expensive.
The raspberry pi was not an early adopter system. It was a consumer friendly evolution of many SBCs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-board_computer?wprov=sf...).
Lots of music equipment is very expensive. People pay thousands for synths and thousands for musical instruments.
The Yamaha GX1/707 was 60k at launch. The macintosh was over 7k in today’s money. The first HD TVs for consumers started in the 7k range.
I’m not sure how you’re defining “early adopter” but nothing you listed is early adopter. All your examples are quite late in the respective areas, when they were getting targeted for mass consumer adoption.
That's going to be entirely subjective and widely dependent on the wallet and finances of whomever you ask, and how badly they been wanting a VR/AR computer thingy.
I understand that this is probably an off-the-cuff comment (and no judgement for it), but it got me curious:
What sort of apps do you think you might need (or want) for this, and how much work do you think it would be to write them?
Like, I can see myself putting together a CLI or a web app to help organize and collate my work (and I have) but I don't see myself creating a word processor.
I'm curious to hear what you (and anyone else) would see as a useful app for this device :)
Still figuring this out, but most things that are useful as phone or tablet apps for one since you don’t want to switch to other devices if you don’t have to when you’re using it. Some sites would be better as apps too, because similar to how the web was clunky on early iPhones it’s also kind of clunky on the Vision Pro due to there not really being web affordances for AR/VR environments (aside from the immersive stuff typical of WebXR).
Integrations with Xcode and Android Studio on my Mac, allowing simulators and connected devices to appear as floating panes in visionOS might be cool.
Most of my friends work in the tech space, and a lot of them have at least one VR headset, most of which have been sitting in 'the drawer of stuff I'll come back to at some point' or have been given or lent to friends/family.
Just make sure you write a twitter thread (or social network of your choice) to maximize those engagement dollars. Standing bravely against the tide is a good look (when the tide is low), or maybe try a different angle.
[edit to add] Also, a comma was added, so this resulted in a net loss of one character while also changing the meaning.
They saw a future that was imminent, a future that their current device could actually possibly be a part of, at least partially. Their original iPhone eventually got things like an App Store and Microsoft Exchange support, becoming a very useful device. The vision was essentially executed on the first try, and the only things that needed to be improved were very incremental details like network speed, screen size/quality, battery life, processor power. Despite that, the device was the right size, shape, and general combination of functionality.
Sure, those first generation devices stopped being updated fairly quickly, but at the end of the day they hit their stride within a couple years of updates, many through software.
I think it’s “the future” only if the tech can move a lot faster than it has thus far. It is a major problem that after so many years of active development with industry giants sinking billions into VR/AR, this space still doesn’t seem anywhere close to the sort of cyberpunk-esque human computer that is the eventual vision of AR, the only way it will gain mass adoption.
Not only did Apple not deliver an AR headset (it’s a VR headset with video passthrough that you can’t wear without messing up your hair), even if they delivered AR glasses or whatever…that is still arguably not a good enough experience. Wearing glasses isn’t great when you don’t normally wear them. That’s much more of a commitment than putting a phone on your pocket or a watch on your wrist. Step one is convincing you to do that.
But that isn’t even really the issue here because not only did Apple not deliver something like a pair of glasses, what they delivered is so far away from that where the very idea of a Vision Pro shrinking down into a pair of Ray Bans seems physically impossible. Apple gave us one of the heaviest headsets out there despite having an external battery to keep the weight down.
When the iPhone came out you could see the device becoming extremely powerful and performant within 5 years. That path was obvious. If you look at an iPhone 5, that is a phone that really isn’t that far off from modern, mature products. It had LTE, and there isn’t really a technical reason why you couldn’t use it just like any other modern phone besides the lack of updates. The product category essentially achieved its ultimate vision within a short period of time.
But when you look at the AR market, all the major VR/AR products were coming out around 5 years ago (or longer) and we’ve barely got a better experience. The difference between the Quest 3 and the original Quest (2019) is basically just some pass through cameras and a speed bump. Incremental changes like we got with the iPhone. We’re still just playing beat saber and superhot.
The Valve Index is a similar age and still represents one of the better HMDs that you can buy. Apple’s device has worse FOV even though it’s $3500 and 5 years newer.
There is not going to be this cool AR future because the products are already in their final form. They are screens attached to your head. That’s all they’ll ever be. We have seen this because they’ve only made incremental changes in their first 5 years like an iPhone or Apple Watch, no fundamental form factor changes. The Vision Pro 5 is going to be the same device as the original, without the external battery, and with a better display. It’s going to still mess up your hair and make you wear dumb looking shit on your head.
Even the educational and enterprise features that the author imagines, while cool, don’t seem to be going anywhere. Microsoft gave up on those despite having very capable first-mover technology and a web page full of enterprise client success stories. I personally guess that it’s just very hard to make useful AR experiences. They’re difficult to develop compared to making a web page, a CRUD app, training video, etc. Hell, they might not even be as cost effective as hands-on apprentice-style training. Between buying the hardware and developing a fully immersive 3D app…the applications for that level of effort are limited, IMO.
That considered we are back to the usual niche applications of VR and then the price is just not even close to reasonable, no matter how cutting edge the actual hardware is (only the displays are really worth mentioning in the end, and the reason others don't use them is because they are too expensive to justify).
At 500 bucks, it was already a hard sale, but at least it can be a gift for nerds or something that won't get used very frequently but is ok to splurge on for entertainment; what Apple has made is fashion for fanboys...
All that is before talking about the fact that with today's knowledge none of this will ever be truly mobile. The external battery pack is already a bit of a travesty but even more when you consider that they put the compute (that is already limited) inside the damn thing, even though for serious applications, it would need much more. However, considering how bad the GPU story on Apple Silicon is, it is clear that Apple doesn't even envision proper games on this thing even though it is one major application!
For this price they had to provide a MUCH better computer, not just the compute capabilities of a diminished iPad (because a good amount has to be used for the spatial features). Since efficiency gains are vanishingly small it should have been clear that the compute requirement would only go up and then putting it all inside the thing isn't a viable strategy.
It should have been either an affordable headset that would connect to Mac or iPad or a complete standalone compute platform where instead of connecting to just a battery, it would connect to full computing box (upgradable/swappable at least).
Then again, under Cook's leadership we got the 2013 Mac Pro and saying it was shortsighted is an understatement. It's basically the same thing, but even worse, because at least a Mac Pro has a clearly defined use case for its price, even though it might have long term shortcomings as a platform...
I mean, so many people are like "OMG Amazing Apple Demo" (or "This is the future" in the linked tweet) not realizing that the Rift was doing the same thing a decade ago. Is the Vision Pro better? I guess it must be given the price. But realistic 3D headsets are a long-solved problem.
While the iPhone 1.0 was incredibly primitive by today's standards, and wasn't the absolute cutting edge tech/compute-wise, it was indeed very polished and fantastic at what it set out to do: Combine an iPod + Internet Communicator + Phone. It had real mass-market use cases it set to solve during development, and solved those right out the gate, despite the many improvements that would follow.
Vision 1.0 doesn't seem to have many particular use cases in mind, and the ones it has seem incredibly niche. There's a lot of really cool tech that's meandering for a reason to exist. This alone makes it unlike any Apple product they have released in recent memory.
The Quest (2019) compared to Quest 3 basically gives you speed bumps, a pass-through camera, but the overall experience of what you’re doing in there is very similar.
Valve didn’t even make a new headset because the experience is still good enough (and they probably don’t see much of a future in it, to be honest).
Microsoft gave up despite having one of the more viable commercial solutions.
This amazing AR experience that Apple is pretending to deliver is just an incremental improvement to VR. It compares well to going from the launch iPhone to the iPhone 5.
What this means is that the VR/AR product market is likely already close to its technological end point. This is as far as we can go: we can strap displays to our heads. We can pass through a camera feed. We can remove the external trackers (though not without introducing blind spots, which will never be a solved problem).
That’s about it. How do I know we are at the end already? Because look at the iPhone 10 compared to the 5, or look at the 15 compared to the 10. What is different about it? The screen is a little bigger? You can unlock it in a fancy way? It’s got a nicer camera and faster processor? It’s the same device that does all the same things. Every year the increments get smaller. VR has already gone through its fastest era of development. It all slows down from here.
It’s decent tech that can be fun or even productive but I just don’t think it’s for everyone, and for the people who it’s for it’s not really something you are going to want to use for 4+ hours a day like most smartphone and computer users. And we aren’t getting this tech in a pair of glasses or a projected hologram in front of our face or anything unobtrusive like that. It’s physically impossible within any foreseeable period of time.
The virtual desktop feature is pretty similar experiences.
The hand tracking controls are classic apple (it just works). The eye tracking can use some more work.
I do feel that this could be the future. It's a huge step forward in certain areas, and I think the rest will be fixed. In a generation or two, this is going to be really compelling. I never felt that way about any of the other headsets I own.
But... no one is buying Quests. I mean, my kids have one and claim to love it. I had a ton of fun with Google Earth on a Rift S a few years back. But the market is a tiny niche thing.
How does selling a premium version of a niche product make money? I just don't see it. And what I find striking is the number of "Apple People" out there who haven't bothered to learn the particular product niche making statements that seem not terribly informed. Most of the "wow" reviews could have been done with an original Rift.
In short, outside of games it’s not a very appealing platform. It’s underdeveloped, with a middling SDK and shoehorned-Android UI that isn’t great for much except games, but despite this Meta thinks it’s good enough for developers to willingly lock themselves into their tiny walled garden. Enthusiast users aren’t too interested in the Quest as a platform either; see how many use the standalone Quest headsets exclusively for PCVR (including myself) — why buy games on Meta’s platform which is almost certainly seeing its demise sooner than later when the same games can be owned on the proven Steam instead?
Meta has also been weirdly rigid, with an inability to read the climate and roll with the punches. Their metaverse stuff has all fallen flat and yet they press forward with it instead of embracing what is working and moving in that direction.
And of course, Meta has a less than sterling reputation, being Facebook. A lot of people are reluctant to spend money to invite an array of Facebook cameras into their homes.
Apple is unlikely to suffer any of these problems to any significant extent. Their attempt may also fail, but they have a lot more going for them.
I mean, will a lot of people do this? Transforming a $3500 device into a $2500 refurb over night?
I wonder if they will get a lot of these.
Of course, my problem is I can not test it. I need eye glass lenses to test it (apparently), so I don't even think I can go into the store and give it a 30s look. The barrier to entry is quite high for me.
+ Apple appears to have worked *VERY* hard to make sure that there is no VR capability in it's VR headset. Most obvious is that it cannot play SBS video, as far as I can tell, at all. Though I'm sure that content providers will make an AVP app that will play them, in short order, what a weird thing to have left out. WebXR VR video does not play either. You may be in the know, but for the sake of stating it clearly: I will not play adult content from any of the websites you'd expect it to. Beyond that there are absolutely zero immersive experiences to be had with those fantastic 4k-per-eye OLED displays... so high-rez windows on a blurry re-displayed image of my crappy office.
+ The controls suck. "suck" meaning "fails to meet expectations". Seriously, eye/tap-controls (combined with the buttons on the headset itself) are identical to the amount of control the Oculus Go controller had, with less precision. The eye-tracking rarely looks exactly where you want it to, and the taps often don't register or release correctly. This is absolutely infuriating when you're trying to do anything. Furthermore, it's a 3DOF control scheme on a machine that is supposed to be "spatial". Watching my wife try to operate the thing, she is waiving her hands and trying to grab things... NOPE! only look-and-tap controls for everything. Want to position that window on the wall? You've got to physically stand up in front of where you want it and 3DOF control it into place, then go sit back down at your desk. In fact...
+ The whole thing really feels like you're supposed to be sitting at a desk the whole time you're using it. Everything is a floating window, and is expected to stay that way. When you walk around, all your windows stay where you placed them in space, but in front of the "pass through" at all times. And, if you try to layer your windows on top or "too close" to each other, then you get a "gradient of passthrough" in all of your surrounding windows that are not in focus. So, you can't read the news on the built-in Safari and work on your 80-inch virtual laptop screen next to each other without one-or-the-other half-disappearing (unless you put them far enough apart that you'd have to swivel in your office chair to look from one to the other. Walk a few feet and all your windows are back where you left them. Still, you'd think that the multiple windows would be great for multitasking but...
+ Not a multi-tasking device. It's very difficult to switch between active windows. If you grab the bar to move the window (easiest way to focus a window, and most obvious) it'll move that window away from where you put it. Also, because your eyes move faster than your hand, you'll often look somewhere before you tap... often the little "close window" circle. Anyway, then you're back up and moving your windows back where you want them. So, I want my 300-inch TV on that wall over there... and my laptop screen on my desk... and my chess board floating off to the right... and my YouTube music playing... but, The virtual desktop hijacks almost all of my input and all of my Siri commands, the Apple TV stops playing if my music website is playing music and vice versa, but the chessboard's background music plays just fine without interruption somehow.
+ AirPod Pro Gen 2 version 2 or GFYS. The Max's don't fit right and don't seal well enough for noise canceling, and the AirPod Pro Gen 2 version 1 don't have the low latency Bluetooth. Great, that's $700 of equipment that "Just [kinda] works."
+ Ok, there's the weight, but what *REALLY* sucks, is that there's no overhead strap. The included over-the-head strap still attaches at the back of the device. Fully resting the entire weight of the AVP on your cheekbones and nose. I eagerly await a 3rd party solution to this problem, but, where are they going to attach it? I suppose a halo-strap is ideal, but it'll need to put something onto that sleek design. I'm about ready to glue a strap over the worthless and invisible EyeSight display so I can get this thing off my nose already.
+ Oh, yeah, and this morning I tried to snooze my alarm clock by looking at it and tapping my fingers together... so it's also breaking my mind.
I'm not going to be returning my headset. I bought a first-gen product and I knew that things wouldn't be great. But, I remember getting that Virtual Boy/Google Cardboard/Oculus Go/Quest1&2 and being blown away by them each a bit more than the one before it. The AVP did not even remotely impress me.
Not holding my breath.
Just having the right few thousand people use it a couple of hours a day a few days a week could have a big impact (or kill it and move on to something that will). Or save a few million and let it languish for years, draining billions.
Seriously, you drop the price once you're past first adopters, which you do after you know what your features are, who your target customers are, and how to make enough of them. Maybe software is different.
Total VR sales are only 15-20million a year. They're not looking to take more than 10% of that with a first product.
So yeah, VR/AR headsets aren't going to replace smartphones anytime soon. But they don't NEED to.
And it costs $3500 NOW, first generation product, but there is a reason why the put "Pro" in the name, the implication being that they fully intend to do a more affordable version.
So as usual, it's not going to be any of the extreme predictions. It's neither going to be a total failure that Apple will stop manufacturing them, nor is it going to be such an overnight success that the average joe will stop paying their mortgage and instead get a gadget.
You don't know that, it's way too early to tell.
> Sales will peter out to nothing after the hype because there just aren't a lot of customers out there who can drop that kind of dosh on a computer at all, let alone something that isn't nearly as capable as a computer like a headset
But A) There are people who do spend that much on a computer and tech in general and B) Just because it may lose momentum after the hype doesn't mean it's a failure. If you want such a product to succeed, you are going to have to bankroll it and invest on it for a few year for it to get a legitimate chance.
> Mac studio sales for example are 1% of their mac sales
And the places that have them, wouldn't have any other product. They work with Macs and they will continue to buy these premium Macs until the end of time. It's a small market but it's a loyal market, especially when entire industries (like film post production, the recording industry, pro photography, graphic design) are all Mac-based.
So this just seems like a generic anti-Apple rant.