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Comment by pryelluw | Hacker News Reader

Five grand is insane.

And probably what most end up paying, or close to it.

What I'm still trying to understand is: what is the use case that Apple thought people would pay that much for? Are people walking around Apple HQ in these things because they are indispensable for some purpose the rest of us have yet to figure out?

It is for software developers and early adopters. It is small investment for entering into new form factor. Google Glasses had the same problem.

In a few years there may be tons of apps. And apple will drop gimmicks like external displays.

Oh wow, there'll be as many apps as we have now for Glass?

Yeah maybe, though VR app stores have been around for a decade with still no sign of that killer app.

This is the most relevant comment. I have the Meta Quest 2 running on a very powerful workstation[0] and its fun for an hour or two every month or so. I get VR sickness sometimes which is really not fun at all. Its actually really fucking terrible. I can fish all day (Ocean or Lake) and not get sick, but these VR headsets can be debilitating.

[0] I was a Macbook Pro user for many, many years until they started soldering everything to the darn MB. Apple is user hostile, imo, to the point that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. I strictly buy used workstations (Think Dell 7820's, SuperMicro, etc.) that are a generation or two behind the latest and greatest. TCO is just phenomenal here AND I can upgrade them or downgrade them very easily. A chromebook with internet access is all I need to have my own private, GPU enabled, "datacenter" when I am away from the house. I love my setup and its so gdamn practical that "justification" is not a verb in my vocabulary.

Apple is going to learn that the hard way.

Meta has huge return rates on their headsets, which is a big reason for their 30 billion loses on it so far.

At $3500, people will play with these Apple units and return them. I can't guess what their return rate will be in terms of numbers, but I know it will be shocking.

exactly why, I did not complete checkout. sticker shock.

I mean, it's less than the original macintosh (which would be 7k today)

Not really a fair comparison in that the original Macintosh was competing against systems that were in the same ballpark of pricing. There weren't equivalently specced machines that were 1/7th the price.

That's fine if you're selling a niche product:

> Sales were strong at its initial release on January 24, 1984, at $2,495 (equivalent to $7,000 in 2022), and reached 70,000 units on May 3, 1984.

I think Apple wants to sell more than 70,000 of these things though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K

The Vision Pro had more than double that number in the first 10 days of preordering. Estimates are Apple expects to produce ~500k units, I don't know if they'll really sell that many though, the popularity is waning quite quickly.

That's my thought as well. The price is very fair considering all the tech in it, and historically we paid a lot more for less. My crappy 1997 Fujitsu laptop was $3k in today's dollars.

> My crappy 1997 Fujitsu laptop was $3k in today's dollars.

I bet it was more useful.

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