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Comment by dougmwne | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this is connected to the Vision Pro release. That’s another giant hardware fishing project that failed to meet the “vision” of an all-day wearable iPhone. Perhaps it became obvious that the car was in even murkier waters.

And to dump some of the employees on image and text generators off whatever self driving computer vision work they were presumably doing before? Interesting choice.

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AVP has not failed yet. Saying so today would be akin to stating that the iPhone failed in the fall of 2007.

Some did, Steve Ballmer laughed his butt off, convinced that no one sane will ever buy a $500 phone.

Not that it failed per se, but there were lots of reports that they ended up at a very bulky and compromised headset that was not much different than what Meta was selling when they really wanted AR glasses. Reports also said the executives were unhappy with the final design and that there was political debate if they should launch or fold.

Maybe in a few versions they will have something that could sell a billion units, but they have a lot of work to do to get there.

While some may have doubted the iPhone, Apple sold 1.9 million iPhones in the year it launched, and cell phones had already been established as an enormous and growing market.

VR seems very different from that. Most people simply don’t want what companies are trying to sell them, and I think multiple major technical breakthroughs would be necessary to change that.

While there were absolutely people who thought the iPhone would fail, the idea that most people were skeptical about the iPhone is simply ahistorical. The iPhone had a huge amount of hype from the moment it was announced, and it was pretty clear from the outset that this was the direction cell phones were headed.

The Vision Pro just doesn't have that. Apple was able to clearly articulate what the iPhone allowed you to do that you couldn't do before. But the use cases presented for the Vision Pro just are a lot more niche, and a lot less compelling. Some people will certainly find uses for it, but right now the Vision Pro feels like a solution in search of a problem.

It hasn't been a year of AVP sales yet.

And as you say, the VR market is small compared to the phone market of 2007.

It wasn’t a full year of iPhone sales either: it launched in June and sold 1.9 million units in just six months.

The VR market is small for a reason.

Yeah but didn't the first iPhone sell pretty well? I tried a demo of AVP in NYC the week after release. The staff casually mentioned that they had units in stock if I'd like one.

I think apple is having a difficult time selling these things. I had a harder time getting a hold of an iPad pro over a month after launch.

Maybe later versions will catch on though.

iPhone sold 270,000 units in the quarter it was launched.

About the same as the Vision Pro.

What I've found when searching, is that is how much it sold in the first few days. It sold 1.4 million in year one.

I don't think AVP will sell that well. My guess is they won't hit their goal of 400k in the first year.

I mean the hype around the iPhone was huge. There was obvious need for a phone that "runs OS X" and was part of the already massive iPod ecosystem. It sold itself.

I still don't get the case for a screen you can wear. My phone screen is big enough for most use cases (like posting this comment). If I need to get work done, my laptop is realistically not much larger than the keyboard I'd need to use anyway. The laptop is also cheaper, and I can show what I'm working on to other people without jumping through hoops.

Classic solution in search of a problem.

I understand it, or at least what it could be. Picture something in eyeglasses or even invisible contacts or neural implant. It adds an AR layer on everything. There are no devices, no screens, no buttons. You look and think and the world responds. The Vision Pro is a clunky preview, but decently feature complete.

Utopian or dystopian, this is exactly the future that Apple, Meta and NeuraLink are chasing.

Vision Pro was never designed to replace the iPhone from day one.

People seem to have this revisionist history where every Apple product is an instant hit. But the iPod, iPhone, Apple Watch etc all took years to reach that product-market-fit stage.

All Apple has done is establish a baseline for what they want the category to be.

Correct. All of those products were pretty crappy when they were first released and then got very good. In the case of the iPhone, I think it was like the third revision when it got good. The iPad comes to mind as one of their only somewhat recent products that was really good right from the start. That one still benefited from being more or less a giant iPhone and it was years before it really came into its own. For at least the past 25 years, their initial forays into a new category have been marked by potential that isn't realized for several more years. I think the Vision Pro will be fine.

I'm extremley sceptical on Vision Pro or AR/VR headsets in general, but I think it's too early to call it failed. I think it met exactly the vision it was supposed to - it just needs years and years of iterating to get to the final goal.

Honestly, a car made more sense than a VR headset if the vision behind the VR headset is "an all-day wearable iPhone". Though I doubt it is, nor was it for the forseeable future. Despite it's outward appearance, I expect Apple's management to consist mostly of engineering type realists, otherwise it becomes hard to explain how they keep being the #1 in Lifestyle products.

I think the VR goggles were always a stab at what's supposed to become Meta's core business.

Regardless, I would have really like to see a car from Apple. Tesla is still too small to get the attention of EU regulators when it comes to their stupid warranty and serviceability. Apple is large enough and already known to not play nice when it comes to repair - I'm sure we would've gotten some amazing legislature about electric vehicle repairability out of it!

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