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Comment by yreg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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