Hacker News Reader

Comment by noneeeed | Hacker News Reader

I think the description of the VisionPro as a dev kit is spot on. It's also a beta product in many way.

Apple know full well that this is not a mass market product, they have made no attempt to make it even remotely affordable to most people. But they also know that every aspect of the hardware will improve over the next decade, and as it does they will have ironed out many of the problems with how we use AR/VR and will be ready for it, based on the real life experiences of actual owners, rather than years of in-house testing.

The screen will get bigger (I hear FoV is pretty poor at the moment), the CPU/power/thermal performance will improve, battery density goes up, cameras and sensors get better and cheaper and many parts will get smaller/lighter. And in that time they will learn by doing, making it better/cheaper/lighter and working on the software and interaction model.

Hopefully at the same time it will really spur on the rest of the industry and we will see more competition and experimentation.

I can't see myself buying something like this for the next 10 years at least. But something like the VPro that is better, smaller and lighter and doesn't cost the earth could be quite tempting for late adopters like me.

View on HN

> (I hear FoV is pretty poor at the moment)

I thought it was pretty good - but nowhere near ideal of course.

But discovered I could dispense with both of Apple's "Light Seal Cushions" and simply line the light seal with some 1/8 adhesive foam. It took a little experimenting to avoid hard pressure points, and then make it comfortable.

It is now very comfortable with the following benefits:

1. The field of view is noticeably wider. Yay! The immersion improvement feels cognitively significant.

2. I realized that greater peripheral vision downward is more important than upward. Being more aware of down makes us feel safer and is also where are our hands and keyboards live.

So I arranged the padding to wear the head set slightly lower, allocating all the increased vertical FOV downward.

3. The combination of being 1/4 inch or so closer to the face, and firmer padding, reduced the feeling of weight on the front of my head.

Warning - literally. I get an occasional popup warning that my eyes are too close to the lenses. The danger being if I were to fall I could potentially hit my eyes. I stay seated most the time, but occasionally walk through rooms, so it is worth being careful.

I use my Vision Pro for 10 hours a day on many days, comfortably. I had to switch to the two-strap support to do this. But I have ordered an adapter that allows the original behind the heat cushion strap to be used with a second cushion strap over the head. I anticipate that working even better, given how much surface area weight will be distributed across. (Also turning a knob is easier for adjustments than messing with velcro.)

Also, got some thicker (in width) lighter foam, to add some more light seal around the edges.

This feels like a real upgrade, a year or so before Apple will release a bump.

Genuine question, what are you doing for 10 hours a day in there?

Can you comfortable code all day in that? If you don't mind my asking, is it purely novelty or is it genuinely better than coding on a 5k monitor?

It’s genuinely better than a 5k monitor.

In the recent update it now lets you mouse off your Mac and onto vision apps just like iPad hands over. It made me switch my desk setup to have the desk attached to my chair so I can have 360 range of screens. The resolution is stupidly high.

I’ve attempted a coding workflow in all of the quests and it just wasn’t possible. It’s awesome in vision

please take a picture of this setup

Unrelated-but-related -- your username is fantastically appropriate for this discussion. I'm imagining a website with the same name, filled with images of people whose headsets have permanently melted onto their faces, like a Dali painting :D

A swivel chair - with a desk across the arm rests. It’s not an impressive looking setup… outside of vr.

Does it require light to work? What about space? Could you e.g. work in a dark closet, as an extreme example?

Do those semi-realistic virtual avatars work for non-FaceTime apps like Zoom?

You can but you need IR lights for it to work

they do work for non-facetime

No. Works in the dark. The vision has IR lights on it.

No the personas aren’t right. They just creep people out. They need more work, or some basic editablity. It generally nails your eyes perfectly at the expense of everything else.

Wow - I am going to try that.

It takes time to absorb all the possibilities

For me it is not a novelty, it has completely stuck.

Yes, on comfort for 10 hours. I have even worked 12 hours, then watched a long 3D movie (Blade Runner 2049, Dune I, etc.) without hesitation.

I cannot imagine going back to only physical screens. I have a 98" monitor with two 55" monitors in portrait angled towards me on either side (heights all match), all wall mounted. Truly wonderful! But this has replaced that for me.

I have even considered beheading a MacBook Pro.

I love the following:

• Never needing to put on or take off reading glasses to see far, or within inches.

• I can have my main Mac "screen" whatever size I want, typically large. Also that I can lean into it when focusing on a patch of code, and it always looks perfect.

• Having multiple Vision safari screens, or utilities, surrounding me. With the look and pinch interface being very nice for navigating.

• Being able to tune out 180 degrees of my space with a natural scene so I am completely undistracted. Wish I could go 360 degrees, and still leave keyboard visible. (Either by having an unobstructed low circle, or having the keyboard "punch through" like hands do.

• Flexible screen position lets me sit with great posture all the time. I tend to pull right up to my desk, push my keyboard far out and lean forward on my elbows a bit. Have the screen large but close enough that I can lean in to focus on something.

• Two environments in one! I will put project organization and context notes on huge screens behind me on a wall. Personal mission control. In thoughtful moments I get out of my chair, walk around the room and see the large screens from anywhere, walk right up to it, make small edits with pinch and zoom.

• The incredible ergonomics of being able to code comfortably in bed, on a couch, recliner, etc. with good ergonomics, due to the screens being flexibly placed. Being able to code in many places keeps my brain fresh.

• I use a holster for the battery. Geeky, but after dropping it as I walked away from my desk 100 times I realized I need that. That elminated inhibitions about moving, and feelings of being chained down.

• I haven't been in flow so consistently for so many hours for a long time. For me the Mac interface expansion/isolation chamber IS what Vision is for.

Issues:

• As noted, wish the keyboard and my drinks would "punch through" 360 degree scenes, or there was an optional lower circle of punch rough.

• Keyboard and trackpad pointer are fussy when switching between Mac and Vision screens.

• Wish I could have more Mac screens, and drag Mac windows out to their own screens. Also pull in iPad and iPhone screens. And push windows/app-states back out to those machines too. Or two other people's devices.

• Wish the Mac screen operated with look and pinch. I do this a few times every day when in flow.

• Wish I could disconnect/reconnect my MacBook Pro screen. The headless MacBook Pro for Vision would be absolutely great. But having the option to use it as a laptop too would be great. Maybe remove my MacBook screen, but set it up so I can clip my iPad Pro to it too?

• Need a Vision Spaces interface for setting up work then moving to a different context, but being able to come back to those screens. Being able to set up a space that is location sensitive, so always available in that room, seat, whatever.

>• Never needing to put on or take off reading glasses to see far, or within inches.

Can you expand on this? Does it basically have built in vision correction? This actually sounds like a 'killer' feature if you don't need to mess with glasses.

You can buy optional magnetic lenses if you upload your prescription when you buy it.

It has optics to correct for vision problems yeah, you give Apple your prescription when buying the Vision Pro.

But more importantly, your eyes are always focusing at a consistent 1ish meter in front of you. That's why you don't have to switch vision correction ever when using the Vision Pro (or any VR display).

just for your information. there is only little knowledge about the influence of vr glasses on the vision. there have been reports of developers that worked in vr for a long time that had issues with theyr sight afterwards.

problems can come from increased heat within the vr device, but also because every lighty our eye receives comes in at the same angle, and thus the eye never needs to adjust to different distances, as it would have to do in a real environment. while it appears / looks the same as in reality it really isnt. thats also the reason you only need one correction.

>I have a 98" monitor with two 55" monitors in portrait angled towards me on either side (heights all match), all wall mounted.

What are these 98" monitors? Is this a TV or some kind of signage display? That truly is a huge setup.

The TVs are:

SAMSUNG 98-Inch Class Neo QLED 4K QN90A

SAMSUNG 55-Inch Class Neo QLED 4K QN95B x 2

In my opinion, desk space taken up by displays is criminal!

Also like to get out of my chair, pace the room, still see my work on a big screen as I think about it. Move to think

And this setup encourages more collaboration

Even a 40 inch 4k TV on a wall works great with a desk spaced suitably

Thank you and damn you. I’m sold.

> • Being able to tune out 180 degrees of my space with a natural scene so I am completely undistracted. Wish I could go 360 degrees, and still leave keyboard visible. (Either by having an unobstructed low circle, or having the keyboard "punch through" like hands do.

Oculus quests have had this feature for a while now so I guess it'll come to AVP too. It only supports a handful of models but that's no big deal for Apple users as they mostly will use Apple keyboards anyway.

Doesn’t wider FoV also decrease pixel density…

Btw it’ll be a few years before they update the Vision Pro

The pixel density in the Vision Pro is high enough that I don't think this is a significant concern.

The displays are really, really good.

I mean it is non-Retina for a reason, because the pixels are noticeable by eye so presumably less density would worsen that.

It is obscured though by the softened out of focus presentation, maybe that blurring makes the difference unnoticeable.

Let me put it this way, then: having used a Vision Pro for two weeks (I bought one and returned it) I would gladly take a greater field of view in exchange for a slightly lower pixel density, and it would be a very easy decision.

I had some major issues with the Vision Pro, but pixel density was not one of them.

Narrow FOV means you have to keep your eyes "locked forward" and people don't realize how much they look at things by moving their eyes.

When I did the AVP demo I was impressed by how quickly my eyes would relax and drift away slightly from looking at something after initially focusing on it. It took some conscious effort at first to maintain steady eye focus on an object whilst actuating it with a gesture.

This is, coincidentally, one of my biggest issues with the Vision Pro. I never got used to it. I'd very frequently want to select one thing while also moving my eyes around to look at other things.

You don’t realize how often you click on something you had been looking at (but no longer) until clicking requires a constant gaze.

New addition to the wish list:

• The pinching focus remains on the control you just looked at for a fraction of a second as your eyes zoom off it.

That would be killer.

In retrospect, it would have been vintage Apple to have realized this was an important detail and resolved it already.

Also widely spreading fingers within a moment of looking at a control could act as "hovering" with a mouse pointer. Add some kind of glow to the control as an intuitive indicator that it is staying in pinch focus. So you can lock in, still look around, and pinch if you decide to - or just relax the hand to abort.

This ability to lock on last gaze, and pinch/abort, would dramatically free the eyes to continue roaming naturally.

> • The pinching focus remains on the control you just looked at for a fraction of a second as your eyes zoom off it.

I'm not convinced this would solve it. What if I really do want to select a different button quickly? Certainly, when I use traditional computers I hate mouse latency. You could add additional pinch controls like you said, but I think it would all continue to be finicky.

I think the problem is that eye tracking is bad, at least as a primary input mechanism.

If I were Apple, I would focus more on hand gestures. The Vision Pro lets you move application windows around with your hands (although you need to initially select them with your eyes), and this always felt much more natural to me than. I can imagine a system where you use your hands to manipulate a cursor in space, possibly even a 3D cursor.

I think if you pinch within fraction of a second after a minimum time previous gaze, and before another minimum time next gaze, it would work really well.

These minimum gaze times could be quite small. When we move our eyes, they move fast. I am guessing in the order of 10-30 ms. Just under our perception of what we are actually doing.

I find myself deciding and starting to pinch, but moving my eyes away at the same time. That is a small window where carry-over gaze would reliably do-what-I-mean without undercutting a follow up gaze and pinch

Hopefully you're right, but the cynic in me thinks we've been saying the same thing about every VR headset that has come out in the last ten years.

I'll only buy a VR device if it's in the form of glasses, not big goggles I need to strap to my face.

glasses won't take over your entire fov though so it suck for VR. maybe better for AR

Yeah but glasses are probably fine for the display replacement market

If all you want is display replacement, you don't even need VR with head tracking.

Indeed, so I think that will likely become more popular when apple-like resolution is widely available

There's nothing that says that a pair of glasses can't have panels on the sides and top to provide full coverage [0]. The main obstacle is miniaturizing the necessary compute and display technology.

[0] A random example: https://www.amazon.com/Vision-Driving-Around-Sunglasses-Pola...

My main concern with the vision pro is that all use cases I know of (other than gaming) work better with some sort of pass through HUD display like the HoloLens.

They spent a ton of company resources, weight and power making the wrong form factor emulate the right form factor, and are shipping with zero killer apps.

You can’t even let your friends play with it without getting it re-fit to their head at the Apple Store, which basically kills social/word of mouth marketing. It certainly isn’t a fashion item / status symbol to be seen in public like all their other stuff.

Maybe the “real” product is sitting in the wings and will be ready to ship in a few years, but the current form factor seems like a non-starter to me.

But their work on the software side transfers seamlessly to a pass through device later. It still serves its purpose as a beta (beta meaning data collection and improvement process, not its modern “we just don’t support this” definition.

> and are shipping with zero killer apps.

That's ok. That's exactly why they released the 'pro' first.

"Pro" is a misnomer here, though. "Pro" normally means "with extra features for professionals", where here it means "it's more of a dev kit than it is an actual product".

My opinion, and its very naive because I've only really tried the Vision Pro for this type of content, but immersive video is the current killer app for the Vision Pro. Sitting in the studio with Alicia Keys warming up for her tour was almost equal parts uncomfortable and amazing.

The main use case Apple presented, productivity, works much better with an opaque screen, not pass-through. There's a reason we don't make transparent screens, nor transparent windows on our screens: text and images are much easier to read if they are opaque.

Translucent terminals are a very commonly used feature? Just saying, I've used them on Linux and Mac for 30 years

If you want glasses the friend problem would be even more complicated, not least because of US regulations on selling prescription lenses.

There were lots of rumors that Apple was working on both AR glasses and VR goggles, but had to focus on the latter because the tech just isn't there to do glasses right.

First Oculus headset versus Quest 3 right now? Quest 3 wins. There's progress. Perhaps not as fast as we'd want. There is progress though. I suspect that progress will continue.

Even Quest 1 vs Quest 3 has very visible improvements in terms of image quality, FOV, and overall comfort.

I went from Quest 2 to Quest 3. Even just that! Having a pass through at all is near revolutionary for my use cases

The cynic in you is overly cynical.

Ten years ago was pre oculus rift. We weren't saying anything about VR headsets.

Five years ago was pre valve index. We didn't have CPUs in a headset. Nor a battery. Cameras were only used for tracking. The things we were saying would improve is "screen door effect" and "tracking", both of which have.

The optical pathway is pretty much locked in. LEEP was invented in the 80s, and that's still the optical system used today. Compare the size to NASA's VR system from the early 90s. https://images.nasa.gov/details/ARC-1992-AC89-0437-6

It's been 30 years of massive improvements to all of the rest of computers, and VR has only shrunk a couple inches. There's not much else we can do to make it smaller.

I am looking at that picture and to me it definitely looks like way more than a couple of inches.

lol, indeed, that is the full monty

it's not much different in size than a vision pro or quest 3, it's just kinda un-wieldly.

the photo of it sitting in a display case gives a decent sense of scale, I think.

http://briteliteimmersive.com/blog/remembering-nasas-view-vr

Look at the bigscreen vr headset!

Maybe it doesn't feel like you are staring at your nose as much in NASA's 92 head set?

Yes and no.

There’s an insane amount of tech in the Vision Pro. Eyesight probably occupies a big chunk. Then there are more sensors than they need. Also the CPU and 100% processing is happening literally strapped to your face.

This is like having two 5k displays powered by a mobile device*.

* 2 x 5k = 28 million pixels, compared to Vision Pro’s 23 million pixels.

This is like comparing an oscilloscope to the iPhone 15 because they both have a screen.

I’m still amazed Quest 2 was affordable as it was vs the entertainment I got out of it. Heavily with the novelty of being my first VR device.

Didn't Microsoft's hololens first launch around 10 years ago? It was AR rather than VR, but it was absolutely pitched as an early product meant for very specific use cases to act as a proof of concept before consumer versions.

I personally used a HoloLens for a few minutes and it had severe problems with field of view and brightness of the display. AR works for enterprise or the military to train people or present information at least the US military for the HoloLens [1]. Google finally axed the Glass Enterprise project in 2023 which was much longer than the original version.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/13/23871859/us-army-microsof... [2] https://support.google.com/glass-enterprise/customer/answer/...

Google Glass was pretty slick honestly, ahead of its time.

I had a friend that worked on the team for a couple years when it first started. The use case of a headsup display for directions while driving was a great experience.

I had a friend get Google Glass. I tried in on for a few minutes and was pretty disappointed. It was a tiny Android window stuck in the upper right of my FOV. Looking at the hardware, I guess it makes sense, but it’s not what the marketing seemed to be selling, and I expected a more custom UI that would get out of the way, rather than what looked like a tiny phone screen.

It wasn’t mine, so maybe there was more to it that I didn’t get from my brief interaction, but it didn’t leave me wanting more.

I like your username.

Yeah the UX definitely wasn't immersive. I liked the idea of a heads up display and have never really wanted a full display experience, Glass would have fit really well for me.

These days I don't even want that, but that's almost certainly of a combination of getting older and over reacting to how pervasive tech and displays have become.

I loved my Google Glass.

See, for example:

https://youtu.be/gAkfPhlvSn8?si=fSObULo52MAvcBoR

it's impressive that this was shot 10 years ago but now meta Raybands do that

Imo headsets will be long obsolete before they are viable and will be replaced with something else entirely.

>Ten years ago was pre oculus rift.

The Rift DK1 is almost exactly 11 years old, released 3/29/13.

Oops, you're right.

The list on wikipedia [1] doesn't include it, I guess because it was a "development kit", and I just naively assumed the "Oculus Rift" was the DK1 not the CV1.

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

Edit: Went ahead and edited the wikipedia page so the next person won't make the same mistake.

> Ten years ago was pre oculus rift. We weren't saying anything about VR headsets.

Rift DK1 was released in ~2013, and lots of gamers bought it throughout 2014. We got the first "consumer release" for the original Rift in 2016. I think its more than fair to say 10 years - we were absolutely talking a lot about Rift DK1 in 2014.

> Five years ago was pre valve index

Valve's first consumer VR headset was the HTC vive, released in 2016:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Vive

"The first-generation Vive was announced in 2015, as part of a collaboration with video game studio and distributor Valve Corporation, and implementing its VR software and hardware platform SteamVR; the first-generation consumer model was released in April 2016."

I don't get your second bullet. The Vive is not the Index.

It demonstrates Valve have been at this longer than the ~5 years of the Index, and closer to a decade again (the point OP disputes and uses Index as evidence of).

not OP but it does seem like you're nitpicking details instead of engaging with what seems to be the intent of the response: AR/VR has come an incredible distance since DK1, the last 10 years have seen it go from a barely-discussed completely unavailable/fringe dev-kit-only technology to being an clearly viable spectrum of mass-market products.

edited: grammar. still feel like I've failed to produce readable english, but I'm giving up

This is wrong. VR =/= AR

I’ve been in AR since 2010

The AVP is leaps and bounds ahead of where we were collectively technically back then

But I don’t see us appreciably closer to the goal of ubiquitous persistent headworn see through visual computing

It’s a social expectations and data problem it’s not a “technical” problem

It’s probably gonna be decades before we see any regularized mainstream adoption, because the form factor is such a different thing that we’re not even close to make it a simple transition for the least savvy consumer

There's been talk about VR and some kind of headset since the late 90s, even if it was cardboard, or some computer science professor wearing large goggles and backpack around campus. Google Glass came out in 2013.

Heck, nintendo even tried marketing a stereoscopic gameboy headset as virtual reality in '95.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Boy

There were a lot of tablets before the iPad but it wasn’t until the iPad that tablets really took off as a serious market segment. Ditto with AirPods and Bluetooth earbuds.

In the past, once Apple started pouring R&D money into a specific product type, the entire industry around it tends to advance very quickly. I’m optimistic about the Vision Pro, and I actually think the n+2 Meta release will be much better off for it.

My question is why does it seem like only Apple can do this, over and over? Why are they the only ones who seem to be able to knock a product category out of the park and legitimize it? Is it just the vast amount of money? Are they the only ones who can create products? Is everyone else that bad? Competitors work for ages and ages fighting each other, refining v1, v2, v2.1, v2.2, v2.25, and then suddenly Apple comes out with something v8-ish and the whole industry scrambles. Why does this keep happening?

They seem prepared to go in at higher price points.

Most other manufacturers seem to take the approach of getting as many features on the side of the box and then compete on price. They cost engineer the crap out of everything and it ends up being somewhat disappointing.

I often maintain that so much technology is 80% of the way to being amazing, but is stymied by commercial concerns that cause companies to cut corners and cheap out, or they hobble their own product to create barriers to interoperability.

While Apple still have to strike the right balance between between features and cost, and also like to make their own walled gardens, they are able to go for the higher price points, and also integrate really well between a wide swathe of products. They are prepared to let specific products be less competative in general (e.g Homepod), because they know that they integrate well into their overall ecosystem.

Yes, "stymied by commercial concerns" is a great way to put it. I get the feeling that many companies/managers don't have enough courage to make a different set of tradeoffs.

A lot of the replies are pretty vague, like they’re just “good at product” or they just “understand this or that” as if it’s some kind of mysticism. But why, and how? What is the formula? I think this reply chain starts to get at why.

I’m imagining a typical business school 2-axis chart where one axis is “willingness to take and commit to risks vs unwillingness/noncommittal” and the other axis is “acts independently vs. reacts to commercial/competitive pressures”. I guess what I want to understand is why is Apple kind of all alone on that plot, where the rest of the industry are clustered together far away from them? What are the business processes that lead to their position? Can a company follow a playbook and change their culture and have similar results? Are there other examples?

A lot of our industry are so extremely risk averse, have tunnel vision trying to copy each others’ feature checkboxes, rush things to market to try to make money before they are fully baked, and then give up when they aren’t instant successes. Everyone seems to follow this playbook.

As someone who is deep inside the Apple ecosystem after making enough to afford the devices, it’s because they make it pleasant to use. Before my first MBP, I had a Dell Inspiron which has good specs, but it was heavy, the plastic was flimsy and the screen was not good. The trackpad was abysimal. In my last work position, I got a Dell XPS and it was the same, so in the span of 8 years, nothing changes to show that they care for me as a user.

Most people don’t want to think about how to do something or care about optimizing it when they can get it done and not think further about it. But companies seems to want to put a lot of barriers into what I want to get done, like popups, complicated screens, ugly interfaces. For the majority of user workflows, Apple offers a simple, unobstrusive way to do them. Starlink routers are almost the same in that regard (the mobile app could use some work, and perhaps add a desktop interface)

My advice (as a user) is for to simplify the usual workflow to the point you only ask the few (0,1-3) indispensable questions, and then get out of the way. Further options can be buried inside Preferences and Settings. And then you perfect the apperance, ease of use, and general enjoyment of using the application/device.

Being pleasant to use also requires some courage to remove features, make compromises and spend extra time on the right things, rather than box-ticking.

In the end you need courage both to make it pleasant to use and to give it a big price.

Apple makes devices for the users. Dell makes them to sell as part of a service contract to a company. Microsoft makes an OS to sell to enterprises to provide a heavily managed experience for their employees so they can maximize productivity and profit. Apple makes an OS for people to use. (and get a 30% cut on almost every purchase the users make with it lol)

My personal machine is an M1 Air, and have to use PCs for work. The time it takes the PCs to wake from sleep until I can do actual work is a constant annoyance. The MacBook Air wakes just as quickly as an iPhone.

It’s details like that, which set Apple apart.

There’s a Jobs story about that one.

The MacBook team had this whole presentation planned for him, a usual dog and pony show about better specs and batteries and whatnot. Instead he just put an iPhone and a MacBook on the table, “woke” them both up, and said “why can’t this (the MacBook) do that (the iPhone)?” End of meeting.

Apple has in house expertise for everything from designing their own processors, writing their own OS and applications, world class designers, manufacturing at scale, and sourcing parts and negotiating favorable pricing.

No other company has all these competencies at the same level.

I think they view design, especially of new products, as an intensely iterative process to identify and solve every problem they can find. And let that process lead them to a new very cohesive product definition.

That takes a very wide set of skills, to follow the series of discovered problems to be solved wherever they lead.

Other companies look at what parts are available, define a product from that, design have different teams build the different parts, each maximizing specs and reducing cost.

For the vast majority of already well defined products, the second path is the right one.

So that path is very familiar to every level of management at every corporation, and doing something completely different from the ground up isn’t easy or natural in that context.

For Apple, the other holistic discovery path is their mission.

Even “big” differences like being super vertical are a second level strategy for Apple, in service of being able to more easily follow problems to product definitions.

But even for Apple, that path is very risky. They have had a few half baked lemons in products that didn’t get as much discovery and attention as they needed.

You're getting close. Over the past 30-40 years, American corporations have focused more and more and more on profitability, and "making the numbers go up." They have sacrificed employee retention in order to pay executives eye-watering packages to focus on eliminating literally everything that doesn't contribute to that goal. They gutted all the R&D they can, years ago. Apple seems to be almost alone in retaining enough business acumen to think further out than the next quarter. It's not magic. They're just continuing to do what places like IBM and HP were famous for, decades ago. It's like the quip in Days of Thunder (and I have no idea why it sticks with me): "I'm not going faster. Everybody else is going slower." Wall Street has killed the future of America, and slowed human progress around the globe, in order to buy a bunch of already-filthy-rich people even more stuff.

Not that I'm bitter and jaded, as an engineer, or anything.

TL;DR: Apple builds to a standard while everyone else builds to a price.

Apple can afford to build to standards, It is not like everyone else is dumb , they simply cannot pull it off the brand strength Apple has is without peer in the market.

If another brand launched first at same price points they simply will not get the traction Apple does.

Even with $3,500 price Apple likely needs sales hundreds of thousands of units to break even , no other manufacturers cannot pull it off

I think there are a lot of smaller companies that can build to standards, and then they either exceed their original vision or things explode to the point where they feel they need to move faster.

I love my Apple Watch (on my second one now) and I didn't like wearing watches. Except the Pebble that I bought (I think that I got the first generation Pebble colour, but it's been a while). After that product, things went sideways for Pebble for a lot of reasons. But the initial products were great and the build quality was good (not great, but good). The same applies to the first few generations of the Palm Pilot (and to a lesser degree, the Treo), although I think that the best PalmOS device built was the Clié NX70.

With respect to Apple's break even…I suspect that the research they did is going to produce benefits across all of Apple's product lines for the better part of the next decade (part of it already has, with the Apple Watch Double Tap hand gesture, although that is movement detection not camera-based).

> to the point where they feel they need to move faster

They feel the need because unlike Apple others cannot wait years to release a product or upgrade to a successful one and still sell enough. Everyone else have limited brand recall, if they don't move fast a competitor will and they loose relevance.

The point is nobody else can sustainably build to standards the way Apple can, because Apple can take its time enter a industry late and still win big.

Ya know the funny thing about Pebble, looking back as someone who is on his 3rd apple watch: At the time, I honestly thought Pebble was doing it the right way! And in hindsight, I still think that at launch, they had the perfect idea - for that point in time. Their initial success even matches that.

When the tech advanced, and use cases evolved, and users had become accustomed to the limitations of the apple watch style of smartwatch - which regarding battery life STILL HOLD TRUE... once all that was the case, Pebble had to deal with the "and now what?" and they couldn't.

> Most other manufacturers seem to take the approach of getting as many features on the side of the box and then compete on price. They cost engineer the crap out of everything and it ends up being somewhat disappointing.

This is a good summary of Windows Mixed Reality headsets, or Kinect

The price thing isn't just about competition. Meta and oculus before it has a stated goal to bring it to the masses. That's not going to work at a $3500 price point.

You need to get Devs interested too and that won't work if only the top 1% of the western world can afford it.

Steve Jobs is on record that Apple doesn’t care about being first (to market). They care about being the best.

This is why secrecy is a huge part of their culture: it allows them to spend years doing R&D work on multiple prototypes until they land on something they think is better than what is already out there.

If they can’t make it work due to the laws of physics (e.g. Apple AirPower) or indecision (e.g. Apple Car), they can shut it down without much fanfare and move on to the next secret R&D project.

> Is it just the vast amount of money?

No, it is the vast amount of risk they are willing to take. Microsoft/alphabet have vast amounts of money too, but no appetite for risk.

Apple is willing to dump tens of billions and years into R&D for physical products, fail, and then try again. Microsoft half asses it, and then pulls back instead of plowing through (see them shutting down Microsoft retail stores and windows phone). But they have that Excel and Windows B2B gravy train they can ride for the foreseeable future.

Please feel free to share what these amazing risk taking products are which Apple R&D have come up with.

As far as I can see its all the same thin, flat device with a screen, just different sizes.

I have no interest in convincing anyone else, maybe they are only risky according to me.

But I do know they seem to result in net incomes that others would seemingly find envious, and yet the others are not able to replicate, so the empirical evidence doesn’t make it seem so easy.

The M series of chips? That was a major risk.

AirPods/pro/max? They've taken major presence a space owned by Sony, Samsung and Bose.

Apple Watch Ultra?

Though it's thin and flat, The iPhone X was a huge leap in specs, contrary to the entire market analyst sentiment that people wanted cheaper phones. Apple made a big bet that people would want the opposite: more expensive phones, and they were right.

M series of chips is an arm processor, licensed by ARM and fabricated by TSMC. On top of that it is a processor. Did apple R&D invent the processor? No, they licensed an existing design, tweaked it, and paid a factory to make it for them.

Airpods are just bluetooth headphones. Did Apple R&D invent bluetooth, or even bluetooth headphones?

Apple watch was not even the first smart watch to market. They did not invent the watch, and they did not invent the smart watch.

You must be pretty blinkard to think that Apple invented all these things instead of licensing existing patents and repackaging them, which is what they do best.

Who is talking about patents? I was talking about business risk. Since when does invention ever imply economic gain? It's business 101, invention rarely leads to business payoffs unless there is innovation in the market, i.e. it is manufactured, packaged, sold, distributed to the demands of the day. Who invented the PC? Kenbak corp & John Blankenbaker, arguably - they didn't last. Motorola invented the mobile phone. Invention is important but is no indication of long term business success.

On the M series of chips, "Tweaked it" is a heavy lift. You are vastly underplaying the amount of Apple's design work that went into the M series of chips. It's led to massive performance gains against the competition.

Airpods are "just" bluetooth headphones, but happen to be the ones that have the most market share by far. It's about design and quality.

The Apple Watch also is the most widely adopted smart watch, by far. Because of how it was designed and manufactured.

The facts are that Apple has taken major risks repeatedly with their design and product decisions, and reaps the rewards with higher margins and market share than the competition. This isn't blinkard, this is just reality.

Microsoft is actually doing great right now, but the thing they're doing great at is Azure and cloud services like 365, plus some very lucky AI investments.

Shutting down their bad products was a good move, even if they should've made good products in the first place.

Because they have spent decades building a brand which most people see as premium and desirable. Doesnt matter what the product is now, if it has an apple logo on it the majority of people will want one.

Other companies trying to compete with Apple in any space will automatically have this disadvantage that they are seen as the inferior choice because Apple have repeatedly positioned themselves as the most premium player in the market, and so thats just what people expect now.

Have you seen the competitors?

OS: Windows is a add-riddled and always ignoring your preferences and getting in the way of your work.

Tablet: Android tablet are slow (or soon to be) and not much applications designed for them

Laptop: Windows and never a good mix of great components, perfomance, and weight.

Phone: Only a few do not add uninstallable junk, and these days, they all try to copy the iPhone which is not something I want is I’m trying to move away from the iPhone.

Speaker System: If I want a homepod alternative, I will not be looking to get inside another closed ecosystem. And I’d want lifetime support (airplay has been reversed-engineered). The last time I used Sonos, it wanted me to use its music player or something.

All of that is only your opinion, there are no objective facts in there at all.

You are both sharing only opinions. What a bizzare statement.

Apple aggressively focus on low-volume high-margin opportunities, have been doing so for some decades, and have a giant war chest to make bets with. In many ways, they work like the very very large version of a successfully bootstrapped business.

Most of their peers pursue maximum volume in an attempt to dominate a market and drown all competition, inebitably at much lower margins. It's the continuation of the VC launch-or-bust rocketship model most of them were born from.

The difference then means that Apple can try making something really unique and compelling and call it a profitable success based on much much smaller sales volume. And if it does happen to launch like a rocketship (as the iPod, iPhone, and iPad each did) all the better.

But their peers set a much higher mark for sales volume when thinking about what's a success or failure. If a product is only lightly taken up, even if nominally profitable at their margins, it's more like a distraction or clue rather than a success in itself. So they scavenge the project and move on to an alternative market or a parallel product idea.

This all sets Apple up to make slow, well-considered bets on quality and design coherency instead of strictly trying to race to market and outmaneuver everyone for volume.

Apple have only had 1 successful product, and thats a flat device with a screen for media consumption. iPod, iPhone, and iPad are just different sizes of this device.

The only thing Apple have done which elevated themselves above their peers is have marketing which positioned them higher in the market.

Remember those Black and White ads of Steve Jobs next to Ghandi, Malcolm X, and Charlie Chaplin? They are paying off now in spades.

That interpretation seems pretty out of sync with their financial history across divisions, their operating margin across divisions, their customer loyalty across divisions, and pretty much everyone's experience of the world, but maybe you're right.

You may not like their products, and you may think their customers are idiots hypnotized by villianous marketers or something, but that's kind of the point of it all: by targetting high margins and precisely volume instead of low margins and maximum volume, they really don't need to care what you think. And that lets them approach products differently.

>You may not like their products, and you may think their customers are idiots hypnotized by villianous marketers or something.

Thats quite a stretch to assume that opinion from my comment?

I actually love Macbook Pros. IMO they are the best Laptop ever built. However in the global market of laptops they are not patrticularly successful. The entiety of the MacOS ecosystem (of which Macbook Pros are a small percentage) barely breaks 20% of the market share.

Are their products more reliable, more fully featured, and objectivley better than their competitiors? No they are not. The reason they are regarded as a more premium option in the market is not because they make less product with more profit margin, its because they have had an incredibly clever marketing department for the last 20 years meticulously curating their brand presence and public perception into being the most premium tech company which produces the best products.

> The entiety of the MacOS ecosystem (of which Macbook Pros are a small percentage) barely breaks 20% of the market share.

Market share is the goal, making money is the goal. Market share helps, but it isn't the same thing. MacBooks do pretty well.

That's the difference in strategy. Apple only cares about profits not about market share. Market share only matters when margins are low and you need volume to bring revenue numbers up. When your margins are high, you can have a much smaller market share but also use that to create a more opinionated brand image and drive brand loyalty.

Thats fine until your revenue growth stagnates. Its then that your shareholders come knocking demanding growth, at which point market share becomes incredibly important. When that happens, opinionated brand image needs to become much more generic brand image to start attracting more of the market.

This is what happened with Xerox, IBM, Microsoft, and it will happen to Apple too.

It already happened to Apple in the 90s and Jobs explicitly killed it as a strategy and culture in Apple.

I think if they went back to that they’ve lost a serious bit of their DNA.

You mentioned Mac only having a 20% market share. Who has the bigger one?

Xerox, IBM, and Microsoft were unable to stay innovative. All three brands had huge missteps entering emerging market categories. Xerox stumbled during the PC transition, IBM with commodity servers, and Microsoft with mobile. The risk of building a brand is building an inflexible brand that doesn't have the agility to change.

It's true that trying to enter every market and own a huge market share in it can lead to lower risk of having to stay ahead of every innovation (as we can see with Google and its inability to productize AI properly) but since Apple's turnaround its execution has been top notch, and that was 20 years ago. With products like the Vision Pro Apple is explicitly trying to avoid losing the innovation race that Xerox, IBM, and Microsoft did.

Do you even realize that Apple owns most of the above-1000$ laptop market and makes something like 40% of all computer profits because it sells so few computers at such a high price?

I'd love to be not successful making a luxury product that sells at commodity volume.

> Are their products more reliable, more fully featured, and objectivley better than their competitiors? No they are not.

This is your personal opinion. My personal opinion, is very much the opposite.

> The reason they are regarded as a more premium option in the market is not because they make less product with more profit margin, its because they have had an incredibly clever marketing department for the last 20 years meticulously curating their brand presence and public perception into being the most premium tech company which produces the best products.

I've heard this same boring claim now for about 20 years. It was wrong as a broad statement twenty years ago, and such a statement I would hazard is still wrong now.

I've had a twenty year career in IT. Starting with PC repair and working for a PC OEM, however the vast majority of my career has been spent in fields involving Linux. (Linux Administrator/Systems Engineering/DevOPS through to executive leadership). I know how computers work, I know how the hardware works, I know the relative value of parts that go into things, yes I can, always have, and still will build machines including using on a regular basis all major operating systems in place today and despite all of this, I still remain an Apple customer and its not because im some dumbo non technical individual tricked by apples fancy marketing voodoo.

It's because for those twenty years Apple has consistently conducted themselves in a way with me personally that for the vast majority of cases, has served me best as a user and as their customer. As opposed to some third party who is paying them to exploit me through their operating system or some mass of adware shipped with their operating system, not just this years profit margins, not just for as long as im in the store and to which afterwards im left alone once ive paid them with a "fuck you, got mine."

Just a few of the events of the past twenty years that have kept me as an apple customer:

* 2006ish era macbook. HDD dies at random just outside of warranty. No local apple stores at the time. Local authorised repairer spends two weeks dicking me around on a fix, nothing. I push it to Apple who was not even local at the time. A week later I have a BRAND NEW macbook, not just a drive, outside of warranty, complete with brand new warranty, an additional year tacked on top and an apology for the service I had received. (We now have apple stores so this would not occur again I imagine.)

* 2014ish iPhone. Much like the macbook I start having issues outside of warranty, it is unable to be debugged in store. Dude wanders away, comes back. "Have you got a backup?", "Yes?", "We'll just give you a refurb, newer model, with warranty, are you happy with that?" "lol, yes I am."

* 2012 15" MacBook pro retina battery replacement - Battery dies outside of warranty in around 2017 and im informed no stock currently exists in the country, and that i'll be waiting months if I wanted a replacement. I am immediately informed that if I do not want to wait, I can instead have a significantly more powerful, and higher specced refurb model, complete with brand new warranty in place of waiting the month for a replacement. I took the replacement. Again, this machine was OUTSIDE of the warranty window. That one retina MBP purchase due to this replacement saw my laptop needs covered for a decade.

This is only touching on a tiny amount of the circumstances that have led to me remaining to continue investigating the purchase of products from Apple. Not everyone will have had these interactions, or come away from Apple positively, and perhaps one day, I also will not and my opinions will change. But at this point, from the day I became a customer through now, I have received a better long term support experience as a customer from Apple, then I have from any other organisation on the planet.

> > Are their products more reliable, more fully featured, and objectivley better than their competitiors? No they are not.

> This is your personal opinion. My personal opinion, is very much the opposite.

Yeah, the GP's personal opinion seems very much the opposite (like yours) as well. Quote:

"I actually love Macbook Pros. IMO they are the best Laptop ever built."

Not sure what caused the dissonance. Seems like trying to prove they're not an Apple fanboy or sth.

MacBook Pros are a highly differentiated product from other laptops; for instance they have an entirely different OS and CPU architecture.

That's not what marketing is. Marketing is knowing what products people will enjoy buying, not just making ads after the fact.

I also don't think most customers are old enough to remember those ads.

> Apple aggressively focus on low-volume high-margin opportunities

It's hard to call anything selling 200M+ units/year low volume.

That's the happy accident. That's the point.

They didn't need those numbers for the iPhone to be worth their original R&D effort, but winning those numbers is even more advantageous for them because of their core philosophy around volume and margins.

Meanwhile, Microsoft/Google/etc are playing a whole different game. When they succeed, they also saturate a market, but that's the only time they call it a success and so they approach the whole product design process differently.

Because Apple is great at product. They have product built into their DNA. Specs and technology are only there to deliver a product experience. Few companies in the technology space think this way.

Other companies are also really bad at product. Google can't convey a coherent product strategy to save their lives. Great at technology (and building chat apps lol), terrible at product.

I think Apple is in a unique situation.

First, we cannot ignore Apple Fanboys (and I am not using that in a negative sense). They have a large base of users who will jump at nearly anything they put out.

However they also have a track record of doing things, both big and small, and pushing the industry to go a certain way. Dropping CD drives is a great example of this, this was an inevitability with more and more distribution through the internet. This would be a risk for a manufacture to try with a random computer because consumers may just ignore it. Apple has the power to say, well you want a Mac? here are your couple options and we are doing this anyways.

Sometimes this fails, see all USB-C Laptops.

But I think it also often comes from thinking about the entire experience. Take them removing the head phone jack (the debate on whether or not they actually needed to do that aside), at the same time we got the AirPods.

Or the iPhone wasn't just simply, without a physical keyboard. It emphasized the advantages of this throughout the entire OS.

But regardless of all the above, I think the simple fact that they just happen to generally sell a lot of devices. Enough that it can normalize a decision for consumers and then other manufactures can follow without risk.

Because they're able to understand what is actually valuable to their customers, and they'll go the extra mile to make sure that what matters is done properly.

It's comparable to why 'Google Video Search' lost out to youtube way back in the day. The google engineer nerds couldn't understand why no one liked their product: it had all these options for uploading video with the best quality and all these formats, while youtube had worse quality and few options. They missed the point and didn't understand the users, and were caught up in the tech rather than what was actually valuable to the users (basically: dead simple to 'just upload a video' - quality doesn't matter as much as that).

Kinda like how Mark Z. has been talking about how the Oculus has similar resolution. It's not the tech specs that make the product - those are necessary but not sufficient. If the product is supposed to be AR: then it needs to actually be AR. And that means. e.g., that details like virtual shadows on real surfaces MUST be included, and must actually work properly. If it's not, then it's only kinda-AR. That's the kind of long tail that Apple understands, and other companies don't. The tech must fit the users, and the experience must be complete.

This. I consider myself a VR/AR enthusiast and I've had many VR headsets since the DK1, included Hololens 2 (and now Vision Pro). The day I started using Hololens 2 I just though "Wow, I could wear this for hours and even do real work on this if the displays and performance were a bit better". The product was simply amazing but it had a few issues (mainly performance) that it limited the device to very specific use cases.

Microsoft decided to mostly abandon the project, move/fire most of the team and give up rather than keep spending resources on a product that had an incredible potential... What would happen if Microsoft released a headset like Hololens 2 capable of running Windows apps for consumers at a similar price to AVP? They have Windows Mixed Reality, an almost infinite software catalogue, and the capabilities to do it... buy they simply don't (think about the Surface).

my generalized thoughts (and there are exceptions so don’t bother replying with “what about XYZ” because its a generalization):

1. Apple focus on customer story for every product. They may get it wrong sometimes but every product is sold with “this is how it will impact your life for the better”.

2. Apple understand brand and fashion. Unlike other companies, they don’t typically rush out the gate with a million variants to try and capture every part of the market. They don’t let it cheapen their brand and they avoid brand fatigue.

3. They stick with things for longer . Other companies tend to throw products at the wall early and hope they stick. Apple comes in later and then doesn’t relent for a long time compared to competitors.

4. They try and not focus on just specs. Other brands focus on features, and do a really bad job at telling you why you need it.

>They try and not focus on just specs.

If I could focus on specs, I wouldn't need spectacles!

> Is it just the vast amount of money?

It's not the money. They did it with the iMac when they were headed for the ground, and with the iPod when they were in a better position but still without infinite funding. Reality is actually quite simple: they spot technology advances, and integrate them into a neat, well-designed package that people actually want to buy.

The first iPod was a fancy shell around an IBM 1.8'' hard drive. There were MP3 players before but they were very bulky, or could store only a handful of files. They saw the hard drive coming, did the math, and went all in.

Same thing with the iPhone: there were smart phones before, but they spotted the capacitive digitizer that was orders of magnitude more accurate than the competition, and boom, multitouch.

Same thing with the AirPods: the killer feature being their fancy Bluetooth chip, which made the experience much better than the competition that was established for a decade at that point.

It is quite interesting that they do it over and over, going as far as saying what they do in interviews, and some people really don't see it for what it is.

> Are they the only ones who can create products?

They are not. They just have a vision of what they want to do, and once they start they put the effort needed (sometimes killing advanced designs before release). Then, they iterate relentlessly generation after generation. They play the long game, and often introduce their first generations at higher price points and keep improving and driving their price points down even if it is not an initial resounding success. Any company can do it, if they take design seriously and optimise for long term strategic goals rather than short-term economics.

> Competitors work for ages and ages fighting each other, refining v1, v2, v2.1, v2.2, v2.25, and then suddenly Apple comes out with something v8-ish and the whole industry scrambles.

If you look closely, when Apple comes in, it's because they have found a differentiating factor that they think will make the difference. They always have a compelling message about why you should choose their product above the competition. And it's never "same product, but cheaper".

Agree. And in a world where most technical people assume differentiation means better specs, Apple repeatedly prioritizes better UX: easier and/or more fun to use.

Except when you will try to use Finder on MacOS. That whole thing is just a massive UX failure

Agreed. I wasn’t trying to say Apple gets every bit of UX perfect (or even acceptable) in all products.

But they do have a history of disrupting markets by leveraging superior UX. Mainstreaming the GUI, the click wheel, the all-glass multitouch phone, etc, etc.

Apple is AFAICT the only company in the world (outside of ultra-luxury brands) that actually cares about user experience enough to spend however much it takes to make it good.

According to this article, the differentiator for the Vision Pro are the tiny, high density OLED screens.

Their competitors are shockingly incompetent.

Consider Google. A couple years ago, a reporter documented the nearly (iirc) 20 attempts Google has made at a messenger. Meanwhile, Apple made one and ground away at it until it became great.

Google is a company that -- and this is true -- dropped trou and put apps on my phone called "Google Meet" and "Google Meet (Original)." And don't forget Duo. See also having "Google Pay" and "Google Wallet."

With a side of Android is kinda meh and look at pics of various Google execs at industry events. There's a solid chance there's an iphone in their hands.

Are you aware that Google Pay and Google Wallet are completely different products, and that Apple has exactly the same counterparts even named the same?

https://www.apple.com/apple-pay

https://www.apple.com/wallet/

It is not the same at all. Google Pay used to be called Wallet for starters. https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/12979ja/google... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wallet

Apple does not have this level of product or branding confusion.

So you don't like Apple, fine. But using Google as a poster child of consistent product marketing is a fool's hill to die on.

Apple does have similar level of branding confusion elsewhere. Look at Apple Music vs iTunes Store. How many people understand the difference between the two subscriptions?

Apple has it in a handful of places.

With Google, it's endemic to their products.

Anyone who has been around longer than a minute in the ecosystem. The iTunes Store isn't a subscription service, it's an a la carte store. Done!

More importantly: it's not confusing because no one really cares or needs to care. New folks use the Apple Music subscription, old folks that know the difference use either.

There is, in fact, an iTunes subscription called iTunes Match. That's the one that lets you upload your own tracks to the cloud, scans them to match against the catalog, and then gives you DRM-free high quality downloads of it.

On the other hand, with Apple Music, there's a different subscription that also lets you upload your music to the cloud and scans them for matches, but what you get back out of it is DRMed downloads. Which don't work outside of the Apple ecosystem, and stop working even on it if you cancel your Apple Music subscription.

On top of that, the way matching works is different for the two services. iTunes Match actually analyzes the raw data of the track to do the exact match, while Apple Music seems to prefer metadata. Which means that, with the latter, you'll often get a different variant of the song, in cases where multiple versions exist.

I'm aware of iTunes Match vs Apple Music Sync Library. Incorporating legacy services into new ones is always a product management tap dance of tradeoffs.

My point is that bring your own library of pre-ripped music into a subscription service for syncing is rare these days unless you're over a certain age or are an audiophile (at which point there are better alternatives like Roon). If you're going to do rare things, then there will always be nuances to understanding the tradeoffs Apple took to support you.

It's not rare for anyone who already has a collection of music, e.g. because they are coming from a different service. It doesn't have to be ripped - it may well have been purchased via numerous existing services that sell downloadable files, from Amazon to Apple itself.

I am still scratching my head what exactly you’re referring to as an “iTunes Store” subscription, you’ll have to explain this one better.

Apple fan, but also Apple TV (the hardware device) and Apple TV+ (the streaming service).

Apple is and always has been a product company. They invent technology to serve the product, and they don't particularly talk up the specifics of the technology, preferring to talk about what it enables. For example, the numerous interaction features introduced by the iPhone, such as swiping, pinching, and tapping. And the high resolution display they demanded for their Vision Pro.

It’s because the majority of tech firms with sufficient capital are not willing to invest in the development of a full product, nor frankly, do they have the leadership to do so. I also believe they don’t have the smarts to capitalise on disruption, so they’d much rather maintain the status quo by swatting competitors.

However the c-levels at those companies are happy to chase $$$, and will closely copy whichever hardware and software is deemed the best in the market at the time. Some also do this because they see the product as a threat to their core business.

There will also be various cheerleaders who exalt that apple’s ideas are trivially obvious and were always the pre-destined pathway for the category. Seemingly ignoring the long floundering that occurred before Apple’s entry.

One of the reasons for this is that Apple is a design-centric company. They really prioritize aesthetic and functional design, and they have a customer base that will allow them to flex these muscles in building luxury lifestyle products. Consumers respond to that. Products like that tend to have a segment-defining quality.

>My question is why does it seem like only Apple can do this, over and over?

Because they don't just treat things as hardware, but as a complete ecosystem. Sure, they price things at a point where they can afford to make a quality product, but it's more than that... There are times when things aren't perfect, but overall everything works together and is very high quality. When I've tried in the past to buy non-Apple gear, things tend to be clunky, incomplete, and put a high burden on me as a user, even in cases where the specs might be better than Apple gear.

One word: culture. Apple just seems to care more, and sweat the details more.

In my experience, at other companies, product development is run on a spreadsheet by MBA PMs. Apple doesn’t operate that way.

Before Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the entire industry had decided separate software and hardware companies were the superior business model. With Intel processors, Microsoft software, and a huge number of PC compatible manufacturers.

Jobs doubled down on the combination of hardware and software designed and implemented under one roof. That bet paid off past anyone’s expectations.

So Apple now is far ahead of everyone else, when it comes to creating products deeply integrating hardware and software and design.

> Why does this keep happening?

Apple has invested in developing the full stack for their products. Not only do they have the full stack of components for the products but the entire toolchain to develop those products. This gives them a very strong foundation for pretty much any product they want to pursue.

The AppleTV and HomePod both use older A-series SoCs and run iOS with a custom shell on top. They get all of the iOS media and peripheral handling capability "for free". Both projects can focus on TV or speaker features since the base OS is largely a solved problem for them. If they need some special consideration from somewhere in SWE they just file a Radar. They don't just get binary blob dumps of firmware from outside vendors and have to beg for bug fixes and hope their contract is big enough to get some consideration.

The Vision Pro leverages their ARM SoCs, base OS, and all the motion coprocessors that have been in their phones and watches for a decade. Novel improvements from the Vision Pro's development will just feed back to those components and make it into the next phone, watch, or whatever.

Most other companies don't actually own their whole product stack. Even Microsoft is at the mercy of their suppliers with the Surface line. They get what Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD have to offer. Smartphone manufacturers are grabbing Qualcomm and Samsung SoCs which are collections of Cortex cores then slap Android on top hoping that Google's latest version is better than the previous version.

It's hard to really make leapfrog products when you're shipping the same shit as your competitors and trying to compete on price.

Correlation or causation?

Apple tends to jump on the bandwagon late but then turns thing mainstream. That worked well for ultrabooks (e.g. sony vaio, then MacBook air, nowadays every laptop) or earbuds.

The AR/VR or visionsomething^TM case is a bit different in that apple actually has to implement a new market. Thus far they don't seem to be trying that hard.

They don't really have to implement the market themselves - they just have to create the marketting buzz. Then they'll happily let Meta build the volume market where the profit margins suck (much as Android did for the iPhone business)

Apple has a history to sticking with things like this. Watch and HomePod were both seen as over-priced and sold poorly the first iterations. Apple leadership had the confidence to see through those initial versions. This was part of the internal culture during my time at Apple.

Watch is my go-to comparison for the Vision Pro. That took several generations before people started to buy in large numbers.

Fitness trackers (Fitbit), traditional and sport watches (with GPS) were popular categories when Apple Watch launched.

Apple Vision Pro is a different beast because AR/VR don’t have product-market fit yet besides a few game genres that Apple doesn’t care about.

Apple is good at improving existing product categories less so at finding product-market fit that usually outsources to others.

> This was part of the internal culture during my time at Apple.

From a management perspective, how do they handle the people side of that - keeping good people on the team and keeping them motivated to do something extraordinary?

People don't like spending time on unsuccessful projects and don't want their names associated with them, and don't want to work extra hard on something that won't come to fruition.

Maybe Apple management has enough internal reputation that employees are willing to take that risk (but even Apple management has flops - the car seeming to be a recent example). But that doesn't feel like a sufficient explanation to me.

So basically they have the patience, the cash stockpile, and the management culture to support large multi-year product field testing with non-employees.

You don't know if Apple sees them as failures. We weren't building to v1. We were building a long lived product. We knew that. We understood our vision and that it might take years to see that through. I don't think anyone would be ashamed to have Apple Watch or HomePod on their resume.

Clearly you are right and they were right, but that's hindsight.

Getting people to see that in forseight when they aren't seeing results, they won't for years, and it's all uncertain that it all won't be a waste of time, and it's frustrating and they have other, more certain offers - that's difficult leadership and management, and I wonder how Apple does it.

But we were getting the results we expected, just not what articles and blog posts expected. I learned very quickly that most things I read regarding projects I had knowledge of were wildly inaccurate.

I know this is anecdotal but my brother uses the Vison Pro daily ever since we have had it. He got a Oculus DK1 and a Oculus Quest 2 (I bought the Quest 2 off from him) and if he wasn't wearing it so much I have worn it and the best experience from it is media consumption. Its really a iPad with a ridiculous screen.

The Quest line of VR headsets are amazing, just saying.

Given my age, I would say the same applies to all headsets I have seen since 1994, when I saw someone using one to play Doom at the Lisbon computer fair.

The problem with every headset over the last ten years was that they just didn’t have the technical commitment to really overcome the major problems. Making good VR is a VERY tech heavy endeavor. Apple has shown that they can make hardware which really begins to solve those issues (good resolution and quality pass through being one, having a nice OS being another). The AVP is truly starting to make a difference in what is possible with VR. It’s not just more optimism.

I haven’t heard anyone say they were going to work exclusively on their Occulus Rift,

Having even a few people saying they are already doing that on the Vision Pro seems significant.

> Apple know full well that this is not a mass market product.

I really feel like too many people are ignoring this. If anyone understands how to play the long game with a new product it is Apple. I mean the Apple TV was a "Hobby" for many years.

Has Apple ever put out a "Pro" version of a product before the "normal" version?

I think it also helps the clear sharing of technology between this and other products. From using the M2 tech, to iOS and (I assume) built with much of the AR tech they have been showing off for the last several years on iPhone.

I honestly kinda wonder how much of ARKit was directly made from work on the Vision Pro?

This version of Vision Pro was never going to be a massive product, I expect they knew they would get returns (and they hoped to mitigate that with the in store demos but that only does so much). But it is setting the ground work for a long term investment.

> Has Apple ever put out a "Pro" version of a product before the "normal" version?

Yes they introduced the MacBook Pro before the MacBook.

I did not know that, however that is a bit different since they had the Powerbook. So that's more of a rebranding than a new product.

I do realize that the name change came with a switch from PowerPC to Intel.

Even with the PowerBook, the PowerBook came before the iBook.

The Mac (Pro) came before the iMac/Mini etc too

The pro moniker is just branding but they usually start with the pro line for more expensive hardware.

Even with the iPhone, the current pro line is a continuation of the main line iPhone that evolved via the X.

They upgraded the MacBook (Pro) to the M3 chip while the Air had to wait (and skip the M2 at all).

I'm not sure what you mean. There's definitely an M2 Air and an M2 Pro.

>> Has Apple ever put out a "Pro" version of a product before the "normal" version?

The Lisa before the (original) Mac

> Has Apple ever put out a "Pro" version of a product before the "normal" version?

HomePod is another one.

I think, crucially, Apple also invented a price anchor for VR computing. Previously, only the extreme high end of VR broke $1.5k.

Now if apple puts out an Apple Vision SE or non-pro or whatever at $1,999 it will be seen as an absolute steal.

No it won’t. It will still be seen as 4x the price of the Quest 3.

It could play out like the iPhone where it costs N times more than the competition, but lasts 2N times longer, and has better resale value. (For iPhone, N is ~1.5)

I’m having a hard time imagining that level of planned obsolescence for VR displays though. If anything, I’d expect the quest 4 (or 5, or whatever generation matches Apple specs) to last longer.

Of course, it’s a moot point for me and the large percentage of the population that will never strap Facebook-controlled eye trackers to their head.

iPhones on average don't last 3 times as much ib people's hands as Android phones that cost 66% as much. Better resale value is fair, but I am contesting that 2N figure strongly.

I regularly replace my screen 1-2 times between iPhone upgrades, and have never kept one until end of security update support. I've never managed to replace an android screen, and have only replaced one android phone that still had security update support (I've only bought flagship androids.)

I replaced my iPhone X this year, with a 15 that I anticipate owning at least another 5-6 years.

I'm still on iPhone X, runs super smooth. The older iPhone X runs better than my test Galaxy S20 which is newer than the iPhone X by many years.

I also have a Galaxy Edge from the same year as the iPhone X. The Samsung is completely unusable. Every tap takes seconds for anything to respond.

The accelerometer on my X finally started failing, making it impossible to hang up voice calls. It wouldn't turn the screen back on after I took the phone away from my face :-D

Looking at the number of articles which compare m3 macbooks against "intel" but mean "the intel macbook from years ago", I totally expect to read lots of articles which pretend non-apple devices don't exist.

Given that those Intel laptops run Windows, which today is worse than any old version of MacOS, can you blame them?

Worse for what, though?

If you do a lot of gaming, for example, macOS is in many ways worse than Linux even.

I hate windows as much as the herd, but OS choice isn't always as clean as "better or worse".

I need to run Windows in some form for various industry specific needs that a VM or emulation simply cannot meet at the moment. I don't like it, but that isn't going to change the state of things.

It's a delight to be able to choose what and where you work with, but it's not the reality a lot of us have to deal with.

In some ways that’s understandable and can be very helpful. Because if you’re a Mac person looking to buy a new Mac then that may be what you have. Newer Intel Macs don’t exist.

If you’re a PC user looking to switch to Mac, or you’re looking for a machine and don’t care about which operating system it has, then it’s less useful.

So what? the iPhones have 4x the price of mid-tier Android phones the whole time.

The point is, for now the AVP is the only iPhone-tier (Pro Ultra Whatever) VR headset. Meta's crap (I have all of them) is analogous to the mid tier budget phones, in this metaphor. (Even the fantastically expensive Quest Pro is just like... an insult, even though it does have eye tracking which is now absolute minimum table stakes (and Quest 3 doesn't have it))

The current price it too high to go mainstream, yes, for sure. But let's see the next. AVP 3Gs could fuckin' destabilize the fuck out of this whole nascent ecosystem.

People can justify the price of an iPhone as they use it ALL the time.

This is what people seem to be missing.

Until now, VR headsets were used almost exclusively for gaming, even if they were capable of other things.

The AVP was made to be a general use device in a way that other headsets just aren’t.

This is like iPhone vs. flip phones in 2006 as far as I can tell.

Yes, your flip phone can play music, take pictures, use the internet, etc. just like an iPhone. But, you would be a fool think the devices are in the same league. Apple just sort of defined a genre of product that didn't exist.

People who want an Apple VR headset may not know, and certainly don't care, that Facebook also sells one.

It’s the first one. Apple packed a ridiculous amount of ultra powerful stuff in it. As the article says they may find out that they don’t need some of that stuff. Also we know that everything gets cheaper overtime.

And Apple put an absolute ridiculous amount of money into designing and building that thing and they’re trying to recoup some of that. But by version two or three a lot more of it will have already been recouped and it won’t be as necessary to keep the prices high.

The first color televisions, cell phones, refrigerators, computers, and microwave ovens were not exactly cheap either.

The price will come down.

In the same way that a MacBook is 4x the price of an Xbox.

As far as the market is concerned: the Quest is a gaming platform that can do computer stuff if needed. The AVP is a computer that can do gaming stuff.

There are many headsets much more expensive than that. They aren't as mainstream but for the hobbyist who is willing to pay more for better, they are definitely out there.

The Vision Pro costs less than Microsoft HoloLens did, considering inflation.

Not sure what the nay sayers are about. Anyone remember the ORIGINAL MacBook Air? Hyper expensive, super underpowered, overheated alot.

And yet -- as Steve demonstrated -- it fit in an envelope.

THIS is Apple launching a new product line (and trust me I'm not a fan boi).

And shortly after (2-3 years?) the MBAs were powerful cheap and barely powered up their fans.

Mind you the MBA was maybe Steve's last obsession. What is Tim's thinking these days?

Still it all seems very Apple like...

My problem with the vision pro is that it doesn’t do enough new, the iPhone and the MacBook Air let you use a computer in an area where you previously couldn’t and made it accessible to normal people. The vision pro isn’t that much better in terms of bringing the technology in a user friendly package to the masses than the quest.

A good measure of an Apple product is if you can pitch a version of it to your grandma or dad who can’t open PDF file. If something only appeals to tech enthusiasts it is not a good Apple product (except the professional line products intended to be used for serious work by professionals which the vision pro isn’t)

A good measure for an Apple product was for me always: it makes tech disappear. That was always the differentiator, I feel: it doesn’t feel like tech and it doesn’t look like it.

Now, I guess, it makes reality disappear?

Sure but why does Grandma want it? She has an iPhone so this isn’t an unanswerable question

The first iPhone was a toy. It wasn’t until the second version (iPhone 3G) + AppStore that is really caught on with existing smartphone users.

I have a Quest and have used other VR systems, the Vision Pro felt like a huge leap forward compared to those.

I walked away from the demo tempted. Not by what is available today, but by what I want to be available and what I want to create with it.

iPhone 1 was limited but extremely useful at launch. People like me that bought on day 1 couldn’t get enough of it. Had an amazing unparalleled Web browser experience and email, an iPod replacement and Google Maps / Youtube in your pocket felt magical. Also got a Vision Pro on day one and used it just a handful of times. Use cases and value prop of AVP nebulous. Smartphones were a popular product category when iPhone launched in a way VR / AR headsets aren’t today.

I don't think VR is all that different from smartphones at the time of the iPhone launch. The Quest has sold over 20 million units. And at the time of the iPhone launch, a lot of people still had "camera phones" and "feature phones". Business users (like me) has Blackberry / Treo / or a few Windows devices. There were weird texting phones for teens that had keyboards, etc. But most people did not have a smartphone.

You are saying that sales, usage, range of use cases and types of audiences of VR headsets today is comparable to Smartphones (Blackberry Palm), Cell phones and personal music players in 2007? Those are the devices that iPhone improved upon and replaced. Most VR headsets stopped being used shortly after purchase and only a few games sub genres have signs of product-market fit

the first iPhone (2007) cost $499 and the second iPhone, iPhone 3g (2008), cost $199. while the 3g support and App Store helped, I think the much lower price led to volume increase from 1.39M to 11.63M YoY.

https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology--media-a...

They actually cost the same the behind the scenes the difference was the subsidy was available by the time the 3G came out when it wasn’t available at lunch.

One of the things I remember about it was someone, maybe Jeff Atwood, spent a fortune on a maxed out model with an SSD.

Even though the SSD was much tinier than the hard drive and the processor in the machine was slow and under clocked to be able to manage heat, in combination with the SSD it was fast compiling code and ran smoother than a normal MacBook Pro.

The flipside is I think the hard drive was a 4200 RPM model and performed absolutely abysmally.

But if you didn’t need much computing power, say you’re a writer, it was extremely small and lightweight and easy to carry. It’s not surprising it changed the industry.

I think of the Vision Pro as the 1984 Mac of VR/AR. The original Mac was next to useless and, adjusted for inflation, cost twice what the Vision Pro does. But it changed the world.

(Yes, it was near useless. The original Mac had 128k of RAM, which allowed for only the smallest of applications. It wasn't until the Mac 512k came out that people could do real work on these machines.)

The next rev of Vision products from Apple, or maybe the rev after that, will just be leaps and bounds beyond what anyone else is doing in the space. No new paradigm of computing truly begins until Apple starts it.

Also, much like the Apple Watch, they took their best guess at what it’s good for but don’t really know yet. So they’ve kind of tried to prepare for everything.

It’s going to be interesting to see what it really shines at as more developers make different kinds of apps.

Personally I'm betting it's not even a dev kit for future VR devices, though we will almost definitely get an iteration or two of them before we get to what I think is their true goal, AR glasses. There's so much unnecessary stuff here if the goal isn't that, mainly the ridiculous outward facing eye screen, that makes sense if it's just to simulate as close as possible using AR glasses.

> It's also a beta product in many way.

I can't remember if it was here or somewhere else I saw the point made that the current Vision Pro is the worst one Apple will ever make. All future Vision* products will likely be technically improved from the current model. So if the Vision Pro is good right now it really can only be refined and get better.

I see the Vision Pro more like the Apple Lisa.

The original Apple Lisa, which cost $9,995 in 1983, would cost approximately $27,905 in today's dollars, adjusting for inflation over the period up to 2023.

So the VisionPro seems downright cheap.

The original Mac was $2500 in ‘84 which is over $7000 now.

I am happy and avid user of Meta's recent Ray Ban Smart Glasses as Im a sunglass wearer (think a huge part of the population are too) and use my phone to take pics a lot. Now do that reliably through Meta's glasses and Zuckerberg just showed the latest Meta glass beta which you can ask "what mountain am i looking at," at it audibly tells you.

Im betting Apple will release similar smart glasses like Meta's in the next year or two.

I hadn’t heard of those until yesterday but I saw a video someone took wearing them on a roller coaster in the front seat and it was very impressive.

> I think the description of the VisionPro as a dev kit is spot on.

A devkit prepared for lock down. It's the old formula: let devs make the platform great, then pull a Sherlock or increase the platform fees. Count me out.

Aren't they already charging the 30% app store tax for the privilege of running software on the device you bought? I doubt that fees going to go up from there.

What exactly are they going to Sherlock?

iOS non-game apps aren't exactly innovative. It's Gmail. It's YouTube. It's social media photo and video scrolls. It's been more than a decade, and the most innovative thing I can find on top downloads and top grossing, Duolingo, is also kind of a game, like if you remove the game part of it it's kind of not much, is it? All the innovations in Google Maps are kind of tied up in backend technologies that aren't specific to the phone at all, indeed predated it.

Once they figured out touchscreen keyboard and accelerated web browsing sort of everything else fell into place. Then the retina display was introduced, and software improved the camera. I don't know what roles 3rd party devs played in all of this, but those list of innovations happened years ago.

They don't Sherlock games.

Even then, is Apple going to approve a game with guns on the AVP? Time will tell. Beatsaber is an innovative game but it leaned on the basic premise of people doing something illegal, uploading non licensed maps and tracks.

Hacker News commenters don't know much about making games - even when they work for huge game studios! - and they don't know much about VR - even when they work at companies making VR headsets!

Hugo must certainly be aware of the Varjo XR3, which is actually the most comparable device to the AVP and even more expensive, but there were developers at Apple on the AVP team who never heard of it, and many more Oculus developers.

At the end of the day this is a love letter to halo product positioning coupled with relentless vendor lock-in applied to helpless consumers. I agree with you that the locked down nature of the product makes it as DoA for developers as the Apple Watch was. People forget that the first apps for iPhones were delivered via jailbreaks made by hackers, who had unlimited access, and that plus Steam ultimately teed up what limited things you can do in iOS apps today, not brilliant strategy.

Agree there is less worry about Apple Sherlocking games. But you are looking at existing apps, not considering Apple is sending emails to devs like me saying “please invent new greenfield use cases for this!” But this time some devs realize Apple will copy the first app that gets popular with AVP users.

For a recent example, during the pandemic mental health journaling apps became popular, and now Apple has their own that has 10x the capability by sticking fingers in all your sensitive location, photo, health data that those 3rd party apps could never dream of.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com