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Comment by somnic | Hacker News Reader

It's a bit hard to imagine Apple of 10 or 20 years ago releasing a product like this without a clearer idea of how people would actually fit it into their daily lives. A lot of their successes have been about reducing friction, and while this is convenient relative to other VR products as far as I can tell, there still doesn't seem to be anything that VR is easier for than non-VR alternatives so far.

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I'm not entirely convinced Apple even wants it to succeed. It's a stepping stone to augmented reality and a true 'forget you are wearing it' type of glasses product that can just naturally complement your surroundings.

I don't think anyone truely thinks people are going to all go to work, strap on a headset and be disconnected from their surroundings all day, that's never going to be a thing. Popping on a pair of glasses however is a much more approachable and user friendy experience, we're just not there yet.

There have been smart glasses made by Snapchat and Facebook, those didn't take off either.

Glasses are not visually subtle in the way smartwatches and phones are. It's one thing for everybody to be carrying the same iPhone, but people won't wear identical one-design-fits-all glasses when out and about.

I'm not sure I'd call those smart. They're basic little camera specs. We both know thats not what we mean when we discuss usable AR.

For glasses, people will care more about how it looks than what it does. The fashion barrier is something that designers have not put enough thought into and unsurprisingly, they haven't taken off.

It’s because there’s a bean counter at the top. It’s obvious this tech was all made for a glasses form factor that’s still at least 10 years away because the gamble that they’d figure it out didn’t pay off.

A visionary at the top just wouldn’t launch until the product was right, but a bean counter is counting how many beans have been spent and wants a return on the decade of dev time so rushed it out into a headset form factor instead.

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