Vision Pro Demand Dwindles as Customer Interest Dropped After Initial Hype
wccftech.com
wccftech.com
I'm not sure what Apple's sales expectations were but if the Apple Vision Pro is not meeting them, they built the wrong product.
Apple already knows and has publicly stated that their high $3500 price limits adoption to a smaller market of enthusiastic (and wealthy) early adopters. Even though this particular 2024 iteration of the product is too expensive to be a mass consumer hit like the 1980s Sony Walkman, the more interesting question is if it can be the start of a new paradigm that will be later filled by cheaper iterations.
Past examples of 1st iteration of products being very expensive but triggers a massive new market:
- 1981 IBM PC costs $5240 in inflation-adjusted 2023 dollars ($1565 in 1981 dollars)
- 1983 Motorola DynaTAC (the "brick phone" ) is $11716 in 2023 dollars ($3995 in 1984)
(And the first flat screen tv I bought in 2003 was $4100 for a 32-inch which is $7000 in today's dollars.)
IBM PCs had the "killer app" with Lotus 123 spreadsheet software as a compelling reason to buy it. Indeed, one of the questions when evaluating cheaper clone computers was "does it run Lotus 123?".
The issue is Apple Vision Pro doesn't have an analogous "killer app". The various demos in the Apple Store and Youtube videos of floating windows in your living room and immersive music videos are "interesting" ... but not indispensable tool for work and life.
It's too early to tell if future cheaper iterations of Apple Vision Pro will eventually take off like other previous expensive products like the IBM PC -- or be relegated to niche status like the over-hyped $5000 Segway.
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer
I bought a clone in '83 for $350. I think it was overclocked to a blazing 8 Mhz. Here's hoping VR follows that slope.
The old joke was that the Lotus 123 predecessor Visicalc sold more Apples than Apple sold Visicalc. Now that was a killer app. IMHO there's no analogous reason or app to buy VR headsets in general much less the Vision Pro in specific.
And until Visicalc there was no reason for most people to buy a (micro)computer. The only folks that bought them were (homebrew) tinkerers that couldn't afford minicomputers (PDPs) or mainframes, where there were "real" applications.
But things eventually trickled down to micros and people found uses for them.
The Vision Pro may simply be in the minicomputer stage of development.
I'm super curious, because in 1990 clones of IBM PC in my country still sells for 500-700 USD.
And yet, it completely changed how the world computed.
I do not see why the Vision Pro will not follow a similar trajectory, not least simply because it's an Apple product. Even if you sniffed at the first model, subsequent models will sport more powerful CPUs, more memory, better displays, and they will get the APIs and development model right to enable more kinds of applications. Apple is just dipping their toes into the water with this initial product much like they did with the Mac. Once they roll out more refined products, the difference with the Quest will be as night and day and it will be obvious that once again, Apple has changed how we compute.
Because there wasn't a $350 competitor that had been around for years that did much the same and excelled in some areas.
It's an incremental product charging revolutionary prices: sub-orbital trajectory.
This is really debatable. There have been computers before and after the Mac that were just as influential but much cheaper. Anecdotal of course, but back in the 80s and early 90s a Mac wasn't on my "must have list" at all. Macs were always overpriced and underpowered, and back then only useful for one thing: "desktop publishing".
Amigas provided much more bang-for-the-buck, and technology-wise Silicon Graphics workstations were far ahead (at 10x the price of course).
The Mac's real influence on mainstream computing might have been that it was an intermediate step to transfer the graphical UI research done at Xerox PARC into MS Windows ;)
My potential use case is to better understand 3-dimensional topology. I'm not concerned about "popular" uses other than how that affects the viability of the product.
There's a potential for some astounding abstract art, when visual artists catch up with musicians who master their own digital tools. This thing is capable of inducing drug-free hallucinations. And of course one recalls the killer app for VCRs...
Sound like a solution looking for problems
When VR gets more comfortable to wear, it will represent a more dramatic shift than moving from terminals to graphical user interfaces.
For now, the Vision Pro very accurately tracks your eyes, but waits for an explicit finger gesture to act. Future interfaces with deep learning will take the form of very sophisticated visual autocomplete, guided by observations of our reactions that would destroy us at poker.
The Vision Pro is the camel's nose under the tent.
We’re backsliding from 100% reliable buttons to slightly finicky touch inputs to inscrutable AI-backed gesture detectors. This goes against decades of HI research.
I’ve had thoughts drawing from my experience playing RTS and organizing information and action under an “inspired by RTS” paradigm. A warehouse with robots could lend itself to management software that could benefit from occasionally putting on a headset and commanding a tiny fleet of drones.
I’ve had thoughts and some experiments using a web based Unity VR but haven’t had as much time to pursue more. I wonder if there’s real opportunity in this space I should be doing more in, especially because it doesn’t seem like very many XR developers exist right now, and there is a new community of Apple users hungry for more useful XR apps. Early days still.
Thus far I’ve trained myself on Unity and have enjoy delivering multiplayer games (thus far built using AWS as platform). I’ve gone through Unity’s VR training (~170 had completed at time of taking) and my personal project was a helms deep style tower defense game, which I loaded up on my valve index through a web browser (pre webGPU support). I think a dedicated app for the target OS is probably best for a VR application but I have tickled myself thinking about hypothetical boring enterprise VR apps served over a web browser.
Any advice from the community? If I wanted to explore XR/VR apps as a developer with more of my daily time, how might I capitalize enough to support myself and one or more families worth of people who can work as collaborators? I’m a moonlighter and there’s only so much time in a day. Nothing is holding me back from spending personal coin hiring freelancers but there is also a local entrepreneurial tech sales pitch event I could present at if I wanted to work with local investors/talent. Should I apply at Meta/Apple or any other big company to see what their XR ops are? Try to bootstrap more by selling online education content and/or create a community and thus unlock more opportunities?
I’m open to advice; thanks in advance to anyone who writes back.
"Consumer VR" has been around first in the mid-90's and then after a first "VR winter" in the second hype-cycle since 2013 (yes it's been over a decade already since the Oculus DK1).
Lack of time or opportunities can hardly be blamed for the missing killer application ;)
There is a killer application actually, and that's flight simulations. Hardly a mass-market of course. Rather as niche as it gets.
One problem of the Apple headset might be that the second VR winter had already started quite a while ago, and everybody is currently distracted by that "new" shiny thing called "AI".
Maybe if we could get the next two or three AI and VR hype cycles to perfectly overlap with each other...
Maybe enhanced car buying: imagine a buyer walking a dealership and each car has pricing info along with features specific to that piece of inventory.
Home inspection: inspector walks through the house, CV picks up flaws to review, and it presents a visual checklist associated with different items in house, etc
I’m sure that when they release it in literally every other country in the world they will sell more (including to me).
They combined the best technology available to make the best possible consumer product, not caring about the final price, but then insisted that it shall NOT be used for the only consumer use-case which has SOME traction: VR-Gaming.
Like insisting that the Apple Watch shall never display the time under any circumstances...
They even knew this because Meta has publicly burned a container ship of cash in the past five years failing to make this imaginary market exist.
"Here, new Platform. NO, NOT VR! Go ahead, do something with it. NOT GAMES!"
They could turn this AR headset thing into a success, with version 2 or 3.
Maybe they figure that there are more (well-off) people interested in watching TV on a giant virtual screen than playing VR games, and maybe they're right.
Regarding price, 10 years ago the idea of spending €2000 on a phone was unheard of but enough people are doing that now to justify the existence of the iPhone 15 Pro Max. If anyone can do it, Apple can.
The iPhone was a Browser, a iPod, a Phone.
The iPad was a Browser and a Reading Device.
The Watch was a Wellness/Fitness companion.
The Vision Pro is TBD, depending on what the community will come up with...
The only thing that's clear and well-prepared this time is, that Apple gets a share of any revenue someone may create with it.
If there's one company that can keep putting money into this until someone comes up with value, it's Apple.
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I believe Apple's end-game is, that every user is wearing this all-day and Apple becomes the master-profiler and gatekeeper to any type of consumption also in the real world. But until they can execute on this direction they need to come up with a reason for someone to put this device on his head in first place...
"All submitted apps targeting Apple TV devices must also fully support Apple Vision Pro by the end of Q1 2025"
(Maybe only for apps with greater than X users in the previous Y months, initially.)
We're all used to dealing with Apple by now, there would be some minor pushback and a bunch of reluctant AVP purchases by companies making VOD apps.
There was a ton of hype - Casey Neistat’s video trended, MKBHD spent three weeks pretty much only talking about it, Joanna Stern, etc
At this point if it was in the $1000 range - it’ll likely sell very well.
Naturally things died down and when we get a simpler, cheaper version in ~2 years - there’ll be interest.
I mean, we are all living in a simulation anyway, and nesting it seems like an insane move :)
Similarily, VR interface would be nice, but I don't think it will be as precise as the mouse. Maybe the interfaces themselves will compensate, as they do now for touch controls, by making everything bigger and putting a lot of empty space, but will it be better? I doubt it.
Human hand has evolved to use physical tools, not by waving empty hands in the air to show abstract concepts. So I'm not sure why some people think the latter is some kind of natural behavior for humans. We use sticks, hammers, knives. Physical stuff. We have to know how it feels, what is the weight, the texture of the surface. By moving everything to virtual space we are depraving ourselves a large part of our senses. Is that better? Not for me.
A better way would probably something that would not depend on the eyes that much, and would provide the same/better control than a mouse can give. Not only this would use more senses, but also would actually improve the quality of life of all people with severe vision deficiences. Currently we all put everything related to IT to the eyes; and if our eyes fail, then we're f*cked. And technology should be there to support and protect us.
The vision pro is just an half assed middle point between regular desktop/laptop use and an almost telepathic way of interacting with computers.
And if you need a middle point, I mean at the very least build something that is actually bearable and that still make you look like a socially apt person like the Xreal air glasses.