The reality distortion field is dead. Perhaps the memo was missed.
It's not like they're selling at small volumes at first, i.e. to early adopters who love it and will convince their friends to be later adopters. Early adopters are mostly either returning it or saying it's basically shelfware now.
So it’s limited as hell in terms of distribution
That's not a defense of the product, it's a criticism.
https://www.theonion.com/apple-introduces-revolutionary-new-...
"It remains to be seen if the Apple Wheel will catch on in the business world where people use computers for actual work instead of just dicking around" resonates for whenever Apple/Meta claim a VR headset is a productivity/business tool.
"everything is just a few 100 clicks away"... sounds like Apple's regulatory compliance. Might become mandatory if you want to use side-loading/3rd party app stores.
> 10 billion
The entire computing environment has evolved dramatically since then, as have the expectations of the once scrappy underdog to the second largest company in the world. At some point, AR / VR will eventually become good enough, and it's good that they are investing in it. It forces Meta to innovate and become better as well.
I personally hope that it will get to the point that i can go anywhere and take my ideal workspace setup with me and lose little to no productivity.
"relentlessly telling customers what they want, regardless of what they might need."
The walled garden doesn't appeal to most people, which is one reason why worldwide Apple has a very small market share. Price is another, and paying more for a device I have far less control over never made sense to me.
>I personally hope that it will get to the point that i can go anywhere and take my ideal workspace setup with me and lose little to no productivity.
My laptop has 3 very portable screens. I don't have to strap anything to my head to be productive. Sure, I'm not going to spread out 3 screens on an airplane, but I'm not typically going to work if I'm on an airplane (YMMV). I'm not sure how you get to be productive living inside a strap-on-bubble even with the passthrough video. It just seems so clumsy. Maybe it will improve, but that's a big maybe and I'm not sure Apple is going to be the one to perfect that experience, especially when their platform is so curated. Where am I going to run my servers and software development stack, on the Vision Pro? No. I still need a laptop to be productive, no matter where I am.
It's a premium product. Iphone has the majority of US (and thus wealthy) customers. It's seen as premium in other wealthy nations as well. Second largest company in the world by market cap means that they clearly operate with more than enough customers who matter to get things done.
I used to be a hardcore linux everything person. Over time I stepped into the walled garden and found I enjoyed not having to constantly think about the interop of everything. It's different for everyone.
> Where am I going to run my servers and software development stack?
Right now you need a laptop. Rapidly approaching a future where devcontainers and remote dev servers will let you dev anywhere you want, where you just choose the interface of choice. You may want a laptop,
I may want to have multiple screens for analyzing data, modifying code, and doing other operationsy things.
The point overall is: Apple is good at shipping products that people want and iterating and improving them. That is undeniable. It does take time to iterate and improve, and Vision will probably get there because this pattern of product is in their DNA.
Take off your HN glasses for a few minutes. I don’t think the vast majority (I’m talking 80-90%+) of people could even tell you “walled garden” means. It doesn’t even start to factor into most people’s buying experiences. In fact, to the average consumer Apple and Google’s policies for the App Store are identical.
Apple could allow sideloading tomorrow and it would not make an appreciable difference in sales worldwide because the people who say they care about it (let alone the subset of that who actually take advantage of it) is vanishing small. I know people on HN will bristle at that but it’s just the truth.
I don’t care what OS you use but I find it hilarious that I have some friends who are staunchly pro-Android/anti-Apple because <insert tired talking point> and then they proceed to use their phones in a way that never exceeds what they could do on iOS.
Price is a much larger factor.
As for your comments on the AVP I agree, at least at its current iteration.
Technologically, we’ve exhausted the low hanging fruit of various scientific and engineering disciplines. Energy, transportation, construction, computing devices, software, medicine, surgery and more - all these things rode enormous waves of potential in the postwar era that have now ebbed.
The iPhone was a low hanging fruit made possible by developments in compute, connectivity, and software.
The next set of fruit is much higher up the tree: see avp, development costs of.
If they expected …that… to sell millions of units straight away, well, as I wrote.
It was plainly a test of both manufacturing and market. To the GP's point, I think it's hard for anyone on the outsjde to judge whether they hit their marks for it or not right now. It certainly wasn't grossly short, as there's no indication that they overshot manufacturing by an order of magnitude or something, but it certainly could have been disappointing. We really can't guess right now.
Good, traditional reporting might be able to surface some insight with real footwork and investigation. Armchair blogspam writing like the article is pointless and is really just clickbait.
If VR is the next big thing, but will take years of niche smaller profit margin products to launch it, established tech companies will struggle to justify the products existence wherein a smaller player could go all in, achieve roughly equivalent results, and be quite content.
It's more how quickly those units sell. How many get returned. How much activity is happening on the platform.
Apple knows all of those numbers. They also know what the potential improvements are and they probably have a really good idea what improvements would move the needle on the numbers that matter.
If Apple kill the AVP it may well look odd from the outside but they'll be well informed.
Now take in consideration that Nintendo is a fraction of the size of Apple.
400k units is nothing, less than a rounding error for a company the size of Apple. They are not in the business of selling some hundred thousand units of hardware.