I wonder how many comments there were like this about the iPod and iPhone.
edit: That said I'm reading now that the early reports that Apple downgraded their expectations for year 1 from 800k units to 400k units after launch were wrong, and instead they were always projecting 400k units.
The iPod was nice because of the storage, but competitors (like Zune) had more storage and were cheaper. It took a while for iPod to get "good" and gain adoption.
The iPhone was closer to the Vision Pro. It was obviously a revolutionary product, but it was extremely limited, and it took several OS versions before it got to the point where it was really ready for mass adoption. The iPhone 3G or 3GS was probably the first one that really got traction.
I use my Vision Pro every day. It's far from perfect, but it's been valuable for me. There are some things that are just significantly better on visionOS. There are tons of rough edges, limitations, and missing features still - it's getting better each release, but it's got a ways to go yet.
I recommend the Vision Pro only if you really know what you're getting into, or actually need it for a business purpose. If you're writing apps for visionOS, you need one. If you're an enthusiast and have the disposable income for it, go for it.
Bottom line: it's not going to replace any other single device for you at the moment. It's more of an "early access to the future" kind of thing than anything else - but it's a future I really do believe will come in a couple of years at most, and in five years I think we'll look back at this period the same way we look back at the original iPhone.
In other words, the criticisms we're seeing here are valid, but they're not the full story. You can't judge the success of a platform based on the first iteration. As visionOS and "spatial computing" mature, these comments will seem silly unless you can put yourself in the context they're being made today.
I'm overall bullish on AR/VR but the time horizon on it becoming mainstream has turned out a lot longer than I imagined when I first bought an HTC vive 8 or so years ago. :)
I'm older now, have more disposable income, and am much more immersed in tech in general.
> I know some people that have VR headsets but nobody, personally, that has the vision pro.
I have a Quest 3, a Pimax Crystal, and a Vision Pro. Of those, I no longer use the Quest 3 - my kids game on it quite a bit, or I'd sell it.
The Pimax Crystal is a great piece of hardware, and works very well for playing PCVR games. I use it for War Thunder (combat flight sim). The software is terrible, but I have it set up to work well with my single use case for it. I'm happy with it based on that.
The Vision Pro is more flexible, and has more utility than the Crystal. It's inferior for gaming to the Quest 3, but not as bad as people seem to be saying it is, and is improving rapidly.
I've gotten the Vision Pro working for PCVR (via ALVR). It's very rough and requires a lot of tinkering to get running, but it works. Honestly, it's about on par with the Crystal in that area, but the Crystal is superior in terms of FOV - and that's very important when you're using it to fly imaginary airplanes in imaginary combat.
> Vision pro is a new product in a market that has little adoption.
I agree. In fact, I think people are making a mistake comparing it directly to things like the Quest line. Yes, it supports many of the same things and has many of the same capabilities. It's targeting a completely different use case, though.
My iPad Pro is more capable hardware-wise than most people's laptops, but it can't do a lot of things a bottom-of-the-barrel laptop can do. That doesn't mean it's worse though, because it's not in competition with those laptops. I have laptops, and still carry my iPad with me and leave the laptops at home most of the time.
> Maybe it is more like the ipad? Or maybe it is just different than any previous apple release.
It's a mix. The produce category is very different, but Apple's approach is pretty consistent. They enter a new market at the very top, implement a few features, and refine them. They don't try to do everything all at once.
As a result, it's not right for everyone. It's only right for people whose use case coincides with the feature set that has been implemented to date. As that feature set expands, so will size of the market.
You aren't remembering the iPod years very well at all. The Zune came out 5 years after the iPod. The iPod was already dominant by the time it came out (had at least 70% market share and was selling millions of units). The early competitors were MP3 CD players and the Creative Nomad. The iPod outclassed every single one of them.
What was suppressing early sales of the iPod was the size, the lack of Windows compatibility, and the ability of common people to buy music for it.
It was quite chonky in Gens 1 and 2 and even Gen 3 was a bit too large for most people. So when the iPod mini came out sales absolutely took off. Second, was the lack of Windows syncing. That came in 2002 with Musicmatch, and then was made vastly better in 2003 with the release of iTunes for Windows. And with the release of iTunes for Windows people also had a way of buying songs for the device.
I was younger then, and wasn't as "tied in" to tech news. I misremembered that part it seems.
The first iPod I saw in the wild was in ~2003-2004. I remember thinking it was really expensive for what it was, but it seemed crazy that it could hold an entire library of music.
What are you talking about? When the first Zune launched, there were already 160 GB iPods, which was more storage then the Zune's 120 GB max (and more storage then you needed unless you watched a lot of videos on your iPod). I can't find MSRPs, but what I can find indicates that they were comparable on price as well.
> The iPhone was closer to the Vision Pro. It was obviously a revolutionary product, but it was extremely limited, and it took several OS versions before it got to the point where it was really ready for mass adoption. The iPhone 3G or 3GS was probably the first one that really got traction.
The iPhone 3G was the second generation iPhone, launched about a year after the first gen. The first gen also sold over 6 million units, while the Vision Pro has yet to crack a million.
I agree that the Apple Vision story isn't finished. But we shouldn't go re-writing history to defend it. Regardless of how much you like it, the Apple Vision Pro hasn't set the world on fire. And it's not clear what Apple can do to get the general public excited about it.
When iPad came out plenty of people had the notion that "no one really needs that, it's just a toy".
This is a pattern with apple products going back to the original Macintosh.
It is, in fact, pretty much still just a big iPhone.
It turns out that's enough for a lot of people.
I still chuckle at that one.
Remember the iPad Mini? People were calling full-size the "Maxi iPad".
That's the phase that we're in right now. The utility isn't quite there, but the promise is.
These days I use my iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard as my primary web interface. That wasn't possible at first, but if you looked at the product with the future in mind, it was forseeable.
I’d compare it to ChatGPT, but honestly there’s way more skepticism of that than there ever was of iPhone.
The revolution that was the iPhone required two pieces, both of which needed each other and only one of which was present at launch: touchscreen UI, and the app store. Those two were not fully in place until after 2008. Even then, it took some time. I think of that ~2006-2011 period as the era of BlackBerry. Of course, the vision was clear by 2010 or so. iPhone 4S/iPhone 5 was really when the rocket ship went parabolic.
The iphone built on existing product categories with product-market fit: PDAs, cellphones, MP3 players, smartphones. The path to improve the initial product was clear. There was a clear target.
Vision Pro launches in an unproven market (VR/AR) with only a handful of games with significant adoption that AVP can't run as well as competitors due to lack of controllers (e.g Beat Saber experience would be worse due to higher latency of hand tracking). Path to improve the product is uncertain because the target market is not clear yet.
I both bought iPhone and Vision Pro on day one. And my enthusiasm and engagement with each product are completely different.
In a generation or two, they realized it was fitness and health which was the target market and honed in on that.
Not saying the trajectory will be the same - Apple Watch is inherently both cheaper and easier to use since you just strap it on your arm instead of closing out the world, just saying they both started out as products without a really compelling purpose.
The only people shitting on it were sitting either in an office in Waterloo, Canada or an office in Espoo, Finland.
“No wireless. Less space than the Nomad. Lame”
Palm CEO on the iPhone
“ We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone, PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
People seem to forget that it took two years to sell the first 1 million iPods and Apple only sold 10 million iPhones the first year - 1% of the total market.
Now, practically everyone is wearing an Apple Watch, including me.
This quote pre-dates the iPhone by a couple of months. So it doesn't remotely qualify as a "failed product" comment. It's just a bad prediction.
(And it's not that bad: the iPhone launched with 2G and without an app market or text-editing beyond delete-and-retype, for example)
How often does a direct competitor CEO outright say that they expect a new competitor product to not be underwhelming?
99% of the time a CEO says anything future looking that isn't regulated by the SEC, they are just leaning on suvivors bias to look good retroactively.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/07/09/bill-gates-said-s...
> Steve Jobs['] ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right and market things as revolutionary are amazing things," Gates wrote. "This time somehow he has applied his talents in getting a better licensing deal than anyone else has gotten for music."
And so locked down - did the iPod even have Windows support in the beginning? I can't remember.
Poor CmdTaco, after all these years, still can't get a break.
John C. Dvorak in 1984…
https://www.liquisearch.com/john_c_dvorak/technological_pred...
> "The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a 'mouse.' There is no evidence that people want to use these things."
None of these apply to Apple in 2024.
The Quest 3 has a massive gaming library, and can do 90% of what the Vision Pro can do. And it's 1/7th of the cost.
If Meta wants to really step it up they'll make PC monitor support a priority with the Quest 4.
Imagine if the iPod came out, cost 7x as much as it's competitors and still was behind in several aspects.
I actually Apple is getting us ready for the Vision Air, it'll come in at 1999 or so.
The Vision Pro is about 6x the price of the Quest 3 - but it's targeted at a completely different vertical, that didn't even exist prior to the Vision Pro launch.
I'm bullish on it, but I totally get why others might not be. Only time will tell.
But it took Apple over two years to sell the first 1 million iPods and the Apple Watch didn’t take off like gangbusters.
> Have you not been following Apple for the last…45+ years?
Not so blindly that I would lose sight of the greater market. There is a pretty clear line in the sand between "high-demand compute hardware" and "shit that is far too expensive that nobody wants". An iPad that you wear on your face falls into the latter category, in case you couldn't tell.
Apple sold Airport devices from 1999-2018. I wouldn’t exactly call that a short lived device.
Mac - John C. Dvorak, "The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a 'mouse.' There is no evidence that people want to use these things"
iPod - famously “less space than the Nomad. No wireless. Lame.”
iPhone - “The PC guys won’t just come in and figure this thing out” - Palm CEO.
iPad - this is the most apt comparison. There were plenty of tablet makers before the iPad was introduced
It's one thing to follow Apple's product history, it's another thing to blind yourself with their popularity until you refuse to acknowledge their failures. People that habitually quote iPhone detractors are vanishingly rare in that first category.
I thought it was supposed to be a game-changer product offering experiences their competitors could only dream of. Where are the killer apps? Where are the people using it on a regular basis? It obviously can't be Apple's fault since they don't release failed products anymore; it must be the users who are wrong.
You have to ship a product first and then iterate.
The first versions of all of those products weren’t great
The first gen iPod was Mac only, the click wheel kind of sucked compared to the later capacitive models and the iTunes Music Store didn’t come online until 2 years later. Between that, USB support and Windows support is what made it take off.
The iPhone was 2G, overpriced to the point where Apple had to cut prices six months in and didn’t support third party apps. Not having Flash support was really a big deal back then.
The first generation Apple Watch along with the apps and the OS were atrocious. Third parties couldn’t make native apps. They were all projections from the phone. Apple remedied it quickly.
If I were single, I would buy it just for the video watching experience and the larger screen when using it with a Mac with the improvements in the refresh rates. But it’s a very isolating experience and when I sit down to watch TV, usually it’s with my wife.
For context: in non inflation adjusted dollars, my old Apple //e setup that my parents bought me was around $3000 in 1986. My first Mac setup was $4000 in 1992 and I spent another $300 on an a new processor for it and I bought a first gen PowerMac 6100/60 + 486DX/2-66 “DOS Compatibility card” in 1994 for $3000.
I’m no stranger to having expensive tech gadgets.
I don’t use my Vision Pro at all.
Do you think I’m an exception or the norm?
I fly a lot. But I wouldn’t want to carry something so bulky with me
I could also see it is as a large display for my Mac since I have limited office space.
The newer iPods looked just like the iPhone just without phone connectivity so that was probably the nail in their coffin but I kind of liked the separation of devices for different tasks.
It was just made obsolete by the iPhone.