However, the VR market just isn’t there and I don’t foresee it ever being there. The Vision is likely going to go down as one of Apple’s biggest “busts”, but more due to the market than Apple making a bad product. I wonder if Jobs would have foreseen this and never released it.
Jobs was at Apple when the Lisa was introduced at a premium/eye-watering $10K (>$30K today). As I understand it, he wanted to run the Lisa group but ended up heading the Mac group instead, and competing against the Lisa. Kind of a shame for Lisa users that the Mac wasn't compatible, but the Mac ultimately ended up delivering most of the benefit at a fraction of the price.
As you note, the challenge now is that there doesn't yet seem to be much of a VR headset market outside of games and vertical apps. But that might be enough for a successor to build on.
VR has an obvious market in games and possibly others but it doesn't feel like anyone at Apple uses this thing at all. Until they figure out why the AVP should exist it'll just be an also-ran headset without a real identity.
It was either behind the times (tin[n]y smartphones, including the iPhone that was already in development, killed powerful boom boxes as well as home hi-fi systems) or ahead of its time (medium and large sized bluetooth speakers were ultimately a successful product category.) HomePod was ultimately semi-successful, though more in its mini size I believe.
Jobs was ultimately right about the iPad (which currently outsells the Mac in terms of unit sales) but it took a while to catch on.
I understand where you’re coming from - have you considered how advances in AI Video generation might pair with a premium headset?
The output from Sora (OpenAI) looks pretty compelling already. I also recently read that Apple is already using AI image generation to create stereoscopic images from any plain old 2D image.
Combine all this together and it’s not impossible to envision (pun intended?) a halfway decent on demand interactive experience.
Kind of amazing to think a holodeck-like experience is in the not too distant future.
And every iteration has pretty much failed, no matter the advances in hardware.
Jobs I imagine would've never done VR.
https://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2013/12/apple-g...
I check in on VR every few years and technically things keep getting better, but that first blocky experience was the most compelling.
VR hasn’t failed, it’s just a niche thing. The VR market is here and it’s mature. Every day something like thirty or forty thousand headsets are sold. That’s great!
Vision pro is a leap forward in dispays, tracking, input gestures. It has not solved the weight/size issue, but if history is a predictor this is an area that apple will excel at with iterative improvements.
You might, I certainly don't. Corporations aren't your friends and aren't something to mythologize
They make money because they sell popular products and collect 30% of a lot of other companies operating on the things they sell
Yes, the Vision Pro is a leap forward technologically. So was the iPhone. But how many products on the way to the iPhone didn’t get released because Jobs (or someone else) realised it wasn’t a compelling offering to customers?
The Vision Pro feels like a tech demo. I can absolutely imagine Jobs being impressed by the tech and canning it nevertheless, waiting for a better application.
Learn about "open market operations" i.e. central planning, and realize the market hasn't been making the decisions for 20 years. LIRP/ZIRP tipped the scale for tech companies.
It's just not a "product" in any typical sense. It's a moderately large bet placed on a possible future which might be here in 5-10 years. I think it's a lot more interesting and productive to run this experiment in public rather than keeping it as an internal lab project.
The needs and desires of those niches are pretty well understood, but what I think the market considers a failure is actually the local optima of the current state of the technology.
What Apple wants to discover is what everyday people, their customers, your typical iPhone holder, what do they tolerate and what will they do with VR?
The mass market is not sim racing, working on helicopters with AR assistance, or designing products in 3D space. They are chatting with mates, watching TV, using various life admin apps etc, none of which are improved by VR. So what does it take to get a mass market VR device popular? It's probably improving the way people achieve their daily tasks they currently use their phone for.
But is that even worthwhile? Do I actually need my banking app or chats in AR/VR? Probably not, so outside of niche entertainment I don't ever see VR being a mass market device. AR in a trendy pair of glasses maybe, people strapped into headsets all day I just don't see.
I think Apple were already working on VR at the time of Jobs' death – seriously it almost talks about it if you read between the lines in Isaacson's book. So I think Jobs would have hyped this to the maximum level of hyperbole like he was good at. But I think the actual product getting screwed up, released yet be totally unavailable, and now this – it's simply not usual Apple behaviour. And the car idea got canned and now this has been screwed up... and they're over two years late to the AI party and a mildly improved Siri is not worthy of a 20% jump in the stock price. I think Tim Cook really needs to go. Ok, doing a good job of keeping the iPhone goose laying the golden eggs has been fine, but that isn't the Apple we really need if the company is really going to ever do anything "insanely great" going forward.
Every time someone brings him up I remember the time he staged a press event in the flint auditorium and god up on stage to announce…an iPod dock with a speaker in it. I hear they sold hundreds of them!
And plenty of other misfires in his tenure, though that was by far my favorite.
But ultimately it's a logistics failure because what is Apple's main USPs? The Apple Stores across the bloody globe – none of which outside the USA have Vision Pros to play with. Ok they're keeping it in the US for now (due to logistics reasons) but Apple is sitting on a cash mountain of how many tens of billions and it can't arrange to put a few Vision Pros in every Store in the world for kids to go in and play with?? Even if the device is "a few months away" that would be one major logistics fail. Build the hype of a device that people really need to try to understand. Get kids playing games on it and interacting with AR Pokemon (or whatever) while their parents are buying new iPhones. Apple could spend two billion dollars on manufacturing a million of these to throw everywhere and not even blink – pocket change for them, and for launching a wholly new class of product. Me saying they've flubbed it is actually being polite, as a shareholder and long term Mac luser, I think they've completely fucked it up. Do you know what I mean?
People lined up for hours to get an iPhone, they were in short supply. I haven’t really heard about any supply issues for the vision pro, anyone that wants one can get one. Maybe not from a local shop in certain countries, but there aren’t any big scalping margins online.
The vision pro, despite being impressive from an engineering perspective, isn't a compelling product. I don't think the logistic issues will have much to do with it's overall success.
"The vision pro, despite being technically impressive, isn't a compelling product." - yeah but I'd at least like to know whether it's a compelling product or not, which is currently impossible for me to do. There are a good ten million people in the world for whom dropping $3500 on one to play with is not going to be a big deal. That's $35billion to kickstart this non-compelling product that they don't even need the revenue to fund.
"I don't think the logistic issues will have much to do with it's overall success." – yeah, correct, but I made that point because Tim Cook's whole MO is that he's the guy who can bring all the logistics issues together, and the entire success of this product right now is dependent on logistics issues that have not been solved.
But then again, we might get a world like this if that does come to pass: https://vimeo.com/166807261
The content of the space in question will overwhelmingly be constructed by generative AI, not raw human labor.
Until we find out how large, interesting, freaky, weird, enticing that world will or can be, it'll be nigh impossible to pin down how many people might use it.
Prediction: it's going to be extraordinarily massive in scale ~30 years out. It'll be regularly used by billions of people if you look out three or four decades. Large enough that an individual person could never explore even a tiny fraction of it in a lifetime. Eventually generative AI will build so quickly it'll put YouTube content addition to shame in terms of expansion rate.
We need to master generative AI (image, video, audio). Then we need to define what people want built in virtual space and create the guide posts for the AI to follow. That will involve a lot of experimentation. We're going to need dramatically greater amounts of storage.
Agree that there’s a lot to learn, but it is just as different of a display + interaction model as window + mouse was to characters + keyboard.
Many products were rushed into market or half baked during his era.
Mac OS X was borderline unusable for years after it launched. Also he believed in a VR future.
M1 absolutely floored naysayers who didn't think an ARM chip could be "good"
M2 seems to be just M1 "but we made it a little faster!"
The fact M3 and M4 aren't even really filtering down into most of their computer offerings definitely doesn't help
Also, I'm writing this on an M3 Pro MacBook. Totally awesome machine, like Platonically good laptop, and doubly so now they ditched that "hat on a pig" Touch Bar and returned to actual function keys...BUT...I have so many cores I can barely even count them in htop and doing things like rendering in iMovie or adjusting the size of 100Mb RAW photos in Preview is STILL SINGLE THREADED. Preview even threw up a rotating beachball of doom and froze the other day when adjusting the size of a single large photo. Totally totally amazed a division of software engineers haven't been laid on to at least rewrite the utterly-parallelizable parts of the native apps on Mac OS. FFS.