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Comment by schmidtleonard | Hacker News Reader

"It's a dev kit for those willing to spend on early access to Apple's AR/VR ecosystem" was always the sane take, it was really weird watching so many people convince themselves that it was a mass-market product and then convince themselves that the failure of a mass-market audience to materialize was some kind of a disaster.

I have no visibility inside Apple so I don't know if they drank their own kool-aid on this one or if this is just Ye Olde Yellow Journalism, but it's a strange amount of drama over something that in any other industry would be a complete non-story, even at ten times the dollar amount. Probably more than that, depending on the industry!

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Apple has no problems clearly announcing dev kits as dev kits, just look at the Developer Transition Kit hardware they released for the PowerPC->Intel and Intel->Apple Silicon transitions. These kinds of things are not only clearly labeled as dev kits they have required paying to join dedicated dev kit programs which expressly forbid getting the (loaned, not bought) device for non-porting or non-development related work. Apple Vision Pro was nothing like that, it had consumer focused announcements at consumer focused events, had consumer ads, sold through the normal consumer channels, and used standard consumer accounts.

The other thing that doesn't line up with this take is how Apple announcing they've cancelled the next Vision Pro to work on a lower cost version is squared up. Even if you still take the Vision Pro as having always been intended a dev kit for early access, needing to cancel the follow on model development to rescope to a lower end product for the market is no less a miss than the initial launch in that the entire program was completely misaligned with the market until well after launch.

I think half of the news stories are a result of Apple pushing this to release to market instead of just shuttering the version internally and the other half are a result of a launch problem like this being relatively rare for the most valuable company in the world and not necessarily about viewing the product itself with blinders.

> how Apple announcing they've cancelled the next Vision Pro to work on a lower cost version is squared up

Apple's made no such announcement, and the presence of the "Pro" moniker implies that a non-Pro version has always been planned.

If that is so, then they will probably release it at the same time as Final Cut. :)

iMovie exists. Technically speaking. Ever since they lobotomized it I too have tried hard to forget, but it has an icon and presumably someone finds it useful or at least clicks on it by accident every now and again.

I think zamadatix convinced me that Apple drank their own kool-aid on VR though. That's too bad. I'm sure someone had a bonus large enough to prevent them from seeing straight. Hopefully it doesn't turn into another Scott Forstall situation, where Apple fires them and then it turns out that sins notwithstanding they were the voice of reason when it came to something else. Dammit, it's been a decade and Apple still hasn't given up on the Fisher Price widgets. Ah well. The world spins on.

> Apple's made no such announcement

They're plenty of reports they announced that change to hardware partners. I wouldn't hold my breath for a press release if that's what you're referring to though.

> and the presence of the "Pro" moniker implies that a non-Pro version has always been planned.

What's this to do with the price of tea in China? Apple halted work on the next Pro version to work on the lower cost version. This doesn't say Apple just now invented the idea of releasing a non-pro version. It does say Apple has realized the initial market tier they were developing for was the wrong one to start with and they need to stop any more work on that tier for now to instead work on getting said lower tier model to market next.

Right, $3500 is a really clear signal that Apple knows what it's doing, that this is not even an attempt to be a mainstream product yet.

Who knows if they'll succeed in the end, but this is just the beginning of a long term project.

I mean, when it's early in the failure, you can say this about any company's failed product: Oh, well [COMPANY] is really just thinking ahead, and might actually be playing 5D Chess... Think of what the long term might bring!

> it was really weird watching so many people convince themselves that it was a mass-market product and then convince themselves that the failure of a mass-market audience to materialize was some kind of a disaster.

They were presumably following Apple’s lead. Apple predicted far higher sales than we’ve seen and have had to cut those predictions down to size.

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