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Comment by salzig | Hacker News Reader

IMHO: the AVP is a DevKit that is sold to consumers. But more polished then the typical DevKit.

But looking into the past and seeing how many people where eager to buy GoogleGlas/Oculus Devkits, why shouldn’t a brand like apple decide to push out a devkit as high price consumer device, instead of trying to keep a devkit for a upcoming product a secret?

I’m still wondering what direction the product can and will take from here on. If you compare it with iphone1 vs iPhones today, it could be quite interesting.

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Because they invested billions of dollars into making said devkit and despite seeming promising the actual general usefulness of it was still extremely unclear, so it was down to 2 choices: a) kill it, or b) ship it and see what happens when the rubber meets the road.

Arguably Apple has never done b) before, but then again they’ve also never poured billions into a R&D project like this before. (The only other example that comes to mind is the car, and that one got killed, so maybe they were loath to kill the two billion dollar science fair projects at the same time).

You mean 21st century Apple. Because 20th century Apple had plenty of good flops: Newton, Pippin, Macintosh TV (no, not Apple TV).

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/01/14/apples-biggest-hardware...

I think the issue is just that the developers Apple wants to poach for this are the ones that they push away the most.

Not only does Meta already control a large chunk of VR game development (to the point that even regular PCVR has been kind of starved for content), but game developers, besides for the iPhone, don't really care for Apple, and considering that the AVP does not have the things that the iPhone has going for it...

I disagree, given Apple’s marketing around it, features like Persona FaceTime, and integrating spatial camera shooting on iPhones. But even if it were true, it’s also failing as a devkit, given how few devs are interested in it.

Because they're 10 years late to the party, everyone has moved into AI now, and even those headsets are hardly selling a lot.

When have Apple ever shipped a product as a "dev kit"? Dev kit is a euphemism for failed market launch. (Maybe Apple should retroactively call the Newton a dev kit as well.)

The ARM porting device for the x86 transition, but that was optional to return.

I was thinking of something that was an actual "product".

To me it seems obvious that the end goal is something with identical functionality to the AVP but in the form factor of a pair of wraparound shades, and that somebody high-up at Apple decided it was perfectly acceptable to set money on fire for 20 years if it let them eventually get something like that to market before anyone else and thereby replace the entire phone/tablet market.

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