It feels like Apple is a company on autopilot, a well oiled money making machine, nothing else.
This leaves Apple and maybe a handful of subsidized third parties as the only people making applications for it, which is pretty much a guarantee that it will remain a tiny niche industry.
But I think Apple learned some things from the Lisa, even though it barely sold.
And even then I proooobably would've been able to justify it? But no external connectivity at all just sank it for me. Like if it had a DP port on it so I could hook it up to a gaming PC, I would've probably at least picked one up second-hand, possibly even new when my bonus hit but 3 large for... what? Email in my house? Movies shown in a way that makes it damn hard to eat popcorn?
But I guess the downside of the DK approach is it means telling developers when the “real” device will ship, which I’m not sure anyone knows.
Watching movies on a big screen would be interesting, but they still do not sell the device in my country in Europe, so I had no way to demo it and judge whether the quality is adequate for a home theater experience.
(I accept, I could book a demo at an Apple Store...)
I'm near-sighted, so I can see how magic glasses that let me focus on everything as if it's six inches away could be nice. That being said, normal prescription glasses work very well for my particular vision impairment, and "You only have to buy glasses once more ever, but they're $3000, weigh over a pound, and need to be recharged" isn't a great value proposition for my needs, but it doesn't take much imagination to figure that being able to toggle even just dark, high contrast, or colorblind modes irl would be nice for some people. Not worth it for me, but possibly for others.
Scrap the passthrough cameras, the LCD eyes, and all that complexity.
I'd love the ability to have AVP immersion with my MBP on a flight, and combined with Airpods, you'd be able to block out everything. I don't need to walk around and wouldn't need to interact through it. It's like transparency for Airpods: an overengineered alternative to just taking an airpod out (or in this case, lifting the headset up).
Still, a small camera is an odd thing to cut.
There just isn't a world where it makes sense to make this very expensive headset and not put a relatively cheap computer in it too which then opens it up to normies who don't own powerful tower computers for content consumption and light games.
Every 4-5 years they need something to show off their tech and they begrudgingly look to gaming studios to provide some demos for them. They get the demos, get some hype, then put it straight back into the box. Devs move on because they know their audience isn't there anyway. Rinse and repeat. This last time was to help show off their unified architecture with AAA games running on an IPad.
For nice hardware with hardly any content, not making huge strides to get existing VR content on it was a terrible strategy. And Apple can afford to just buy one of the bigger players to get content too.
Apple’s strategic position is to be the main device by which apps and AI can gain access to end users. This puts them in a nice position to charge a toll on everything that passes through their device. Now if someone were to come out with a new type of device and a new paradigm that could disrupt iPhone as the main device, Apple would be in trouble.
Not long ago, Zuck seemed really confident about metaverse/AR/VR. Apple took the disruption threat seriously and countered with AVP. Now it looks like metaverse flopped. I suspect the priority of AVP has gone down inside Apple accordingly.
At each step the tech gets smaller and more physically accessible, the use case gets more interactive and less demanding and serious, and the demographic gets wider and less technically educated.
Apple owned a huge part of the last change with the iPhone.
What's the next step in the series?
Clearly it's not a huge device you strap to your face.
But it's also not an easy question to answer. What is the next step after social media?
From a software POV it's AI, but where's the matching hardware? The next gen has to be even smaller, multimodal, but still physically interactive, likely always on.
Glasses are the closest, but not there yet.
So I think we're still in the early Nokia mobile stage. The concept exists and the current tech is beginning to be workable, but the gamechanger refinement and perfection of the concept is still a way off.
VR gaming is a niche even among hardcore gamers. There’s some value in spatial computing for just being a more ergonomic way to do computer stuff (i.e. not being in a fixed position all day, being able to walk around while you work) but it’d need to be able to hit everything a Mac can do with no compromises to be worth it at that price (and at the cost of making you look goofy). So far it seems like it’s only found real utility in some very specific industrial and scientific research contexts, which is very cool but probably isn’t the lane a mass market consumer products manufacturer wants as their play long-term.
Apple’s UI work on AVP is under-appreciated. It’s been improving over the years, as real usage showed the need for things like shared world anchors and coordinates, prediction for pose estimation, etc.
The hardware isn’t ready yet. At this point I half-think the UI won’t be truly real until we have BCI (brain-computer interface for the offended party above). But it may well take a decade to really land what an always-on, sometimes-invisible AR UI looks like and how it works.
There’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to for example take a stroll in the park and read my email, song lyrics, etc.. without craning my neck downwards or holding my phone right in front of my face. The content should just be where my eyes are looking. Even laying on the couch to watch a movie is annoying when you have to hold your arm up and shift the balance of your iPad all the time to stop getting tired. Just put it in front of me. For input, I favor a ring you can scroll and squeeze.
I’ve thought about hanging a book-holder from the ceiling by a string for this reason. Maybe a ton of helium or a quiet drone would work too. I think thats’ the frontier..having our current setups but just floating around us.
The processors have to be what? Three or four times faster and the battery life has to be at the level of a MacBook Pro with everything squeezed into a device half its current size how many years away is that 3-4 years? And don’t forget the accessory processors that Apple designed specifically for that Vision Pro.
Abbreviations waste people’s time
At the time, they weren't even among the biggest tech companies. Today, they are one of the largest companies in the world.
However even today, if you go to the European countries less fortunate with their economies, having anything Apple is usually obtained via credit, or some contract bundling, for example with the cable or Internet operator, naturally bound to a minimal duration of 24 to 36 months contract.
Not something like in US and countries with similar economies where most people don't think twice to get Apple gear, and quickly pre-order new gear after each couple of new product announcements.
Given how many iPhones I've noticed suddenly showed up in hands of regular people, including teenagers, in the last couple years in Poland, I imagine there's healthy second-hand/used devices market going too. iPhones have reputation of being long lasting devices (battery shenanigans notwithstanding), maybe the reputation is true.
However, yeah iPhones hold quite well in 2nd hand market.
As much true back then, as it is in 2026, with the added category of some GNU/Linux users buying shiny hardware and then complaining macOS UNIX implementation doesn't overlap with GNU/Linux, beyond regular POSIX.
The MS investment didn’t save them. It provided both companies cover in the news. “Apple won’t die” and “Microsoft isn’t a monopoly”.
Neither was a fact and both benefited.
AND yes, both companies benefited.
Jobs was booed when he announced it! It had very much the air of Lando Calrissian announcing Cloud City's strategic partnership with Darth Vader.
What likely saved Apple was the fact that despite undergoing three CEOs, they did not squander the $150 million settlement with Microsoft.
But they still had sufficient funds, equivalent to $2 billion at today’s value, to continue their operations. They also had a team of highly skilled individuals who went on to develop a new operating system, OSX, and build computers with G3, G4 processors. They have also released new iMacs, Mac laptops, and Mac desktop computers to the public.
Does this imply that with $2 billion today, plus or minus $1 billion, one can achieve all these accomplishments and grow into a large technology company? It seems like an unlikely long-shot that Microsoft saved Apple.
In hindsight, it appears that Apple had some exceptionally talented individuals, certainty more talented than the group at Microsoft and Intel.
Because both Microsoft and Intel, in hindsight, sat on their laurels for the better part of two decades. -
Does this imply that with $2 billion today, plus or minus $1 billion, one can achieve all these accomplishments and grow into a large technology company?
You're the only one implying those things!
It seems like an unlikely long-shot that Microsoft saved Apple.
Why unlikely? They got into financial trouble due to bad decisions. They needed a bail-out from a former arch-rival to dodge bankruptcy. They eventually achieved huge success due to better decisions. There's nothing contradictory there.
It was presented as an investment, but the $150 million was just the initial payment of a much larger settlement which was not disclosed.
That undercuts the work how?
Unless by "Apple Silicon" you specifically meant "the decision to transition from x86 to ARM". There is actual work there, but not a lot of risk. Apple famously maintained an internal x86 port of Mac OS X for years after Rhapsody was shitcanned and renamed "Mac OS X Server", so doing the same with ARM isn't that worse. iOS was derived from OSX; and just having iOS already up and running on ARM is already a good deal of the way towards a macOS port to ARM. In fact, it got easier as iOS got more technology hand-me-downs from macOS.