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Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

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Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#321

Post by AurelioB »

bredren wrote: post #298
jjeaff wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5-10 years? They are selling the standalone Oculus quest for $400 right now. At least, they would be if they could keep it in stock. Seems cheap enough for mainstream. Considering the game console price point.

I think it is a mix of things that make 5-10 years sound reasonable to me. Part of it is the equipment setup and hardware requirements make it almost a gaming hobbiest attraction still. (although I have not set up a quest or reviewed the recommend specs) The comparison consumer-ready technology would be an iPhone or a Nintendo Switch which are sort of out-of-the-box experiences mainstream consumers are quickly gettin…

The Oculus Quest is an out-of-the-box experience. Oculus is aiming for mainsteam market with this. Maybe you're confusing the Quest (standalone) with the Rift S (wired).

As soon as you unbox the Quest you're ready for the onboarding process (which is quite enjoyable btw). No PC or additional hardware required.

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#322

Post by didibus »

hinkley wrote: post #128
tootie wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their tech is actually pretty decent. It's as good as anything else on the market. Their biggest mistake has been setting sky high expectations and just not coming close. If you got a cold demo of Magic Leap you'd probably be blown away. If you watch their simulated demo from however many years ago, then try on the headset you'll be sorely disappointed.

I'm having trouble thinking of times when I felt more demoralized as a developer than when the sales team has made promises that simply defied the laws of information theory, and then wondered why we couldn't just work harder to fix the problem. I mean, technically, capital I Innovation often comes in finding a way to do something without violating the laws of physics, but that's how company origin stories are writte…

I know that feeling, but at the same time, if Marketing makes the sales, and the customers are happy, the plan is working. And I have definitely seen cases where constraints bred creativity, and the ridiculous promises of marketing actually did force the devs to be more creative and sometimes spark some miracle, aka, some really creative and innovative approach to the problem. It also often falls flat, but that's the gamble I guess.

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#323

Post by Judgmentality »

sh87 wrote: post #320
Judgmentality wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pebble took on enormous debt expecting their market to just keep growing. They had a great product, but they thought they had the next iPhone. They bet big, and they went bankrupt (basically the acquisition cost was just to cover the cost of debt). https://qz.com/857412/pebble-went-from-kickstarter-to-being-...

If you bet big, you may lose and eat the dust. If you don't, and play cautiously, your competition will eat your market and starve you. You still eat the dust. I just don't get it.

> I just don't get it.

Nobody likes to admit it, but luck is 99% of success.

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#324

Post by kmonsen »

npunt wrote: post #261

Magic Leap made one of the classic mistakes that other before-their-time products make: they tried to create a general purpose product because they didn't have a killer app that could focus their efforts. When you're building a product without a focused use case, you are pulled in a ton of different directions. In AR, this means focusing on fidelity , embodied in high resolution, wide field of view visuals, powerful…

I think they just never had a great product. Look at VR, even though the products are becoming really good, it is not hitting mainstream and this is even more niche.

The startup cost is enormous, it is really hard to create good content and there is close to zero revenue since there are few users. And the users that does exist is the techie crowd that doesn't like to pay for anything.

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#325

Post by adventured »

draw_down wrote: post #303
samatman wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I've heard a few people (more common around the debut) say "the iPad is Jony Ive's Apple Newton" I always reply "As it happens, the Apple Newton was Jony Ive's Apple Newton..." It was his first product for Apple, the Bondi Blue iMac was just his first successful product.

Strange statement to make about the iPad regardless. The iPad is an incredible success; the only way it doesn't seem like one is in comparison to the iPhone.

Easily one of the most successful consumer products in history. Nearly half a billion iPads have been sold since 2010, with around $300 billion in sales in those ten years.

In electronics & tech, the good scale comparisons are few, things like the iPhone, Mac, Windows, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox.

To put that $300b into better context, that's equivalent to the total sales of Windows throughout its entire 30 year history up to about 2014. The iPad will probably end up being the second best selling consumer technology product of all-time behind the iPhone. It has already well passed the iPod in units and dollar sales.

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#326

Post by wmeredith »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #319
didibus wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but I also want to say it's often more complicated then this. Like, the Apple Watch example seems easy, but what happened to FitBit? FitBit went all in on your idea. Picked a single use case with a market, delivered on it. Yet Apple swooped in, took the market from them. Why is that? This is an open question, I don't claim to have the answer. It just seems that in this case, Apple was promising, as…

Fitbit should have iterated on their devices, making them more accurate while maintaining "host platform" neutrality. Instead, they thought they were in a position to compete against Apple and Samsung in "tiny wrist computers" and the rest of the story is history.

Fit it also had quality issues. My wife owned several and used all of them until they fell apart, which was always less than a year. They were garbage. Counterexample: I have g-shocks that have been abused for decades and are going strong.

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#327

Post by yabatopia »

save_ferris wrote: post #97
alephnan wrote: post #67

> Citing COVID-19, CEO Rony Abovitz wrote in a blog post that the company needed to shift focus Right... because of Covid-19. As a counter example, Animal Crossing on the Nintendo Switch is doing phenomenal right now, in part due to Covid-19.

Nintendo is a well-established company with a solid platform for its Switch that sells millions of units. They've been doing this for a little while longer tbf. I get the sense that "shifting focus" means that Magic Leap were so focused on the hardware that they didn't really think concretely about bringing a viable platform to market, or something like that. I just don't understand how a company raises that kind of…

Expanding on the Nintendo analogy: Magic Leap was/is building a killer gaming console, but with no games to play on.

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#328

Post by huffmsa »

kmonsen wrote: post #324
npunt wrote: post #261

Magic Leap made one of the classic mistakes that other before-their-time products make: they tried to create a general purpose product because they didn't have a killer app that could focus their efforts. When you're building a product without a focused use case, you are pulled in a ton of different directions. In AR, this means focusing on fidelity , embodied in high resolution, wide field of view visuals, powerful…

I think they just never had a great product. Look at VR, even though the products are becoming really good, it is not hitting mainstream and this is even more niche. The startup cost is enormous, it is really hard to create good content and there is close to zero revenue since there are few users. And the users that does exist is the techie crowd that doesn't like to pay for anything.

Techies will pay for hardware though. But it's got to be good hardware.

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#329

Post by npunt »

didibus wrote: post #313
npunt wrote: post #261

Magic Leap made one of the classic mistakes that other before-their-time products make: they tried to create a general purpose product because they didn't have a killer app that could focus their efforts. When you're building a product without a focused use case, you are pulled in a ton of different directions. In AR, this means focusing on fidelity , embodied in high resolution, wide field of view visuals, powerful…

I agree with you, but I also want to say it's often more complicated then this. Like, the Apple Watch example seems easy, but what happened to FitBit? FitBit went all in on your idea. Picked a single use case with a market, delivered on it. Yet Apple swooped in, took the market from them. Why is that? This is an open question, I don't claim to have the answer. It just seems that in this case, Apple was promising, as…

Good counter-example. The reason is leverage. FitBit had nothing to leverage, whereas Watch had iPhone, Apple's manufacturing prowess, and Apple's entire market presence. There's a part of the essay that covers the leverage piece, but the quote that most applies (and may be most controversial here on HN) is:

> "a lack of leverage is one reason why category-defining products are rarely created by brand new startups."

This idea of course is distressing to product creators. You can create great products (focused, well-executed, nails the need) that don't succeed. Business can be pretty unfair like that.

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#330

Post by AceJohnny2 »

ajoy wrote: post #305
braythwayt wrote: post #165

A little perpendicular to the subject, but this kind of thing always brings my mind back to iPhone. Apple had AT LEAST four kicks at the can with mobile devices. They had the "Knowledge Navigator" vaporware in 1987, twenty years before iPhone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_navigator They started working on realizing the KN concept in 1987, and shipped Newton in 1993, fourteen years before iPhone. Alas, the…

Most people don't know this, but Nokia had hit upon a lot of these ideas before the iPhone, but didn't act on it : https://venturebeat.com/2010/09/27/nokia-had-iphone-like-pro... They were an innovative company, till internal culture or complacency killed it (conjecture).

I still fondly remember some Nokia exec's rebuttal of capacitive-sensing touchscreen technology in favor of resistive, which allows pressure sensing [1] but not multitouch. It was exemplary of Nokia being out-of-touch (heh).

[1] lol iPhone "3D Touch"

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