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This thread is amazing, and has shades of the original iPod and iPhone launch [1,2] commentary. I can't believe that people would go on permanent written record with this stuff, but humans gotta human! 1. iPod launch thread on macrumors: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.5... 2. iPhone launch thread on macrumors: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-announces-the-iph...
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A study of futurism I read made the insightful observation that things which explode in popularity don't just do things differently -- they let you do new things. Apple II - graphical OS iPod - music in your pocket iPhone - smartphone with cellular data iPad - large screen low cost iWatch - phone functionality on wrist These are all different in kind, not different in amount products. What does AR allow you to do, th…
If "phone functionality on wrist" counts as a "different in kind" product, why on earth wouldn't "smartphone functionality without looking down at a smartphone, watch, or other device" qualify? For that matter, if "smartphone with cellular data" counts, why not "smart glasses with cellular data and apps"? As you can tell, I'm a skeptic of this difference in kind v. difference in quantity construct.
wrist : insideOfPocket
wrist : eyes
That's the count of people for whom AR glasses would be different in kind.
Curious how this will compare to the nreal air. I’m not sure why apple insists on leading here. They should just wait until the tech is ready.
"Apple’s ambition is that customers will eventually wear the device continuously all day, replacing daily tasks done on an iPhone or a Mac such as playing games, browsing the web, emailing, doing FaceTime video calls while collaborating in apps, working out and even meditating. It will feature hand and eye control and run many of the kinds of apps found on Apple’s other devices." This concept has been well-explored i…
I think there's a false leak here, because one of the comments on the Bloomberg article mentions them going with a design where the battery is external and connected via a wire to the headset (to prevent heat issues). That seems like such a bizarre design choice for Apple that I can't imagine they'd actually do that. Just... make the chip weaker? (Like if you don't have pockets, where does the battery go? Or if you'r…
I kind of hope it's not a false leak, just to see the battery with cord, lmao.
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Absolutely. Between Apple Silicon, Apple Watch, AirPods, and scaling operations to be able to sell the amount of products they do in a year, that is hard to argue against being an overwhelming success for Tim Cook as CEO. Is it equal to the legacy of Apple under Jobs? Definitely not. But how many other companies/people released 3 revolutionary products?
I think even if Apple went bankrupt in 5 years, what Tim Cook has achieved is extremely good. It was not sure at all that Apple would grow this much over 12 years. It is not clear Steve Jobs himself could have had this success.
But I'm much more bullish than most of the commenters here. Many seem to not have shifted their understanding of progress in VR/AR in the last 5 years, when there have been fundamental tech advances. Then, others don't seem to understand how much Apple is planning to push the state of the art here. Their headset will have roughly double the resolution of existing devices, and contain not one but two, laptop level mobile chips. The lenses / optics are going to solve a lot of issues people have had, the pass through quality is going to be near photo-realistic - you won't feel you need to take these off at all. Some of the apps we know about include photo-realistic video conferencing with quality that is unheard of outside of laboratory conditions before.
Maybe Apple is on the right track here, since the Oculus Quest has sold more units than all the other VR headsets combined. But there is one big difference: Apple's headset will be a very expensive premium product (apparently around 3000 USD), while the Oculus Quest costs just 400 USD.
I think consumers just don't want to spend a lot of money on VR. Except for the Quest, they are all far too expensive, and that's why they didn't sell. Apple just makes the problem worse by increasing the price even more.
John Carmack has made the same point repeatedly: VR is not a high price product category. If he is right, the Apple headset will fail. It may be more feasible to sell $3000 smartphones than to sell VR headsets at this price.
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VR and AR are a solution looking for a problem. It's admittedly a cool tech demo. I enjoyed my time playing Half Life: Alyx and The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners on my Valve Index before I decided to sell it out of disuse. The article says that Apple has a glasses product and a VR/AR product that sounds similar to a Quest Pro. So if we look at the glasses product it immediately runs into a lot of issues. Do I want…
I don't think it's a solution looking for a problem. I'd be willing to put them on at work and see which pins on a piece of hardware do what instead of looking back and forth between a datasheet. Lots of examples exactly like that, especially if the glasses are fed sensor data so the temperature/pressure appears right beside the area it is measuring.
Estimates of the size of this market were in the single digit billions of dollars for Google, who bailed out of Google Glass recently: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/18/google-glass-enterprise-mark...
For comparison, the iPhone makes $200 billion in revenue every year. Apple Services (Music, TV+, etc) make something like $20 billion every quarter.
Apple does not enter many businesses that only have the potential to make $1-2 billion.
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> Current optical designs mean that there is a large out of focus area when you look anywhere that isn't forward You sound like you are a year or two out of date with your "current" understanding. The industry has moved to pancake lenses which make the view clear edge to edge. There's no more out of focus peripheral view, in recent headsets you read and look around using your eyeballs and not your head just like you…
You mean like the pancake lenses in the Quest Pro? Those are still what I'd consider garbage tier old tech. Probably the best we are going to get down the path of fixed focal point acrylic lenses, but definitely not what I'd call sharp edge to edge. The edges might qualify as "very soft" instead of "totally out of focus" but that's about the best you can say.