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Apple forced to make major cuts to Vision Pro headset production plans

ft.com

31–40 of 446 posts

Re: Apple forced to make major cuts to Vision Pro headset production plans

#31
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TLS gives no cypher overlap error.

get firefox

I've been seeing the no-cipher error intermittently on Firefox as well.

The site is working for me at the moment.

Re: Apple forced to make major cuts to Vision Pro headset production plans

#32
post #23
post #8

From the beginning, this product was a very classically Apple strategy of 'let's just take the Next Gen technology, integrate it well, and beat everyone else to market.' Similar to the iPhone 'winning' capacitive touch (or the iPod winning with Toshiba's mini HDD's), Apple plans to 'win' on SOTA hand tracking, camera-based full-color passthrough, face tracking, etc. These are all things that Meta (and the rest) have…

> classically Apple strategy of 'let's just take the Next Gen technology, integrate it well, and beat everyone else to market.' If that were true, they’d long have an iPhone with a foldable screen, and would have shipped AR/VR glasses years ago. I don’t think that ever was their strategy. IMO, they figure out what a good product needs and build it as soon as technology allows. That always requires integrating technol…

Yes, they only beat people to market in the sense that once they release a product, everyone else realizes that's what the product should be and creates variations on it—so in hindsight it looks like Apple's take is the "first."

Re: Apple forced to make major cuts to Vision Pro headset production plans

#33
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

again, the issue is development dollars. Its great that its high resolution displays, the question is if your company wants to dump hundreds of thousands of development dollars making something for the vision pro when its not clear there's a consumer market for them, or who the target market is. Sure apple could sell 100,000 anything. The question is are you going to be able to make any money developing for apple's $…

Apple has been smart to present it as a desktop replacement (as opposed to some ar/vr/metaverse device), which is something they can deliver that will let users bring their existing apps to the new medium without adaption. Ideally yes apps should update themselves, tailor the experience. But the main focus so far has been pretty conventional app like experiences, which happen to be hovering in space. Where-as most he…

I don't think presenting it as a desktop replacement was "smart" so much "the only possible way to justify the asking price", but I don't think its going to work out that way personally. Having tried many VR headsets I can't think of any I want to wear all day.

They can sell 100k of them and crow about being sold out, but I don't think even apple has figured out who this is for - thats what I got from their presentation on it. The only answer they have so far is "people who will spend $3500 on a vr headset" which isn't a use case.

For the most part we got marketing level "watch people emote joy as they do things with this device" and all the use cases sucked.

Re: Apple forced to make major cuts to Vision Pro headset production plans

#34
post #13

I got to try one (several big companies got them in advance) absolutely brilliant. I was worried my Unity Game dev contracts were dead for good, but I'm back now baby. Apple saved my consulting biz with their Unity partnership!

why would your unity gamedev consulting be dead without this? anything happening in this space?

At least in my little corner of that world, Unreal has been gaining mindshare and market share pretty aggressively for the last five years. This is forcing me to start thinking about Unity again.

Re: Apple forced to make major cuts to Vision Pro headset production plans

#35
The fact that not a single person wore the Vision Pro or showed off anything other than prerecorded/rendered videos during the keynote should have given everyone a clue about how far along in production it was.

Everything about it gave off the vibe of marketing teams overhyping a product and engineering left to pick up the pieces afterwards, which is very unlike how Apple usually works.

Re: Apple forced to make major cuts to Vision Pro headset production plans

#36
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oculus were nobodies more or less back then and didn't have apple's supply chain expertise, and even still their devkits were only like $300 USD 10 years ago. I feel like the major cuts are because of lack of hype. I don't think anybody understands if there is a market for this, so nobody is sure how much money to put into developing for it. To me this feels like the first apple product in a long time without a compe…

I can think of so many use cases if it were good. If it were good, you could replace all Displays with it. Games, Movies, Remote Meetings etc. Oh and Porn. So much porn. The problem is the pricetag. It's 10x too expensive for mass adoption and 5x too expensive for developers to bother working for it.

Games - will be available on cheaper a oculus or valve headset you can give to your kids.

Movies - same thing, also not worth the headset price.

Remote Meetings - why do I want to wear a headset that stops a video of me being recorded? The presentation they had exactly showed that people who didn't wear the headset had video of them and people wearing the headset just had an avatar card. It was the opposite of helpful. This headset makes remote meetings worse.

Porn - its an apple device - any porn will just be web based because otherwise apple won't allow it.

None of these use cases are $3500 compelling. There's no target market, and no compelling use case. It's a brand new helicopter skidoo hybrid and as impressive as it sounds its not clear why it exists yet.

Re: Apple forced to make major cuts to Vision Pro headset production plans

#37

Well, now - Financial Times doesn’t give away much for free, do they.

The Bypass Paywalls plugin works well with FT [0]. [0] https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

If you're on iOS then I find that this shortcut works pretty well - simply open the paywalled link, share and then "Unpaywall".

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/71648f5ad34f4d8f972718e5f36...

Re: Apple forced to make major cuts to Vision Pro headset production plans

#38

This makes me worry they might cancel the solid gold Vision Pro Edition next.

You may have to go to third party accessories for that https://caviar.global/catalog/virtual-reality

WTAF! I mean I know there is a market for everything, but a gold-plated vision pro… and a Rolex-embedded in a smartphone case…

To each their own.

Re: Apple forced to make major cuts to Vision Pro headset production plans

#39
post #35

The fact that not a single person wore the Vision Pro or showed off anything other than prerecorded/rendered videos during the keynote should have given everyone a clue about how far along in production it was. Everything about it gave off the vibe of marketing teams overhyping a product and engineering left to pick up the pieces afterwards, which is very unlike how Apple usually works.

Journalists were allowed to wear the headset during closed-door sessions after the keynote. It exists and it works. By not allowing anyone to be photographed wearing the headset, Apple appears to be doing some kind of preemptive damage control about the fact that headsets look dorky no matter how expensive they are.

Re: Apple forced to make major cuts to Vision Pro headset production plans

#40
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

again, the issue is development dollars. Its great that its high resolution displays, the question is if your company wants to dump hundreds of thousands of development dollars making something for the vision pro when its not clear there's a consumer market for them, or who the target market is. Sure apple could sell 100,000 anything. The question is are you going to be able to make any money developing for apple's $…

“Out there” for who? Apple has customers who will buy multiple $15,000 configuration Mac Pros without batting an eye. That’s the price of the tool and for what they’re working on (perhaps a $250,000,000 movie) it’s justified. The Vision Pro, as announced, clearly isn’t much of a consumer product. The price is too high. But that’s not surprising, it does have ‘Pro’ in the name. When the Vision or Vision Air. come out…

I would absolutely buy this argument were it not for Apple's own portrayal of it during unveiling that shown a person watching movies, which is not commonly a professional role ( as in, it is intended as a consumer product ).

That is not to say that I think it is a bad idea. I am not an apple fanboy and I want to get my hands on it if I can convince wife it is not a waste.

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