Live data from Hacker News

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

ft.com

151–160 of 446 posts

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

#151
post #62

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…

Apple tends to be good at getting technology into people's hands and then iterating based on the use cases that emerge. The iPhone without being able to write apps for it seemed like a really bad idea at the time, but they were able to iterate quickly and get feedback that let them launch the app store more effectively. Their Vision Pro just needs to get into enough company's hands for people to start exploring what…

It sounds like you agree apple has no idea what the use case is or who its for.

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

#152
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 helpfu…

So you agree with me, there are many usecases for an advance ar/vr device its just > The problem is the pricetag. It's 10x too expensive for mass adoption and 5x too expensive for developers to bother working for it.

No, I don't agree with you. Everything you said was either a bad usecase already answered by existing VR tech or made actively worse by the headset.

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

#153
post #63
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man you really hate this thing! Apple has the luxury of being patient, and the benefit of a developer ecosystem and bottomless funds. This release may or may not be huge (I don’t think it will), but the one after, or the one after that, probably will be. I agree Apple doesn’t know the use cases or customers that will be big for gen 3 in a few years. So what? They didn’t know that for the Watch or iPhone either. The m…

> the benefit of a developer ecosystem Apple hates 3rd party developers, the ecosystem exists because there's money to be made off Apple users. If there's no users of an Apple device there will be no developers - and frankly, there's no incentive to even hack around on their devices.

They love 3rd party developers who play by Apple’s rules and just ignore everyone else because they can.

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

#154
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…

> For now it seems more for executive

For me it seems more like a devkit targeted at developers who are supposed to figure out what can you even do with it.

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

#155

What kind of software, speaking as an independent developer, is going to work well with a market of only some 100k's of users globally? Yikes...

What kind of software would you sell to corporations or rich early adopters? We'll see in Q1/2024 when the Vision Pro comes out for real.

apple enterprise is an even thinner slice of that

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

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the enduring myths about Apple's late entry into product sectors is the idea that they're waiting to "get it right". The first iPhone was a joke, it took them until the 3GS to get it right. I don't agree that this is a myth. If you look at the first generation iPhone in a vacuum, it was limited, perhaps (but I think there are plenty of arguments that the first gen iPhone was pushing envelopes - name one othe…

> When operating at Apple's scale, at least a decade of roadmap if not more was already planned in depth. I highly doubt that considering that web app / native app store debacle. Also was there any real reason to not support 3g from the beginning? A lot of “dumber” phones had it so it seems more likely that they just made a mistake.

I'm referring primarily to the hardware side of this from a roadmap perspective.

I don't think early politics about how apps get shipped plays too much into the core planning for the device, e.g. form factor, manufacturing, user interactions, structure of built-in apps, etc. are all pretty much orthogonal to the app distribution model.

But even then, there were clearly two camps, which means there was a disagreement about a specific path, but not a lack of forward thinking. And then they course corrected. Something that many companies simply do not do.

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

#157
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you provide an example of the sort of thing you’re talking about? Because I’m the type of person the other commenter was talking about (I’ve been in the Apple ecosystem for a very long time), and I feel I’m too close to it to have a reasonably objective viewpoint on it one way or the other.

Sure. iPhones and the Apple desktop OS. In both of them, I am lost as to how to accomplish anything but the most common stuff. The design of the OSes is such that it's not obvious how to do anything, and they provide very little guidance. You have to already know how to do what it is you're trying to do. This is even worse on Apple smartphones, because a lot of stuff is done using mystery gestures that you have to al…

I’m actually curious about specifics here for macOS aside from things like hidden scroll bars. Mainly because I find it to be one of the most discoverable. If you go into the ‘help’ menu in any application, you get a search box that searches all the menus of the application, if a shortcut exists for the action it’s listed alongside it. Admittedly Qt and KDE can do this too, but only for QT apps, while on macOS it’s every app that actually provides menus. Nearly every application handles files and actions the same way, and take the same common shortcuts for things like preferences. If I want to see shortcuts for system actions, they’re all listed in the keyboard control panel, and arbitrary shortcuts for arbitrary applications can be added there. I can’t name another system that feels as integrated and discoverable in that sense, except possibly KDE or gnome running ONLY apps developed specifically for that toolkit.

What system(s) do you find more discoverable, and how? I’m honestly curious because I love checking our new systems or window managers and it’s bugged me not to have some of this elsewhere for a while.

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

#158
post #24

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 $…

I think 3rd party developers are largely irrelevant for it’s initial success. It’s like the original iPhone, if the hardware and built in apps are compelling then people will buy it which will eventually create an ecosystem. That’s IMO why VR has largely failed, out of the box there hasn’t been a compelling reason to get one and there isn’t enough software to keep people interested.

The iPhone had some very clear and straightforward use case which were appealing to some extent to every person who had a phone and used internet.

To me VR seems closer to where PCs were in the 80s at this point.

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

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When operating at Apple's scale, at least a decade of roadmap if not more was already planned in depth. I highly doubt that considering that web app / native app store debacle. Also was there any real reason to not support 3g from the beginning? A lot of “dumber” phones had it so it seems more likely that they just made a mistake.

I'm referring primarily to the hardware side of this from a roadmap perspective. I don't think early politics about how apps get shipped plays too much into the core planning for the device, e.g. form factor, manufacturing, user interactions, structure of built-in apps, etc. are all pretty much orthogonal to the app distribution model. But even then, there were clearly two camps, which means there was a disagreement…

Yeah absolutely. I just don’t think that consumer tech companies which make 10 year plans (instead of a broad high level vision) and try to stick to them tend to be that successful.

> are all pretty much orthogonal to the app distribution model.

I’m not sure it’s only the distribution but the entire existence of native third party apps that they weren’t sure about.

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

#160
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. iPhones and the Apple desktop OS. In both of them, I am lost as to how to accomplish anything but the most common stuff. The design of the OSes is such that it's not obvious how to do anything, and they provide very little guidance. You have to already know how to do what it is you're trying to do. This is even worse on Apple smartphones, because a lot of stuff is done using mystery gestures that you have to al…

I’m actually curious about specifics here for macOS aside from things like hidden scroll bars. Mainly because I find it to be one of the most discoverable. If you go into the ‘help’ menu in any application, you get a search box that searches all the menus of the application, if a shortcut exists for the action it’s listed alongside it. Admittedly Qt and KDE can do this too, but only for QT apps, while on macOS it’s e…

How do you show hidden folders in Finder? You literally have to memorize a keyboard shortcut. How do you switch apps in full screen mode, you need to know trackpad gestures or keyboard shortcuts. Every post like 2004 addition to MacOS seems to be reliant on trackpad gestures to the point using the operating system with a mouse is a negative.

The search bar in the menu is fine if there is a menu to search. IIRC or at least last time I used it the screenshot tool had no menus and was extremely unclear as to how to save a screenshot as a file in the location you actually want.

Post reply on HN