Apple plans a slow, appointment-only rollout of Vision Pro

Then tell anyone driving something less fancy than a Mercedes S-class or equivalent to fuck off :-)

It's funny to see a company rooted in jeans and T-shirt California counterculture struggle to reinvent something that would have been painfully obvious to any luxury store owner before the 20th century: throw out anyone not wearing sufficiently fancy clothing.

This is anecdotal of course. Your experience is yours. Sorry you went through that. My experiences have all been pretty smooth.

As for the Vision Pro, I think we’re dealing with a very different kind of product. They want everyone to have a positive experience, and this is the kind of thing no one has used even if you’ve used VR headsets, you’ve not used the product they created. They want to make sure you’re not getting stuck on fit or comfort.

Have you ever used an AR/VR headset for something you generally enjoy (a game, a movie, Google Maps, whatever)?

I ask because my own experience (and the consensus of my network and the critics I read) is that devices like Oculus and the Vive Pro are extraordinarily compelling but overall held back by immature technology. Base stations. Wires. Visible pixels. Low quality video pass through. Stupid controllers you have to hold in your hands.

People see the potential and flashes of what might be, but it's impossible to get beyond the awful user experience.

> What Apple is missing here is that people wanted the iPhone (a phone with an iPod built in) for years before it was even officially announced as under development.

Two thoughts on this:

1) It seems to undermine your point that iPhone launched in 2007 and yet through 2011 failed to come close to outselling iPod in terms of units.

2) The device you are describing -- "a phone with an iPod built in", before the iPhone -- actually did exist. The Motorola ROKR E1, or the "iTunes Phone": it was unveiled in 2005 on stage by Steve Jobs. Motorola did the phone stuff, and Apple did the iPod bit.

It was a dismal failure and was discontinued after roughly a year on the market.

> It succeeded because the market invented it, not because Apple are geniuses who showed us we needed it.

What do you mean by "invented"? Because literally two years before the iPhone launched, the market "invented" a phone with a built-in iPod, manufactured by the leading cell phone manufacturer of the day, in collaboration with Apple, and it failed miserably. Did the market invent that phone?

It's fair to say that Apple is not the first entrant to most market it contributes to, and it's fair to say that they are rarely the progenitors of the technologies their devices rely upon.

What Apple is very good at is deeply understanding when new technologies can be combined or honed to bring them over a threshold of resonance with consumers which drives widespread adoption. It is not enough to simply say "ship a phone with a touch screen' --- folks were doing that for years before iPhone launched. Instead it's about understanding the interplay of latency, brightness, PPI, plural point awareness, manufacturing yields, component costs, and making tradeoffs which pursue a vision which people buy into.

That's why when you said "a phone with an iPod built in" you could have been referring to both iPhone _and_ the ROKR, but the two devices could not be more different: ROKR had a fiddly microSD card for storage. Crummy slow processor and user interface. Stupid tiny keyboard for typing on. WAP internet. Wired transfer speeds slower than high speed USB. Slow java apps. A low resolution TFT LCD display. Only 11 megabytes of onboard memory.