Apple Vision Pro review

The first iPhone, yeah, it had some detractors, but I don't think the kinds of criticisms the parent poster gave ever really applied to the iPhone. To succeed, the iPhone didn't have to be this utopian product; it just had to be more useful than its main competitor, which was dumbphones. People who complained that it was missing features the Blackberry had were working from an unstated major premise that the iPhone was initially targeted at enterprise users, and I think that everyone who wasn't too busy being a pundit to see how the world works could see that that quite transparently wasn't the case. There was even a time period where I had both an iPhone for personal use and a Blackberry for work.

And I think the criticism about entertainment is spot-on. By contrast, despite being extraordinarily limited compared to even the very next modal, the first iPhone was fantastic for entertainment, precisely because it was good for fostering shared experiences. It didn't take long after the device came out before you'd see groups of people clustered around an iPhone, looking at photos together on that big, vibrant, gorgeous screen. That was something that none of its competitors could do. And you better bet that people saw that happening and started wanting to have one of their own so they could have fun, too.

I do think we're still in the "wait and see" phase for this product, but, unlike some of the original iPhone criticisms or cmdrtaco's original dismissal of the iPod, the criticisms this article points out feel really personally relevant to me.

Oh sorry, that's from CNET's review of the first iPhone in 2007: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/original-iphone-review/

It's way too early to tell if this product line will succeed in the long term. Will the first gen Vision Pro be a runaway success? Of course not! Will later generations look as obvious as the iPhone does now? I sure hope so!

For comparison, Apple sold 1.4 million iPhones in 2007. Supposedly Apple is expecting to sell around 500k Vision Pro units this year. Given the 3x price difference (in 2024 dollars), that effectively means the first gen Vision Pro is expected to bring the same revenue as the first gen iPhone.

We all have rosy retrospection about how great and obvious the first iPhone or first iPod was, but honestly nobody had any idea if Apple's crazy bet would pay off. We all agreed it was magical tech, but it was expensive, had tons of limitations, and nobody really needed it. Sound familiar?

All I know is betting against Apple has rarely paid off. They do have failures too though and this is clearly technologically more ambitious than any other launch, so who knows! And honestly that's what makes this launch most exciting.

It's been so long since I've had child-like wonder about some new technology that I'm just glad Apple took a chance on launching such a crazy device, even if I don't know what to do with it... yet.

This is a disingenuous argument. Your other points are much more valid than this one. You don’t have a VR headset to interact with other people in the same room. If you want to watch a movie with other people around you, there are many other (cheaper) ways to do that (and Apple can sell you a nice AppleTV to do it).

They're just a consumer goods company. Sometimes they make good things people don't appreciate at first. Sometimes they make bad things that people don't appreciate ever.

Their track record is better than the mean, but comparing every criticism of a first-gen Apple product to the iPod/iPhone launches is unserious. Of course some people panned any given new thing on Earth.

And this isn't even in response to someone predicting that AVP would fail, but just that the 1st-gen AVP is an immature product. The 1st-gen iPhone was an immature product! It's delusional (and discrediting to Apple!) to think the iPod, iPhone, OS X, Intel Macs, M1 Macs, etc. were as mature at launch as the later iterations we associate those technologies with now.