301–310 of 863 posts
Hmm so basically they say Apple massively overengineered it and doesn't expect to sell it to more than 3 people at that price, which is right.
But Occulus has been owned by Facebook for a long time now, what stopped them?
They could at least have an aspirational "research" device that they sold for 5000, in addition to the semi-affordable (minus privacy concerns) stuff.
I think the description of the VisionPro as a dev kit is spot on. It's also a beta product in many way. Apple know full well that this is not a mass market product, they have made no attempt to make it even remotely affordable to most people. But they also know that every aspect of the hardware will improve over the next decade, and as it does they will have ironed out many of the problems with how we use AR/VR and w…
> Apple know full well that this is not a mass market product. I really feel like too many people are ignoring this. If anyone understands how to play the long game with a new product it is Apple. I mean the Apple TV was a "Hobby" for many years. Has Apple ever put out a "Pro" version of a product before the "normal" version? I think it also helps the clear sharing of technology between this and other products. From…
Yes they introduced the MacBook Pro before the MacBook.
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Apple aggressively focus on low-volume high-margin opportunities, have been doing so for some decades, and have a giant war chest to make bets with. In many ways, they work like the very very large version of a successfully bootstrapped business. Most of their peers pursue maximum volume in an attempt to dominate a market and drown all competition, inebitably at much lower margins. It's the continuation of the VC lau…
Apple have only had 1 successful product, and thats a flat device with a screen for media consumption. iPod, iPhone, and iPad are just different sizes of this device. The only thing Apple have done which elevated themselves above their peers is have marketing which positioned them higher in the market. Remember those Black and White ads of Steve Jobs next to Ghandi, Malcolm X, and Charlie Chaplin? They are paying off…
You may not like their products, and you may think their customers are idiots hypnotized by villianous marketers or something, but that's kind of the point of it all: by targetting high margins and precisely volume instead of low margins and maximum volume, they really don't need to care what you think. And that lets them approach products differently.
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There were a lot of tablets before the iPad but it wasn’t until the iPad that tablets really took off as a serious market segment. Ditto with AirPods and Bluetooth earbuds. In the past, once Apple started pouring R&D money into a specific product type, the entire industry around it tends to advance very quickly. I’m optimistic about the Vision Pro, and I actually think the n+2 Meta release will be much better off for…
My question is why does it seem like only Apple can do this, over and over? Why are they the only ones who seem to be able to knock a product category out of the park and legitimize it? Is it just the vast amount of money? Are they the only ones who can create products? Is everyone else that bad? Competitors work for ages and ages fighting each other, refining v1, v2, v2.1, v2.2, v2.25, and then suddenly Apple comes…
First, we cannot ignore Apple Fanboys (and I am not using that in a negative sense). They have a large base of users who will jump at nearly anything they put out.
However they also have a track record of doing things, both big and small, and pushing the industry to go a certain way. Dropping CD drives is a great example of this, this was an inevitability with more and more distribution through the internet. This would be a risk for a manufacture to try with a random computer because consumers may just ignore it. Apple has the power to say, well you want a Mac? here are your couple options and we are doing this anyways.
Sometimes this fails, see all USB-C Laptops.
But I think it also often comes from thinking about the entire experience. Take them removing the head phone jack (the debate on whether or not they actually needed to do that aside), at the same time we got the AirPods.
Or the iPhone wasn't just simply, without a physical keyboard. It emphasized the advantages of this throughout the entire OS.
But regardless of all the above, I think the simple fact that they just happen to generally sell a lot of devices. Enough that it can normalize a decision for consumers and then other manufactures can follow without risk.
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> Most people think it's rude to talk to each other indoors with sunglasses on. Nobody finds it rude to talk to each other with actual glasses on. If AR had similar utility and minimal impact on seeing each others eyes, then the same would be true. Sunglasses prevent people from tracking where people are looking which is why they come off as rude. > That's the slimmest form factor you're going to get, and it still st…
> The minimalist form factor for AR is contact lenses not glasses. That is extremely unlikely to ever be possible. A chip that size that did both high-bandwidth radio AND wireless charging (since you're not gonna have wires dangling from your eyes) AND high refresh rate display would fundamentally have to get extremely hot, with anything resembling current electronics. You'd have to invent an entirely different trans…
That's not immersive 3D, but the useful bit of AR would be things like putting peoples names above them at a party as if you where in an MMO. Countdown timers over cooking pots, a map or just an arrow when walking somewhere etc.
I recently saw Dune 2 on IMAX. If the Vision Pro can soon replicate that experience they will print (even more) money and could lock the big film studios down forever pretty much. That is the killer use case. Everything else seems like fluff.
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Hopefully you're right, but the cynic in me thinks we've been saying the same thing about every VR headset that has come out in the last ten years.
Apple has a history to sticking with things like this. Watch and HomePod were both seen as over-priced and sold poorly the first iterations. Apple leadership had the confidence to see through those initial versions. This was part of the internal culture during my time at Apple.
From a management perspective, how do they handle the people side of that - keeping good people on the team and keeping them motivated to do something extraordinary?
People don't like spending time on unsuccessful projects and don't want their names associated with them, and don't want to work extra hard on something that won't come to fruition.
Maybe Apple management has enough internal reputation that employees are willing to take that risk (but even Apple management has flops - the car seeming to be a recent example). But that doesn't feel like a sufficient explanation to me.
> Vision Pro is a meticulously over-engineered “devkit” that is far too heavy to have product-market fit but good enough to seed curiosity into the world That's exactly what I think. And that's exactly why I bought it. I have: * Oculus Rift 1 * HTC Vive * Quest 2 None of those made me want to write apps for them. They have nice games and I spent quality time with them, but just playing. I tried watching videos and it…
> If you can work from an iPad Sorry I can't and why the heck should I. I can get vastly superior work computer for 10% of the price (of goggles) that has none of the apple nor general tablet hard and massive limits. Huge constant time saving on work effectivity. I could do some work with samsung ultra series (mouse, keyboard and massive screen cinnectivity via single usbc out if box), but even that is massively subp…
But this is missing the point that, while it can do work things reasonably well, that's not its primary use case. All of the marketing focuses on content consumption - movies, reading, reliving photos and videos, facetime - and other things typically already done on an iPhone or iPad. For those use cases, it's pretty much perfect, with the text clarity being leagues ahead of any other production device, maybe except some enterprise-targeted Varjo headsets.
I got mine on day 1 (February 2) and have spent many hours using it and experimenting, trying to make the device as unobtrusive as possible so I can use it for hours watching movies/surfing the web/etc., activities which become enjoyable if you're not constantly adjusting your position/VP's position on your head and face. Here are my takeaways FWIW: 1. The only body position I find comfortable and compatible with pro…
Doesn't laying down in a fixed position render much of the purpose of the device obsolete?
My two cents (as an owner of a Vision Pro): 1) This is a beta product and I wouldnt recommend it to anyone that is not a developer or in a position to create apps for it, 2) this is going to have as big of an impact on humanity as the computer or the internet did and every engineer or aspiring entrepreneur should pay it attention. This device is magical. Yes it's too heavy, yes there are not enough apps, yes sharing…
> this is going to have as big of an impact on humanity as the computer or the internet I don't see how anyone can say this with a straight face. VR/AR just isn't there and won't be there for a lot longer than people think. Everyone always acts like we're -so close- but then we just aren't. Hololens and Oculus are over a decade old, and honestly when I first demo'd both ages ago, they were incredible (especially Holo…
We also know that people are perfectly willing to wear something on their face to be able to see better, and willing to carry something around in their pockets to be more connected -- glasses and phones.
So I think the only real barrier is technical feasibility: can you make it small enough, light enough, power efficient enough, and, of course, affordable enough?
AVP and Oculus clearly aren't there yet. Relative to smartphones, I think we're at the "Palm III" or maybe "Palm V" level of things. I personally have no idea if a path forward to the "iPhone 3S/iPhone 4" level even really exists for VR headsets.
But if it does and we get there, I think there's no doubt that these headsets (probably just goggles at that point) will take over the world, like phones have.