Vision Pro: What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right

The list on wikipedia [1] doesn't include it, I guess because it was a "development kit", and I just naively assumed the "Oculus Rift" was the DK1 not the CV1.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_virtual_reality_headse...

Edit: Went ahead and edited the wikipedia page so the next person won't make the same mistake.

As it improves, I don't question that it has a future, and some people like it so much they're working on it and writing apps now. The question is how many years from now before a larger mass of people are using it?

The OP talks about the Internet, but the Internet started some time between the 1969 first ARPAnet transmission and 1974 paper on the Internet protocol. Out to 1993 most people were not consciously using the Internet, it was a rather niche thing. With the release of the Netscape web browser in 1994, the inclusion of IP networking capability in Windows 1995 etc., this began to change.

One could say this about AI as well. Up until 2019, Norvig and Russell's CS textbook "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" had only a ten page sub-chapter on neural networks. The now recognized as groundbreaking 2012 ImageNet competition victory by Krizhevsky, Sutskever and Hinton, was greeted with skepticism and disinterest on this forum ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4611830 ). The ideas for connectionist AI were there starting with McCulloch and Pitts 1943 paper, so that's a lot of development where things still weren't really happening until around 2012 or even 2019.

Some people can see the potential in things decades in advance, but they can take time to move into the mainstream, and it is difficult to determine how long that can take.

It's not the money. They did it with the iMac when they were headed for the ground, and with the iPod when they were in a better position but still without infinite funding. Reality is actually quite simple: they spot technology advances, and integrate them into a neat, well-designed package that people actually want to buy.

The first iPod was a fancy shell around an IBM 1.8'' hard drive. There were MP3 players before but they were very bulky, or could store only a handful of files. They saw the hard drive coming, did the math, and went all in.

Same thing with the iPhone: there were smart phones before, but they spotted the capacitive digitizer that was orders of magnitude more accurate than the competition, and boom, multitouch.

Same thing with the AirPods: the killer feature being their fancy Bluetooth chip, which made the experience much better than the competition that was established for a decade at that point.

It is quite interesting that they do it over and over, going as far as saying what they do in interviews, and some people really don't see it for what it is.

> Are they the only ones who can create products?

They are not. They just have a vision of what they want to do, and once they start they put the effort needed (sometimes killing advanced designs before release). Then, they iterate relentlessly generation after generation. They play the long game, and often introduce their first generations at higher price points and keep improving and driving their price points down even if it is not an initial resounding success. Any company can do it, if they take design seriously and optimise for long term strategic goals rather than short-term economics.

> Competitors work for ages and ages fighting each other, refining v1, v2, v2.1, v2.2, v2.25, and then suddenly Apple comes out with something v8-ish and the whole industry scrambles.

If you look closely, when Apple comes in, it's because they have found a differentiating factor that they think will make the difference. They always have a compelling message about why you should choose their product above the competition. And it's never "same product, but cheaper".

(1) Quest is a game console

Quest is clearly a gaming device. It boot straight into the store. The re-opens the store at every opportunity. This means, trying to use it for non-gaming means you're constantly reminded your on a VR game console. It'd be like trying to use a PS5 for work. I kind of get why they did it but I hate it. I'm happy my iPhone does not boot into the store and does not go back to the store every time I go to the home screen.

(2) Quest doesn't care about productivity

This is kind of the same as 1 but, ... I actually try to use my Rift-S with my desktop for certain activities almost daily. I press the right controller's system button, close the home tab, close the library tab, close the store tab, open the desktop. Then I interact with the a few desktop apps. I copy or move files and I run certain apps that I've written that work reasonably well with point and click controls

But, I tried accessing my desktop on a Quest via the various link (wired and wireless) and it crashed 1 of 3 times. This is clearly a niche feature to Meta. Meta expects you're just playing games from their store.

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You can certainly argue Meta didn't get those things wrong but for me, they are wrong. The more productivity I can do on a Quest the more useful it is it me any many others. There are more phones than game consoles. IMO they should make the device be general purpose, not sell a "pro" version for productivity. Phone game sales far out shadow game console game sales. They don't need to design the Quest around a game console experience.